Parmenides (515-445 B.C.E.) was born in Elea, a Greek city in southern Italy (today called Velia) that lay at the other end of the known world from where Heraclitus and the other Ionians lived. But he almost certainly studied in Athens (itself situated just about at the center of the then-known world) and there is ample evidence that he was a student of Anaximander and deeply influenced by the teachings of the Pythagoreans, whose religious and philosophical brotherhood he joined at their school in Crotona. All we have left of his writings are about 160 lines of a poem called Nature, written for his illustrious student Zeno ... and preserved in the writings of later philosophers such as Sextus Empiricus. His style, no doubt influenced by Pythagorean mysticism, owes more to earlier myths and allegories designed as much to stupefy and mislead the uninitiated as to pass on to other initiates the secret teachings of the wise and enlightened masters.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)