 The opposition between Continuity and Discreteness played a significant role in ancient Greek philosophy. This probably derived from the still more fundamental question concerning the One and the Many, an antithesis lying at the heart of early Greek thought (Stokes 1971). The Greek debate over the continuous and the discrete seems to have been ignited by the efforts of Eleatic philosophers such as Parmenides (c. 515 BCE), and Zeno (c. 460 BCE) to establish their doctrine of absolute  monism.[6]  They were concerned to show that the divisibility of Being into parts leads to contradiction, so forcing the conclusion that the apparently diverse world is a static, changeless  unity.[7]  In his Way of Truth Parmenides asserts that Being is homogeneous and continuous. However in asserting the continuity of Being Parmenides is likely no more than underscoring its essential unity. Parmenides seems to be claiming that Being is more than merely continuous—that it is, in fact, a single whole, indeed an indivisible whole. The single Parmenidean existent is a continuum without parts, at once a continuum and an atom. If Parmenides was a synechist, his absolute monism precluded his being at the same time a divisionist.