  The dramatic occasion of Plato’s dialogue, Parmenides, is a  visit to Athens by the eminent philosopher Parmenides and Zeno, his  younger associate, to attend the festival of the Great Panathenaea.  Plato describes Parmenides as about sixty-five years old, Zeno as  nearly forty, and Socrates, with whom they converse, as “quite  young then,” which is normally taken to mean about twenty.  Given that Socrates was a little past seventy when executed by the  Athenians in 399 B.C.E., this description suggests that Zeno was born  about 490 B.C.E. He would appear to have been active in Magna Graecia,  that is, the Greek-speaking regions of southern Italy, during the  mid-fifth century B.C.E. There is otherwise little credible information about the circumstances of his life. Diogenes Laertius’s brief  “Life of Zeno” (D.L. 9.25–9) is largely taken up with  stitching together conflicting reports of his involvement in a brave  plot to overthrow one of the local tyrants, but how much truth these  reports contain cannot be determined. Although Diogenes also says  that Zeno so loved his native Elea that he had no interest in  immigrating to Athens, this report is not inconsistent with his  having spent some time there; and Plutarch’s report that Pericles  heard Zeno expounding on the nature of things in the manner of  Parmenides (Plu. Pericles 4.5) suggests that Zeno may indeed have visited Athens and read his famous book, as Plato’s  Parmenides implies, to a group of intellectually keen  Athenians. Vivid evidence of the cultural impact of Zeno’s arguments  is to be found in the interior of a red-figure drinking cup (Rome,  Mus. Villa Giulia, inv. 3591) discovered in the  Etrurian city of Falerii and dated to the mid-fifth century B.C.E. It  depicts a heroic figure racing nimbly ahead of a large tortoise and  has every appearance of being the first known “response”  to the Achilles paradox.