 That some in antiquity viewed Parmenides as a strict monist is evident from Plutarch’s report of the Epicurean Colotes’ treatment of Parmenides in his treatise, That One Cannot Live According to the Doctrines of Other Philosophers. Colotes’ main claim appears to have been that Parmenides prevents us from living by maintaining that “the universe is one” (hen to pan), a tag which Colotes apparently took to mean that Parmenides denied the existence of fire and water and, indeed, “the inhabited cities in Europe and Asia”; he may also have claimed that if one accepts Parmenides’ thesis, there will be nothing to prevent one from walking off a precipice, since on his view there are no such things (Plut. Col. 1114B). In short, as Plutarch reports, Colotes said that “Parmenides abolishes everything by hypothesizing that being is one” (1114D). Plutarch himself, however, takes strong issue with Colotes’ view, charging him with imputing to Parmenides “disgraceful sophisms” (1113F) and with deliberately misconstruing his position (1114D). Plutarch explains that Parmenides was in fact the first to distinguish between the mutable objects of sensation and the unchanging character of the intelligible: “Parmenides…abolishes neither nature. Instead, assigning to each what is appropriate, he places the intelligible in the class of what is one and being—calling it ‘being’ in so far as it is eternal and imperishable, and ‘one’ because of its likeness unto itself and its not admitting differentiation—while he locates the perceptible among what is disordered and changing” (1114D). Plutarch insists that Parmenides’ distinction between what really is and things which are what they are at one time, or in one context, but not another should not be misconstrued as an abolition of the latter class of entities: “how could he have let perception and doxa remain without leaving what is apprehended by perception and doxa?” (1114E-F). Plutarch’s discussion of Parmenides in Against Colotes is particularly significant in that it is a substantial discussion of the relation between his account of Being and his cosmology by an ancient author later than Aristotle that is not overtly influenced by Aristotle’s own discussions. In many ways it anticipates the Neoplatonic interpretation, represented in Simplicius, according to which, broadly speaking, the two accounts delivered by Parmenides’ goddess describe two levels of reality, the immutable intelligible realm and the plural and changing sensible realm (see especially Simplicius’s commentary on Arist. Cael. 3.1.298b14–24; cf. Procl. in Ti. 1.345.18–24).