 The Eleatics (Parmenides and Melissus, 5th century BCE) held a monist conception of reality, the One, and Melissus declared it to be infinite. Such a monistic conception of reality sees change (or becoming) as appearance, and Zeno’s famous paradoxes of infinity (see the entry on   Zeno’s paradoxes) emerge in this context. Suffice here to say that Zeno’s paradoxes (the Achilles, the arrow, and others) involved the infinitely small and were aimed at buttressing Parmenides’ monism. Working across the 5th and the 4th century BCE, Democritus defended an atomistic theory with an infinite void and infinitely many atoms. The infinite by this time had shown some of its major aspects, taken as substance by some and as plurality (of atoms, times, geometrical points, etc.) by others.