Socrates
SOC. I will tell you and it is not a bad description, either, that nothing is one and invariable, and you could not rightly ascribe any quality whatsoever to anything, but if you call it large it will also appear to be small, and light if you call it heavy, and everything else in the same way, since nothing whatever is one, either a particular thing or of a particular quality; but it is out of movement and motion and mixture with one another that all those things become which we wrongly say are—wrongly, because nothing ever is, but is always becoming. And on this subject all the philosophers, except Parmenides, may be marshalled in one line—Protagoras and Heracleitus and Empedocles—and the chief poets in the two kinds of poetry, Epicharmus, in comedy, and in tragedy, Homer, who, in the line0ceanus the origin of the gods, and Tethys their mother,Hom. Il. 14.201, 302has said that all things are the offspring of flow and motion; or don’t you think he means that?
Socrates
SOC. Then who could still contend with such a great host, led by Homer as general, and not make himself ridiculous?