Eleatics
Parmenides had two followers. Zeno also came from Elea, Melissus from Samos; by convention the three are collectively called the Eleatics. Eleaticism was in one sense a dead end. But the concept of an unchanging reality beyond the material world endured in, and because of, Plato; and a passage in which Melissus argues that if there were after all a plurality of things, they would all have to be as unchanging as his One, points the way to the greatest inspiration of ancient physical theory, the atomism of Leucippus of Miletus. (Boardman, 1986)