ZENGG (Hungarlan, Zeng; Croatian, Senj; Italian, Segna), a royal free town of Hungary, in the county of Lika-Krbava, Croatia-Slavonia, 34 m. S.E. of Fiume, on the Adriatic Sea. Pop. (1900) 3182. Zengg lies at the entrance to a long cleft among the Velebit Mountains, down which the bora, or N.N.E. wind, sweeps with such violence as often to render the harbour unsafe, although the Austrian Lloyd steamers call regularly. Apart from the cathedral of its Roman Catholic bishop, a gymnasium, and some ancient fortifications, the town contains little of interest. It carries on a small trade in tobacco, fish and salt. The island of Veglia faces the town and the port of San Giorgio lies 5 m. S.
The captaincy of Zengg was established, in the 15th century, by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, as a check upon the Turks; and subsequently, until 1617, the town became famous as the stronghold of the Uskoks.
ZENITH (from the Arabic), the point directly overhead; its direction is defined by that of the plumb-line.
ZENJÁN, or Zanjan, a town of Persia, capital of the Khamseh province, about 205 m. N.W. of Teheran, on the high road thence to Tabriz, at an elevation of 5180 ft. It has a population of about 25,000 and post and telegraph offices, and was one of the original strongholds of the Bábí sectarians, who held it against a large Persian force from May 1850 to the end of the year, when most of them were massacred. It has extensive gardens, well watered by the Zanjaneh river, which flows south of it. The well-stocked bazaar supplies the neighbouring districts.
ZENO, East Roman emperor from 474 to 491, was an Isaurian of noble birth, and originally bore the name of Trascalissaeus, which he exchanged for that of Zeno on his marriage with Ariadne, daughter of Leo I., in 468. Of his early life nothing is known; after his marriage (which was designed by Leo to secure the Isaurian support against his ambitious minister Aspar) he became patrician and commander of the imperial guard and of the armies in the East. While on a campaign in Thrace he narrowly escaped assassination; on his return to the capital he avenged himself by compassing the murder of Aspar, who had instigated the attempt. In 474 Leo I. died after appointing as his successor Leo the son of Zeno and Ariadne; Zeno, however, with the help of his mother-in-law Verina, succeeded in getting himself crowned also, and on the death of his son before the end of the year became sole emperor. In the following year, in consequence of a revolt fomented by Verina in favour of her brother Basiliscus, and the antipathy to his Isaurian soldiers and administrators, he was compelled to take refuge in Isauria, where, after sustaining a defeat, he was compelled to shut himself up in a fortress. The growing misgovernment and unpopularity of Basiliscus ultimately enabled Zeno to re-enter Constantinople unopposed (476); his rival was banished to Phrygia, where he soon afterwards died. The remainder of Zeno's reign was disturbed by numerous other less formidable revolts. Since 472 the aggressions of the two Ostrogoth leaders Theodoric had been a constant source of danger. Though Zeno at times contrived to play them off against each other, they in turn were able to profit by his dynastic rivalries, and it was only by offering them pay and high command that he kept them from attacking Constantinople itself. In 487 he induced Theodoric, son of Theodemir, to invade Italy and establish his new kingdom. Zeno is described as a lax and indolent ruler, but he seems to have husbanded the resources of the empire so as to leave it appreciably stronger at his death. In ecclesiastical history the name of Zeno is associated with the Henoticon or instrument of union, promulgated by him and signed by all the Eastern bishops, with the design of terminating the Monophysite controversy.
See J. B. Bury, The Later Roman Empire (London, 1889), i. pp. 250-274; E. W. Brooks in the English Historical Review (1893), pp. 209-238; W. Barth, Der Kaiser Zeno (Basel, 1894).
ZENO OF ELEA, son of Teleutagoras, is supposed to have been born towards the beginning of the 5th century B.C. The pupil and the friend of Parmenides, he sought to recommend his master's doctrine of the existence of the One by controverting the popular belief in the existence of the Many. In virtue of this method of indirect argumentation he is regarded as the inventor of “dialectic,” that is to say, disputation having for its end not victory but the discovery or the transmission of truth. He is said to have been concerned in a plot against a tyrant, and on its detection to have borne with exemplary constancy the tortures to which he was subjected; but authorities differ both as to the name and the residence of the tyrant and as to the circumstances and the issue of the enterprise.
In Plato's Parmenides, Socrates, “then very young,” meets Parmenides, “an old man some sixty-five years of age,” and Zeno, “a man of about forty, tall and personable,” and engages them in philosophical discussion. But it may be doubted whether such a meeting was chronologically possible. Plato's account of Zeno's teaching (Parmenides, 128 seq.) is, however, presumably as accurate as it is precise. In reply to those who thought that Parmenides's theory of the existence of the One involved inconsistencies and absurdities, Zeno tried to show that the assumption of the existence of the Many, that is to say, a plurality of things in time and space, carried with it inconsistencies and absurdities grosser and more numerous. In early youth he collected his arguments in a book, which, according to Plato, was put into circulation without his knowledge.
Of the paradoxes used by Zeno to discredit the belief in plurality and motion, eight survive in the writings of Aristotle and Simplicius. They are commonly stated as follows.[1] (1) If the Existent is Many, it must be at once infinitely small and infinitely great—infinitely small, because the parts of which it consists must be indivisible and therefore without magnitude; infinitely great, because, that any part having magnitude may be separate from any other part, the intervention of a third part having magnitude is necessary, and that this third part may be separate from the other two the intervention of other parts having magnitude is necessary, and so on ad infinitum. (2) In like manner the Many must be numerically both finite and infinite—numerically finite, because there are as many things as there are, neither more nor less; numerically infinite, because, that any two things may be separate, the intervention of a third thing is necessary, and so on ad infinitum. (3) If all that is is in space, space itself must be in space, and so on ad infinitum. (4) If a bushel of corn turned out upon the floor makes a noise, each grain and each part of each grain must make a noise likewise; but, in fact, it is not so. (5) Before a body in motion can reach a given point, it must first traverse the half of the distance; before it can traverse the half of the distance, it must first traverse the quarter; and so on ad infinitum. Hence, that a body may pass from one point to another, it must traverse an infinite number of divisions. But an infinite distance (which Zeno fails to distinguish from a finite distance infinitely divided) cannot be traversed in a finite time. Consequently, the goal can never be reached. (6) If the tortoise has the start of Achilles, Achilles can never come up with the tortoise; for, while Achilles traverses the distance from his starting-point to the starting-point of the tortoise, the tortoise advances a certain distance, and while Achilles traverses this distance, the tortoise makes a further advance, and so on ad infinitum. Consequently, Achilles may run ad infinitum without overtaking the tortoise. [This paradox is virtually identical with (5), the only difference being that, whereas in (5) there is one body, in (6) there are two bodies, moving towards a limit. The “infinity” of the premise is an infinity of subdivisions of a distance which is finite; the “infinity” of the conclusion is an infinity of distance. Thus Zeno again confounds a finite distance infinitely divided with an infinite distance. If the tortoise has a start of 1000 ft. Achilles, on the supposition that his speed is ten times that of the tortoise, must traverse an infinite number of spaces—1000 ft., 100 ft., 10 ft., &c.— and the tortoise must traverse an infinite number of spaces—100 ft., 10 ft., 1 ft., &c.—before they reach the point, distant from their starting-points 111119 ft. and 11119 ft. respectively, at which the tortoise is overtaken. In a word, 1000+100+10 &c., in (6) and 12+14+18 &c., in (5) are convergent series, and 111119 and 1 are the limits to which they respectively approximate.] (7) So long as anything is in one and the same space, it is at rest. Hence an arrow is at rest at every moment of its flight, and therefore also during the whole of its flight. (8) Two bodies moving with equal speed traverse equal spaces in equal time. But, when two bodies move with equal speed in opposite directions, the one passes the other in half the time in which it passes it when at rest. These propositions appeared to Zeno to be irreconcilable. In short, the ordinary belief in plurality and motion seemed to him to involve fatal inconsistencies, whence he inferred that Parmenides was justified in distinguishing the mutable movable Many from the
- ↑ See Zeller, Die Philosophie d. Griechen, i. 591 seq.; Grundriss, 54.
