XENOPHANES (c. 570-478 B.C.)

Xenophanes was from the polis of Colophon, on the west coast of Asia Minor, fifty miles north of Miletus and fifteen miles north of Ephesus. He left Colophon after it fell to the Medes in 546/5. With the threat of the invasion of Ionia and mainland Greece by the Persians in the Persian War, he moved to Syracuse. Unlike the other Ionian philosophers, he wrote poetry rather than prose. Some believed that he taught Parmenides and founded the Eleatic school of philosophy; however, he is now considered to have been a relatively solitary thinker.

Xenophanes was a natural scientist as well as a philosopher and was one of the first Greeks to argue that the earth, or at least part of it, had originally been under water, as evidenced by fossils of shell-fish and seaweed in the quarries of Syracuse. He was not, however, concerned with giving a comprehensive account of the natural world. He was a critic of the writings of Homer and Hesiod, attacking their depiction of the gods as anthropomorphic polytheism. He offered his own monotheistic account of divinity, according to which there was just one god, wholly different from human beings, having a body but motionless.

Biographical Fragments

(1) 'Already there are sixty-seven years /

tossing my thought throughout the land of Greece. /

From my birth there were twenty-five in addition to these, /

if I know how to speak truly about these matters.'

-- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers (9.18)

Theology (critical)

(1) 'Give us no fights with Titans, no, nor Giants /

nor Centaurs -- the forgeries of our fathers -- /

nor civil brawls, in which no advantage is. /

But always to be mindful of the gods is good.'

-- Athenaeus, Scholars at Dinner (11.462c)

(2) "Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all deeds which among men are a reproach and a disgrace: thieving, adultery, and deceiving one another."

-- Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians (9.193)

(3) 'Mortals believe that the gods are born and have human clothing, voice and form.'

-- Clement, Miscellanies (5.109)

(4) "Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and dark, Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired."

-- Clement, Miscellanies (7.22)

(5) "If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had."

-- Clement, Miscellanies (5.110)

(6) "Xenophanes used to say that those who say the gods are born are just as impious as those who say that they die, since in both ways it follows that there is a time when the gods do not exist."

-- Aristotle, Rhetoric (2.23 1399b6-9)

(7) 'On the subject of reincarnation Xenophanes bears witness in an elegy which begins: "Now I will turn to another tale and show the way." What he says about Pythagoras runs thus: "Once they say that he was passing by when a puppy was being whipped, and he took pity and said: "Stop, do not beat it; for it is the soul of a friend that I recognized when I heard it giving tongue.""'

-- PP, p. 219

Theology (constructive)

(1) "God is one, greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or thought."

-- Clement, Miscellanies (5.109)

(2) 'All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears.'

-- Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians (9.144)

(3) "But without effort he shakes all things by the thought of his mind."

-- Simplicus, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics (23.19)

(4) "He always remains in the same place, moving not at all, nor is it fitting for him to go different places at different times."

-- Simplicus, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics (23.19)

Epistemology

(1) 'By no means did the gods reveal all things to mortals from the beginning, but in time, by searching, they discover better.'

-- Stobaeus, Selections (1.8.2)

(2) 'No man has seen nor will anyone know the truth about the gods and all the things I speak of. For even if a person should in fact say what is absolutely the case, nevertheless he himself does not know, but belief is fashioned over all things [or, in the case of all persons].'

-- Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians (7.49.110)

(3) 'Let these things be believed as resembling the truth.'

-- Plutarch, Table Talk (9.7.74b)

Science

(1) "She whom they call Iris, this thing too is cloud, purple and red and yellow to behold."

-- Scholium BLT on Iliad (11.27)

(2) "Xenophanes says that the things on boats which shine like stars [St. Elmo's Fire], which some call the Dioscuri, are little clouds which shine as a result of the motion."

-- Aetius (2.18.1)

(3) 'Sea is the source of water and the source of wind. For not without the great ocean would there come to be in clouds the force of wind blowing out from within, nor the streams of rivers not the rain water of the upper sky, but great ocean is the sire of clouds and winds and rivers.'

-- Geneva Scholium on Iliad (21.196)

(4) "Xenophanes declared that the sea is salty because many mixtures flow together in it... He believes that earth is being mixed into the sea and over time it is being dissolved by the moisture, saying that he has the following kind of proofs, that sea shells are found in the middle of the earth and in mountains, and the impressions of a fish and seals have been found at Syracuse in the quarries, and the impression of a laurel leaf in the depth of the stone in Paros, and on Malta flat shapes of all marine life. He says that these things occurred when all things were covered with mud long ago and the impressions were dried in the mud. All humans are destroyed when the earth is carried down into the sea and becomes mud, and then there is another beginning of coming to be, and this change occurs in all the world orders."

-- Hippolytus, Refutation (1.14.5-6)

(5) 'All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.'

-- Philoponus, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics (1.5.125)

???

(6) "If god had not created yellow honey, they would say that figs are far sweeter."

-- Herodian, On Peculiar Speech (41.5)