XENOPHANES

A Greek philosopher and poet, born about 570 B.C. at Colophon in Asia Minor. At the age of 25, after the conquest of his native city by the Persians, he was expelled from his home, and thence-forth led an unsettled and wandering life, in the course of which he recited his own poems as rhapsodies. Accordingly, he lived from time to time at the court of the Pisistratidae at Athens, and at that of Hieron at Syracuse, and for a longer period at Zancle and Catana in Sicily. His later years he apparently spent at Elea (Lat. Velia) in South Italy, a colony of the Phocaeans, in the founding of which he took part. In one fragment he describes himself as an old man of 92; according to another account, he lived to be more than 100. He is the founder of the Eleatic philosophy and of pantheism, inasmuch as he combated the anthropomorphic view of the gods dominant in Homer and Hesiod, and in the popular belief in general. He asserted the doctrine of a one all-ruling divinity, who, as true existence: opposed to appearance or non-existence as the One and the All, the Whole, undivided, unmoved, and eternal, underlies the universe and is identical with it. He resembles man neither in form nor understanding; being all eye, all ear, all intellect, by the power of his mind and without extraneous effort he sways and governs all things. Apart from two elegiac poems, we possess only fragments of the writings of Xenophanes: viz. part of the didactic poem, Concerning Nature, his principal work, which he himself recited; part of an epic poem on the founding of Colophon and Elea; and fragments of the Silloi, or satires in which he attacked the opposing views of poets and philosophers.