Xenophanes (c.570—c.475 BCE)

Founder of the Eleatic school of Greek philosophy, Xenophanes was a
native of Colophon, and born about 570 BCE. It is difficult to
determine the dates of his life with any accuracy and the facts of his
life are also obscure. Xenophanes early left his own country and took
refuge in Sicily, where he supported himself by reciting, at the court
of Hiero, elegiac and iambic verses, which he had written in criticism
of the Theogony of Hesiod and Homer. From Sicily he passed over into
Magna Graecia, where he took up the profession of philosophy, and
became a celebrated teacher in the Pythagorean school. Give way to a
greater freedom of thought than was usual among the disciples of
Pythagoras, he introduced new opinions of his own opposing the
doctrines of Epimenides, Thales, and Pythagoras. He held the
Pythagorean chair of philosophy for about seventy years, and lived to
the extreme age of 105.

Xenophanes was an elegiac and satirical poet who approached the
question of science from the standpoint of the reformer rather than of
the scientific investigator. If we look at the very considerable
remains of his poetry that have come down to us, we see that they are
all in the satirist's and social reformer's vein. There is one dealing
with the management of a feast, another which denounces the
exaggerated importance attached to athletic victories, and several
which attack the humanized gods of Homer. The problem is, therefore,
to find, if we can, a single point of view from which all these
fragments can be interpreted, although it may be that no such point of
view exists. Like the religious reformers of the day, Xenophanes
turned his back on the anthropomorphic polytheism of Homer and Hesiod.
This revolt is based on a conviction that the tales of the poets are
directly responsible for the moral corruption of the time. 'Homer and
Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a
disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceiving of
another' (fr. 11). And this he held was due to the representation of
the gods in human form. Men make gods in their own image; those of the
Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue
eyes and red hair (fr 16). If horses or oxen or lions had hands and
could produce works of art, they too would represent the gods after
their own fashion (fr. 15). All that must be swept away along with the
tales of Titans and Giants, those 'figments of an earlier day' (fr. 1)
if social life is to be reformed.

Xenophanes found the weapons he required for his attack on polytheism
in the science of the time. Here are traces of Anaximander's cosmology
in the fragments, and Xenophanes may easily have been his disciple
before he left Ionia. He seems to have taken the gods of mythology one
by one and reduced them to meteorological phenomena, and especially to
clouds. And he maintained there was only one god — namely, the world.
God is one incorporeal eternal being, and, like the universe,
spherical in form; that he is of the same nature with the universe,
comprehending all things within himself; is intelligent, and pervades
all things, but bears no resemblance to human nature either in body or
mind.

He taught that if there had ever been a time when nothing existed,
nothing could ever have existed. Whatever is, always has been from
eternity, without deriving its existence from any prior principles.
Nature, he believed, is one and without limit; that what is one is
similar in all its parts, else it would be many; that the one
infinite, eternal, and homogeneous universe is immutable and incapable
of change. His position is often classified as pantheistic, although
his use of the term 'god' simply follows the use characteristic of the
early cosmologists generally. There is no evidence that Xenophanes
regarded this 'god' with any religious feeling, and all we are told
about him (or rather about it) is purely negative. He is quite unlike
a man, and has no special organs of sense, but 'sees all over, thinks
all over, hears all over' (fr. 24). Further, he does not go about from
place to place (fr. 26), but does everything 'without toil (fr. 25).
It is not safe to go beyond this; for Xenophanes himself tells us no
more. It is pretty certain that if he had said anything more positive
or more definitely religious in its bearing it would have been quoted
by later writers.