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Founder of the Eleatic school of 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.
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