XENOPHANES of Colophon, the reputed founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, is supposed to have been born in the third or fourth decade of the 6th century B.C. An exile from his Ionian home, he resided for a time in Sicily, at Zancle and at Catana, and afterwards established himself in southern Italy, at Elea, a Phocaean colony founded in the 6rst Olympiad (536 533). In one of the extant fragments he speaks of himself as hav ing begun his wanderings 67 years before, when he was 25 years of age, so that he was not less than 92 when he died. His teaching found expression in poems, which he recited rhapsodically in the course of his travels. In the more considerable of the elegiac f rag ments which have survived, he ridicules the doctrine of the migra tion of souls (xviii.), asserts the claims of wisdom against the prev alent athleticism, which seemed to him to conduce neither to the good government of states nor to their material prosperity (xix.), reprobates the introduction of Lydian luxury into Colo phon (xx.), and recommends the reasonable enjoyment of social pleasures (xxi.). Of the epic fragments, the more important are those in which he attacks the "anthropomorphic and anthropop athic polytheism" of his contemporaries. According to Aristotle, "the first of Eleatic unitarians was not careful to say whether the unity which he postulated was finite or infinite, but, contemplating the whole firmament, declared that the One is God." Whether Xenophanes was a monotheist, whose assertion of the unity of God suggested to Parmenides the doctrine of the unity of Being, or a pantheist, whose assertion of the unity of God was also a declaration of the unity of Being, so that he anticipated Par menides is a question about which authorities differ.
Of Xenophanes's utterances about (r) God, (2) the world, (3) knowledge, the following survive : ( 1) "There is one God, greatest among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals. . . . He is all sight, all mind, all ear (i.e., not a corn posite organism). . . . Without an effort ruleth he all things by thought. . . . He abideth ever in the same place motionless, and it befitteth him not to wander hither and thither. • . . Yet men imagine gods to be born, and to have raiment and voice and body, like themselves. . . . Even so the gods of the Ethiopians are swarthy and flat-nosed, the gods of the Thracians are fair-haired and blue-eyed.. , . . Even so Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all that is a shame and a reproach among men—theft, adul tery, deceit and other lawless acts. . . . Even so oxen, lions and
horses, if they had hands wherewith to grave images, would fashion gods after their own shapes and make them bodies like to their own. (2) From earth all things are and to earth all things return. . . . From earth and water come all of us. . . . The sea is the well whence water springeth. . . . Here at our feet is the end of the earth where it reacheth unto air, but, below, its founda tions are without end. . . . The rainbow, which men call Iris, is a cloud that is purple and red and yellow. (3) No man hath cer tainly known, nor shall certainly know, that which he saith about the gods and about all things ; for, be that which he saith ever so perfect, yet doth he not know it ; all things are matters of opinion. . • . That which I say is opinion like unto truth. . . . The gods did not reveal all things to mortals in the beginning; long is the search ere man findeth that which is better." There is very little secondary evidence to record. "The Eleatic school," says the Stranger in Plato's Sophist, 242 D, "beginning with Xenophanes, and even earlier, starts from the principle of the unity of all things." Aristotle, in a passage already cited, Metaphysics, As, speaks of Xenophanes as the first of the Eleatic unitarians, adding that his monotheism was reached through the contemplation of the obpav6s. Theophrastus (in Simplicius's Ad Physica, 5) sums up Xenophanes's teaching in the propositions, "The All is One and the One is God." Timon (in Sext. Empir. Pyrrh. i. 224), ignoring Xenophanes's theology, makes him resolve all things into one and the same unity. The demonstrations of the unity and the attributes of God, with which the treatise De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgia (now no longer ascribed to Aristotle or Theophrastus) accredits Xenophanes, are plainly framed on the model of Eleatic proofs of the unity and the attributes of the Ent, and must therefore be set aside.
The wisdom of Xenophanes, like the wisdom of the Hebrew Preacher, showed itself, not in a theory of the universe, but in a sorrowful recognition of the nothingness of things and the futility of endeavour. His theism was a declaration not so much of the greatness of God as rather of the littleness of man. His cosmology was an assertion not so much of the immutability of the One as rather of the mutability of the Many. Like Socrates, he was not a philosopher, and did not pretend to be one; but, as the reasoned scepticism of Socrates cleared the way for the philosophy of Plato, so did Xenophanes's "abnormis sapientia" for the philosophy of Parmenides.