Xenophanes

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek poet and philosopher of the early classical period, usually counted among the pre-Socratics. Born in Colophon, a coastal city in Ionia in what is now Turkey, he spent much of his life away from his homeland, travelling through the Greek-speaking world. He matters because he moved from myth towards natural explanation and a critical view of the divine, and his ideas still shape how we read early Greek thought.

The reliable facts of his life are few, and many details remain disputed. His birth date has been calculated in several ways. The oldest scheme, attributed to Apollodorus, places it around 580-577 BC, but this is a conventional reckoning based on a symbolic date. Other scholars, relying on a fragment in which he speaks of sixty-seven years spent in exile, argue for a later date, around 570-560 BC. His death is usually placed around 478 BC, though with some uncertainty. Some ancient testimony says he lived to a great age, perhaps more than ninety years.

His choice of verse is one of the most striking features of his work. Unlike many thinkers of his time, who wrote in prose, he used traditional poetic forms. Only fragments of his poems survive, quoted by later authors, and they include elegies, iambics and hexameters. In his elegies he takes up themes of the symposium, such as piety, moderation and criticism of luxury and greed, and he argues that wisdom benefits the community more than the strength of victorious athletes. Some ancient writers also credit him with satires aimed at poets and philosophers.

His central concern was the gods, above all the gods presented by Homer and Hesiod. He objected to depicting the divine with human form and human passions, deceptions and quarrels, and proposed a sterner picture: a single, supreme god who is motionless, who perceives and knows everything, and who resembles mortals neither in body nor in mind. He held that human beings can reach only opinion rather than certain knowledge, and that complete truth belongs to the divine. This attitude has earned him a place as one of the first sceptics in the epistemological sense.

He also sought natural causes rather than divine intervention to explain the world. He is credited with an account of St Elmo's fire as the agitation of tiny cloud droplets, and with a picture of the earth extending without limit downward and in every direction. His ideas on clouds and the rainbow have been linked to the Milesian thinkers, especially Anaximenes.

His influence was considerable. The Eleatics, and Parmenides in particular, were traditionally seen as heirs to his ideas, although recent scholarship qualifies that link. Later Christian writers read his theological fragments as an early formulation of monotheism among the Greeks, and later sceptics cited him as a precursor. His critique of anthropomorphic gods and his insistence on the limits of human knowledge remain important reference points in the history of philosophy.