Xenophanes (c.570–c.475 B.C.), Greek philosopher, a proponent of an idealized conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Greek West (Sicily and southern Italy). The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism. He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports but also quite a few verbatim quotations – fragments from his ‘Lampoons’ (Silloi) and from other didactic poetry.
Xenophanes attacks the worldview of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Greek piety: it is an outrage that the poets attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional biases (blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans). Indeed, anthropomorphic gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint (‘If cattle, or horses, or lion. . . could draw pictures of the god. . . ,’ frg. 15). There is a single ‘greatest’ god, who is not at all like a human being, either in body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes without ‘moving,’ through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive ‘Twin Sons of Zeus’ (St. Elmo’s fire) to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation. There are no mysterious infernal regions; the familiar strata of earth stretch down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat: what he offers is only a ‘conjecture.’ In later antiquity Xenophanes came to be regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of God. See also ELEATIC SCHOOL, PRE-SOCRATICS. A.P.D.M.
