p Xenophanes, the son of Dexius or Orthomenes of the Ionian city of Colophon, depicts in his poem a well-fed complacent citizen who, lying on a soft couch by the fire-side in the winter season, sipping sweet wine and nibbling peas inquires of a stranger: "Who are you among men, and where from? How old are you, my good friend? What age were you when the Mede came?" The answer is Xenophanes’s own story: "By now seven-and-sixty years have been tossing my carefilled heart over the land of Hellas. From my birth tilj then [that is, till his exile], there were twenty-five years to be added to these if indeed I am able to tell correctly of these matters" (DK 21 B 22, 8). Proceeding from this passage and kno’wing that Persian conqueror Harpagus the Mede seized Colophon approximately 540 B.C., we may put his birth about 565 B.C. He is known to have been still alive at the age of ninety-two, i.e. in 473. Having left Colophon, Xenophanes lived first in Zancle (Messina), in Sicily, then in Catana and Syracuse. He is known to have visited the islands of Paros and Malta, as well as the Lipari Islands. He wrote an epic poem called The Settlement of a Colony at Elea in Italy, yet it is not known if it was devoted to the foundation of Elea like his poem The Founding of Colophon, or described his own settlement there during his wonderings "over the land of Hellas." Xenophanes also wrote elegies and poems of mockery (silloi) and is considered to be the founder of the satyrical genre. He is also credited with a philosophical poem called traditionally On Nature of which we have about 20 fragments. The total number of the extant fragments of his poems runs to about forty.

p Tradition holds Xenophanes as a witty and caustic man who loved freedom and hated tyranny and oppression. He recommends speaking with a tyrant as little as possible or as sweetly as possible, advises the Egyptians not to mourn over Osiris, if he is an immortal god, and not to offer him sacrifice if he is mortal, ridicules the exaggerated- athleticism of the day and cautions his countrymen against the preference of muscle to brains as "wisdom is better than the strength of men or of horses" (B 2), castigates vainglorious foppery, etc. There is hardly a more resolute opponent of tradition, 79 primarily religious and mythological, in the history of ancient philosophy than Xenophanes. Homer was the basis of education in Greece in that period, yet, according to Xenophanes, "both Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things that are shameful and a reproach among mankind: theft, adultery, and mutual deception" (B 11). Indeed, Hermes’s trickery exalted in one of Homer’s hymns, gods’ amorous adventures, the notorious love affair of Hephaestus’s wife Aphrodite and Ares described in the eighth book of Odyssey, the stories of Chronos who emasculated his farther Ouranos and of Zeus who overthrew his farther Chronos, etc., cannot serve as examples to be followed. Yet Xenophanes was more than a moralising literary critic. The real target of his attacks on the old beliefs and dubious stories about the gods was the frank anthropomorphism of popular theology. Among the extant evidence are these fragments from his poems: "But mortals believe the gods-to be created by birth, and to have their own (mortals’) raiment, voice and body... Aethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair... But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies (of their gods) in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses" (B 14, 16, 15).

p These passages preserved by Clement of Alexandria not only disclose the main weakness of polytheism, but represent one of the most important arguments of atheism against any religion: the assertion that the true creators of gods are people who shape them in their own image, but not vice versa. This does not mean, however, that Xenophanes was an atheist. To popular polytheism he counterposed the philosophical conception of god which later became known as pantheism (Gr. pan meaning “all” and theos meaning “god”).

p Characterising Xenophanes’s understanding of god, Aristotle wrote: "With reference to the whole material universe he says the One is God" (Met. 1 5 986 b). Xenophanes himself describes the nature of god as follows: "There is one god, among gods and men the greatest, not at all like mortals in body or in mind... And he always remains in the same place, not moving at all, nor is it fitting for him to change his position at different times... But without toil he sets everything in 80 motion, by the thought of his mind... He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole" (J3 23, 26, 25, 24).

p This understanding of god comes very near to the Ionian conception of living nature which is the cause of its own motion and change. In fact, Xenophanes identifies god not with the spirit, but with the world, i.e. his pantheism is naturalistic. His search for a single determinate substance was very much in the Ionian tradition, but the ancient evidence about its nature is conflicting. Aetius asserts that Xenophanes considered earth to be the source of everything: "For everything comes from earth and everything goes back to earth at last" (B 27). On the other hand, Sextus Empiricus, having cited a similar passage from Xenophanes, hastens to add another quotation from his poem: "We all have our origin from earth and water" (B-33; confer Sext. Adv. Mathem. X 314). That water played an important role in the cosmology of Xenophanes is also attested to by the fact that he derived all meteorological phenomena from water (sea): "The sea is the source of water, and the source of wind. ...The mighty main (sea) is the begetter of clouds and winds and rivers" (B 30). Xenophanes held that the sun and the heavenly bodies consist of luminous clouds and are renewed daily, being quenched in the daytime and rekindled at night. The moon is a felted cloud. The phenomenon of Dioscures known among the Greeks as St. Elmo’s fire is "little clouds glimmering in virtue of the kind of motion that they have" (A 38-A 46).

p Borrowing from the lonians, Xenophanes did not identify himself with them. For all his adherence to “sea” and “water” as the originating cause of things, in contrast with Thales, he stressed the primacy of earth. He knew that it sometimes immerses in water as evidenced by shells found in mountains or imprints of fishes and seals discovered in the Syracuse quarry, etc., but his earth does not float on the surface of the sea like in Thales—it has no bounds: "This is the upper limit, of the earth that we see at our feet, in contact with the air; but the part beneath goes down to infinity" (B 28). On the evidence of Macrobius, Xenophanes believed the soul to consist of earth and water (A 50). He was familiar with the orphico-Pythagorean theory of the transmigration of souls and clearly showed his attitude to it in this gibe at Pythagoras:

p “They say that, passing a belaboured whelp,
He, full of pity, spake these words of dole: 81
’Stay, smile not: ’Tis a friend, a human soul;
I knew him straight whenas I heard him, yelp’.”

p (Diog. L. VIII, 36).

p Xenophanes was the first among the Greek philosophers to cast doubt upon the possibilities of human knowledge. Having discarded the anthropomorphic gods, he declared man’s own needs to be the guide to knowledge: "Truly the gods have not revealed to mortals all things from the beginning but mortals by long seeking discover what is better" (B 18). However, one should not be too optimistic about man’s ability to grasp absolute truth: "And as for certain truth, no man has seen it nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and about all the things I mention. For if he succeeds to the full in saying what is completely true, he himself is nevertheless unaware of it; and Opinion (seeming) is fixed by fate upon all things" (B 34). As distinct from Heraclitus who claimed to speak on behalf of the Logos, Xenophanes must have extended his scepticism to his own pronouncements: "Let these things be stated as conjectural only, similar to the reality" (B 35). It is not surprising, therefore, that the sceptics of later periods regarded Xenophanes as one of the founders of their philosophy.

p What is then the true significance of Xenophanes’s philosophical heritage? Are we to regard him as a pantheist or a sceptic, a monist convinced that God is. One, or a dualist insisting that everything derives from earth and water? Did he believe in the progress of human knowledge or consider it unable to overstep the bounds of opinion? The conclusion that suggests itself after studying the ancient evidence for his views is that it would not be correct to treat his conflicting statements as elaborate conceptions and to attempt a flat answer to these questions. Xenophanes’s utterances testify to the embryonic state of his philosophy, plastic and ambivalent like any nascent system. Its potentialities were realised in the fifth century B.C. by the Eleatic school and in the fourth-third centuries B.C. by the scepticism of Pyrrho and Timon of Phlius.

p A similar attitude should evidently be adopted to attempts to affiliate him with a definite trend of thought and choose between the Ionian “physiologers” writing on nature in the Milesian tradition or the “dialecticians” who launched the investigation into the contradictory nature of logical notions. 82 We have already shown his affinity with the former. On the other hand, ancient sources provide convincing evidence that he was one of the founders of subjective dialectics, the teaching of thinking or logic.

p Aristotle is known to have written a treatise On Xenophanes which was later lost. Instead, we have a small treatise On Xenophanes, Zeno and Gorgias which, as the philological investigation in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries showed should be called On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias. Its author was an unknown peripatetic commentator of the first century A.D. who may have used Aristotle’s genuine work when writing the section on Xenophanes. Though this section can by no means be relied upon for accurate exposition of Xenophanes’s arguments, it gives certain valuable information which is worth quoting. According to its author, Xenophanes maintained that the one eternal, uniform and spherical god, the cosmos, could be neither unlimited nor limited, neither moving nor motionless. Indeed, the One Being must be either unlimited, infinite, or limited, finite. If it is unlimited, it does not exist, since in order to exist it must be determined by something, i.e. limited. If it is finite and limited, it cannot be One (single), as it must have something which limits it, which is Other. So, being is not One but Many. The problem of motion is treated in a similar manner. The motionless is in fact identical with the non-existent, since neither anything can come to it, nor can it come to anything. On the other hand, if anything moves, it must move relative to something else which implies plurality, many—as a result, the unity of being, its singleness is lost again. The conclusion is that the One is neither at rest, nor moving, as it is neither non-being nor Many (De MXG III 977b 16; cf. DK 21 A 28).

p How does this conception agree with Xenophanes’s pantheism mentioned above? There may be two ways to explain this apparent contradiction. First, one may proceed from the assumption that Xenophanes attempted to give a logical analysis of the conception of the one all-embracing being identified by him with god. In that case the treatise On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias should be regarded as a collection of aporias or logical paradoxes connected with the problem of One Being that were outlined by Xenophanes, modernised in the spirit of Late Plato’s dialectics and expounded in terms of the Aristotelian logic. Second, the treatise may be viewed as an exposition of Xenophanes’s later doctrine evolved by him under the 83 influence of Parmenides and indicative of a strong tendency towards scepticism. On the evidence that we have the first explanation appears more convincing.

However that may be, Xenophanes was the first philosopher to advance the conception of One Being which was to become central to the Eleatic school.