Xenophanes
He noticed that the gods of each people look exactly like that people, and drew the obvious conclusion.
Xenophanes wandered the Greek world for sixty-seven years, and he left behind something sharper than most settled thinkers: the observation that Ethiopians say their gods are dark and flat-nosed, while Thracians say theirs are red-haired and blue-eyed. If horses could draw gods, he added, they would draw them as horses. Behind the joke was a genuine claim: God (one, not many) is nothing like a human body. It does not travel, does not feel anger, does not change. It perceives the whole by mind alone. The nature of things, meanwhile, is not water or fire but earth and water mixed. He doubted that humans can ever achieve certainty, only better and better opinion. That combination of critique and humility, aimed at both religion and knowledge, makes him the first philosopher of human limits.
What survives
His book is lost. 6 lines survive, each because a later writer quoted it.
Places
Ideas
Words
“If oxen and horses and lions had hands and could draw, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.”
“The clear truth no man has seen, nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods; for even if one should happen to say what is right, still he himself does not know it.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Colophon
Born in the Ionian city of Colophon, near the sanctuary of Claros, in the generation when Ionia's cities were falling under Persian rule.
Leaves Ionia
Left his homeland around the time of the Persian conquest and never resettled. By his own account he 'tossed about the Greek land' for sixty-seven years, reciting his poems from city to city.
Dies after a long wandering life
Died in his nineties, still composing. Later tradition connected him with Elea in southern Italy, making him, plausibly or not, a forerunner of Parmenides.
Influence
Influenced
- Parmenides
Ancient tradition made Xenophanes the teacher of Parmenides and the first of the Eleatics; whether or not they ever met, his argument that there is one god unlike mortals in body or thought set the direction Parmenides followed.
- Sextus Empiricus
Xenophanes' remark that no man has ever known the certain truth, and that even if he spoke it he would not know it, was quoted for centuries as the earliest Greek statement of the skeptical problem.
