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Concept
Xenophanes
Summary
Xenophanes of Colophon (zəˈnɒfəniːz ; Ξενοφάνης ὁ Κολοφώνιος ksenophánɛːs ho kolophɔ̌ːnios; c. 570 – c. 478 BC) was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer from Ionia who travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early Classical Antiquity.
As a poet, Xenophanes was known for his critical style, writing poems that are considered among the first satires. He also composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories. He also criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak. His poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his work survives in quotations by later philosophers and literary critics.
Xenophanes is seen as one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers. A highly original thinker, Xenophanes sought explanations for physical phenomena such as clouds or rainbows without references to divine or mythological explanations, but instead based on first principles. He also distinguished between different forms of knowledge and belief, an early instance of epistemology. Later philosophers such as the Eleatics and the Pyrrhonists also saw Xenophanes as the founder of their doctrines, and interpreted his work in terms of those doctrines, although modern scholarship disputes these claims.
The Ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes was born in Colophon, a city that once existed in Ionia, in present day Turkey. Laertius says that Xenophanes is said to have flourished during the 60th Olympiad (540–537 BC), and modern scholars generally place his birth some time around 570-560 BC. His surviving work refers to Thales, Epimenides, and Pythagoras, and he himself is mentioned in the writings of Heraclitus and Epicharmus.
By his own surviving account, he was an itinerant poet who left his native land at the age of 25 and then lived 67 years in other Greek lands, dying at or after the age of 92.
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