Xenophanes

c. 570 - c. 478 BCE · Greek (Ionian, of Colophon) · Presocratic philosophy, theology, epistemology

If oxen had hands, they would draw their gods like oxen.

When the Persians conquered Colophon in 546 BCE, Xenophanes was exiled and spent the next sixty-seven years wandering the Greek world — he counted those years himself, in verse — performing his poems at symposia from Sicily to Italy. He lived into his nineties and produced work that cuts against almost everything his contemporaries assumed: that Homer told the truth about the gods, that athletic victory was the highest human achievement, that certainty about divine things was possible.

Topics Xenophanes addresses

• the one god of fragment 23
• anti-anthropomorphism polemic
• the oxen-and-lions argument
• cultural relativism of god-images
• critique of Homer and Hesiod
• divine cognitive activity
• divine immobility
• no man knows the clear truth
• reliable opinion resembling the truth
• by seeking they find out better in time
• the episteme/doxa distinction
• sophie over athletic arete
• earth and water as basic principles
• the earth extends downward without limit
• the sea as source of all moisture
• fossils as evidence of past sea-on-land
• the rainbow as cloud
• sun and stars as clouds lit by exhalations
• proper conduct at the symposium
• piety in thought and deed
• moderation in wealth and luxury
• service to the city
• anti-Pythagorean satire
• the silloi as literary genre

Converse with Xenophanes on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Xenophanes's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.