II. Xenophanes of Kolophon

55. We have seen how Pythagoras identified himself with the religious movement of his time; we have now to consider a very different manifestation of the reaction against that view of the gods which the poets had made familiar to every one. Xenophanes denied the anthropomorphic gods altogether, but was quite unaffected by the revival of more primitive ideas that was going on all round him. We still have a fragment of an elegy in which he ridiculed Pythagoras and the doctrine of transmigration. “Once, they say, he was passing by when a dog was being ill-treated. ‘Stop!’ he said, ‘don’t hit it! It is the soul of a friend! I knew it when I heard its voice.’”[265] We are also told that he opposed the views of Thales and Pythagoras, and attacked Epimenides, which is likely enough, though no fragments of the kind have come down to us.[266] His chief importance lies in the fact that he was the author of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry which culminated in Plato’s Republic.

It is not easy to determine the date of Xenophanes. Timaios said he was a contemporary of Hieron and Epicharmos, and he certainly seems to have 125played a part in the anecdotical romance of Hieron’s court which amused the Greeks of the fourth century much as that of Croesus and the Seven Wise Men amused those of the fifth.[267] As Hieron reigned from 478 to 467 B.C., that would make it impossible to date the birth of Xenophanes much earlier than 570 B.C., even if we suppose him to have lived till the age of a hundred. On the other hand, both Sextus and Clement say that Apollodoros gave Ol. XL. (620-616 B.C.) as the date of his birth, and the former adds that his days were prolonged till the time of Dareios and Cyrus.[268] Again, Diogenes, whose information on such matters mostly comes from Apollodoros, says that he flourished in Ol. LX. (540-537 B.C.), and Diels holds that Apollodoros really said so.[269] However that may be, it is evident that the date 540 B.C. is based on the assumption that he went to Elea in the year of its foundation, and is, therefore, a mere combination.[270]

126What we do know for certain is that Xenophanes had led a wandering life from the age of twenty-five, and that he was still alive and making poetry at the age of ninety-two. He says himself (fr. 8 = 24 Karst.; R. P. 97):—

There are by this time threescore years and seven that have tossed my careworn soul[271] up and down the land of Hellas; and there were then five-and-twenty years from my birth, if I can say aught truly about these matters.

It is tempting to suppose that in this passage Xenophanes was referring to the conquest of Ionia by Harpagos, and that he is, in fact, answering the question asked in another poem[272] (fr. 22 = 17 Karst.; R. P. 95 a):—

This is the sort of thing we should say by the fireside in the winter-time, as we lie on soft couches after a good meal, drinking sweet wine and crunching chickpeas: “Of what country are you, and how old are you, good sir? And how old were you when the Mede appeared?”

We cannot, however, be sure of this, and we must be content with what is, after all, for our purpose the main fact, namely, that he refers to Pythagoras in the past tense, and is in turn so referred to by Herakleitos.[273]

Theophrastos said that Xenophanes had “heard” Anaximander,[274] and we shall see that he was certainly acquainted with the Ionian cosmology. When driven 127from his native city, he lived in Sicily, chiefly, we are told, at Zankle and Katana.[275] Like Archilochos before him, he unburdened his soul in elegies and satires, which he recited at the banquets where, we may suppose, the refugees tried to keep up the usages of good Ionian society. The statement that he was a rhapsode has no foundation at all.[276] The singer of elegies was no professional like the rhapsode, but the social equal of his listeners. In his ninety-second year he was still, we have seen, leading a wandering life, which is hardly consistent with the statement that he settled at Elea and founded a school there, especially if we are to think of him as spending his last days at Hieron’s court. It is quite probable that he visited Elea, and it is just possible that he wrote a poem of two thousand hexameters on the foundation of that city, which was naturally a subject of interest to all the Ionic émigrés.[277] But it is very remarkable that no ancient writer expressly says that he ever was at Elea, and the only thing besides the doubtful poem referred to which connects him with it is a single anecdote of Aristotle’s as to the answer he gave the Eleates when they asked whether they should sacrifice to Leukothea and lament her or not. “If you think her a goddess,” he said, “do not 128lament her; if not, do not sacrifice to her.” That is absolutely all, and it is only an apophthegm.[278] It is strange there should be no more if Xenophanes had really found a home at last in the Phokaian colony.

56. According to a notice preserved in Diogenes, Xenophanes wrote in hexameters and also composed elegies and iambics against Homer and Hesiod.[279] No good authority says anything about his having written a philosophical poem.[280] Simplicius tells us he had never met with the verses about the earth stretching infinitely downwards (fr. 28),[281] and this means that the Academy possessed no copy of such a poem, which would be very strange if it had ever existed. Simplicius was able to find the complete works of much smaller men. Nor does internal evidence lend any support to the view that he wrote a philosophical poem. Diels refers about twenty-eight lines to it, but they would all come in quite as naturally in his attacks on Homer and Hesiod, as I have endeavoured to show. It is also significant that a considerable number of them are derived from commentators 129on Homer.[282] It seems probable, then, that Xenophanes expressed his theological and philosophical views incidentally in his satires. That would be quite in the manner of the time, as we can see from the remains of Epicharmos.

The satires themselves are called Silloi by late writers, and this name may go back to Xenophanes himself. It is also possible, however, that it originates in the fact that Timon of Phleious, the “sillographer” (c. 259 B.C.), put much of his satire upon philosophers into the mouth of Xenophanes. Only one iambic line has been preserved, and that is immediately followed by a hexameter (fr. 14 = 5 Karst.). This suggests that Xenophanes inserted iambic lines among his hexameters in the manner of the Margites, which would be a very natural thing for him to do.[283]

57. I give all the fragments of any importance according to the text and arrangement of Diels.

Now is the floor clean, and the hands and cups of all; one sets twisted garlands on our heads, another hands us fragrant ointment on a salver. The mixing bowls stand ready, full of gladness, and there is more wine at hand that promises never to leave us in the lurch, soft and smelling of flowers in the jars. In the midst the frankincense sends up its holy smoke, and there is cold water, sweet and clean. Brown loaves are set before us and a lordly table laden with cheese and rich honey. The altar in the midst is clustered round with flowers; song and revel fill the halls.

130But first it is meet that men should hymn the god with joyful song, with holy tales and pure words; then after libation and prayer made that we may have strength to do right—for that is in truth the better way—no sin is it to drink as much as a man can take and get home without an attendant, so he be not stricken in years. And above all men is he to be praised who after drinking gives goodly proof of himself in the trial of skill, as memory and voice will serve him. Let him not sing of Titans and Giants—those fictions of the men of old—nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all; but ever give heedful reverence to the gods.

What if a man win victory in swiftness of foot, or in the pentathlon, at Olympia, where is the precinct of Zeus by Pisa’s springs, or in wrestling,—what if by cruel boxing or that fearful sport men call pankration he become more glorious in the citizens’ eyes, and win a place of honour in the sight of all at the games, his food at the public cost from the State, and a gift to be an heirloom for him,—what if he conquer in the chariot-race,—he will not deserve all this for his portion so much as I do. Far better is our art than the strength of men and of horses! These are but thoughtless judgments, nor is it fitting to set strength before our art. Even if there arise a mighty boxer among a people, or one great in the pentathlon or at wrestling, or one excelling in swiftness of foot—and that stands in honour before all tasks of men at the games—the city would be none the better governed for that. It is but little joy a city gets of it if a man conquer at the games by Pisa’s banks; it is not this that makes fat the store-houses of a city.

They learnt dainty and unprofitable ways from the Lydians, so long as they were free from hateful tyranny; they went to the market-place with cloaks of purple dye, not less than a thousand of them all told, vainglorious and proud of their comely tresses, reeking with fragrance from cunning salves.

Since all at first have learnt according to Homer....

Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. R. P. 99.

They have uttered many, many lawless deeds of the gods, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. R. P. ib.

But mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and have clothes[284] like theirs, and voice and form. R. P. 100.

Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. R. P. ib.

The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair. R. P. 100 b.

The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better. R. P. 104 b.

One god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought.... R. P. 100.

He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over. R. P. 102.

But without toil he swayeth all things by the thought of his mind. R. P. 108 b.

And he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither. R. P. 110 a.

All things come from the earth, and in earth all things end. R. P. 103 a.

This limit of the earth above is seen at our feet in contact with the air;[285] below it reaches down without a limit. R. P. 103.

All things are earth and water that come into being and grow. R. P. 103.

The sea is the source of water and the source of wind; for neither in the clouds (would there be any blasts of wind blowing forth) from within without the mighty sea, nor rivers’ streams nor rain-water from the sky. The mighty sea is father of clouds and of winds and of rivers.[286] R. P. 103.

The sun swinging over[287] the earth and warming it....

She that they call Iris is a cloud likewise, purple, scarlet and green to behold. R. P. 103.

For we all are born of earth and water. R. P. ib.

There never was nor will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so. But all may have their fancy. R. P. 104.

Let these be taken as fancies[288] something like the truth. R. P. 104 a.

All of them[289] that are visible for mortals to behold.

And in some caves water drips....

If god had not made brown honey, men would think figs far sweeter than they do.

58. The intention of one of these fragments (fr. 32) is perfectly clear. “Iris too” is a cloud, and we may infer that the same thing had just been said of the sun, 134moon, and stars; for the doxographers tell us that these were all explained as “clouds ignited by motion.”[290] To the same context clearly belongs the explanation of the St. Elmo’s fire which Aetios has preserved. “The things like stars which appear on ships,” we are told, “which some call the Dioskouroi, are little clouds made luminous by motion.”[291] In the doxographers this explanation is repeated with trifling variations under the head of moon, stars, comets, lightning, shooting stars, and so forth, which gives the appearance of a systematic cosmology.[292] But the system is due to the arrangement of the work of Theophrastos, and not to Xenophanes; for it is obvious that a very few hexameters added to those we possess would amply account for the whole doxography.

What we hear of the sun presents some difficulties. We are told, on the one hand, that it too was an ignited cloud; but this can hardly be right. The evaporation of the sea from which clouds arise is distinctly said to be due to the sun’s heat. Theophrastos stated that the sun, according to Xenophanes, was a collection of sparks from the moist exhalation; but even this leaves the exhalation itself unexplained.[293] That, however, matters little, if the chief aim of Xenophanes was to discredit the anthropomorphic gods, rather than to give a 135scientific theory of the heavenly bodies. The important thing is that Helios too is a temporary phenomenon. The sun does not go round the earth, as Anaximander taught, but straight on, and the appearance of a circular path is solely due to its increasing distance. So it is not the same sun that rises next morning, but a new one altogether; while the old one “tumbles into a hole” when it comes to certain uninhabited regions of the earth. Besides that, there are many suns and moons, one of each for every region of the earth.[294] It is obvious that things of that kind cannot be gods.

The vigorous expression “tumbling into a hole”[295] seems clearly to come from the verses of Xenophanes himself, and there are others of a similar kind, which we must suppose were quoted by Theophrastos. The stars go out in the daytime, but glow again at night “like charcoal embers.”[296] The sun is of some use in producing the world and the living creatures in it, but the moon “does no work in the boat.”[297] Such expressions can only be meant to make the heavenly bodies appear ridiculous, and it will therefore be well to ask whether the other supposed cosmological fragments can be interpreted on the same principle.

13659. In fr. 29 Xenophanes says that “all things are earth and water,” and Hippolytos has preserved the account given by Theophrastos of the context in which this occurred. It was as follows:—

Xenophanes said that a mixture of the earth with the sea is taking place, and that it is being gradually dissolved by the moisture. He says that he has the following proofs of this. Shells are found in midland districts and on hills, and he says that in the quarries at Syracuse has been found the imprint of a fish and of seaweed, at Paros the form of an anchovy in the depth of the stone, and at Malta flat impressions of all marine animals. These, he says, were produced when all things were formerly mud, and the outlines were dried in the mud. All human beings are destroyed when the earth has been carried down into the sea and turned to mud. This change takes place for all the worlds.—Hipp. Ref. i. 14 (R. P. 103 a).

This is, of course, the theory of Anaximander, and we may perhaps credit him rather than Xenophanes with the observations of fossils.[298] Most remarkable of all, however, is the statement that this change applies to “all the worlds.” It really seems impossible to doubt that Theophrastos attributed a belief in “innumerable worlds” to Xenophanes. As we have seen already, Aetios includes him in his list of those who held this doctrine, and Diogenes ascribes it to him also.[299] In this place, Hippolytos seems to take it for granted. 137We shall also find, however, that in another connexion he said the World or God was one. If our interpretation of him is correct, there is no difficulty here. The main point is that, so far from being a primeval goddess, and “a sure seat for all things ever,” Gaia too is a passing appearance. That belongs to the attack upon Hesiod, and, if in this connexion Xenophanes spoke, with Anaximander, of “innumerable worlds,” while elsewhere he said that God or the World was one, that is probably connected with a still better attested contradiction which we have now to examine.

60. Aristotle tried without success to discover from the poems of Xenophanes whether he regarded the world as finite or infinite. “He made no clear pronouncement on the subject,” he tells us.[300] Theophrastos, on the other hand, decided that he regarded it as spherical and finite because he said it was “equal every way.”[301] This, however, leads to very serious difficulties. We have seen already that Xenophanes said the sun went right on to infinity, and this agrees with his view of the earth as an infinitely extended plain. Still more difficult to reconcile with the idea of a spherical and finite world is the statement of fr. 28 that, while the earth has an upper limit which we see, it has no limit below. This is attested by Aristotle, who speaks of the earth being “infinitely rooted,” and adds that Empedokles criticised Xenophanes for holding this 138view.[302] It further appears from the fragment of Empedokles quoted by Aristotle that Xenophanes said the vast Air extended infinitely upwards.[303] We are therefore bound to try to find room for an infinite earth and an infinite air in a spherical and finite world! That comes of trying to find science in satire. If, on the other hand, we regard these statements from the same point of view as those about the heavenly bodies, we shall at once see what they most probably mean. The story of Ouranos and Gaia was always the chief scandal of the Theogony, and the infinite air gets rid of Ouranos altogether. As to the earth stretching infinitely downwards, that gets rid of Tartaros, which Homer described as situated at the bottommost limit of earth and sea, as far beneath Hades as heaven is above the earth.[304] This is pure conjecture, of course; but, if it is even possible, we are entitled to disbelieve that such startling contradictions occurred in a cosmological poem.

A more subtle explanation of the difficulty commended itself to the late Peripatetic who wrote an account of the Eleatic school, part of which is still extant in the Aristotelian corpus, and is generally known now as the treatise on Melissos, Xenophanes, and Gorgias.[305] He said that Xenophanes declared the 139world to be neither finite nor infinite, and he composed a series of arguments in support of this thesis, to which he added another like it, namely, that the world is neither in motion nor at rest. This has introduced endless confusion into our sources. Alexander used this treatise as well as the great work of Theophrastos, and Simplicius supposed the quotations from it to be from Theophrastos too. Having no copy of the poems he was completely baffled, and until recently all accounts of Xenophanes were vitiated by the same confusion. It may even be suggested that, but for this, we should have heard very little of the “philosophy of Xenophanes,” a way of speaking which is in the main a survival from the days before this scholastic exercise was recognised as having no authority.

61. In the passage of the Metaphysics just referred to, Aristotle speaks of Xenophanes as “the first partisan of the One,”[306] and the context shows that he means to suggest he was the first of the Eleatics. We have seen already that the certain facts of his life make it very unlikely that he settled at Elea and founded a school there, and it is probable that, as usual in such cases, Aristotle is simply reproducing 140certain statements of Plato. At any rate, Plato had spoken of the Eleatics as the “partisans of the Whole,”[307] and he had also spoken of the school as “starting with Xenophanes and even earlier.”[308] The last words, however, show clearly enough what he meant. Just as he called the Herakleiteans “followers of Homer and still more ancient teachers,”[309] so he attached the Eleatic school to Xenophanes and still earlier authorities. We have seen in other instances how these playful and ironical remarks of Plato were taken seriously by his successors, and we need not let this fresh instance of the same thing influence our general view of Xenophanes unduly.

Aristotle goes on to tell us that Xenophanes, “referring to the whole world,[310] said the One was god.” This clearly alludes to frs. 23-26, where all human attributes are denied of a god who is said to be one and “the greatest among gods and men.” It may be added that these verses gain very much in point if we may think of them as closely connected with frs. 14111-16, instead of referring the one set of verses to the Satires and the other to a cosmological poem. It was probably in the same context that Xenophanes called the world or god “equal every way”[311] and denied that it breathed.[312] The statement that, there is no mastership among the gods[313] also goes very well with fr. 26. A god has no wants, nor is it fitting for one god to be the servant of others, like Iris and Hermes in Homer.

62. That this “god” is just the world, Aristotle tells us, and the use of the word θεός is quite in accordance with Anaximander’s. Xenophanes regarded it as sentient, though without any special organs of sense, and it sways all things by the thought of its mind. He also calls it “one god,” and, if that is monotheism, then Xenophanes was a monotheist, though this is surely not how the word is generally understood. The fact is that the expression “one god” wakens all sorts of associations in our mind which did not exist at all for the Greeks of this time. His contemporaries would have been more likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else. As Eduard Meyer excellently says: “In Greece the question of one god or gods many hardly plays any part. Whether the divine power is thought of as a unity or a plurality, is irrelevant in comparison with the question whether it exists at all, and how its nature and its relation to the world is to be understood.”[314]

142On the other hand, it is wrong to say with Freudenthal that Xenophanes was in any sense a polytheist.[315] That he should use the language of polytheism in his elegies is only what we should expect, and the other references to “gods” can be best explained as incidental to his attack on the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod. In one case, Freudenthal has pressed a proverbial way of speaking too hard.[316] Least of all can we admit that Xenophanes allowed the existence of subordinate or departmental gods; for it was just the existence of such that he was chiefly concerned to deny. At the same time, I cannot help thinking that Freudenthal was more nearly right than Wilamowitz, who says that Xenophanes “upheld the only real monotheism that has ever existed upon earth.”[317] Diels, I fancy, comes nearer the mark, when he calls it a “somewhat narrow pantheism.”[318] But all these views would have surprised Xenophanes himself about equally. He was really Goethe’s Weltkind, with prophets to right and left of him, and he would have smiled if he had known that one day he was to be regarded as a theologian.