A collection of surviving poetic fragments from the pre-Socratic philosopher-poet who challenged Greek religious tradition and pioneered naturalistic explanation
What the Work Is
Testimonies and Fragments refers to the surviving body of work attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–c. 478 BC), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and poet. None of his poems survive intact; what remains are fragments quoted by later Greek writers, philosophers, and literary critics. These fragments constitute the entirety of our direct knowledge of Xenophanes’ thought. Unlike other pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus or Parmenides, who each wrote a single work, Xenophanes composed a variety of poems, and no two surviving fragments can be positively identified as belonging to the same original text. According to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, Xenophanes wrote a poem on the foundation of Colophon and Elea running to approximately two thousand lines, and later testimony suggests his collection of satires was assembled in at least five books.
What the Book Is About
The fragments present Xenophanes as a highly original thinker who sought to reform Greek religious understanding and to explain physical phenomena through natural principles rather than mythology. His poetry criticizes the traditional depiction of the gods in Homer and Hesiod, questions the value of athletic achievement, and offers early naturalistic accounts of phenomena such as clouds, rainbows, and the sun. The surviving material also reveals one of the first philosophical treatments of the distinction between knowledge and belief. Although later philosophical schools claimed Xenophanes as their founder, modern scholarship regards him as a distinct and independent thinker whose ideas extend well beyond the influence he had on subsequent traditions.
Key Ideas and Themes
Critique of Traditional Religion
Xenophanes directed his sharpest criticism at the polytheistic religious views of earlier Greek poets and his contemporaries. He objected to Homer and Hesiod for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak, arguing that such depictions were inconsistent with genuine piety. His central insight was that humans project their own image onto the divine: if oxen or horses could draw, he reportedly observed, they would depict their gods as oxen or horses. This critique did not amount to atheism—Xenophanes did not question the existence of a divine entity—but rather challenged the anthropomorphic conception of divinity that dominated Greek literature and cult practice.
Positive Theology
Against the traditional pantheon, Xenophanes posited a single supreme God, “one, greatest among gods and men,” who bears no resemblance to mortals in body or mind. This God is eternal, immobile, and comprehends all things within himself, moving all things by the power of thought alone. Five key concepts emerge from his positive theology: God is beyond human morality, does not resemble human form, cannot die or be born, exists outside any divine hierarchy, and does not intervene in human affairs. This understanding of a separate, uninvolved divinity motivated Xenophanes to seek naturalistic explanations for physical phenomena rather than attributing them to divine action.
Natural Philosophy
Xenophanes was likely the first philosopher to offer an explanation for St. Elmo’s fire, the glow that appears on ship masts during thunderstorms, which he attributed to the agitation of small droplets in clouds. His cosmology held that the earth extends infinitely downward and in every direction, with only one boundary to the universe—the one “seen by our feet.” Rather than the sun passing under the earth at sunset, he believed the sun and moon travel along a straight line westward, with a new sun or moon reconstituted after an eclipse. This implies he understood the sun and moon as types of objects that appear in the sky rather than specific individuals that recur each day.
Examining fossils of sea creatures found above land, Xenophanes concluded that water once covered the entire Earth’s surface. He used this evidence to argue that the cosmic principle of the universe was a tide flowing between wet and dry, or earth and water. These two extreme states alternate, and with each alternation human life becomes extinct and then regenerates. This argument can be read as a rebuke to Anaximenes’ theory that air was the fundamental substance, and it represents an important step toward backing up philosophical claims with evidence and observation.
Epistemology
Xenophanes is among the first philosophers to engage with epistemological questions. He held that objective truth exists in reality, but that humans are unable to know it with certainty. He distinguished between true belief and knowledge, acknowledging that one can think one knows something without actually knowing it. His verses on this subject were later quoted by the skeptic Sextus Empiricus. Xenophanes also maintained that the widest variety of evidence was the surest way to prove a theory, an early endorsement of empirical inquiry.
Social Criticism
Several surviving fragments address proper conduct at the symposium, the Greek drinking parties held to commemorate athletic or poetic victories. These poems stress piety and honor toward the gods, discourage drunkenness and excess, and endorse moderation. Xenophanes rejected the cultural glorification of athletic victories, arguing that cultivating wisdom was more important than physical achievement. His critical style has led his poems to be considered among the first satires.
Structure and Approach
The fragments are written in elegiac couplets and iambic poetry, forms typical of Greek sympotic verse. Although later sources attribute a poem titled “On Nature” to Xenophanes, modern scholars doubt this label, which was likely assigned by librarians at Alexandria to works by philosophers Aristotle had identified as students of nature. The philosophical remarks of Xenophanes were probably expressed incidentally within his satires rather than in a separate treatise. The name “Silloi” given to his satires may go back to Xenophanes himself, or it may originate with the Pyrrhonist philosopher Timon of Phlius, who put much of his own satire into Xenophanes’ mouth.
Significance and Influence
Xenophanes’ influence has been interpreted in remarkably diverse ways: as the founder of epistemology, as a poet and rhapsode rather than a philosopher, as the first skeptic, the first empiricist, a rationalist theologian, a reformer of religion, and more. The philosopher Karl Popper read Xenophanes as an early precursor of critical rationalism, holding that we may act on the basis of working hypotheses while knowing that certainty is unlikely.
Many ancient accounts associate Xenophanes with the Greek colony of Elea in Italy, either as author of a poem on its founding, as founder of the Eleatic school, or as teacher of Parmenides. Modern scholarship generally rejects these associations, noting that no ancient writer expressly says Xenophanes ever visited Elea, and his wandering life seems inconsistent with settling there to found a school. Similarly, the claim that he taught Zeno of Elea is now considered false.
Xenophanes is sometimes considered the first skeptic in Western philosophy, and his thought was seen as a precursor to Pyrrhonism. The church historian Eusebius, quoting Aristocles of Messene, traces a line of philosophy from Xenophanes through Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, and others, culminating in Pyrrho. Timon of Phlius praised Xenophanes as an example of someone who, while not a perfect skeptic like Pyrrho, was forgivably close to it.
Because of his concept of a single supreme God, Xenophanes is often seen as one of the first monotheists in Western philosophy of religion, though the relevant quotation refers to multiple gods over whom the supreme God is greater. Ancient doxographers including Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, and Plutarch summarized his thought as monolatrous and pantheistic. Aristotle’s Metaphysics summarized his view as “the All is God.” The philosopher Pierre Bayle considered Xenophanes’ views similar to Spinoza’s, and the physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein identified him as one of the earliest pandeists. His view of an impersonal god influenced the pre-Socratic Empedocles, who conceived of god as an incorporeal mind, even while dismissing Xenophanes’ belief that the earth is flat and extends downward forever as foolishness.
The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes was born in Colophon, a city that once existed in Ionia, in present-day Turkey. Laertius stated 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 lived 67 years in other Greek lands, dying at or after the age of 92. Although ancient testimony notes that he buried his sons, there is little other biographical information about him or his family that can be reliably ascertained. It is considered likely Xenophanes’ physical theories were influenced by the Milesians; for instance, his theory that the rainbow is clouds is on one interpretation seen as a response to Anaximenes’s theory that the rainbow is light reflected off of clouds.
Philosophical Context and Divine Attributes
Orphism and Pythagorean philosophy introduced into the Greek spirituality the notions of guilt and pureness, causing a dichotomic belief between the divine soul and the mortal body, a doctrine in contrast with the traditional religions as espoused by Homer and Hesiod. God moves all things, but he is thought to be immobile, characterized by oneness and unicity, eternity, and a spiritual nature which is bodiless and is not anthropomorphic. He has a free will and is the Highest Good, he embodies the beauty of the moral perfection and of the absence of sin. Xenophanes espoused a belief that “God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind”. He maintained that there was one greatest God, an eternal being, spherical in form, comprehending all things within himself, the absolute mind and thought, therefore intelligent, moving all things but bearing no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind. This god “shakes all things” by the power of his thought alone, and, differently from human creatures, has the power to give “immediate execution” (in Greek: to phren) and make effective his cognitive faculty (in Greek: nous).
Additional Testimony and Influence
The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias contains a significant testimony of his teachings. Others associate him with Pythagoreanism, though modern scholars generally believe that there is little historical or philosophical justification for these associations between Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Parmenides as is oft alleged in succession of the so-called “Italian school”. In his ninety-second year he was still 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 very remarkable that no ancient writer expressly says he ever was at Elea, and all the evidence we have seems inconsistent with his having settled there at all.
