Xenophanes 570 BC – 475 BC

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher and poet who traveled widely after leaving Ionia and lived to a great age. He produced the earliest sustained critique of anthropomorphic religion, arguing that human beings imagine the gods in their own image. In its place he proposed a single, unmoving, all-perceiving deity unlike mortals in body or in mind. He also articulated a skeptical epistemology, distinguishing certain knowledge from the conjectural belief available to human beings. His fragments influenced both the Eleatic school and later Hellenistic skepticism.

Xenophanes was born around 570 BC at Colophon in Ionia and left his city, by his own report at the age of twenty-five, when it fell to the Medes. The remainder of his very long life — he writes that he had been wandering for sixty-seven years — was spent in itinerant performance across the Greek world, especially in southern Italy and Sicily, where he is associated with the founding of the city of Elea. Ancient tradition makes him the teacher of Parmenides; the claim is contested but signals a real continuity of concern.

He composed in elegiac, iambic, and hexameter verse, and the surviving fragments include sympotic poetry, satirical Silloi against Homer and Hesiod, and the philosophical verses on the gods and on nature on which his philosophical reputation rests. He explained fossils as the remains of creatures left on once-submerged terrain, and the rainbow and Saint Elmo's fire as physical phenomena.

Xenophanes argued that men make gods in their own image, that 'one god' greater than gods or men 'shakes all things by the thought of his mind' alone, and that human knowledge is at best a 'belief like the truth' rather than the truth itself. With these moves he founded the Greek philosophical critique of anthropomorphic religion and of the limits of human knowledge. He is reported to have died around 475 BC.