Xenophanes

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek poet-philosopher who left Ionia as a young man and spent a long life travelling the Greek world, especially Sicily and southern Italy. His verses, surviving only in fragments, criticised the gods of Homer and Hesiod as human projections: Ethiopians picture their gods dark and snub-nosed, Thracians picture theirs blue-eyed and red-haired, and if horses and cattle could draw they would make gods like themselves. Against this he proposed a single, non-anthropomorphic divinity, and he doubted that anyone has certain knowledge of such matters.

Key ideas

• Humans make gods in their own image, as the varied images of the gods across peoples show.
• There is one god, unlike mortals in body or thought, who moves all things by mind.
• Homer and Hesiod wrongly attribute theft, adultery and deceit to the gods.
• No one has clear and certain knowledge of the gods; we have only opinion.

Major works

• Fragments of elegiac and satirical poems (Silloi), preserved in later authors
• Diels–Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, chapter 21 (standard collection of fragments and testimonies)

In the conversation

• Debate The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable Mateo Quispe · 6 replies
• Question What did Xenophanes actually say about horses, oxen and the gods, and what was he arguing for? Nikos Stavridis · 4 replies