Xenophanes
Ancient Greek · Europe · 570 to 475 BCE
Greek poet and thinker who mocked gods made in human image, and held that we can only guess at the truth.
What it is
Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek poet and thinker from the Ionian city of Colophon. He lived in the sixth century BCE and into the early fifth, and the sources differ on his birth, putting it between about 570 and 560 BCE; they place his death around 478 BCE.
He left his native city and, by his own account, spent 67 years wandering the Greek lands, beginning at the age of 25. He lived for a time in Sicily and joined the colony at Elea in southern Italy. He put his thinking into verse and recited it as he travelled. Only fragments of those poems survive, quoted by later writers.
The main ideas
- Gods made in our image. He criticised the habit of picturing the gods as human. The gods, he suggested, look the way their worshippers imagine them.
- Against the poets. He criticised Homer and Hesiod for stories that show the gods behaving immorally.
- One greatest god. One fragment speaks of a single god, greatest among gods and men, unlike mortals in body or in thought. This god moves all things by the power of thought.
- The limits of knowledge. No one has seen the clear truth about the gods and about all things, and no one will know it. Even a person who happened to say something true would not know that it was true.
- Natural explanations. He offered natural explanations. He treated the rainbow as a kind of cloud, and he drew on fossils of sea creatures found inland to argue that water had once covered the land.
- Wisdom before show. He criticised the honours given to athletes and the taste for luxury, and argued that wisdom matters more than athletic victories.
What it looks like in practice
Imagine someone who notices that a friend's idea of the divine looks suspiciously like the friend's own family or country. Xenophanes would ask how much of the picture comes from the thing itself and how much from the person painting it. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writings.
Books and moments
- Fragments of verse. His poems were written in verse, including elegiac couplets, and ancient writers called some of them satires. Almost everything we have comes from quotations in later authors.
- Diogenes Laertius. The ancient biographer of the philosophers reports that he was born in Colophon, and later writers add other details about his life.
- The fragment on knowledge. The lines on what no one can know survive because ancient sceptics quoted them.
Questions and criticism
- Was he a monotheist? The line about one greatest god sounds like an early statement of belief in a single god. Yet it speaks of gods in the plural, so it may mean the greatest of several gods.
- Was he a sceptic? Ancient sceptics claimed him as their founder, and later writers linked him to the Eleatic school. Modern scholars dispute these claims.
- How firm are the dates? Because the sources give different years, his life can only be placed roughly.
Close neighbours
The pages on Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes cover thinkers of Miletus. The page on Parmenides covers the Eleatic school later linked to him, and the page on Pyrrho covers the sceptical tradition that claimed him.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Parmenides · Ancient writers named him as a teacher of Parmenides, and his one unmoved god points toward Parmenides' one being. (scholars disagree about this link)
Other Ancient Greek thinkers
- Thales of Miletus · 624 to 546 BCE
- Anaximander · 610 to 546 BCE
- Anaximenes · 586 to 526 BCE
- Pythagoras · 570 to 495 BCE
- Heraclitus · 535 to 475 BCE
- Parmenides · 515 to 450 BCE
- Anaxagoras · 500 to 428 BCE
- Empedocles · 494 to 434 BCE
- Zeno of Elea · 490 to 430 BCE
- Leucippus · 480 to 420 BCE
Sources we used
- Xenophanes · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Xenophanes · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
- Xenophanes · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026