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Updated: June 8, 2025
And lastly, Xenophanes of Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single deity on high the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence consists of thought, reason and eternity. He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some fragments of his writings above.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders of Greek theology, we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of Dante.
The position of Xenophanes, who, toward the latter part of the sixth century B.C. migrated, apparently for political reasons, in fear of Persian imperialism, from Colophon in Asia Minor to Elea in Italy, was a little different, and, for our purpose, more interesting.
And lastly, Xenophanes of Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single deity on high the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence consists of thought, reason and eternity. He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some fragments of his writings above.
Metrodorus, that it is a forcible illapse of the sun upon clouds which makes them to sparkle as fire. Xenophanes, that all such fiery meteors are nothing else but the conglomeration of the enfired clouds, and the flashing motions of them.
It follows that as a whole this form of criticism is outside the scope of our inquiry. Still, there is one single personality in early Greek thought who seems to have proceeded still further on the lines of this naïve criticism, namely, Xenophanes of Colophon.
In this rudimentary form, a high antiquity may safely be ascribed to palaeontology, inasmuch as we know that, 500 years before the Christian era, the philosophic doctrines of Xenophanes were influenced by his observations upon the fossil remains exposed in the quarries of Syracuse.
The founder of this school was Xenophanes, born in Colophon, an Ionian city of Asia Minor, from which being expelled he wandered over Sicily as a rhapsodist, or minstrel, reciting his elegiac poetry on the loftiest truths, and at last, about the year 536 B.C., came to Elea, where he settled.
One can easily see in these discussions some adumbration of many theological or metaphysical difficulties of later times, as of the origin of evil, of freewill in man, of the relation of the created world to its Creator. If these problems cannot be said to be solved yet, we need not be surprised that Xenophanes did not solve them.
If they had not done so, we could not have known what deeds were done in Troy, nor what Thales, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, and the other physicists thought about nature, and what rules Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and other philosophers laid down for the conduct of human life; nor would the deeds and motives of Croesus, Alexander, Darius, and other kings have been known, unless the ancients had compiled treatises, and published them in commentaries to be had in universal remembrance with posterity.
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