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Updated: May 8, 2025
Thales has said that water is the source of everything. Anaximander would not agree to this, for he thought that all had come from space. Anaximenes had affirmed that it was air. Anaxagoras had remarked that matter was infinite. Xenophanes had declared that everything was one whole, and that it was a god, everlasting, eternal, never born and never dying, but round in his shape!
That wanton Alcibiades, having asked one, who pretended to learning, for a book of Homer, gave him a box of the ear because he had none, which he thought as scandalous as we should if we found one of our priests without a Breviary. Xenophanes complained one day to Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, that he was so poor he had not wherewithal to maintain two servants.
His sin has been transmitted to his descendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. "The whole is one," Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same sense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical terms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an indistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world.
XENOPHANES. But for its position, this deep walled-plain, 185 miles in diameter, would be a fine telescopic object, with its lofty walls, large central mountain, and other details. OENOPIDES. A large and tolerably regular walled-plain, 43 miles in diameter, on the W. of the last. The depressions on the W. wall are worth examination at sunrise. There is apparently no detail whatever on the floor.
The tendency to deify nature appears even in writers who do not wholly exclude gods from their schemes of the world in the sayings of Heraclitus, for example: "All things are one," "From all comes one, and from one comes all." A similar view is attributed to Xenophanes by Aristotle, and traces of such a conception appear in Euripides.
This city had, like Miletus, reached a high pitch of commercial prosperity, and like it also became a centre of philosophic teaching. For there Xenophanes remained and founded a school, so that he and his successors received the name of Eleatics. His date is uncertain; but he seems to have been contemporary with Anaximander and Pythagoras, and to have had some knowledge of the doctrine of both.
When we come to natural philosophy, however, Thales of Miletus, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Pythagoras of Samos, Xenophanes of Colophon, and Democritus of Abdera have in various ways investigated and left us the laws and the working of the laws by which nature governs it.
We see God face to face every hour, and know the savour of Nature. The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one another.
This is the doctrine of metempsychosis, which had many adherents in ancient days, and also in a more or less fanciful fashion in modern times. To Pythagoras have been attributed a certain number of maxims which are called the Golden Verses. XENOPHANES; PARMENIDES. Xenophanes of Colophon is also a "unitarian."
Here Xenophanes, who was at the head of the embassy, fearlessly stated, that he was sent by King Philip to conclude a treaty of alliance and friendship with the Roman people, and that he had commissions to the Roman consuls, senate, and people.
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