Xenophanes mocked Homer's gods as human projections and wandered Greece for 67 years
Around the sixth century BC a travelling poet from Ionia started asking awkward questions. Why did Homer's gods lie, steal and squabble like people? Why should a wrestling champion be honoured above a wise man? Xenophanes answered in biting verse, and along the way offered natural explanations for rainbows, clouds and the glow on ships' masts.
Xenophanes came from Colophon, a city in Ionia on what is now the Turkish coast, and was probably born around 570 to 560 BC. By his own account he left home at 25 and spent 67 years roaming other Greek lands, living to at least 92. Little else about his life is secure beyond a report that he buried his sons. His poems survive only as fragments quoted by later writers, and no two can be firmly assigned to the same work.
He wrote some of the earliest Greek satires, aiming at wealth, excess and the cult of athletic victory; cultivating wisdom, he insisted, mattered more. His verses on the symposium, the aristocratic drinking party, urged piety and moderation and warned against drunkenness. Above all he attacked Homer and Hesiod for picturing gods as foolish or morally weak.
In their place he proposed a single supreme God, unlike mortals in body or mind, who never dies or is born and does not meddle in human affairs. That distant deity freed him to explain nature without myth. A rainbow, he suggested, is a kind of cloud, perhaps a reply to Anaximenes, who took it as light reflected off clouds. He was likely the first to try to explain St Elmo's fire, blaming agitated droplets in storm clouds, and he pictured an earth stretching infinitely downward, with new suns and moons forming as old ones travelled away westward.
He also separated knowledge from mere belief, making him an early figure in epistemology. The Eleatics and later the Pyrrhonist sceptics claimed him as their founder, though modern scholars see a more independent thinker than either school allowed. Heraclitus mentioned him, and the sceptic Timon of Phlius later put his own satire into Xenophanes' mouth.
Source: Xenophanes
