Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 570–470, B.C.

Xenophanes was a poet. A friendly sojourner of scant means, “tossing about…from city to city”, he was well received in aristocratic circles of western Greece to whom he recited his poems. His temperament was Ionian; restless, curious, many-sided, critical as well as biting, he would rightly be considered the head of the ancient enlightenment – the man who would trace new paths in crucial theological, philosophical, and gnoseological areas. He was born in 570, b.c., at Colophon, Ionia. It was said that he was Anaximander’s student and the teacher of Parmenides, whose works, however, would later influence his own thought.