Xenophanes of Colophon

Abstract

Born in Colophon in Asia Minor (south of Smyrna), Xenophanes, according to his own statement as handed down by Diogenes Laertius, was twenty-five years of age when, unwilling to live under Persian rule, he left his hometown to travel ever since all over Hellas:

• But seven years already and sixty

• Have this way and that been driving my grief all over Hellas.

• Then, however, there were five and twenty more years from my birth,

• If I indeed (still) know how to tell precisely about it.

There is among gods and men one god the greatest, Not in body nor mind resembling the mortals.

Xenophanes

To begin with the so-called Older Ionian Natural Philosophers would be the right thing to do from a purely chronological viewpoint. But this presentation intends to be chronological only within the various groups of philosophers. Therefore, Thales and the others of his type shall be ignored for a while and, for good reasons, the first group to be dealt with consists of two men who, though the one is in opposition to the other, have in common that they attempt, each in his own way, at a religious reform. Both, Xenophanes as well as Heraclitus, come to pronounce a faith different from the creed of their people.