Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Xenophanes of Colophon, son of Dexios or, as Apollodorus says, of Orthomenes, is praised by Timon; at any rate Timon says: "And Xenophanes, free from conceit, scourger of Homeric deception." Having been banished from his homeland, he lived in Zancle in Sicily * * * and also spent time in Catana. According to some, he was a pupil of no one, but according to others, of Boton of Athens or, as some say, of Archelaus. And, as Sotion says, he lived in the time of Anaximander. He also wrote poems in epic meter, as well as elegies and iambics against Hesiod and Homer, scourging what had been said by them concerning the gods. But he also recited his own works as a rhapsode. It is also said that he held opposing doctrines to Thales and Pythagoras, and attacked Epimenides as well. He was exceedingly long-lived, as he himself also somewhere says:

"Already there are seven and sixty years tossing my troubled care through the land of Hellas; and from my birth until then there were five and twenty in addition to these, if indeed I know how to speak truly about these things." He says that the elements of existing things are four, and the cosmoses infinite, but not alternating. Clouds are formed when the vapor from the sun rises up and lifts them into the surrounding expanse. The substance of God is spherical, having no resemblance to man; he sees as a whole and hears as a whole, yet does not breathe; and the whole is mind, wisdom, and eternal. He was also the first to declare that everything that comes into being is perishable, and that the soul is breath.

​He also said that most things are inferior to mind; and that one should converse with tyrants either as little as possible or as agreeably as possible. When Empedocles said to him that a wise man cannot be found, he said: "Naturally; for he who is to recognize a wise man must himself be wise." Sotion, however, says that he was the first to say that all things are incomprehensible, but he is mistaken. He also composed the Founding of Colophon and the Colonization of Elea in Italy, in two thousand epic lines. And he flourished about the sixtieth Olympiad. Demetrius of Phalerum says in his On Old Age, and Panaetius the Stoic in his On Cheerfulness, that he buried his sons with his own hands, just as Anaxagoras did. It seems that he was sold into slavery by * * and ransomed by the Pythagoreans Parmeniscus and Orestades, as Favorinus says in the first book of his Memorabilia. There was also another Xenophanes, of Lesbos, an iambic poet. These, then, are the scattered philosophers.