VII

XENOPHANES

XENOPHANES of Colophon was probably born about 570 and died after 478 B.C. What we know for certain is that he spoke of Pythagoras in the past tense,1 that Heraclitus mentions him along with Pythagoras,² and that he says of himself that, from the time when he was 25 years of age, three-score years and seven had ‘tossed his care-worn soul up and down the land of Hellas.’³ He may have left his home at the time when Ionia became a Persian province (545 B.C.) and gone with the Phocaeans to Elea,⁴ founded by them in 540/39 B.C, six years after they left Phocaea.⁵ As he was writing poetry at 92 and is said to have been over 100 when he died,⁶ the above dates are consistent with the statement that he was a contemporary of Hieron, who reigned from 478 to 467 B.C.⁷ According to Theophrastus, he had ‘heard’ Anaximander.⁸

Xenophanes was more a poet and satirist than a natural philosopher, but Heraclitus credited him with wide learning,⁹ and he is said to have opposed certain doctrines of Pythagoras and Thales.¹⁰ We are told that he wrote epics as well as elegies and iambics attacking Homer and Hesiod. In particular, 2,000 verses on the foundation of Colophon and the settlement at Elea are attributed to him.¹¹ He is supposed to have written a philosophical poem; Diels refers about sixteen fragments to such a poem, to which the name On Nature was given; but such titles are of later date than Xenophanes, and Burnet12 holds that all the fragments might have come into the poems directed against Homer and Hesiod, the fact that a considerable number of them come from commentaries on Homer being significant in this connexion.

Xenophanes attacked the popular mythology, proving that God must be one, not many (for God is supreme and there can only be one supreme power),¹³ eternal and not born (for it is as impious to say that the gods are born as it would be to say that they die; in either case there would be a time when the gods would not be);¹⁴ he reprobated the scandalous stories about the gods in Homer and Hesiod¹⁵ and ridiculed the anthropomorphic view which gives the gods bodies, voices, and dress like ours, observing that the Thracians made them blue-eyed and red-haired, the Aethiopians snub-nosed and black,¹⁶ while, if oxen or horses or lions had hands and could draw, they would draw them as oxen, horses, and lions respectively.¹⁷ God is the One and the All, the universe;¹⁸ God remains unmoved in one and the same place;¹⁹ God is eternal, one, alike every way, finite, spherical and sensitive in all parts,²⁰ but does not breathe.²¹ It is difficult to reconcile the finite and spherical God with Xenophanes’ description of the world, which may be summarized as follows.

The world was evolved from a mixture of earth and water,²² and the earth will gradually be dissolved again by moisture; this he infers from the fact that shells are found far inland and on mountains, and in the quarries of Syracuse there have been found imprints (fossils) of a fish and of seaweed,²³ and so on, these imprints showing that everything was covered in mud long ago, and that the imprints dried on the mud. All men will disappear when the earth is absorbed into the sea and becomes mud, after which the process of coming into being starts again; all the worlds (alike) suffer this change.24 This is, of course, the theory of Anaximander.

As regards the earth we are told that

‘This upper side of the earth is seen, at our feet, to touch the air, but the lower side reaches to infinity.’²⁵

‘This is why some say that the lower portion of the earth is infinite, asserting, as Xenophanes of Colophon does, that its roots extend without limit, in order that they may not have the trouble of investigating the cause (of its being at rest). Hence Empedocles’ rebuke in the words “if the depths of the earth are without limit and the vast aether (above it) is so also, as has been said by the tongues of many and vainly spouted forth from the mouths of men who have seen little of the whole”.’²⁶

‘Xenophanes said that on its lower side the earth has roots extending without limit.’²⁷

‘The earth is infinite, and is neither surrounded by air nor by the heaven.’²⁸

Simplicius²⁹ (on the second of the above passages) observes that, not having seen Xenophanes’ own verses on the subject, he cannot say whether Xenophanes meant that the under side of the earth extends without limit, and that this is the reason why it is at rest, or meant to assert that the space below the earth, and the aether, is infinite, and consequently the earth, though it is in fact being carried downwards without limit, appears to be at rest; for neither Aristotle nor Empedocles made this clear. Presumably, however, as Simplicius had not seen Xenophanes’ original poem, he had not seen Fr. 28, the first of the above passages; for this passage seems to be decisive; there is nothing in it to suggest motion downwards, and, if it meant that there was infinite air below the earth as there is above, there would be no contrast between the upper and the under side such as it is the obvious intention of the author to draw.³⁰

According to Xenophanes the stars, including cornets and meteors, are made of clouds set on fire; they are extinguished each day and are-kindled at night like coals, and these happenings constitute their setting and rising respectively.31 The so-called Dioscuri are small clouds which emit light in virtue of the motion, whatever it is, that they have.³²

Similarly the sun is made of clouds set on fire; clouds formed from moist exhalation take fire, and the sun is formed from the resulting fiery particles collected together.³³ The moon is likewise so formed, the cloud being here described as ‘compressed’ ,³⁴ following an expression of Anaximander’s for compressed portions of air; the moon’s light is its own.³⁵

When the sun sets, it is extinguished, and when it next rises, it is a fresh one; it is likewise extinguished when there is an eclipse.³⁶

The phases of the moon are similarly caused by (partial) extinction.37

According to Xenophanes, the sun is useful with reference to the coming into being and the ordering of the earth and of living things in it; the moon is, in this respect, otiose.³⁸

More remarkable are Xenophanes’ theory of a multiplicity of suns and moons, and his view of the nature of the sun’s motion; and here it is necessary to quote the actual words of Aerius :

‘Xenophanes says that there are many suns and moons according to the regions , divisions and zones of the earth; and at certain times the disc lights upon some division of the earth not inhabited by us and so, as it were, stepping on emptiness, suffers eclipse.

‘The same philosopher maintains that the sun goes forward ad infinitum, and that it only appears to revolve in a circle owing to its distance (away from us).’³⁹

The idea that the sun, on arriving at an uninhabited part of the earth, straightway goes out, as it were, is a curious illustration of the final cause.⁴⁰ For the rest, the passage, according to the most natural interpretation of it, implies that the sun does not revolve about the earth in a circle, but moves in a straight line ad infinitum, that the earth is flat, and that its surface extends without limit. On this interpretation we are presumably to suppose that the sun of any one day passes out of our sight and is seen successively in regions further and further distant towards the west until it is finally extinguished, while in the meantime the new sun of the next day follows the first, at an interval of 24 hours, over our part of the earth, and so on, with the result that at any given time there are many suns all travelling in the same straight direction ad infinitum. If this is the correct interpretation of Xenophanes’ theory (and this is the way in which it is generally understood), it shows no advance upon, but a distinct falling off from, the systems of Anaximander and Anaximenes. Berger,⁴¹ deeming it incredible that Xenophanes could have put forward views so crude, not to say childish, at a time when the notion of the sphericity of the earth discovered by the earliest Pythagoreans and by Parmenides must already have spread far and wide, seeks to place a new interpretation upon the passages in question.

For the Ionians, with their flat earth, there was necessarily one horizon, so that the solar illumination and the length of the day were the same for all parts of the inhabited earth. As soon, however, as the spherical shape of the earth was realized, it would necessarily appear that there were different horizons according to the particular spot occupied by an observer on the earth’s surface. It was then, argues Berger, the different horizons which Xenophanes had in view when he spoke of many suns and moons according to the different regions or climates, divisions and zones of the earth; he realized the difference in the appearances and the effects of the same phenomena at different places on the earth’s surface, and he may have been the first to introduce, in this way, the mode of expression by which we commonly speak of different suns, the tropical sun, the Indian sun, the midnight sun, and the like. This is ingenious, but surely not reconcilable with other elementary opinions stated by Xenophanes, such as that there is a new sun every day. Then again, Berger has to explain the sun’s ‘going-forward ad infinitum as contrasted with circular motion; as, on his theory, it cannot be motion in a straight line without limit, he takes it to be the motion in a spiral which the sun actually exhibits owing to the combination of its two motions, that of the daily rotation, and its yearly motion in the ecliptic, which causes a slight change in its latitude day by day. But in the first place this motion in a spiral is not motion forward ad infinitum for the spiral returns on itself in a year just as a simple circular motion would in 24 hours. Indeed, Berger’s interpretation would make Xenophanes’ system purely Pythagorean, and advanced at that, for we do not hear of the spiral till we find it in Plato.42 And, if Heraclitus’s system also represents (as we shall find it does) a setback in astronomical theory, why should not Xenophanes’ ideas have been equally retrograde ?

There remains the story that Xenophanes told of an eclipse of the sun which lasted a whole month.⁴³ Could he have intended, by this statement, to poke fun at Thales?44 Berger, full of his theory that Xenophanes’ ideas were based on the sphericity of the earth, thinks that he must have inferred that the length of the day would vary in different latitudes and according to the position of the sun in the ecliptic, and must have seen that, at the winter solstice for example, there would be a point on the earth’s surface at which the longest night would last 24 hours, another point nearer the north pole where there would be a night lasting a month, and so on, and finally that at the north pole itself there would be a night six months long as soon as the sun passes to the south of the equator; Xenophanes therefore, according to Berger, must simply have been alluding to the existence of a place where a night may last a month. If, as seems certain, Xenophanes’ earth was flat, this explanation too must fall to the ground.

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¹ Fr. 7 (Vors. i², p. 47. 20–23).

² Heraclitus, Fr. 40 (Vors. i², p. 68.10).

³ Fr. 8 (Vors. p. 48. 3–6).

⁴ Gomperz, Griechische Denker, i³, pp. 127, 436.

⁵ Herodotus, i. 164–7.

⁶ Censorinus, De die natali c. 15. 3, p. 28. 21, ed. Hultsch.

⁷ Timaeus in Clem. Stromat. i. 14, p. 353 (Vors. i², p. 35. 2).

⁸ Diog. L. ix. 21 (Vors. i², p. 34. 35).

⁹ Heraclitus, loc. cit.: ‘Wide learning does not teach one to have understanding; if it did, it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.’

¹⁰ Diog. L. ix. 18 (Vors. i², p. 34. 12).

¹¹ Ibid. ix. 20 (Vors. i², p. 34. 26).

¹² Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 128.

¹³ Simpl. in Phys. p. 22. 31 (Vors. i², p. 40. 30).

¹⁴ Aristotle, Rhetoric ii. 23, 1399 b 6.

¹⁵ Fr. 11 (Vors. i², p. 48. 13).

¹⁶ Fr. 14,16 (Vors. i², p. 49. 2, 11).

¹⁷ Fr. 15 (Vors. i², p. 49. 5).

¹⁸ Aristotle, Metaph. A. 5, 986 b 21 (Vors. i², p. 40. 15); Simpl., loc. cit. (Vors. i², p. 40. 29); cf. Çicero, De nat. deor. i. 11.28 (Vors. i², p. 41. 44); Acad.pr. ii. 37. 118 (Vors. i², p. 41. 42).

¹⁹ Fr. 26 (Vors. i², p. 50. 22).

²⁰ Hippol. Refut. i. 14. 2 (D. G. p. 565; Vors. i², p. 41. 26).

²¹ Diog. L. ix. 19 (Vors. i², p. 34. 18).

²² Fr. 29. 33 (Vors. i², p. 51. 5, 20).

²³ I read, with Burnet, after Gomperz (seaweed) instead of .

²⁴ Hippol. Refut i. 14. 5–6 (D. G. p. 566; Vors. i², p. 41. 33–41).

²⁵ Fr. 28(Vors. i², p. 51. 2).

²⁶ Aristotle, De caelo ii. 13, 294 a 21–28.

²⁷ Aèt. iii. 9. 4; 11.1,2 (D. G. pp. 376, 377; Vors. i², p. 43, 33, 35).

²⁸ Hippol. Refut. i. 14. 3 (D. G. p. 565; Vors. i², p. 41. 29).

²⁹ Simplicius on De caelo, p. 522. 7, ed. Heib. (Vors. i², p. 43. 28).

³⁰ As witness the and the and the clear opposition of ‘touching the air’ and reaching to infinity . implies, not motion towards, but arrival at, or reaching, a destination. Berger, it is true, rejects as a misapprehension the whole of the traditional view of Xenophanes’ system (Gesch. der wissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Griechen, pp. 191 sqq.). We shall have to consider his argument later; but it necessitates getting a sense out of the fragment and the passage of Aristotle other than the literal interpretation. The significant words in the passage of Aristotle are ‘saying that it (the earth) is rooted ad infinitum. ’. Berger (p. 194, note) holds that the expression is not used in the literal sense of having roots extending ad infinitum, but that ‘we use the word only as an expression for a supporting force not capable of closer definition’; he can only quote in favour of this certain metaphorical uses of ‘root’ and other words connected with it, and which of course do not in the least prove that is used in a metaphorical sense in our passage; indeed, if it is used in so vague a sense, it is difficult to see how Xenophanes thereby absolved himself from giving a further explanation of the cause of the earth’s remaining at rest, which, according to Aristotle, was his object. As regards the fragment from Xenophanes’ own poem, Berger says that he prefers to regard it as an attempt to give in few words an idea of the horizon which divides earth and heaven into an upper, visible, half, and an invisible lower half. This again leaves no contrast between the upper and lower sides of the earth such as the fragment is obviously intended to draw. On both points Berger’s arguments are of the nature of special pleading, which can hardly carry conviction.

³¹ Aët. ii. 13. 14, iii. 2. II (D. G. pp. 343, 367; Vors. i², pp. 42. 39, 43. 15).

³² Aët. ii. 18. 1 (D. G. p. 347; Vors. i², p. 42. 42).

³³ Aët. ii. 20. 3 (D. G, p. 348; Vors. i², p. 42. 45); Hippol. Refut. i. 14. 3 (D. G. p. 565).

³⁴ Aët. ii. 25. 4 (D. G. p. 356; Vors. i², p. 43- 12).

³⁵ Aët. ii. 28. 1 (D. G. p. 358; Vors. i², p. 43- 13).

³⁶ Aët. ii. 24. 4 (D. G. p. 354; Vors. i², p. 43. 1). The passage, which is under the heading ‘On eclipse of the sun’, implies that it is an eclipse which comes about by way of extinguishment , but the next words to the effect that the sun is a new one on rising again suggest that it is ‘setting’ rather than ‘eclipse’, which should be understood.

³⁷ Aët. ii. 29. 5 (D. G. p. 360; Vors. i², p. 43.14).

³⁸ Aët. ii. 30. 8 (D. G. p. 362; Vors. i², p. 43. 9).

³⁹ Aët. ii. 24. 9 (D. G. p. 355; Vors. i², p. 43. 3–8).

⁴⁰ Tannery, op. cit., p. 133.

⁴¹ Berger, op. cit., pp. 190 sqq.

⁴² Plato, Timaeus 39 A.

⁴³ Aët. ii. 24. 4 (D. G. p. 354; Vors. i², p. 43. 2–3).

⁴⁴ Tannery, op. cit., p. 132.