From the Beginning to Plato

62 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
also recited his own poems. He is said to have held contrary opinions to
Thales and Pythagoras, and to have rebuked Epimenides too.
(Diogenes Laertius IX.18 [KRS 161])
This account corresponds pretty much with the surviving fragments. Many of
them are indeed clearly satirical, and the poems from which these are taken—in
all three metres mentioned by Diogenes—were known in antiquity as silloi:
‘squints’ or lampoons. It has been conjectured that even fragments dealing with
physical phenomena belonged not to a philosophical poem on nature like
Empedocles’ (as is implied in some unconvincing very late sources), but to his
critique of the traditional theology of Homer and Hesiod, which is well
represented among the fragments in any case. 45 Among the other butts of his wit
Pythagoras is the certain target of some surviving verses:
On the subject of reincarnation Xenophanes bears witness in an elegy
which begins: ‘Now I will turn to another tale and show the way.’ What he
says about Pythagoras runs thus: ‘Once they say that he was passing by when
a puppy was being whipped, and he took pity and said: “Stop, do not beat
it; for it is the soul of a friend that I recognised when I heard it giving
tongue.”’
(Diogenes Laertius VIII.36: fr. 7 [KRS 260])
But it may also be that Xenophanes’ attack on Thales was the original home of
the following snippet:
Of the earth this is the upper limit, seen by our feet neighbouring the air.
But its underneath reaches on indefinitely.
(Achilles Introduction 4: fr. 28 [KRS 180])
Aristotle refers to this passage in his chapter on the different explanations theorists
have given for the stability of the earth. He accuses Xenophanes of not trying
hard enough. We may think his revulsion from speculation on this question gives
him the better of the argument with Thales. 46
Diogenes seems to suggest that the lampoons, in the fashion of lampoons,
mostly had their effect by being circulated and repeated by others. By contrast
Xenophanes himself performed his own non-satirical poems, evidently as a
travelling entertainer at festivals and other aristocratic gatherings. We are told
that after exile from his native city of Colophon he emigrated to Sicily. The
‘exile’ is generally associated by scholars with the capture of the city by the
Persians in 546/5 BC, an event to which he himself refers in some verses where
he speaks of the coming of the Mede (fr. 22). This probably occurred when he
was 25 years of age, if we may so interpret some further verses which boast of an
extraordinarily long life, and which incidentally indicate a career pursued all
over Greece: