From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 63
Already there are seven and sixty years tossing my thought up and down
the land of Greece. And from my birth there were another twenty five to
add to these, if I know how to speak truly about these things.
(Diogenes Laertius IX.18: fr. 8 [KRS 161]) 47
We possess two substantial elegiac poems, each a little over twenty lines long,
representing Xenophanes’ activity as performer at dinner parties and the like.
Both contain a critical strain. One (fr. 2) begins with a famous assault on the
Olympic games and the conventional view that victory in any of its athletic
events brings a benefit to the victor’s city which rightly entitles him to great
honours from it. No, says Xenophanes: such a person ‘is not my equal in worth—
better than the strength of men and horses is my wisdom’. For athletic prowess
does not contribute to the good government of the city, nor does it fill the city’s
coffers. Xenophanes implies that his own moral teaching, on virtue and piety (fr.
1) and against luxury (fr. 3), is by contrast oriented towards the public good. The
other poem (fr. 1) is about the proper conduct of a symposium. Its main focus is
on the nature of true piety. The first half stresses physical preparations:
everything must be clean and pure, fragrant with flowers and incense, with pure
water to hand. The wine is to be served with the simplest of foods: bread,
cheeses, honey. Then Xenophanes gives instructions about what is to be said.
‘Reverent words and pure speech’ hymning the god is to precede talk of virtue, of
right and noble deeds—not tales of giants, Titans and centaurs, nor of conflicts
between men in which there is no profit: nothing, presumably, at all like the
Theogony or the Iliad. 48
Xenophanes’ explicit attacks on Homer and Hesiod in his lampoons are not
merely critical but—in a sense I shall explain—self-critical. The Milesians had
implicitly questioned traditional assumptions about the natural world. In
subjecting what the great poets say about the gods to overt scrutiny and
condemnation Xenophanes’ focus is not reality but how we conceive of it.
Philosophy, one might say, now for the first time takes a reflexive turn.
This is immediately apparent from the key fragments on anthropomorphic
theology, which constitute Xenophanes’ principal claim to a significant niche in
the history of philosophy:
Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame
and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving
one another.
(Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos IX.193: fr. 11 [KRS 166])
But mortals consider that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and
speech and bodies like their own.
(Clement Miscellanies V.109.2: fr. 14 [KRS 167])