From the Beginning to Plato

This extract gives a good impression of how the writer works. It looks very unlikely
that he has any more to go on in his construction of Xenophanes’ reasoning than
fragments 23 and 24. He gets the unity of god from fragment 23 (cf. 977a23–4).
That Xenophanes believes god is like all over is inferred from fragment 24, and
then made the consequence of his unity, in line with a similar inference attributed
to Melissus by this same author (974a12–14). The key move to the conclusion
that god is therefore spherical is finally worked out by application of reasoning
borrowed from fragment 8.22–4, 42–5 of Parmenides. 52
Despite the preoccupation of many of our sources for Xenophanes with his
theology, there is little doubt that his discussions of questions about the heavenly
bodies and meteorological phenomena were in fact more extensive. As well as a
number of fragments on these topics, a considerable amount of information
about his views relating to them is preserved in the doxography. What is
missing, however, is evidence of a cosmogony, or of the associated drive
towards a comprehensive narrative characteristic for example of Anaximander.
Thus the general survey of his thought in the Miscellanies attributed to Plutarch
sticks mostly to a summary of the pseudo-Aristotelian Xenophanes, interrupted
and then completed by a disjointed sequence of reports about specific theses of
Xenophanes’ physics or epistemology. Hippolytus’ overview is better organized,
but on physical questions very brief and selective until a final section on largescale
changes in the relation of earth and sea. 53
We should therefore conclude that there probably never was a single poem
devoted to natural philosophy. It is less easy to conjecture what form
Xenophanes’ writing on the various natural questions which interested him
would have taken. Indeed we are in a position of total ignorance on the issue.
One thing clear from the few surviving fragments, however, is that many of his
verses echoed lines of Homer and Hesiod, invariably to subvert the picture of the
natural world they conveyed.
Consider for example the following pair of lines attributed to Xenophanes:
All things that come to be and grow are earth and water.
(Simplicius Physics 189.1: fr. 29 [KRS 181])
For we have all come to be from earth and water.
(Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematico IX.34:fr.33 [KRS 182])
These verses recall Menelaus’ words in the Iliad, cursing the Achaeans:
May you all become earth and water.
THE IONIANS 67
(Homer Iliad VII.99)
Perhaps Xenophanes’ point against Homer would have been that everything alive
already is earth and water. Whether or not that is how he began his presentation
of the idea, his further development of it probably included his remarkable