From the Beginning to Plato

68 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
argument for the cyclical process of alternate domination of the earth’s surface
by earth and sea:
Xenophanes thinks that a mixture of the earth with the sea is going on, and
that in time the earth is dissolved by the moist. He says that he has
demonstrations of the following kind: shells are found inland and in the
mountains, and in the quarries in Syracuse he says that an imprint of a fish
and seals were found; and in Paros an imprint of coral in the depth of the
rock, and in Malta slabs of rock containing all sorts of sea creatures.
These, he says, were produced when everything was long ago covered with
mud, and the imprint was dried in the mud. All mankind is destroyed
whenever the earth is carried down into the sea and becomes mud; then there
is another beginning of coming into being, and this is the foundation for all
worlds.
(Hippolytus Refutation I.14.5 [KRS 184])
The idea of a cycle of this kind had probably been anticipated by Anaximander,
who certainly held that the earth was once much wetter than it is now. But
Xenophanes thought the world was at a different phase of the cycle: the earth is
not drying out, but reverting to sea. And although Anaximander may have
appealed to the evidence of fossils, this is actually attested only for Xenophanes.
Whether Xenophanes collected the evidence himself or relied on the reports of
others, his assemblage of examples and conception of their significance
constitute one of the high points of Ionian historiē (enquiry).
The longest physical fragment is also about the sea:
Sea is the source of water, and source of wind. For neither inside clouds without the great
ocean, nor streams of rivers nor shower water from the air above: but the
great ocean is begetter of clouds and winds and rivers.
(Geneva scholium on the Iliad XXI.196: fr.30 [KRS 183])
These lines may have belonged to the same poem as did the verses about earth
and water. On the other hand there is reason to conjecture a separate poem
directed explicitly or implicitly against traditional conceptions of the heavenly
bodies as divinities with marvellous properties. 54
The striking description of the ocean (pontos) as ‘begetter’ already recalls, yet
simultaneously rationalizes, Hesiod’s account of how it ‘begat’ Nereus, the old
man of the sea, and other mythical figures (Theogony 233–9). But the mention of
clouds among the offspring of ocean is particularly significant, for the
doxographical evidence makes it clear that Xenophanes explained virtually all
astronomical and meteorological phenomena in terms of cloud. On these subjects
his thinking was both relentlessly systematic and at the same time satirical: the
object was to reduce mystery and grandeur to something familiar and homely. 55