Opening Xenophanes of Colophon — Xenophanes in Plato Scroll…
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Xenophanes · Arthur Fairbanks (1898)
The wandering rhapsode and founder of the Eleatic school (c. 570 – c. 478 BCE). His surviving fragments preserve the earliest sustained Greek critique of anthropomorphic religion — if oxen and lions had hands, they would paint their gods like oxen and lions — and the first articulation of a single god “supreme among gods and men, not like mortals in body or in mind.” He is also the first known Greek skeptic of knowledge itself: even when a man chances upon the truth, he says, he does not know that he knows it. Translated by Arthur Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece (London: Kegan Paul, 1898). XENOPHANES of Kolophon, son of Dexias (Apollodoros says of Orthomenes), was the founder of the Eleatic School. After a careful review of the evidence, Zeller (Yorsokr. Phil. pp. 521-522) concludes that be was born about 580 B.C.; it is agreed by all writers that he lived to a great age. …
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