Xenophanes

Xenophanes was a native of Ionia Colophon in Asia Minor. With the Persians conquest, early in his life, he took up residence in Sicily, at the court of Hieron where he recited elegiac and iambic verses, which he had written in criticism of the Theogony of Hesiod and Homer.He expressed his philosophical views mainly in satirical verse. From Sicily, he travelled to Magna Grecia, and there he became a celebrated philosophe. He became a celebrated teacher in the Pythagorean school. allowing greater freedom of thought than was usual among the disciples of Pythagoras, he introduced new opinions of his own opposing the doctrines of Epimenides, Thales, and Pythagoras. He held the Pythagorean chair of philosophy for about seventy years, and lived to the extreme age of 105.

Philosophy of Xenophanes: Xenophanes ridiculed the many Gods of the Greeks maintained there was only one God. God is one incorporeal eternal being, and, like the universe, spherical in form; that He is of the same nature with the universe, comprehending all things within himself; is intelligent, and pervades all things, but bears no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind.

He taught that if there had ever been a time when nothing existed, nothing could ever have existed. Whatever is, always has been from eternity, without deriving its existence from any prior principles. Nature, he believed, is one and without limit; that what is One is similar in all its parts, else it would be many; that the one infinite, eternal, and homogeneous universe is immutable and incapable of change.

God according to Xenophanes was quite unlike a man, and has no special organs of sense, but 'sees all over, thinks all over, hears all over'. He does not go about from place to place, but does everything 'without toil'. It is not safe to go beyond this; for Xenophanes himself tells us no more. It is pretty certain that if he had said anything more positive or more definitely religious in its bearing it would have been quoted by later writers.