Ancient Philosophy · Part 4 · The first philosophers · B2
Xenophanes: The Gods We Make
Part 4 of Ancient Philosophy: a poet who wandered the Greek world for sixty-seven years noticed something uncomfortable: every people imagines the gods looking like themselves. If horses could draw, he said, their gods would be horses. The second conditional (if oxen had hands, they would…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, a philosopher who was also a poet, and a traveller, and a troublemaker: Xenophanes.
He looked at the gods of Homer, who steal, lie and betray their wives, and said: these are not gods; these are us.
And a very useful one. Even for you, Philo, as you will see.
Xenophanes was born in Colophon, an Ionian city near Miletus, around 570 BCE. When the Persians conquered Ionia, he left, and spent the rest of a very long life travelling around the Greek cities of Sicily and southern Italy, reciting his poems.
He wrote in verse, not prose. About forty fragments survive, many of them quoted by Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria, who used his attacks on the Greek gods to support their own arguments. In one fragment he says that he has been wandering the Greek lands for sixty-seven years, and that he was twenty-five when he began.
Xenophanes criticised the gods of Homer and Hesiod, suggested that there is one greatest god unlike human beings, explained natural things like the rainbow without gods, and asked how much human beings can really know.
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