Fragments

Xenophanes of Colophon, an itinerant poet-philosopher active across the Greek world in the sixth century BC, composed elegiac and hexameter verse attacking the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod as human projections, observing in a famous surviving fragment that Ethiopians depict their gods as black and snub-nosed while Thracians depict theirs as red-haired and blue-eyed, and that if horses could draw, they would draw gods shaped like horses. Against this, he proposed a single greatest god, unlike mortals in body or thought, who moves all things by mind alone without effort, a conception often read as an early step toward philosophical monotheism. He also insisted, in a mood ancient skeptics later claimed as ancestral, that certain knowledge of the gods and the world is beyond human reach and that even correct belief could never be distinguished with certainty from lucky guessing. Colophon marks only his birthplace; he left at twenty-five for a lifelong itinerant career with no fixed place of composition.