Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments

by Xenophanes, J.H. Lesher (Translator)

Xenophanes of Colophon was a philosophical poet who lived in various cities of the ancient Greek world during the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC. In this book, James Lesher presents the Greek texts of all the surviving fragments of Xenophanes' teachings, with an original English translation on facing pages, along with detailed notes and commentaries and a series of essays on the philosophical questions generated by Xenophanes' remarks. Also included are English translations of all the ancient testimonia relating to Xenophanes' life and teachings, and a discussion of how many of the testimonia pose the impediments to achieving a consistent interpretation of his philosophy. The Xenophanes who emerges in this account fully warrants classification as a philosophical moral critic and reflective student of nature, critic of popular religious belief and practice, and perhaps the first to challenge claims to knowledge about divine matters and the basic forces at work in nature. As with earlier works in the Pheonix series, this volume aims to make an important portion of Presocratic writing accessible to all those interested in ancient philosophy and the first phase of European natural science. This new paperback edition contains an updated bibliography.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Greece, Religion, Poetry, Classics

272 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

Xenophanes of Colophon (Ancient Greek: Ξενοφάνης ὁ Κολοφώνιος IPA: [ksenopʰánɛːs ho kolopʰɔ́ːnios]; c.570 – c.475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and social and religious critic. Knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers. To judge from these, his elegiac and iambic poetry criticized and satirized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod, the belief in the pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and the Greeks' veneration of athleticism. He is the earliest Greek poet who claims explicitly to be writing for future generations, creating "fame that will reach all of Greece, and never die while the Greek kind of songs survives."

Reviews

[Mehmet]

"Her şey topraktan gelir ve toprakta son bulur." (s.29)

[Murat Dural · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kolophonlu Ksenophanes üzerine, ondan arda kalan fragmanlarını belli başlıklar altında toparlayan güzel bir eser. Kısa gibi gözüksede özüne inebilmek için çok yavaş okumak zorunda kaldım. Antik metinlerin, özellikle eski filozofların başkaları tarafından aktarılan sözlerini incelemek ayrı bir sabır gerektiriyor. Ksenophanes'in düşünceleri ise bambaşka bir hazine. Şaşırtıcı.

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Fragments" is really an understatement. It would be apposite to title this book "Sentences" or "Lines" or even "The Last Bit of a Line." I was interested in Xenophanes for his reputation as a critic of Homer and his many mentions in Bolano novels, and from what exists of his actual writing, he seems like a really interesting dude. The problem is there is very, very little of what he's actually written. Lesher spends a lot of time and words debating the possible meanings of these snippets and long before the end of it I had already realized the pointlessness of it all. Was there any point to begin with? I wanted to get a different view of an ancient time that I find fascinating. Surprisingly, in the dearth of surviving poems I did find some great sentiments, but not enough to warrant picking up the book. If a collection of full manuscripts existed I would love to read it, but that ain't the case. Find the fragments online and see what Xenophanes had to say. It won't take you long.

[Dawson Escott · Rating 3 out of 5]

For all my goodreads followers out of the loop, I've been trying to, post-graduation, put some time in to read books that feel like "homework"- nonfiction, maybe difficult, definitely hailing from academia, and dealing with some kind of arcane knowledge I have to chew on a little. I think I just miss the stimulation I had in college that came from reading things I wouldn't immediately want to read and trying to meet them halfway, appreciate them on their terms. Or maybe it's just masochistic or I'm a greenhouse flower that has trouble existing outside of school. psychoanalyze however you wanna.

This desire is currently manifesting in me working through reading about presocratic philosophers in order. (I'm going through the recommended reading of the podcast "the history of philosophy without any gaps) I'm interested in that foundational historic moment of thinking critically and re-viewing the world around you. It's interesting to look at the roots of what becomes this wide Western tradition of grappling with the same ideas and thinkers over and over again. I'm also pretty interested in the specific challenges that come with interpreting fragmentary work, which is really all we have of a lot of these thinkers. So that's where this drive is coming from when you see books like these coming out of me on your feed. This is the first thing I've read that's a full book I can actually log on here.

Anyway, quick lore drop Xenophanes. I find what he contributes as a thinker to the conversation pretty fun. He is openly antagonistic and content to make wide declarations with little theoretical justification. Maybe bad for overall philosophical merit, but more entertaining for reading. He disses Homer and Hesiod directly, and tries to argue against the superstition that epic poetry passed down to ancient Greece. He finds much to criticize about the human (and often immoral) portraits of the gods, and puts up instead an idea of a much more abstract capital-G God that's all-powerful, all-knowing, and strongest above all other gods. Obviously this new theory, with some reworks, gets a lot of mileage in the years to come. The more interesting long term challenge he raises that I really enjoyed reading about was his declaration on the impossibility of really knowing specific truth:

"[T]he clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods ... For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak just of what has been brought to pass, still he himself would not know. But opinion is allotted to all."

This has often been interpreted as the birth of cynicism/skepticism and even arguably epistemology. The chapter discussing this section of Xenophanes' philosophy was definitely the strongest. But throughout I enjoyed seeing the author squeeze nuggets of insight out of even the smallest, most unrevealing fragments of writing. His style is clear and relatively easy to follow, if dry at times, and he does a lot to explicate the text and provide signposts to how other scholars have interpreted the fragments throughout time. I disagree totally with the other guy's review that suggests you just read the fragments on their own-- some of these pieces are so minimal and often even misleading that you will not get an enriched understanding of Xenophanes and his contributions to philosophy without looking at the commentary also.

I definitely did not read all the footnotes, considering many just dealt with questions of translation and I don't have any knowledge of Ancient Greek. HOWEVER, if you don't have the weird curse that I do of feeling compelled to read every page and every section of a book before being able to say you really "finished" it, I definitely suggest skipping the Testimonia section of the book. The writing from other authors just sucks, is overly abstract and evades comprehension. There's a reason I'm more interested in the fragments and the more poetic works of ancient philosophy-- when you get to fully preserved prose text, a lot of the time it's just a damn unfun slog to get through.

more early philosophy stuff to come...

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Xenophanes insists the Gods are moral. As with much Greek poetry, what survives is too fragmented for me.

[Emir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ve dolayısıyla hiçbir insan yoktur hiçbir insan da olmayacak tanrılarla ilgili apaçık gerçeği ve her şeyle ilgili söylediklerimi bilen zira biri kusursuz bir şey söylese bile yine de hiçbir şey bilmez sanıdır herkesin payına düşen

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a lot of discussion about interpreting from the Greek word for word, which is what I was hoping for. Though the intention, to restore Xenophanes to a serious place in Pre-Socratic thought, is a noble one and Lesher has many insights into Xenophanes works and times.

[CivilWar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear and very thorough overview of one of the most under-appreciated presocratic philosophers.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book of wisdom!

[Çağrı Fidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Islamiyetten bin yıldan daha fazla önce yaşayan Ksenophanes dedi ki: "Tanrı her şeyi sözle yarattı. Onlara 'Ol' dedi, oldular..."

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Now I will come to yet another account, and I will show the way.

And they say that once as he was passing by a puppy being beaten,
he felt compassion and said this:
'Stop, don't beat it, since in truth it is the soul of a friend
which I recognized upon hearing it cry out’”
—
“But mortals suppose that gods are born,
wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.”
—
“Indeed not from the beginning did gods intimate all things to mortals,
but as they search in time they discover better.”
—
“One god is greatest among gods and men,
not at all like mortals in body or in thought.”
—
“The sea is the source of water and of wind,
for without the great sea there would be no wind
nor streams of rivers nor rainwater from on high;
but the great sea is the begetter of clouds, winds,
and rivers.”
—
“and of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen
nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things.
For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak just of what has been brought to pass,
still he himself would not know. But opinion is allotted to all.”
—
“If god had not made yellow honey, they would think
that figs were much sweeter.”

[Ethan Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent dual language edition of the fragments and testemonia of Xenophanes. Xenophanes was an Ancient Greek poet who has historically been grouped with the presocratic philosophers. Probably this owes as much to his traditional (though now quite dubious) connection with Parmenides and the Eleatic school. In any case, Xenophanes was the first Greek we have record to begin the semi-sceptical purification of the idea of God. His predecessors, Homer and Hesiod, had sung of the Gods in vividly human terms, describing them as capable of both virtue and of unspeakable crimes. For Xenophanes, these singers of the sacred poetry of Greece are impious. To impute human form to perfection is already a blasphemy, not to speak of the gods committing murder and adultery. Xenophanes says that human beings have opinion rather than knowledge and that if donkeys fashioned images of the gods these would take the shape of donkeys. But God is one and immovable and shakes all things with thought.

This purification, this removal of God from the world of images and of time and space, has been one of the most consequential strands of Western thought. It was a theme that, after Xenophanes, would soon be taken up by Plato.

[Adrián P. C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐ OK/Good.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of extant segments from the writings by Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570 BC to c. 475 BC). I listened to an audio book of the Hermann Diels arrangement and John Burnet translation (into English), read by Dan Steffen on YouTube. The work has two parts, elegies and satires, which contain segments of his writings. Among his ideas are the arguments that there exists a distinction between beliefs (or maybe "truth") and knowledge (or maybe "perception"), that religious thought is therefore human projection onto a world which people cannot inherently ever know, that the world, as composted of things either wet or dry, alternates reality between these states, and that there is an infinite amount worlds which do not overlap in time. While some readers might not find the collection cohesive or otherwise easy to read, other readers seeking a representative work of a Pre-Socratic philosopher should find ample material to consider.

[Ege Atakan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yunan dünyasının ilk tek-tanrıcısı. Parmenides, Zenon, Sokrates ve Platon’u etkiledi. Monotomoralliğin öncülerinden(!)

[Enrico · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are so few fragments that it is hard to rate these. They are ok, if there were some more it would probably be a bit higher rated.

[begum gok · Rating 5 out of 5]

ksenophanesi ve antik cagdaki tanri gorusunu tanimak iicn ozet niteliginde bir kitap.

[Petra Hermans]

You may call it a tradition, but it would not
be a tradition when old traditions were broken,
by an old structure.