he correct course is to
deal with him in this place as the only eminent thinker in antiquity about
whom it is known that--starting from popular belief and religious
motives--he reached a standpoint which at any rate with some truth may be
designated as atheism.

Xenophanes lived in the latter part of the sixth and the beginning of the
fifth centuries B.C. (according to his own statement he reached an age of
more than ninety years). He was an itinerant singer who travelled about
and recited poetry, presumably not merely his own but also that of others.
In his own poems he severely attacked the manner in which Homer and
Hesiod, the most famous poets of Greece, had represented the gods: they
had attributed to them everything which in man's eyes is outrageous and
reprehensible--theft, adultery and deception of one another. Their accounts
of the fights of the gods against Titans and Giants he denounced as
"inventions of the ancients." But he did not stop at that: "Men believe
that the gods are born, are clothed and shaped and speak like themselves";
"if oxen and horses and lions could draw and paint, they would delineate
their gods in their own image"; "the Negroes believe that their gods are
flat-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red
hair." Thus he attacked directly the popular belief that the gods are
anthropomorphic, and his arguments testify that he clearly realised that
men create their gods in their own image. On another main point, too, he
was in direct opposition to the religious ideas of his time: he rejected
Divination, the belief that the gods imparted the secrets of the future to
men--which was deemed a mainstay of the belief in the existence of the
gods. As a positive counterpart to the anthropomorphic gods, Xenophanes
set up a philosophical conception of God: God must be One, Eternal,
Unchangeable and identical with himself in every way (all sight, all
hearing and all mind). This deity, according to the explicit statements of
our earliest sources, he identified with the universe.

If we examine more closely the arguments put forth by Xenophanes in
support of his remarkable conception of the deity, we realise that he
everywhere starts from the definitions of the nature of the gods as given
by popular religion; but, be it understood, solely from the absolute
definitions. He takes the existence of the divine, with its absolute
attributes, for granted; it is in fact the basis of all his