Xenophanes (lived c. 570–c. 470 BC)

Greek poet and philosopher. He attacked the immoral and humanlike gods depicted by the poet Homer, holding that there is only one deity, ‘in no way like men in body or in thought’. He speculated that stars were ignited clouds, and that everything was mud since fossils of sea creatures were found inland.

Born in Colophon, he left Ionia at the age of 25 and travelled around the Greek world reciting his philosophical and other poems. His outlook was generally undogmatic, because ‘seeming is wrought over all things’. Considerable fragments of his elegies and of his poem On Nature have survived.