CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 15 



colonized by the Greeks at an early period, and by the extermination or the 

 assimilation of the aboriginals a homogeneous Greek nationality had grown 

 up here, split up into small states, as in the mother country, and living, if 

 possible, under still worse conditions of political unrest. But their intellec- 

 tual culture rivalled that of the Asiatic cities. A peculiarity of the western 

 Greek philosophers was that a number of them were, like Pythagoras, 

 imaginative prophets and imperious statesmen, and at the same time keen 

 research-workers, while they founded schools of a far stricter order than 

 their Ionian predecessors. One philosophic school of this kind was the 

 Eleatic school, called after the city of Elea, in southern Italy. There came to 

 this city at the end of the sixth century b.c. a man whose name was Xenoph- 

 ANEs, born at Colophon in Asia Minor and a disciple of Anaximander. 

 Disturbances in his native city had driven him into exile and he had wandered 

 far and wide in the greatest poverty, supporting himself by reciting his own 

 poems in the towns he visited. Finally in Elea he found a place of refuge 

 and died there about 490 at a very advanced age. The results of his scientific 

 researches he has described in a poem, similar to his master Anaximander's 

 treatise On Nature. Some fragments of this poem are still extant. In spite of 

 the extraordinary audacity of the ideas which it contained, it won its author 

 a great reputation and a large number of disciples. He based his ideas on 

 Anaximander's theory of the origin of the world through the condensation of 

 water and primordial mud, and he developed it still further. Of interest in 

 this connexion is his pointing out fossilized marine animals high up in the 

 mountains, which he declared to be a proof that the mountains were at one 

 time under water. These ideas were neglected, mainly owing to the fact that 

 Aristotle and his disciples regarded fossilization as one of the "lusus natura." 

 It was not until the Renaissance that Xenophanes' more correct views once 

 more came into their own. But speculations as to the origin of the world 

 drove Xenophanes further and further over to purely theological problems. 

 He became a keen and eloquent opponent of his fellow-countrymen's belief 

 in a plurality of gods, which he despised on account of their purely human 

 limitations; horses and oxen, he declared, would, if they thought as men, 

 imagine gods in the form of horses and oxen. On the other hand, he for his 

 part maintained the eternity and unfathomableness of divinity, and con- 

 sistently therewith the eternity, unity, and immutability of the world in 

 which we live. This did not prevent him, however, from embracing Anaxi- 

 mander's theory of alternating evolution and annihilation of the earth and 

 all that lives on it. But it was the theory of immutability that his disciples 

 further developed. The most famous of these, Parmenides of Elea, vigorously 

 maintains the unity of being. The world is conceivable, he declared, only if 

 we disregard the variations and changes and seek the immutable. In this 

 connexion he warns us against relying upon the senses, whose judgment is 



