the founder of the Eleaic sect of philosophy among the Greeks, was born at Colophon probably about the 61st Olympiad. From some cause or other he left his country early, and took refuge in Sicily, where he supported himself by reciting, in the court of Hiero, elegiac and iambic verses, which he had written in reprehension of the theogonies of Hesiod and Homer. From Sicily he passed over into Magna Graecia, where he took up the profession of philosophy, and became a celebrated preceptor in the Pythagorean school. Indulging, however, a greater freedom of thought than was usual among the disciples of Pythagoras, he ventured to introduce new opinions of his own, and in many particulars to oppose the doctrines of Epimenides, Thales, and Pythagoras. Xenophanes possessed the Pythagorean chair of philosophy about seventy years, and lived to the extreme age of a hundred years, that is, according to Eusebius, till the 81st Olympiad. The doctrine of Xenophanes concerning nature is so imperfectly preserved, and obscurely expressed, that it is no wonder that it has been differently represented by different writers. Perhaps the truth is, that he held the universe to be one in nature and substance, but distinguished in his conception between the matter of which all things consist, and that latent divine force which, though not a distinct substance but an attribute, is necessarily inherent in the universe, and is the cause of all its perfection.