the virtual founder of the Eleatic sect of philosophy among the Greeks, was born at Colophon, probably about the sixty-fifth Olympiad (B.C. 520). 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. Pythagoras maintained the doctrine of an absolute and infinite Unity, who was the producer of the universe. Xenophanes denied the possibility of such a production, and had little difficulty in demonstrating the tenability of his assertion. Creation being accordingly impossible, it follows that there is but one Being in the universe, self-existent and intelligent, but without personality and without responsibility. Hence pantheism of the purest kind. (See Aristotle, *Met.* i. c. 5, § 7; also *Pantheism.*) Xenophanes possessed the Pythagorean chair of philosophy about seventy years, and lived to the extreme age of 100 years, that is, according to Eusebius, till the eighty-first Olympiad. See the works of Karsten, of Ch. A. Brandis, and of Cousin, regarding the writings and life of this distinguished philosopher.