stretching infinitely downwards (fr. 28),[1] and this means that the Academy possessed no copy of such a poem, which would be very strange if it had ever existed. Simplicius was able to find the complete works of much smaller men. Nor does internal evidence lend any support to the view that Xenophanes wrote a philosophical poem. Diels refers about twenty-eight lines to it, but they would all come in quite as naturally in his attacks on Homer and Hesiod, as I have endeavoured to show. It is also significant that a number of them are derived from commentators on Homer.[2] It is more probable, then, that Xenophanes expressed such scientific opinions as he had incidentally in his satires. That would be in the manner of the time, as we can see from the remains of Epicharmos.
The satires are called Silloi by late writers, and this name may go back to Xenophanes himself. It may, however, originate in the fact that Timon of Phleious, the "sillographer" (c. 259 B.C.), put much of his satire upon philosophers into the mouth of Xenophanes. Only one iambic line has been preserved, and that is immediately followed by a hexameter (fr. 14). This suggests that Xenophanes inserted iambic lines among his hexameters in the manner of the Margites.
57.The fragments. I give the fragments according to the text and arrangement of Diels.
Elegies
(1)
Now is the floor clean, and the hands and cups of all; one sets twisted garlands on our heads, another hands us fragrant ointment on a salver. The mixing bowl stands ready, full of
- ↑ Simpl. De caelo, p. 522, 7 (R. P. 97 b). It is true that two of our fragments (25 and 26) are preserved by Simplicius, but he got them from Alexander. Probably they were quoted by Theophrastos; for it is plain that Alexander had no first-hand knowledge of Xenophanes, or he would not have been taken in by M.X.G. (See p. 126.)
- ↑ Three fragments (27, 31, 33) come from the Homeric Allegories, two (30, 32) are from Homeric scholia.
