Poems

Knowledge of Xenophanes' views comes from fragments of his poetry that survive as quotations by later Greek writers. Unlike other pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus or Parmenides, who only wrote one work, Xenophanes wrote a variety of poems, and no two of the fragments can positively be identified as belonging to the same text. According to Diogenes Laertius, Xenophanes wrote a poem on the foundation of Colophon and Elea, which ran to approximately