The founder of this school was Xenophanes, born in Colophon, an Ionian city of Asia Minor, from which being expelled he wandered over Sicily as a rhapsodist, or minstrel, reciting his elegiac poetry on the loftiest truths, and at last, about the year 536 B.C., came to Elea, where he settled. The principal subject of his inquiries was deity itself,--the great First Cause, the supreme Intelligence of the universe. From the principle _ex nihilo nihil fit_ he concluded that nothing could pass from non-existence to existence. All things that exist are created by supreme Intelligence, who is eternal and immutable. From this truth that God must be from all eternity, he advances to deny all multiplicity. A plurality of gods is impossible. With these sublime views,--the unity and eternity and omnipotence of God,--Xenophanes boldly attacked the popular errors of his day. He denounced the transference to the deity of the human form; he inveighed against Homer and Hesiod; he ridiculed the doctrine of migration of souls. Thus he sings,-- "Such things of the gods are related by Homer and Hesiod As would be shame and abiding disgrace to mankind,-- Promises broken, and thefts, and the one deceiving the other." And again, respecting anthropomorphic representations of the deity,-- "But men foolishly think that gods are born like as men are, And have too a dress like their own, and their voice and their figure; But there's but one God alone, the greatest of gods and of mortals, Neither in body to mankind resembling, neither in ideas."