On the other hand, it is wrong to say with Freudenthal that Xenophanes was in any sense a polytheist.[315] That he should use the language of polytheism in his elegies is only what we should expect, and the other references to “gods” can be best explained as incidental to his attack on the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod. In one case, Freudenthal has pressed a proverbial way of speaking too hard.[316] Least of all can we admit that Xenophanes allowed the existence of subordinate or departmental gods; for it was just the existence of such that he was chiefly concerned to deny. At the same time, I cannot help thinking that Freudenthal was more nearly right than Wilamowitz, who says that Xenophanes “upheld the only real monotheism that has ever existed upon earth.”[317] Diels, I fancy, comes nearer the mark, when he calls it a “somewhat narrow pantheism.”[318] But all these views would have surprised Xenophanes himself about equally. He was really Goethe’s _Weltkind_, with prophets to right and left of him, and he would have smiled if he had known that one day he was to be regarded as a theologian. Footnote 315: Freudenthal, _Die Theologie des Xenophanes_. Footnote 316: Xenophanes calls his god “greatest among gods and men,” but this is simply a case of “polar expression,” to which parallels will be found in Wilamowitz’s note to the _Herakles_, v. 1106. Cf. especially the statement of Herakleitos (fr. 20) that “no one of gods or men” made the world. Footnote 317: _Griechische Literatur_, p. 38. Footnote 318: _Parmenides Lehrgedicht_, p. 9. CHAPTER III HERAKLEITOS OF EPHESOS [Sidenote: Life of Herakleitos.]