The period at which he lived is clear enough, and as this suffices, it is a matter of indifference that the year of his birth and of his death is unknown. According to Diogenes Laertius (IX. 18), he was contemporary with Anaximander and Pythagoras. Of his circumstances further than this, it is only known that he, for reasons which are unknown, escaped from his native town, Colophon, in Asia Minor, to Magna Græcia, and resided for the most part at Zancle, (now Messina) and Catana (still called Catania) in Sicily. I find it nowhere said by the ancients that he lived at Elea, although all recent writers on the history of Philosophy repeat it, one after the other. Tennemann, in particular, says (Vol. I. pp. 151 and 414), that about the 61st Olympiad (536 B.C.), he repaired from Colophon to Elea. Diogenes Laertius (IX. 20), however, only says that he flourished about the 60th Olympiad and that he made two thousand verses on the colonization of Elea, from which it might be easily concluded that he was also born at Elea. Strabo says this in the beginning of his sixth book—when describing Elea—of Parmenides and Zeno only, and these he called Pythagoreans; hence, according to Cicero (Acad. Quæst. IV. 42) the Eleatic school took its name from these two. Xenophanes was nearly a hundred years old, and lived to see the Median wars: it is said that he became so poor that he had not the means of having his children buried, and was obliged to do so with his own hands. Some say that he had no teacher; others name Archelaus, which is a chronological error. He wrote a book “On Nature,” the general subject and title of Philosophy at that time; some verses have been preserved to us which so far show no powers of reasoning. Professor Brandis of Bonn collected them together, with the fragments of Parmenides and Melissus, under the title “Commentationum Eleaticarum, P. 1,” Altonæ, 1813. The older philosophers wrote in verse, for prose comes much later on; on account of the awkward and confused mode of expression in Xenophanes’ poems, Cicero calls them (Acad. Quæst. IV. 23): _minus boni versus_. As to his philosophy, Xenophanes in the first place maintained absolute existence to be the one, and likewise called this God. “The all is One and God is implanted in all things; He is unchangeable, without beginning, middle or end.”[48] In some verses by Xenophanes found in Clemens of Alexandria (Strom. V. 14, p. 714, ed. Potter), it is said: “One God is greatest amongst gods and men. Neither like unto mortals in spirit or in form;” and in Sextus Empiricus (adv. Math. IX. 144): “He sees everywhere, thinks everywhere, and hears everywhere,”