Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/98

 74 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE culture, who turns from the world to become high priest of an ascetic brotherhood based on mysticism and puri- fication. The rise of a distinctly philosophical epos is im- mediately due to the curious spiritual rebellion of Xenophanes of Colophon, a disciple of Anaximander, who was driven by the Persian invasion of 546 B.C. to earning his livelihood as a rhapsode. But he knew from Anaximander that what he recited was un- true. ''Homer and Hesiod fastened on the gods all that is a shame and a rebuke to man, thieving and adultery and the cheating one of another." He made his master's physical Infinite into God — "there is one God most high over men and gods ; " " all of him sees, thinks, and hears ; he has no parts ; he is not man-like either in body or mind." ''Men have made God in their own image; if oxen and lions could paint, they would make gods like oxen and lions!' He wrote new ' true ' poetry of his own— the great doctrinal poem On Nature,* an epic on the historical Founding of Colophon,* and 2000 elegiacs on the Settlement at Elea * of himself and his fellow-exiles. The seventy years which he speaks of as having "tossed his troubled thoughts up and down Hellas" must have contained much hard fight- ing against organised opposition, of which we have an echo in his Satires.* He was not a great philosopher nor a great poet ; but the fact that in the very stronghold of epic tradition he preached the gospel of free philosophy and said boldly the things that every one was secretly feeling, made him a great power in Greek life and litera- ture. He is almost the only outspoken critic of religion preserved to us from Greek antiquity. The scepticism or indifference of later times was combined with a con- ventional dislike to free speech on religious matters —