Xenophanes as polymath

Xenophanes was a 6^th century BCE poet and natural philosopher. He is not as well known these days as Hesiod and Pythagoras, but his accomplishments were still quite impressive. He traveled widely and managed to live to the staggering old age of 92, which was pretty amazing for those days. He was known as both a rhapsode, which was a professional reciter of other people’s poems, and a poet of some distinction. It was through his poetry that he conveyed his knowledge and opinions. He wrote poems about the elements, the earth and cosmos, the gods, history, the weather and meteorological phenomena, and philosophy.

He even argued that the earth had at one time been submerged by the sea. His proof for this theory was that marine fossils such as shells and the impressions of a fish and of seaweed, had been inland and in mountains. He also noted that the impression of a bay-leaf had been found in the depth of a rock. That’s a pretty astounding conclusion for twenty-six hundred years ago.

For the breadth of his knowledge and the acuteness of his observations, Xenophanes certainly seems to be a polymath. So far, Heraclitus’s “polymaths” have all been pretty serious intellectual powerhouses. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll start looking at other, more modern, definitions of the term polymath as we start trying to figure out what a polymath for the 21^st century really is.