Xenophanes

”Cicero says that only Xenophanes of Colophon, among all the philosophers who recognized the gods, had tried to root out all types of divination.

Pyrrho, and other skeptics or epechists, whose dogmas are held by many of the ancients to be taken from Homer, the seven sages, and from Archilochus and Euripides, and to whose number these are added, Zeno, Democritus, and Xenophanes, say that they are yet upon the inquiry after truth.

It is so with the most part of this third sort of authors, as the ancients have observed in the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and others.

Therefore it was that Xenophanes pleasantly said, “That if beasts frame any gods to themselves, as ’tis likely they do, they make them certainly such as themselves are, and glorify themselves in it, as we do.

Xenophanes complained one day to Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, that he was so poor he had not wherewithal to maintain two servants.