THE BOUNDLESS EARTH OF XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON

The cosmology of Xenophanes of Colophon, for which we have only fragmentary evidence, contains several aspects which remain unclear. The extant texts tend to agree that Xenophanes believed the Earth to be boundless in the downward direction. Scholars conse q uently usually conclude that the surface of the Earth was the only boundary dividing the Earth and the heavens in Xenophanes' cosmology. The Earth thus either stretched endlessly downwards, whereby new heavenly bodies always moved in a straight line into infinity above its surface, or - alternatively - it filled the lower part of a spherical universe and heavenly bodies moved in arcs and regularly came into existence and perished. One can also argue, however, that we should instead understand references to the endlessness of the Earth in the sense of Earth forming the lower boundary of the entire universe, whereby the Earth itself was limited and the heavens stretched above its surface. Heavenly bodies were permanent, although meteorological in their nature, and moving above a flat Earth. Although several testimonies attribute a spherical shape of both the divinity and the totality to Xenophanes, it is much more likely that the notion of a spherical universe appeared only later in the work of Parmenides. Although Xenophanes is often linked to the Eleatic philosophers, his cosmology and concept of the Earth in fact fully belonged to the Ionian tradition. It can also be argued that many of the unclear aspects of Xenophanes' cosmology are due to the thinker's poetic way of expressing his thoughts, which later doxographers interpreted in different ways.