X
XANTHUS, one of the early Greek historians, a Lydian by birth, and probably a native of Sardes. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he lived shortly before the Peloponnesian war, and it is evident from one of Xanthus' own fragments, that his work was written in the reign of Artaxerxes I., 465-425 b.c. Suidas states that the historian was born about the time of the taking of Sardes by the Ionians, which took place 499 b.c. Xanthus was the author of a work on Lydia in four books, which appears to have been a production of great merit. But only a few fragments of it are extant, which have been preserved by Strabo and other writers. These scanty remains of the "Lydiaca," however, contain valuable information on the history and geography of Asia Minor. They have been collected in Creuzer's Historicorum Græcorum antiquissimorum Fragmenta, and in C. & Th. Müller's Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum, &c.—J. T.
XAVIER, Francis. See Francis Xavier.
XENOCRATES, an eminent Platonic philosopher, succeeded Speusippus (Plato's immediate follower) as head of the academy about 340 b.c. He was born in 396 at Chalcedon, a city on the shores of the Bosphorus, nearly opposite Byzantium. Like Speusippus, Xenocrates accompanied Plato on at least one of his visits to the court of Dionysius of Syracuse. After Plato's death in 347, he withdrew, in company with Aristotle, to the court of Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus in Mysia, a province of Asia Minor. He cannot have remained very long in this retreat, for we are told that he was frequently sent by the Athenians on embassies to Philip of Macedon, with whom they were at this time embroiled, and by whom, in the year 338, they were finally subjugated. When the failing health of Speusippus compelled him to resign the presidency of the academy, Xenocrates was summoned to the vacant post; and this office he occupied from about 340 b.c. until his death in 314, when he was in the eighty-third year of his age. The temperament and morals of Xenocrates were grave, not to say austere, in the extreme. His name was quoted in antiquity as almost a synonym for modesty and temperance. His powers of persuasion must also have been very great, if we may judge from the conversion of Polemon, which was effected by means of his eloquence. Polemon was notorious for his profligacy and dissipation. But happening one day to enter the academy with a crowd of riotous companions, he was so much struck by the discourse of Xenocrates, who was lecturing on the advantages of temperance, that he tore the chaplet of flowers from his head, and resolved, then and for ever, to renounce his former way of life. Acting up to his resolution, he became the most temperate of the temperate, and, moreover, studied philosophy so assiduously that he was judged worthy to succeed Xenocrates in the presidency of the academy. Xenocrates was a voluminous writer; but none of his works have come down to us. But from their titles we may learn that he prosecuted diligently the researches in which his great master had led the way. He wrote on logic, on ideas, on the opposite, on the indefinite, on the soul, on the passions, on happiness and virtue, on the state; and he seems, like Plato, to have dwelt principally on the distinction between sense and reason as the cardinal distinction in philosophy —J. F. F.
XENOPHANES, an early Greek philosopher, was a native of Colophon, an Ionic city in Asia Minor. He was born probably about 590, and died about 500 b.c. When he was grown to manhood Colophon fell under the subjection of the Lydians, whose luxury and corrupt morals so much disgusted him that he left the place, and took refuge in the recently founded colony of Elea in Southern Italy. Here he founded the Eleatic school of philosophy, the reputation of which was upheld and increased by his successors, Parmenides and Zeno. At this time the art of prose-writing had not begun to be cultivated. The opinions of Xenophanes were accordingly delivered in verse. He seems to have been a composer and reciter of various kinds of poetry, some fragments of which are extant. These relics have been collected, along with those of Parmenides and some other early philosophers, by Karsten, a Dutch scholar, and were published by him in 1830. The doctrines of Xenophanes were rather theological than philosophical. One of his principal aims was to disabuse the minds of his countrymen of the absurd ideas about the gods, which had been instilled into them by the poems of Homer and Hesiod. He proclaims a pure monotheism, and severely condemns the creed which holds that God is fashioned after the likeness of man. "Men," he says, "imagine that the gods are born, and are endowed with our form and figure. But if oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and mould things as men do, they, too, would form the gods after their own similitude—horses making them like horses, and oxen like oxen." In order to speak intelligibly of the speculations of Xenophanes, it is necessary to keep in view the kind of truth which philosophy strives to reach and give expression to. The only kind of truth which philosophy recognizes, is truth as it exists for all intellect. Truth, as it presents itself to this or that peculiar order of intellect, is not the aim of philosophy—is not truth at all in the strict sense of the word. Hence sensible knowledge is not true knowledge, for it is not universally valid: the senses may be organs of human cognition merely. The senses show us things in their diversity; and this diversity will vary with every variation in the senses. But there is a unity in things as well as a diversity; if they are πολλά, they are likewise ἑν; and this unity is apprehended not by sense, but by pure intellect. There is thus something which is common to all things, and this which is common to all things is apprehended by something common to all intellects. An intelligence need not of necessity apprehend the universe as coloured, or sonorous, or solid, but it must of necessity apprehend it as one—as held together by some principle of unity. Xenophanes was the first who proclaimed the oneness of the universe; and Aristotle says, that "looking forth over the expanded world, Xenophanes declared that the one in all things was God." His successors, Parmenides and Zeno, argued for "Being" as the real and permanent in all things, i.e., as the truth for all intellect, while they regarded change (the phenomena of sense) as unreal and elusory. The philosophy of Xenophanes and his followers is valuable as an effort to raise speculation from the region of sense into that of intellect, and to show that the objects of reason are more real and significant than those of the senses.—J. F. F.
XENOPHON, a Greek historian and miscellaneous writer, was born at Athens somewhere between 440 and 430 b.c. Of his youth and early manhood there is nothing known, except that he was one of the most distinguished of the little band of young men of superior culture and character who, towards the end of the Peloponnesian war, looked to Socrates as their great teacher and example. His first public appearance is in the year 401, when, not finding much to interest him at home in the then humiliated condition of his native country, he took service under Cyrus the Younger in his famous but ill-starred expedition against his brother Artaxerxes II., then on the Persian throne. Here he distinguished himself after the battle of Cunaxa, by heading that difficult retreat of the ten thousand over the highlands of Armenia to the shores of the Black Sea, which has become so famous in military history. Shortly after this we find him in the ranks of the Spartan army, and the constant
