Xenophanes' Poetic Travels

Abstract

Abstract:

Scholars hold that Xenophanes was a wandering rhapsode or a perpetually itinerant performer. This consensus depends on the combination of a misunderstanding of one testimonium (D.L. 9.18 = A1), a misapprehension of another testimonium as a fragment (B45), and a questionable interpretation of one genuine fragment (B8), which probably describes not Xenophanes' bodily travels but rather the travels of his disembodied thought through the panhellenic circulation of his poetry. Rather than being some sort of special itinerant figure, this essay argues, Xenophanes was a settled elite and a celebrated poet during his own lifetime whose movements reflected his participation in normal networks of xenia and patronage.