Thanks to the new editorial methods, the number of these witnesses is now likely to increase up to about two hundred items or even more. Obviously Diels relied on now out-of-date editions. In the Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (even before, in the Doxographi Graeci) Hermann Diels included roughly one hundred passages from the Herculaneum papyri, mainly extracts from the works of Epicurus and Philodemus. They can be organized following the chronological succession of either the so-called Presocratic ‘schools’ (Milesians, Eleatics, Atomists, etc.) or individual philosophers (e.g. A catalogue of these sources is the first step of a comprehensive edition with commentary of the witnesses concerning the Presocratic philosophers contained in the Herculanean texts. The paper presents a method for collecting and systematizing the evidence for the Presocratics in the Herculaneum papyri. By removing the division between “philosophy” and “poetry”, different aspects of Xenophanes’ fragments begin to coincide with the phenomenon of the ancient symposium, understood as a space for intellectual competition. As I suggest, the critique of traditional mythical narratives, and undermining other poets’ authority, can be interpreted as an expression of performative practices functioning at symposia of the archaic and classical epochs. This sympotic context determines the second question: how the poetic fragments fi t with those compositions in which Xenophanes attacks traditional beliefs and poetic ideas of Homer and Hesiod. The initial problem lies in understanding the performative aspect in Xenophanes’ elegiac poems analysis of fragments 1W and 2W has revealed that his literary output can be situated within the framework of the aristocratic symposium. ![]() The aim of the present article is to discuss relations between archaic Greek philosophy and poetry through the example of Xenophanes of Colophon (sixth century BCE), the poet best known for a critique of traditional religion using anthropomorphic imagery.
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