What Does Xenophanes Have to Object against in Sport?

Abstract

The article suggests that the conventional reading of Xenophanes’s fragment B 2 DK is biased by the doxographical construction about Xenophanes as the father of Eleatic ontology and by Socrates’s claim to have been of more use to society as a philosopher than the winners of horse-races (Plat. Ap. 36d–e). The argument runs that Xenophanes uses σοφίη in the traditional meaning of ‘(practical) expertise’, without implying any ontological dual- ism between body and spirit or pacifist denunciation of the violence of the athletic games.