  Many later writers identified Xenophanes as the teacher of Parmenides and the founder of the Eleatic “school of philosophy”—the view that, despite appearances, what there is is a motionless, changeless, and eternal ‘One’. This view of Xenophanes is based largely on Plato’s reference to “our Eleatic tribe, beginning from Xenophanes as well as even earlier” (Sophist 242d) and Aristotle’s remark that “...with regard to the whole universe, he says that the one is the god” (Meta. A5, 986b18), along with some verbal similarities between Xenophanes’ description of the “one greatest, unmoving god” and Parmenides’ account of a “motionless, eternal, and unitary being”. But the Xenophanes who speaks to us in the surviving fragments is a combination of rhapsode, social critic, religious teacher, and keen student of nature. Euripides’ Heracles 1341 ff. echoes his attack on the stories told about the gods by Homer and Hesiod (B11–12) and a passage of Euripides’ Autolycus quoted by Athenaeus (C2) repeats portions of the attack on the honors accorded to athletes delivered in B2. In the Republic, Plato shows himself the spiritual heir of Xenophanes when he states that the guardians of his ideal state are more deserving of honors and public support than the victors at Olympia, criticizes the stories told about the gods by the poets, and calls for a life of moderate desire and action. A pronounced ethic of moderation, sometimes bordering on asceticism, runs through much of ancient Greek ethical thought, beginning with Solon and Xenophanes and continuing through Socrates and Plato to the Epicureans and Cynics. Xenophanes’ conception of a “one greatest god” who “shakes all things by the thought (or will) of his mind” (noou phreni) may have helped to encourage Heraclitus’ belief in an ‘intelligence’ (gnômê) that steers all things (B41), Anaxagoras’ account of the nous that orders and arranges all things (B12), and Aristotle’s account of a divine nous that inspires a movement toward perfection without actually doing anything toward bringing it about (Metaphysics Lambda.)