  In his Lives of the Philosophers (Diels-Kranz, testimonium A1), Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes was born in the small Ionian town of Colophon and flourished during the sixtieth Olympiad (540–537 BCE). Laertius adds that when Xenophanes was “banished from his native city” he “joined the colony planted at Elea” (in Italy), and also lived at Zancle and Catana (two Greek communities in Sicily). He credits Xenophanes with composing verses “in epic meter, as well as elegiacs and iambics attacking Hesiod and Homer and denouncing what they said about the gods”, with reciting his own works, and with composing poems on the founding of Colophon and Elea. Later writers add that “he buried his sons with his own hands”, was sold into slavery, and later released from it. By Xenophanes’ own account (B8) he “tossed about the Greek land” for sixty-seven years, starting at the age of twenty-five.