  Diels-Kranz (DK) provides 45 fragments of his poetry (although B4, 13, 19, 20, 21 and 41 would be more accurately classified as testimonia), ranging from the 24 lines of B1 to the single-word fragments of B21a, 39, and 40. A number of the ‘sympotic poems’ (poems for drinking parties) (B1–3, 5, 6, 22, and the imitation in C2) were preserved by Athenaeus, while the remarks on the nature of the divine were quoted by Clement (B14–16 and 23), Sextus Empiricus (B11, 12, and 24), and Simplicius (B25 and 26). Other snippets survive in the accounts by Diogenes Laertius and Aëtius, or as marginal notes in our manuscripts of various authors, or as entries in later rhetorical summaries and dictionaries. Seventy-four selections, of which the most extensive is the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On Melissus, Xenophanes, Gorgias (MXG), make up the collection of testimonia in DK. Laertius’ statement (A1) that Xenophanes “wrote in epic meter, also elegiacs, and iambics” is confirmed by extant poems in hexameters and elegiac meter, with one couplet (B14) a combination of hexameter and iambic trimeter. Ancient writers referred to a number of his compositions as silloi—‘squints’ or satires, and a critical tone pervades many of the surviving fragments. Three late sources credit Xenophanes with a didactic poem under the title Peri Phuseôs (“On Nature”) but not every allusion to an earlier author’s views “on nature” represented a reference to a single work on that subject.