Battling the Gods
Atheism in Ancient Greece
The first thing to say is that there are a number of really good reasons that no one has really done a full scale study on irreligion since A. B. Drachmann’s Atheism in Pagan Antiquity, which was published about a century ago. To break them down:
All evidence is relevant, just as it is for religion, but no evidence seems to directly confront this issue.
Along with this, the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard also recognized this in practice:
“Religious beliefs must always be treated with the greatest caution, for we are then dealing with what neither European nor native can directly observe.” (1965: 7)
Of course, Evans-Pritchard could observe and survey his subjects but no surveys of belief exist from the ancient world.
Then there is the normative destructive influences of survival of source material. As we’ll see, atheism isn’t seen as a positive thing. It’s a sign of madness, or a signal of moral degeneracy, etc. That means that the material that survives is really about what I’ll call the ‘spectre’ of atheism (after Hunter 1985). This can be very useful, as we’ll get to, but it’s not the same thing as atheists saying they’re atheists, behaving as such, and being treated as such. It’s more fictional or mythical stories and warnings. The atheist here is a kind of fall guy. Michael Hunter (1985: 146) observed (quoting Fotherby’s Atheomastix) a similar phenomenon with respect to Early Modern England:
Quite apart from the actual existence of ‘atheism’, the spectre of it undoubtedly allowed authors to rehearse arguments on matters ‘most needful to be belled; yet least labored in by Divines.’ By visualizing unbelievers who ‘must be refuted by the principles of nature only, for all other arguments they scorn’, writers were given an excuse to expound the principles of natural theology.
This kind of material is useful for looking at attitudes towards atheism, but not attitudes towards atheists, if that makes sense. These are fictional characters, not real people, behaving in real ways, engendering real life reactions.
In the Classics, to put it simply, people don’t believe in atheism. Yes, you read that right. Since Lucien Febvre’s (1942) Problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle(an excellent book on 16th C French atheism which has an English translation from the 1980s), Classics has been in a pretty sticky mire regarding unbelief. This polemical work was intended as a response to the historian Abel Lefranc’s Pantagruel (1905), in which it had been argued that Rabelais, the French Renaissance polymath, was an atheist. Febvre argued that religion was embedded in the physical, cultural, political, linguistic, and conceptual environment of Rabelais’s sixteenth century France:
Today we make a choice to be a Christian or not. There was no choice in the sixteenth century. One was a Christian in fact. One’s thoughts could wander far from Christ, but these were plays of fancy, without the living support of reality. One could not even abstain from observance. Whether one wanted or not, one found oneself immersed from birth in a bath of Christianity from which one did not emerge even at death.
You can see the echoes of this in Jan Bremmer’s comment on atheism in ancient Greece, in his article in the Cambridge Companion:
Antiquity was not that different from the Middle Ages in this respect. The ancient Greeks and Romans also moved in a landscape where temples were everywhere, where gods adorned their coins, where the calendar went from religious festival to festival, and where religious rites accompanied all major transitions in life.
It really is the consensus:
Glenn Most (2003: 304), after a defense of “belief” in the ancient world, rules out atheism:
…just as monotheism was not a viable cultural option in antiquity, so too, symmetrically, atheism was virtually unknown: ancient lists of those philosophers who denied altogether the very existence of the gods never manage to come up with more than a handful of names.
Paul Woodruff:
True atheism is elusive in this period, and we do not know for certain of any thinker who denied the existence of the gods. Denying that the gods take action falls short of atheism in the full sense.
And Tom Harrison:
The real difference arguably is not between Christianity and ancient religion, but between an age today (in Britain) where unbelief is envisioned as a normal, if not indeed as the normal position… and earlier ages, Christian as well, in which complete unbelief was scarcely imaginable.
Febvre’s thesis — or (though this isn’t very important) the Classics reading of Febvre — basically posits that religion was not just socially, culturally, linguistically, etc embedded, but it was cognitively embedded. This is a key distinction. It leads Bremmer to his conclusion. It is wrong, and there is simply no evidence for it and a great deal against it. The thesis that atheism is impossible before the 16th C has been challenged (effectively) in other disciplines — chiefly by David Wootton, Susan Reynolds, and John Arnold. As Reynolds (1991: 22) argues, ‘mankind had the same basic mental equipment’: the potential mentalities of different societies only substantially differ in the limits of their technological abilities, none of which were required for atheism; atheism could exist in ‘even the most untouched and traditional societies’. There’s a wealth of evidence and argumentation across other disciplines at this point, and we can safely discard the ‘cognitively embedded’ thesis, though of course the general point about religion being socially, culturally, etc embedded is still important and true. However, the Febvre thesis hasn’t seen an effective academic challenge in Classics yet.
This is all partly because of the non-normative nature of atheism, it has always been very difficult to pin down core concepts key to studying atheism. There is something about religion and religious concepts that makes it problematic to fix a definition of them; there is, perhaps, nothing ‘essentially religious’, and consequently, nothing essentially irreligious (Asad 2003 is very good on the slippery nature of religious terms). Terminological issues are certainly in large part responsible for inhibiting the systematic study of atheism (as Lois Lee 2012, 2015: 22, Campbell 1971: 17–45, and Pasquale 2007: 76 have argued). The meanings, definitions, and semantic ranges of even the broadest terms, of ‘atheism’, ‘belief’, and ‘agnosticism’, are highly problematic and controversial. Atheism is also often further subdivided: minor and major, positive and negative, strong and weak, militant and fundamentalist. These controversial and opaque terms are widespread in the Classics, where they are inconsistently and often unreflexively used. But lively discussions in the social sciences, particularly by Lois Lee and Stephen Bullivant, have demonstrated the problems with using existing terms without further thought and analysis, even with qualifications depending on context (e.g. ‘I am now talking about atheism in X sense’). In particular, these warn against insisting on terms that are ‘imprecise or overly narrow and which are confused and combined with one another without consistency’, as Lee (2015: 22) observes. This stuff will be quite familiar to the reader of New Atheism: it’s often (appropriately) raised by these writers. For the sake of clarity, I take here what I think is the most philosophically sound and historically useful notion of atheism: atheism is opposed to belief, and agnosticism answers an entirely different question. (The question is ontological, for theism and atheism, and epistemological, for agnosticism.) My view is as opposed to what I call ‘BAD’: the idea of Belief, Agnosticism, and Disbelief as part of the same scale and answers to the same question. I’m happy to defend this claim if you want to quiz me about it.
There is also the problem of Great Man Theory. In short, people have looked for famous atheists, and they’ve been caught in that trap I mentioned above: their lives have become lists of weird behaviors and ideas. We’re missing obvious evidence of normal, quiet, atheists.
The results of atheism in the Greek world were believed to be much broader and more significant than a personal religious viewpoint which was, in isolation, unproblematic.
For instance, atheism was perceived by many as the key to the religious, political, and moral corruption of Athens’ political classes by Socrates and the sophists. Socrates was prosecuted for his beliefs. There’s a lot of controversy about the phrasing of the accusation against Socrates, but I take the essential phrase here — adikei Sōkratēs theous ou nomizōn — makes most sense translated as ‘Socrates is a wrongdoer because he does not believe in the gods’. Anyway, Socrates was not prosecuted only for his beliefs: he was also prosecuted for ‘being a missionary’ (Hansen 1995: 26) and preaching them to his followers. In the Apology of Socrates, Plato’s Socrates defends himself by arguing that for years the Athenians have listened to him, many of whom have now grown up and surely wised up to any potential corrupting influence he had on them, and he challenges anyone to come forward with evidence of wrongdoing (Pl. Ap.33c-34b; See also Pl. Men. 91e, where Plato’s Socrates comments that no one noticed Protagoras was corrupting the young for the forty years that he taught). In this, Plato’s Socrates damns himself. In the Laws, Plato’s Stranger dismissed atheism as a youthful folly (Pl. Laws 10.888a-b). It is reasonable to speculate that Plato had the Stranger voice this opinion in response to claims of Socrates’ corruption of the youth. In fact, the group of young men taught by Socrates, and the sophists in general, did not suddenly cease in their impiety as they grew older. The students of Socrates had become associated with everything from the loss of the Peloponnesian War, to the mutilation of the Hermes, and other systematic impieties committed by the aristocracy, which were inevitably connected to the famous plague of 430, 429, and 427–6BC, too. In the minds of the jurors, Socrates and his fellow teachers had corrupted the men responsible for these disasters, turning them towards impiety. So, as Brickhouse and Smith remark, the real question is not why Socrates was brought to trial, but why he was not brought to trial sooner (1989: 23). There is far more to say about the trial of Socrates: subsequent chapters return to it. What is clear is that the trial of Socrates should be read in context of Greek approaches to religious education and the corruption of the young in religion.
The religious and political aspects of atheism are much better understood than the moral. By the late fifth and early fourth century in Athens, atheism was believed to result in immorality (or the reverse), at least by enough jurors as to make the arguments of Socrates’ prosecutors persuasive. Oddly, Plato offers as good of an example as any of this: ‘Two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed, and the godless, which is most wretched.’ Still, it should not be assumed that atheism has any inherent connection with morality, or that Greeks would map the connection in the same sort of way to the way it commonly is in the Christian West. From a very early period in Greece atheism was believed by some to result in immorality, but it was not, and never became, a ubiquitous or inextricable connection. This connection was placed more in the public eye in the late fifth and early fourth centuries, for two main reasons: first, because the assumption that atheists were immoral underwrote accusations of impiety against perceived atheists (like Socrates); and secondly because in this period major secular, humanist moral theories were developed that would have resulted in different moral behaviors, often by the same figures who were later accused of atheism.
So the first point is that atheists were viewed as immoral, to differing degrees, in different places and times.
The danger of atheism was in the breakdown of law and order. I think Thucydides’ record of the plague of Athens in 430–29 and 427–6BC stands for itself.
[2.47] the supplications made at sanctuaries, or appeals to oracles and the like, were all futile, and at last men desisted from them, overcome by the calamity… [2.52] Bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead people rolled about in the streets and, in their longing for water, near all the fountains. The temples, too, in which they had quartered themselves were full of the corpses of those who had died in them; for the calamity which weighed upon them was so overpowering that men, not knowing what was to become of them, became careless of all law, sacred and profane. And the customs which they had hitherto observed regarding burial were all thrown into confusion, and they buried their dead each one as he could. And many resorted to shameless modes of burial because so many members of their households had already died that they lacked the proper funeral materials. Resorting to other people’s pyres, some, anticipating those who had raised them, would put on their own dead and kindle the fire; others would throw the body they were carrying upon one which was already burning and go away.… [53.4] No fear of gods or law of men restrained; for, on the one hand, seeing that all men were perishing alike, they judged that piety and impiety came to the same thing, and, on the other, no one expected that he would live to be called to account and pay the penalty of his misdeeds. On the contrary, they believed that the penalty already decreed against them, and now hanging over their heads, was a far heavier one, and that before this fell it was only reasonable to get some enjoyment out of life.
Atheism came from disaffection and immorality, in the Greek mind, and it led to the loss of law and order, and divine retribution. It made sense, then to police atheism to some degree at least; especially when the consequences (loss of law and order and divine retribution) could be felt. There are a number of examples in our sources of individuals put on trial for atheism in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries. These are very controversial. Each example has been undermined for one reason or another — because the source material is unreliable, or the date is strange, or by semantic muddling (as with Socrates’ accusation: by arguing it wasn’t really about atheism). That’s too complex to get into here, but suffice it to say that those supposed to have been prosecuted for atheism are:
- Diagoras of Melos. Prosecuted for ‘offence of word rather than action’ according to Lysias: divulging the Mysteries and chopping up a statue of Herakles to use as fire wood. Ar. Birds 1071–87, and later in Lys. 6.17. Athenagoras Plea 4, Suda sv. Diagoras [Suda Online: δ,524]; The Mysteries: Melanthios FGrHist 326 F3, Krateros FGrHist 342 F16. (Likely)
- Euripides was accused of atheism and prosecuted for it. Arist. Rh. 1416a., also Satyrus, Vita Eur. C10. Herakles as mad: POxy 2400, 3rd Century AD, probably based on Satyrus. (Probably didn’t happen)
- Anaxagoras. Reputation for natural philosophy. Brought to trial under asebeia (impiety) for ‘not believing in the gods’ (τὰ θεῖα μὴ νομίζοντας, according to Plutarch), ‘because he declared the sun to be a hot ball of metal’ (διότι τὸν ἥλιον μύδρον ἔλεγε διάπυρον, according to Diogenes Laertius) instead of a god, and ‘declared the firmament was made of stones’ (‘Ἀναξαγόραν εἰπεῖν ὡς ὅλος ὁ οὐρανὸς ἐκ λίθων συγκέοιτο’). Ephorus, FrGrHist 70 F196 ap. DS 12.39.2; his fate: DL 2.3.8, 2.3.12–15; Plut. Per. 32.1–3. (Likely)
- Protagoras. Reputation for natural philosophy. Protagoras’ work Concerning the Gods opened with a statement of what was perceived as agnostic atheism (unbelief, but not disbelief): ‘Concerning the gods, I cannot ascertain whether they do or do not exist’ (περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι οὔθ᾽ ὡς εἰσίν, οὔθ᾽ ὡς οὐκ εἰσίν). Prot. F3 Graham 2010: 696–7; Eusebius, PE. 14.3, 7; Arist. F67 Rose = Sophistes F3 Ross. Arist. ap. DL 9.51–4. He was described by the Old Comic poet Eupolis as ‘an offender in regard to celestial matters’ in 421BC. DL 9.50 = Eupolis F157, a fragment of the 421BC Flatterers.
- Diogenes of Apollonia. Reputation for natural philosophy. Demetrius of Phalerum FGrHist 228 F42 ap. DL 9.57, Athen. 12.60 = 542e.
- Damon of Oea. Reputation for natural philosophy and hanging out with other atheists. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 27.4. Plut. Per. 4.2.
- Theophrastus. For undermining the gods. DL 5.37, Ael. VH 8.12.
- Stilpo of Megara. Prosecuted for impiety for arguing that the Athena of Pheidias was not a god, and at the trial defended himself by arguing that he had said she was not a god but a goddess. DL 2.116
Outside of Athens, there is not a great deal of evidence on trials for atheism or impiety. Plato’s Socrates, in the Euthydemus (271b-c), remarks that the sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus were exiled from Thurii. Thurii was a Athenian-led colony: it was likely heavily influenced by Athenian culture, not least because it was partly the brain-child of Protagoras and Pericles. In the late 320s or early 310s, before his trial in Athens, Demetrius of Phalerum was exiled from the Libyan polis Cyrene, a Theran colony (Plut. On Exile 601). There is no evidence that Greece in general, then, including Athens before the Peloponnesian war, people were very concerned to prosecute atheistic views as impiety. The heightened sensitivity that resulted in the common accusations in Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries appears to be due to unique circumstances at the time.
I think the key here is that individuals with a reputation for atheism are being used — much in the same way as witches have been — as a scapegoat for the woes of the community. Regardless of the historicity of the trials, it seems clear that trials for atheism were viewed as a plausible consequence of public atheism. There’s also a small amount of evidence of book burning and some other weird things. It seems clear that the deterrents were significant enough that atheists would have been very unwise to air their views in public. That fits well with our evidence: close cabals and sympotic contexts, etc. As Hussey (1995: 536) has observed:
There were in fact some who were atheists, though they had good reason to keep their opinions hidden.
Or Sutton (1981: 37) before him, on Critias:
an obvious question: if these atheistic ideas were Critias’ own, why should he care to advertise the fact? There would be little to gain and much to risk both in terms of personal reputation and of political chances.
Here I’m going to be talking about atheism as Other; as l’étrange: that is, oppositional self-definition of religious identity in Greece. If you want an introduction to the concept of other, I recommend starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and Michel de Certaeu’s Possession at Loudun. Seeing the atheist as other is, I think, the most important ‘use’ of ancient Greek atheism. The importance of the category of l’étrange — the strange; a powerful sense of the uncanny and otherness — has most recently been observed by Whitmarsh: ‘[t]he history of atheism cannot be just that of those who profess not to believe in gods; it must also account for those social forces… that construct it as the other, the inverse of true belief.’ (Whitmarsh 2016: 116)
Even in the Odyssey, atheism began to be conceived as an ‘other’ that was set against, and helped to define, normative religion in Greek society. This raises the question: what is legitimate and illegitimate religion in ancient Greece? There were many forms of extra- or para-religious beliefs and behaviors, including atheism, but also magic, belief in ghosts, curses, and necromancy. It is impossible to define these practices accurately and non-tautologically, as has been recognized in the scholarship on magic: they are practices that broadly shared the practical techniques and conceptual backdrop of religion, but can be grouped in a distinct category as practices that were, in some contexts, subject to prejudice and caricature as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘superstitious’. ‘The scholarly literature’, anthropologists M. and R. Wax observed, ‘contains two principal approaches to the definition and study of magic: an intellectual and a moral’ (Wax and Wax 1963: 495). This was the perspective of James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, who argued that magic differed from religion as threats and coercion against the gods, while religion was humble prayer. Yet Greek practitioners of magic not only made curses or spells (epodai), but also prayers (euchai); both aimed to persuade (peithein) the gods, as Plato’s Stranger observed (Pl. Laws 10.909b). These beliefs and behaviors all played a significant part in ordinary Greek life, but they were perceived as differently ‘legitimate’ by different individuals. In other words, the question I posed above — what is legitimate religion? — was a problem for the Greeks too. The best way for our purposes to study these ‘illegitimate’ forms of religion is to concentrate on the attitudes towards those practices, or ‘caricatures’, more than the practices and beliefs themselves (much the same as atheism). Thinking through ‘illegitimate’ religion allowed individuals to construct and reinforce their own understanding of ‘right’ religion in an environment that often lacked more concrete guidance about appropriate ways to behave and think.
Using this lens, the equivalency presented in many of our sources between atheism and fanatical religion or superstition seems quite obvious. This tradition has informed our modern approaches to religion, and can be traced back to the Greeks. Superstition was one of the categories through which the Greeks defined the religious ‘other’. Through the tradition of writing on ‘superstition’, it is possible to explore the way in which both atheism and superstition were paired as symbols of austerity, as extreme and inappropriate attitudes to the gods, and caricatured to some extent as equivalent or allied phenomena. At the opening of his On Superstition(peri tēs deisidaimōnias, lit. about god-fearing), Plutarch distinguishes between atheism and superstition (Plut. On Sup. 164e):
Ignorance and blindness in regard to the gods (theōn) divides itself at the very beginning into two streams, of which one produces in hardened characters, as it were in stubborn soils, atheism (atheotēta), and the other, as in moist soils, produces superstition (deisidaimōnian) in tender characters.
This idea of good religion being the ideal between two extremes can be traced back through Theophrastus to Aristotelean moral philosophy (and beyond — perhaps into Hippocratic texts, Herodotus, Thucydides, and so on). As Aristotle puts it in his Nicomachean Ethics:
…moral virtue is a mean. How so? Namely, that it is a mean between two vices, one of excess and the other of defect; and because it aims at hitting the middle point in feelings and in actions.
Though criticism of ‘superstition’ was key to developing religious identity, those who engaged in such criticism had to navigate the appropriate levels and types of criticism, and avoid a broader skepticism of the supernatural. This skepticism was a distinct category from other forms of atheistic skepticism, and was about exploring and reinforcing one’s own beliefs through opposition.
Scholars have often struggled to perceive how Greeks recognized and practiced a coherent set of beliefs and rituals without a guiding doctrine. Just as the Greeks ‘invented the barbarian’ (see Hall 1989 and Hartog 1988) in order to define their ‘Greekness’ without needing to articulate explicitly or codify what it was to be Greek, they also ‘invented’ the magician, the witch, the oracle-monger, and the atheist to explore and reinforce their religious and communal identity. In his Possession at Loudun (originally published in French in 1970), the French Jesuit historian Michel De Certeau observed the association and correlation between atheism and other ‘superstitious’ beliefs and behaviors. De Certeau found that the increasing identifications of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries coincided with the emergence of public atheism, or at least anxiety about public atheism. De Certeau theorized that witchcraft and atheism, and anxieties about these, arose as a result of (and helped to combat) the doubt and uncertainty that plagued the societies living under the collapsing medieval theology of the period. De Certeau argued that a communal theology under threat must admit doubt, or figures of doubt (like witches or atheists) in to the communal consciousness, in order to be punished or excluded.
This thesis is borne out in the Greek world: atheism, which could be viewed as part of a package of otherness, allowed for the compartmentalization, demonetization, and punishment of figures of doubt and instability. Keeping in mind the constant rivalry of skeptical and theistic ideas in Greek religion, the generation of oppositional otherness in order to create a target for doubt must have been a part of the ordinary religious environment. However, this would, inevitably, come to the fore during crisis periods (as observed already): the Athenians publicly caricatured, demonized, and finally put to death or exiled a number of those they deemed atheists, the most famous of whom was Socrates. The Socrates of Plato makes this argument; that the Athenians made him a bogeyman through the caricatures of Aristophanes and his other critics (in Pl. Ap. 18b, 18d):
many accusers have risen up against me before you, who have been speaking for a long time, many years already, and saying nothing true; and I fear them more than Anytus and the rest, though these also are dangerous; but those others are more dangerous, gentlemen, who gained your belief, since they got hold of most of you in childhood, and accused me without any truth, saying, “There is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a ponderer over the things in the air and one who has investigated the things beneath the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger.” […] But the most unreasonable thing of all is this, that it is not even possible to know and speak their names, except when one of them happens to be a writer of comedies.
Socrates’ role as scapegoat for the city was achieved by the larger scale caricaturing of atheism as part of a set of (unfixed) beliefs and practices that fall under the ‘other’. This was part of a crisis of identity as Athens lost faith in the power of its army, democracy, and customs: ‘what it meant to be an Athenian was a focus of concern’ (Eidinow 2016b: 326). Certain individuals, like suspicious women, as Eidinow has argued, or philosophers like Socrates who came to be seen objects of broadly moral panic and religious deviancy, became collective scapegoats for Athens during times of heightened tensions or difficulty (Moral panic: Eidinow 2016b: 10; suspicious women: 312–26). Attacks against these groups demonstrate, as Hugh Bowden (2008: 56) has argued, ‘a polemical attempt to mark out a particular notion of “proper religion”’. Spectres of atheism, impiety, and forms of ‘superstition’ — each with a tangential and difficult relationship to real people and behaviours — were constructed to be an inversion of normal and desirable behaviours through which the Greeks articulated, explored, and attempted to cement their religious identity.
I will leave the article here for discussion. If you have an opinion or disagree with anything said, please leave a response. I love discussion being born from writing. Please share with your friends and applaud if you liked my work.
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