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 mat...