Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Page 13
Oedipus the King is a play that seriously explores the idea of a world without divine determination. It pushes as hard as one could, within the confines of a religious festival, the idea that the will of the gods does not dictate our lives. Later on, Oedipus—still deceived by events—refers to himself as a “child of Fortune,” meaning that he is illegitimate. But the word tukhē, “fortune,” is another term that drips with materialist, antideterminist, nondivine philosophy; it is associated particularly with the philosopher Democritus, who believed in a world governed by chance. Oedipus revels in this world of indeterminacy. When he discovers himself to be deliciously free from divine determination—indeed, as he thinks, a bastard child with no parental obligation at all—he is thrilled. It is one of the most moving parts of the play.11
But, of course, Oedipus is proven wrong and his joy revealed to be delusional. His attempts to explore alternative theologies are crushed without compunction by the traditional divine order. “I am atheos!” he cries: it will have taken the ancient spectators a few seconds to work out that he means it in the older sense, “abandoned by the gods,” rather than the current “atheist.” He still sees himself as disconnected from the divine sphere, but he now recognizes its power. The plot arc of most ancient tragedy is fundamentally conservative: it tends to reaffirm the status quo, to restore an ideology that was threatened, and in particular to put a divine seal on events at the end. It is, in that sense, geared up to validate the divine orthodoxy. But it would be a rather unadventurous reading of Oedipus the King that took it as a straightforward, pietistic validation of the power of the gods. In any work of literature, the journey matters as much as the destination, and Oedipus’s tour of a world without divine providence resonates deeply against the intellectual backdrop of the time. It would be better to see the conservative shape of the plot line as creating a safe space in which dangerous religious ideas can be experimented with without causing offense.12
It was, however, Sophocles’s younger contemporary Euripides who was most closely associated with exploring the nature of atheism. In one of Aristophanes’s comedies, in which he appears as a character, an old ribbon seller protests that she has been put out of business by his plays: “He has persuaded all the men that there aren’t any gods.” Two hundred years or so after his death, an Egyptian called Satyrus wrote a biography of him, which stated that he was prosecuted for impiety (asebeia) by the demagogue Cleon—“impiety” being the charge concocted by Diopeithes to attack Anaxagoras and subsequently used against Diagoras of Melos and Socrates. These claims count for little in historical terms: Aristophanes, obviously, was a satirist and given to two-dimensional caricatures, while Satyrus was probably going on scurrilous reports derived from his own plays rather than hard biographical facts. Unfortunately, these two pieces of evidence have prompted a rather sclerotic reaction from certain modern scholars, who have lined up with folded arms to assure their readers that Euripides was not really an atheist. Fundamentally, their argument rests on a very simple critical move. Just because he has his characters say things that seem to deny the power of the gods, they observe, does not mean that he himself believes these things. We should, they caution, look to see what ultimately happens to the people in his plays who deny the gods: this being tragedy, they usually end up dying horribly. Now, as a general point this is undeniable. But the attack is aimed at the wrong target. No scholar in the twenty-first century should be claiming anything as simplistic as “Euripides was an atheist.” The age of biographical criticism is over: we cannot divine the author’s views solely on the basis of what his characters say. Nor should we be thinking of these complex, provocative, but ultimately open-ended plays as vehicles for a single, simple message (whether that is “I believe in gods” or “I don’t”). What matters is that of all the dramatists, Euripides has his characters deliver the most sophisticated attacks on traditional religion, using arguments that he surely mined from the rich seam of contemporary sophistic thought. Whether he was or was not personally an atheist, he was certainly captivated by atheistic ideas and rarely missed an opportunity to articulate them.13
Take, for example, the bizarre prayer that the Trojan queen Hecuba addresses to Zeus in extraordinary terms: “O vehicle of the earth and possessor of a seat on earth, whoever you are, most difficult to know, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of men: I pray to you.” This is like no ordinary prayer: it imports pre-Socratic language into a mythological setting in the distant past, in a way that seems deliberately anachronistic. One ancient commentator thought, no doubt correctly, that he could detect an allusion to the notorious arguments of Anaxagoras that the universe is built of matter and directed by a cosmic “mind.” But it also reflects a genuine question about Anaxagoras’s meaning: was his “mind” supposed to represent a natural energy, like the god of the Ionian pre-Socratics? Or was it simply the underlying structure of reality, which discloses itself to human rational thought?14
In The Madness of Heracles, produced probably toward the end of Euripides’s life (he died in 406 BC), the focus shifts onto the moral critique of religion. The play falls into four phases. In the first, Heracles’s family—his adoptive father Amphitryon, his wife Megara, and his children—are being persecuted by the wicked Theban king Lycus while he is away on his labors. When he announces that he will kill them the second phase begins: Heracles returns just in time to slay Lycus and his agents. The third phase is all about the vengeance of the goddess Hera, who is jealous of Heracles since his biological father is her husband Zeus. She sends Lyssa (the personification of insanity) and Iris (the messenger goddess) to drive him mad; he promptly kills his own children, thinking they are his enemies. Finally, he awakens from his madness and though grief-stricken is persuaded by Amphitryon and Theseus to live on and to move to Athens. The play gives plenty of opportunities for reproaching the gods for their injustice. First of all, Amphitryon berates Zeus for not looking after his son Heracles properly: “I am only a mortal,” he says, “but I outdo you in virtue, though you are a great god…You are a stupid kind of god, or by nature you are unjust.” The fact that Zeus’s son Heracles, of all people, was beset by suffering throughout his life logically implies that the gods either cannot or are unwilling to look after their own kin (a basic obligation of Greek ethics). The logical structure behind this argument suggests, again, that it is drawn from contemporary philosophical reasoning. Later in the play, Heracles, newly awoken from his trance and in a suicidal mood, also expresses skepticism about Zeus, “whoever he is.” Like the chorus of Oedipus the King, he echoes the conventional, pious prayer’s doubt about the correct naming of the god, but in a way that suggests that he may not exist at all. “Do not be angry, old man,” he says to Amphitryon. “I consider you my father, not Zeus.” Presently, Theseus tries to console him by saying that even the gods suffer: the myths portray them as cuckolded, punished, and imprisoned. Heracles replies that “I do not believe that the gods enjoy illicit unions, or that they chain each other up; I do not think, nor will I ever be persuaded, that one god can be master over another. A god has no need of anything, if he is truly a god. These are the wretched tales of singers.” Heracles appeals to a traditional critique (going back to Xenophanes, via Pindar) of poetic stories of divine immorality but does so in terms that suggest an underlying argument against the existence of divinity: if there are such things as gods, they will be entirely blessed, but if they are blessed, they will have no need of anything; hence they will not have any need to change anything (least of all in an immoral way). Ironically, Heracles is himself at this moment caught up in such a tale of divine immorality (Hera is behind his madness). In one sense that fact disproves his argument and reaffirms the traditional conception of the gods. But it also underlines the central theological problem of the play: where is Zeus, the all-powerful king of the gods, and why does he seem to have so little control over things?15
The Madness of Heracles explores a version of what theologians now ca
ll the “problem of evil”: if there is a god, and that god is just and powerful, how do we account for the existence of evil in the world? This paradox is expressed most strikingly in a Euripidean play that survives only in fragments, Bellerophon:
Someone says that there really are gods in heaven?
There are not, there are not—if you are willing
Not to subscribe foolishly to the antiquated account.
Consider it for yourselves; do not use my words
As a guide for your opinion. I reckon that tyrants
Kill very many people and deprive them of their property
And break their oaths to sack cities;
And despite this they prosper more
Than those who live piously in peace every day.
I know too of small cities that revere the gods
Which are subject to larger, more impious ones
Overcome as they are by a more numerous army.16
This is one of the most explicitly atheistic utterances in all of ancient culture; it is frustrating that it comes in fragmentary form, and the context is unclear and the speaker unknown. The best guess is that Bellerophon himself speaks these words. One clue lies in his family background: Bellerophon was one of those descendants of Aeolus, who are so closely associated with atheism in the Catalogue of Women. There are also other fragments from Euripides’s play that suggest a depressive, cynical, fatalistic worldview: one, for example, reads: “I’d rather die: it’s not worth living, if people see bad men unjustly honoured.” We know from other sources that Bellerophon was prone to moroseness. In Homer’s Iliad, it is said that late in life Bellerophon “wandered the plain of Aleion, eating out his heart, avoiding the footsteps of humans.” Homer does not explain the source of the misery, except to comment that Bellerophon “was hateful to all the gods.” There are cryptic hints here that Homer knew a story in which Bellerophon, who had been a heroic success in his earlier life, somehow offended the gods and was punished with exile, which in turn led to his disenchantment with religion.17
How did Bellerophon offend the gods? Homer’s account gives us no clue, but later versions tell how, flush with heroic success, he attempted to fly up to Olympus on the winged horse Pegasus; Pegasus however reared and threw his rider to earth. Pindar, the famous composer of praise songs for athletic victors in the earlier part of the fifth century BC, already knew this story. It is almost certain that Euripides’s play featured Bellerophon’s assault on the heavens, using the theatrical crane (mēkhanē, or “machine”) to swing him up toward the roof of the skēnē, or set building. This is confirmed by a parody in Aristophanes’s play Peace, performed in 421 BC, which has a similarly melancholic figure, Trygaeus, railing against the gods and soaring up to Olympus to confront them—but in the comedy he flies on a dung beetle, not a heroic horse.18
If this is right, and Bellerophon speaks the words quoted above, then there are some interesting implications. Like other descendants of Aeolus in myth, Bellerophon expresses his skepticism by trying to usurp the gods’ prerogatives, in this case trying to enter their very domain. Atheism is seen as an aggressive challenge to the gods, an attempt to claim immortal privileges for humans—just as, for example, Salmoneus tries to imitate Zeus’s thunder using pots and pans behind his chariot. Humans cannot fly, but in myth gods can. The winged horse is like Salmoneus’s thunder-generating machine, an artifice designed to mimic the effects of divinity. And the same point can be made of the theater itself: it too is a human invention that makes gods out of mortals, thanks to masking, staging, and the crane. Bellerophon flying up to heaven is a sign not just of a mythical hero overreaching himself, but also of the theater’s disturbing illusionistic power, which can make a god of a human.
But in this fifth-century retelling, at a time of intense philosophical questioning of the divine, this mythical pattern seems to have been directly linked to a rational argument for the gods’ nonexistence. The implicit atheism of figures from myth like Salmoneus has been transformed into explicit argument. Bellerophon’s reasoning, indeed, has the structure of a philosophical syllogism: if (a) any gods who exist preside over justice in the world and (b) injustice is not rectified then (c) there can be no gods. The philosophical nature of the argument is reflected in the phrasing “consider it for yourselves; do not use my words / As a guide for your opinion”: the pedagogical voice of the instructor teaches self-reliance and independence. The verb “consider,” skeptesthai, is not a poetic word: it is more appropriate to highbrow intellectual reasoning. We also have the advice not to rely foolishly on “antiquated reasoning.” The Greek says palaios logos, which could also be an ancient account or story: in the context, this implies that the speaker is pitching his new, intellectualized version of divinity directly against the model of divinity enshrined in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and in Hesiod. In other words, the speaker at this point seems to be aligning himself with philosophical critics who attack the traditional epic portrayal of the gods—in this case, the traditional portrayal of them as arbiters of justice—and base their conceptions of the universe instead on what can be derived from rational observation.
What is more, there is just the tiniest hint that behind Bellerophon’s words lie a direct reference to a contemporary philosophical thinker. The evidence needs treating with some care and in some detail. The very last lines of the fragment are difficult to interpret and were not quoted above. Literally, it would translate as follows:
I think that, if a man were lazy and prayed to the gods and did not go gathering his livelihood with his hand, you would <…> and ill-fortune fortify religion
This clearly does not make sense, and so scholars have reasonably assumed that one or more lines have dropped out of the text (at the point marked by “<…>”). There is much speculation about what the missing words might be, speculation that need not distract us at the moment. The important point is the word “fortify,” which corresponds to the Greek purgousin, from purgos, “tower.” It looks as if something, together with ill-fortune, would fortify or “build up the towers of” religion. What is behind this particular metaphor? Why should religion be thought of in terms of “towers”? Partly, surely, because Bellerophon’s own atheism is coupled with an assault on the fortifications of Mount Olympus. Olympus is a lofty mountain, rather like a city; for Bellerophon to fly up there suggests the equivalent of a siege on heaven. It is interesting to note, in passing, that one later source refers to a “tower” (pyrgos) as part of the theatrical set building. If this was the case already in classical times, then Bellerophon’s flight, on the crane, would have been literally a flight toward a tower.19
But there is another reason to focus on the towers. Let us zoom out a little and think about the context. It is not known when Bellerophon was written, but we do know that Aristophanes’s Peace—containing the parody—was performed in 421. It seems likely that the object of the parody would have been fresh in the minds of audiences: so Bellerophon had been performed at some point in the previous five years. Euripides’s play will have been produced during the time of heightened anxiety that followed the impeachment of Anaxagoras in around 432. It is possible, even, that there is a precise allusion to another trial for impiety. The prosecution of Diagoras of Melos, nicknamed “the Atheist,” seems to have occurred at some point between 423 and 415. Diagoras was already well known enough in 423 to be mocked by Aristophanes in his play Clouds. In other words, there is a distinct possibility that when Bellerophon was composed, Diagoras was the public intellectual whom Athens associated most closely with atheism (even if we know nothing about his actual claims).
Why does this matter? One of the few things we know about Diagoras was that he composed a work called Apopyrgizontes logoi, a rather obscure phrase that will take a little bit of unpacking. The title refers to logoi—speeches, arguments, accounts—that apopyrgizein, an otherwise unparalleled verb composed of two elements: apo (away from or off) and pyrgos (tower). Pyrgos is the very word we have discussed in co
nnection with Euripides’s Bellerophon. What might Diagoras’s title have meant? We know of other sophists and philosophers of the era who wrote works with similar titles: Protagoras wrote Knock-Down Arguments (Kataballontes logoi), and Thrasymachus Knocking-Over Arguments. It is likely, then, that Diagoras’s Apopyrgizontes logoi were Arguments That Knock Down Towers. They were surely claims against the existence of the Olympian deities; he may well have presented himself as metaphorically enacting a siege on Mount Olympus itself. There is no way of telling whether Diagoras specifically mentioned the example of Bellerophon’s flight up to Olympus. But it seems likely, as an acute nineteenth-century commentator first guessed, that when Euripides’s Bellerophon speaks of the things that “fortify” (purgousin), he is subtly alluding to Diagoras’s Arguments That Knock Down Towers, a work that clearly had an immediate impact on Athenian society. I speculate, then, that Diagoras’s atheistic work is likely to have presented its author as besieging, at least metaphorically, the “towers” of Olympus, and that Euripides’s Bellerophon, produced probably in the late 420s in the aftermath of the publication of Diagoras’s scandalous work, alluded to this by presenting its protagonist as attempting to literalize the metaphor and engaging in a type of siege of Olympus.20