Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  This idea of atheism as an assault on the heavens was picked up in Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds, performed in 414 BC: here two Athenians co-opt the world’s birds to help them build a city in the sky (“Cloudcuckooland”) and end up besieging the gods by starving them of sacrifices. There is, indeed, an explicit allusion in the play to Diagoras, and to the action taken against him by the Athenians in 416–415 BC: “Whoever kills Diagoras of Melos shall receive one talent!” proclaim the birds (one talent being a huge amount of silver). The “Melian starvation” that the birds try to impose on the gods is also surely a reference to Diagoras. In the period of ten years or so after the publication of Diagoras’s atheistic book, a rich complex of ideas emerged associating fantasies of human flight with assaults on Olympus, and hence with displacing the gods.21

  So what are we to conclude about Athenian drama and religion? There were certainly religious aspects to it: it was performed in sacred space during a festive celebration of Dionysus and introduced with sacrifices. The theater was the central place in Athens where religious themes could be explored and expounded upon; in fact, it was the only space in the city where the implications of their religious system could be pondered collectively. Most of the plays, indeed, were generally pious in their overall implications. But this left plenty of room for sympathetic and constructive exploration of the challenging ideas about the gods introduced by the pre-Socratics and the sophists. Is it possible to imagine a monotheist equivalent? Is there any synagogue, mosque, or church where the ideas of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris are expounded seriously and constructively? If such places exist at all, they are extremely rare. But then Greek religious culture had no sacred text, no orthodoxy, no clear sense of what was ruled in and out of the sacred sphere, and as a result it was not blasphemous to subject the nature of the gods to radical questioning.

  8

  Atheism on Trial

  In January 1962, Greek construction workers on the national road that runs east from Thessaloniki along the ancient Via Egnatia uncovered a cist grave. Excavation of the area revealed a network of tombs, containing numerous grave goods. Among these was an ancient scroll, now carbonized, dating to the second half of the fourth century BC. The Derveni papyrus, as it is now known (after the nearby town), is the oldest surviving European manuscript of any length. As such it is invaluable both as an artifact and as a document. The papyrus contains a late fifth-century BC allegorical commentary, infused with pre-Socratic ideas, on a now-lost mystic poem on the nature of gods; the person buried with it was probably expected to carry it with him or her into the afterlife. This is a rare example of a Greek use of a text as sacred, although in a ritual-functional rather than a scriptural sense. Presumably the sacredness was attached primarily to the original poem, not to the commentary; perhaps that was originally included on the papyrus (much of which has been lost), or perhaps the commentary was all that was to hand at the time of the burial. At any rate, the dead person may well have been a member of one of the mystic afterlife cults that modern scholars have tended to group together under the label “Orphic,” and the papyrus may have been intended somehow to ease her or his passage to the afterlife.1

  In one of the earliest legible sections of the text, the author inveighs against those who “disbelieve” (apistousi). “Given that they do not understand dreams or each of the other things, on the basis of what examples would they believe? Overcome by error, and by pleasure too, they have no understanding or belief. Disbelief and misunderstanding are the same thing. For if they do not understand or know, it is not possible for them to believe.” This is, to my knowledge, the earliest reference in Greek to the idea of religious belief as the foundation of a religious community, and to the labeling of outsiders as disbelievers. It offers a cautionary reminder that any picture of classical Greece as entirely free from religious discrimination should be nuanced. Much of the literary material that survives from classical and archaic times tends to be relatively nondoctrinaire; this, indeed, was a crucial factor in its survival through different eras with different religious and political ideologies. But the Derveni papyrus shows that there were those who could insist that only they and their sect had the true understanding of the nature of the divine and that all others were disbelievers. It is quite possible, moreover, that the author thought that only his group was likely to survive in the afterlife.2

  Atheism is not just a philosophical position willingly assumed by consenting adults; it is also a social category constructed by self-styled protectors of religious orthodoxy as a receptacle for those whose beliefs they do not share. Like pirates, heretics, and terrorists, atheists constitute what social scientists call an “outgroup,” a group defined in the negative by the religious “ingroup.” This was true of Greek antiquity as much as it is today. The history of atheism cannot be just that of those who profess not to believe in gods; it must also account for those social forces (of the kind that can be glimpsed in the Derveni papyrus) that construct it as the other, the inverse of true belief.

  The invention of atheism was, both etymologically and historically, the creation of a negative. The Greek word atheos, which first appears in the fifth century BC, implies the absence (a-) of a god (theos). The older meaning implies someone who has lost the support of the gods, someone who is “godless” or “godforsaken” in the archaic English senses. It was often used in a kind of hyperbolic crescendo along with other negative adjectives, in phrases such as “atheos, unruly (anomos), and lawless (adikos).” This kind of phrasing suggests wild, barbaric behavior that is the very antithesis of proper, civilized Greek behavior (think of Homer’s Cyclopes: “arrogant, lawless [athemistōn] men, who place no trust in the god, and neither sow nor reap vegetation”). Within the lifetime of the classical Athenian democracy, however, it came to acquire a second meaning, referring to someone whose beliefs or practices suggest a lack of commitment to belief in the gods. “I certainly do believe in gods—I am not an out-and-out atheos,” said Socrates at his trial in 399 BC (according to Plato). From the 430s onward we hear of atheos being used as a surname or nickname attached to various individuals. The pre-Socratic Hippo of Samos, active in Athens in the mid-430s, was said to be “surnamed the atheos”; so were Diagoras of Melos (mid-420s onward) and Theodorus of Cyrene (late fourth century). In other words, if you said “Hippo the atheist,” everyone knew who you meant.3

  A more powerful insult than atheos was asebēs, “impious.” It was potent because it was legally actionable. The verb sebein meant to worship the gods in the traditional manner, to pay them their due (as in the modern name Sebastian). The crime of asebeia seems to have referred originally to any individual’s failure to perform sacraments according to custom, an infringement of the local rules of a temple that would incur sanctions meted out by the priesthood. There is plenty of evidence that temples could impose fines on anyone they decreed asebēs: someone, for example, who cut down sacred trees or who failed to follow the proper protocols while serving as a priest. At some point in the 430s, however, a seer called Diopeithes seems to have set in motion a chain of events that ultimately changed the term’s meaning irrevocably.4

  We have met Diopeithes before: he was the religious crackpot lampooned by the comic poets and perhaps reflected in Sophocles’s portrait of Tiresias in Oedipus the King. His significance for fifth-century atheism lies in a passage found in the historian Plutarch, who writes that he “brought in a bill providing for the public impeachment of those who did not recognize the gods, or who taught doctrines regarding the heavens.” The real aim, Plutarch says, was to attack Pericles, the most powerful man in Athens, by accusing his friend Anaxagoras of illicit religious beliefs. This passage has caused scholars much consternation. Could it really be the case that the Athenians, otherwise so intellectually curious, approved a bill that banned disbelief in the gods and speculation about the heavens? What is more, the legal process that Plutarch mentions is not any old kind of prosecution: an eisangelia (im
peachment) was the most severe form of incrimination, which in effect accused the defendant of subversion of the democratic constitution. An impeachment was tried in front not of a jury but one of the political decision-making bodies, the Council or the Assembly. A large majority of such cases resulted in the death penalty.5

  Some modern commentators have been incredulous: for Diopeithes to have persuaded his fellow citizens to treat disbelief in the gods as an invitation to impeachment would have been a murderously intolerant act, and an exceptional instance of public legislation about religious beliefs. Yet there is no reason—apart from an anxious desire to protect the Athenians’ reputation as enlightened liberals—to doubt the Diopeithes decree. There are certainly a few problems of a chronological nature with Plutarch’s account at this point, but the language of the decree itself has the technical ring of Athenian officialdom. Although writing some five hundred years after the events, Plutarch was working with compilations of documentary sources from the original time, among them a collection of verbatim transcriptions of Athenian legal decrees (and commentaries on them) compiled by Craterus of Macedon in the early third century BC. The specifics of Diopeithes’s decree probably came (via Craterus or someone like him) from the records in Athens’s own official archive. It seems genuine enough.6

  The decree targets two kinds of criminality. The first is not recognizing (nomizein) the gods. The Greek word is ambiguous and can suggest either their ritual worship or belief in their existence. Perhaps this ambiguity was intentional, so that prosecutors could use the law to sweep up both those who were derelict in their fulfilment of religious obligations and those who held heterodox beliefs. This would fit with the corresponding extension of impiety from the sphere of ritual into that of belief. The second activity outlawed is “teaching doctrines regarding the heavens,” which might seem at first sight a completely different issue. What does pre-Socratic speculation about the nature of the cosmos have to do with not recognizing the gods? But that is presumably the whole point: the motives behind the decree were political in nature and designed to forge a link between Anaxagoras’s speculative theories and outright rejection of the city’s gods. What was even more revolutionary, however, was that this was the first time in Greek public life that legislation had sought to govern people’s intellectual beliefs about the nature of the world. If you did not believe the right things about the world then you did not believe the right things about the gods, and in that case you were unlikely to be in a position to worship them effectively. Athens had its first taste of the idea of religious orthodoxy. To be a good citizen you had not only to do right but to think right too.7

  Diopeithes, the dancing madman of the comic poets, may well have been motivated by nothing more than a fanatical religious obsession. The political machination behind the scenes, on the other hand, may have been the work of Pericles’s enemy Cleon (who in the 420s would succeed him as the most influential citizen in the popular assembly). At any rate, the ability to mobilize public opinion was the most powerful weapon at anyone’s disposal in democratic Athens. The new thought crime of impiety was not just a state-imposed restriction; it was also a means of manufacturing outrage against political opponents. Athens was tasting not only the concept of orthodoxy but also its politicization.8

  This process of politicization was facilitated by the adoption of the extraordinarily slippery word asebeia, “impiety.” Once the Diopeithes decree had unhooked it from its narrowly ritual meaning, it could be used to describe just about anything. When Aristotle tried to define it he came up with “crimes against gods and deities, parents, the dead, and the fatherland”—a definition that leaves rather little wrongdoing actually excluded. Aristotle was speaking in moral, not legal terms, and certainly the cases covered by asebeia that came to court tended to be more narrowly connected with religious misdemeanors. Even so, the connection to religion could be tenuous. There is, for instance, the case of a man who prosecuted his father for murder being himself accused of asebeia for the very act of bringing the prosecution. Sometimes the charge of asebeia seems to have been piled on top of an existing one, simply to intensify it. The fourth-century BC orator Demosthenes, for example, cried impiety when a political rival slapped him in the theater: because he (Demosthenes) held the official position of chorus master, he protested, and because the offense occurred within the sacred space of the theater, is Meidias not guilty of asebeia as well as assault?9

  Athenian law as a rule avoided tight definitions of particular crimes and rested on the assumption that each citizen had an innate sense of natural justice. From a modern perspective, indeed, there is a troubling elasticity to Greek legal language. This was an inevitable result of the fact that unlike Rome, Athens had no professional jurists whose job was to interpret the law. Decisions were made by the populace, and so the system rested on popular, commonsense conceptions of justice rather than forbidding (but perhaps more rigorously defined) statutes. But while this meant that the law was democratized, it also opened it up to exploitation by mudslingers. Even within this malleable system, however, impiety was understood with unusual latitude. In fact, it is not even clear whether there was a specific law against impiety as such: it may have been simply that describing a particular action as asebeia was felt to be enough to make it actionable. Plutarch’s phrasing does not mention impiety as part of the wording of the original decree. All we can say with any confidence is that in the aftermath of Diopeithes’s intervention, accusations of asebeia became the favored means of hobbling both political opponents and intellectual undesirables, and that popular culture too (as we can see from drama) began to be obsessed with labeling certain individuals or ideas as impious.10

  Pinning down just how many people were tried for atheism under the impiety laws is not straightforward. As ever, the problem is one of sources. In later Greek culture, the idea that Athens was obsessed with trying religious heretics became a starting point for all biographies of intellectuals. There are stories about trials of the tragic dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides, for example. Diogenes of Apollonia was a younger contemporary and former student of Anaxagoras’s, a natural philosopher who believed that air was a kind of god, and was included in later lists of atheoi; he is said to have “almost come into danger” (whatever that means) in Athens. Protagoras is said to have been tried and to have had On the Gods burned in the marketplace; though condemned to death, he escaped. There are reports, too, of trials of the later fourth-century philosophers Aristotle, Demades, Theophrastus, Demetrius of Phalerum, and Stilpo of Megara. How many of these stories are true is anyone’s guess, but scholars have in general not given them much credence.11

  Four trials, however, are more or less secure. It is highly likely that Anaxagoras was prosecuted for asebeia, although again the exact details (when? by whom? did he stand trial or flee?) have been hotly debated. The trial is often mentioned by ancient sources and was alluded to by Plato a mere fifty or so years later. The poet Diagoras of Melos, too, author of Arguments That Knock Down Towers, was banished from Athens for impiety; there was also an inscription in bronze set up that offered a reward of one talent of silver for anyone who killed him. But was he actually an atheist, and was he persecuted for that reason? Or was the issue his participation in the group that in 415 BC revealed and mocked the secret rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries? Scholars have been split on the matter. On the one hand, his punishment is often associated with the profanation of the Mysteries in the sources, and there is no mention of any trial for his beliefs. The two tiny fragments of his poetry speak of gods in the conventional way. These observations have led some to conclude that he was not in fact a professed atheist at all. Yet the evidence that he was is overwhelmingly strong. He is more commonly associated with atheism than any other ancient figure: there are thirty passages testifying explicitly to this effect, beginning with a play by Aristophanes in around 418 BC in which a character proclaims that “Socrates the Melian” (that is, a hybrid of Socrates and Diagoras) denies th
e existence of Zeus. If Euripides’s Bellerophon is alluding to Arguments That Knock Down Towers (as I argued in the previous chapter), then the association goes back to the 420s. In the mid-fourth century BC, Aristotle’s pupil Aristoxenus was reading an atheistic prose text that he attributed to him: this may well have been Arguments That Knock Down Towers. There are, what is more, some wonderful anecdotes about his cavalier attitudes toward the divine, which may not count for much in historical terms but they do show that ancients uniformly thought of him as the fifth-century atheist par excellence. He is said to have lost his belief in the gods after a poet swore a solemn oath that he had not plagiarized one of Diagoras’s compositions; when Diagoras saw him perform the piece, and that the gods had not punished him for his oath breaking, he drew his own conclusions. He once declared he was cold and threw a wooden statue of Heracles on the fire (“This is your thirteenth labour,” he quipped). In a sea storm the crew of his ship blamed him for incurring the gods’ displeasure; he pointed out another ship that was struggling and said, “Do they have a Diagoras too?”12

  So, was Diagoras prosecuted for profaning the Mysteries or for his atheism? In fact, that is surely the wrong way to phrase the question. At the time of Diagoras’s expulsion, the war with Sparta was going badly; Athens was in a state of panic and paranoia. The expedition to attack Sicily in 415 BC was a desperate roll of the dice for Athens. It was in this climate that the religious crisis that implicated Diagoras arose. Just before the ships set sail, various herms (phallic statues standing on pillars) were mutilated; according to Thucydides this was seen as an aristocratic plot, and the general Alcibiades and others were accused both of having mutilated herms in the past and of parodying the Eleusinian Mysteries at drunken private parties. It was a serious affair: the claim was that the accused were conspiring to overthrow the democracy, and large numbers were implicated (over sixty names are attested). Alcibiades suffered impeachment (eisangelia) for impiety. In the view of the historian Thucydides (who was alive at the time), the entire process of incrimination was a political witch hunt brought about by those who were jealous of Alcibiades’s success and wanted it for themselves. Is it likely that in this turbulent environment, a sharp distinction was drawn between Diagoras’s atheistic beliefs and his supposed involvement in the profanation of the Mysteries? Surely not. Given his reputation for atheism, his accusers would have found it easy to throw him in with the profaners of the Mysteries, and they would have thrown at him all the ammunition that they could find.13