Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  The third of the three confirmed impiety trials is the best known of all. In 399 BC, the philosopher Socrates was charged with corrupting the young and not recognizing the gods of the state. Although he was presented with the opportunity to counterpropose exile as a penalty in the event of conviction, he chose death instead. The state execution of Socrates is a different kind of story, which deserves (and will receive) a separate chapter.

  The last of the impious Athenian atheists was Theodorus of Cyrene, who came to Athens from North Africa much later, sometime around 315 BC. Details of his trial are sketchy (it may have taken place around 308 BC), but the reason to include him is that the later tradition is unequivocal in granting him the epithet “the atheos.” As with Diagoras, it is even possible that he chose to self-identify in this way. The evidence for this needs teasing out. According to his biographer, Theodorus acquired the sobriquet Theos (“God”). The nickname, we are told, derived from a trick played on him by the philosopher Stilpo of Megara. Stilpo asked him whether he agreed with the proposition that “that which you say you are, you are.” Theodorus did indeed agree. Thanks to an ambiguity in the Greek language, however, the sentence could also mean “that which you say exists, you are.” Exploiting this second meaning, Stilpo asked him if a god exists; when Theodorus agreed, Stilpo declared that Theodorus must therefore himself be a god (on the grounds that “that which you say exists, you are”). Yet the transmitted anecdote makes no sense, since Theodorus famously denied the existence of gods. In the original version of the story what Stilpo must have asked him was whether not “a god (theos)” but “an atheos” exists—and thereby “proved” him to be atheos himself. Stilpo would have assumed that atheos (in the sense of “god-forsaken”) was an insult. The surprise, however, was that Theodorus was actually rather pleased with his new title—presumably because it linked him to Socrates, Diagoras, and Anaxagoras. And thus he acquired his nickname: not Theos, but atheos. The joke, if my reconstruction is right, is evidence that he did actively self-identify as an atheist. He wrote a book called On the Gods (an echo, surely deliberate, of Protagoras’s work); as so often is the case, it does not survive, but one ancient report says that it “entirely did away with beliefs about the gods.”14

  The trial of Theodorus marked the final stage in the process that began with the Diopeithes decree, which legitimized attacks on individuals for their impious thoughts. The dangerous idea that heterodox religious belief is enough to threaten the foundations of the state had been born and was available for unscrupulous political manipulation. Men like Cleon, who was probably behind the Diopeithes decree, and Thessalus (the son of the general Cimon), who prosecuted Alcibiades—not for the last time in history—manipulated public emotion for their own ends by appealing to moral outrage at religious impropriety.

  What the Athenian example shows is that even within Greek polytheism, a flexible and adaptive system, the mixture of religion, law, and imperialism was a potentially toxic one. With so much money, fame, and power at stake, late fifth-century BC Athens offered the closest precursor in the archaic or classical Greek world to the centralized sacro-political empires of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds; it is perhaps not so surprising to find that religion became one of the levers of power. Even so, it is worth remembering that the trials of Anaxagoras, Diopeithes, and Socrates were rarities. Athens in fact traveled only a short way down the road toward theocracy. In the democratic state, the political decision-making process was ultimately too diffuse and unpredictable to allow one group or agenda to dominate for long periods.

  So the invention of atheism (in the negative sense of the word) in fifth-century BC Athens was rooted in a politically influenced desire to stigmatizee certain individuals. But perhaps there was more to it than that. What if what began as an insult was in time reappropriated as a badge of honor? This is a phenomenon well attested by modern social scientists: think of “queer,” “nigger,” or even “geek.” In such instances, the connotations of an initially negative term shift, and the label becomes associated with positive attributes. In the case of atheos, it is not hard to imagine how that process may have occurred. Perhaps the point of transition was Diagoras of Melos and his Arguments That Knock Down Towers: if I am right that he introduced the image of the disbeliever as theomakhos, “battler against the gods,” then he may well have also argued that an atheos was a powerful, masculine vanquisher of the gods—someone who made the deity (-theos) disappear (a-)—rather than the wild, Cyclopic figure that the term had conventionally suggested up until that point. Modern studies of the reappropriation of stigmatizing labels suggest it is the first step in the process of countercultural group formation. It is, then, perfectly plausible that the term “atheos” was originally (say in the 430s) applied negatively to heterogeneous pre-Socratics and sophists who were associated with disbelief in the gods, and that a revisionist definition by Diagoras or someone like him made it a label with which others then actively sought to be associated (whether publicly or in private). If this is right, then perhaps we can suggest, tentatively, that Diagoras was the first person in history to self-identify in a positive way as an atheist, and that others like Theodorus followed him. Atheos had the advantage over asebēs in that it did not imply illegality, but nevertheless retained a certain countercultural punch. Perhaps there was indeed, as one scholar has suggested, a coherent “atheist underground” operating in Athens from the late fifth century BC onward, exchanging texts and ideas, and indeed identifying themselves as atheoi. This is speculative, but not implausible.15

  One major Athenian thinker of the fourth century, certainly, became convinced toward the end of his life that a cabal of atheists was threatening to undermine society. It is to him that we now turn.

  9

  Plato and the Atheists

  Athens in 399 BC was a fearsome place to be. In 404 the city had fallen to the Spartans, after twenty-seven bruising, bloody years of warfare. The aftermath was horrific. For thirteen months, the democracy was suspended, and a pro-Spartan oligarchy known as the “Thirty Tyrants” was installed. Their leaders, Theramenes and Critias (possibly the author of the atheistic Sisyphus fragment), were famed for their brutality. A faction loyal to the old democracy was identified, arrested, and executed. After a while, a power struggle between Critias and Theramenes saw the latter hauled off and killed. In 403 BC, their rule ended when rebellious forces led by the staunch democrat Thrasybulus joined battle near the Piraeus. After more fighting, the democracy was restored.1

  Despite an amnesty forbidding mnēsikakia, “the remembering of wrongdoing,” Athens in 399 BC was scarred and haunted by recent events. This was the backdrop for one of the most important events in Greek cultural and religious history, the trial and execution of Socrates. Athens’s most famous philosopher had found himself reluctantly embroiled in the events of the previous five years. Critias had been one of his students, along with another of the tyrants, Charmides. Both of these were relatives of Plato, Socrates’s star student and later apologist; in fact, two of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates are called Critias and Charmides. Certainly Socrates had not been an unequivocal supporter of the junta. On one occasion he had been mandated, along with others, to arrest one Leon of Salamis; he had refused, however, because (reportedly) he had a greater fear of committing injustice than he had of the recriminations that would follow. On that occasion, he was saved by the fall of the tyrants from any repercussions of his principled insubordination. In the public’s mind, however, the stain of association with that hated band, which the Athenians of the newly restored democracy were keen to drive from their memory, was hard to shift.2

  But association with the tyrants was not the explicit basis of the charge against Socrates, which ran: “Socrates commits a crime in not recognizing the gods the state recognizes, and introducing other, new divine powers instead. He also commits a crime by corrupting the young.” Diopeithes’s decree providing for the impeachment of “those who do not recognize the gods” l
ies in the background: the shared language of “not recognizing” (mē nomizein) suggests this much. The vaguer charge of asebeia, “impiety,” was also hanging in the air. But as so often in Athenian criminal prosecution, impressionistic as it was, not everything corresponds exactly to known legislation. “Corrupting the young” was not a crime on the statute book. The additional accusation was no doubt designed to influence the jurors with insinuations: this, after all, was the philosopher who had taught Critias and Charmides (and Alcibiades too) when they were young men. There was also a pederastic hint in the word “corrupt”: Socrates was well known for his attachment to handsome youths. For an older man to court a younger boy was not in any sense seen as a moral offense, but it was a practice associated with the aristocratic elite and so likely to play badly with the largely working-class jurors.3

  Whatever the underlying political motivations, the explicit force of the charge lay in the assertion that he had turned his back on the religion of the city and invented his own private mysticism. This accusation was rooted in a peculiar foible of his: he claimed to have access to a daimonion, a “divine thing,” which he identified sometimes as a voice in his head and sometimes as a “sign from the god.” He was claiming a direct communion with an unspecified deity, a form of divine engagement that cut right across the usual ideology of Greek religion, which insisted that collective ritual marked one’s subservience to the social order. Believing that gods speak to us was not in itself so very strange: Greeks imagined that gods revealed all sorts of things through dreams, signs, and even direct manifestations (“epiphanies”). It was the idea of an enduring one-to-one relationship with his own personal deity that was the problem. If Socrates believed that he alone had been granted access to the full depths of the divine, while conventional religion merely paddled in the shallows, that would have been deeply threatening to the civic consensus. Earlier philosophers had claimed similar things: the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides of Elea, for example, describes a journey on a chariot, through a locked gate, to the temple of a goddess who reveals to him the ways of truth and hollow belief. But Parmenides was not unfortunate enough to have to defend this claim in the aftermath of a bloody aristocratic regime spearheaded by some of his followers. Socrates’s (alleged) claim to exclusive access to divine truth could have been presented to his democratically minded peers as a dangerous attempt to legitimate the rule of the many by the elite.4

  What did Socrates really think about the gods? Did he really “not recognize the gods of the city,” as the accusation ran? Did he believe firmly in the “divine thing,” or was that simply a whim of this famously ironic philosopher? How did he square this emphasis on divine revelation with his philosophical commitment to rationalism? Barring some remarkable discovery, these questions will never be answered conclusively, for Socrates—like Jesus and Mohammed (and, indeed, several other noted Greek philosophers)—wrote nothing down. Every single piece of evidence for him comes mediated through others. What is more, apart from the scurrilous portrait painted by the comic poet Aristophanes in 423 BC (in Clouds), during Socrates’s lifetime, every major piece of evidence is carefully polished up by one of Socrates’s loyal supporters, in the aftermath of the trial. Socrates is a paradox: we know all about his central importance to Athenian cultural life in the late fifth century BC, but there is little certainty about his beliefs.5

  The two most important of these sources for Socrates’s thought are also the two most vigorous polishers of the Socrates myth: Xenophon and Plato. Xenophon (ca. 430–355 BC) was an aristocratic Athenian who combined a diverse literary output with a colorful military life. An associate of Socrates in his youth, he left Athens in the turbulent years after the end of the Thirty Tyrants to join the Greek mercenary force supporting the failed attempt of the Persian Cyrus the Younger to oust his brother, Artaxerxes II, from the throne. His epic march from Mesopotamia to the Black Sea (where the soldiers uttered the famous cry “The sea! The sea!”), and thence to Greece, is recorded in his Anabasis. When he returned, he began associating with his native city’s other nemesis, Sparta, and even fought with the Spartan king Agesilaus II against Athens in 394 BC. This loyalty to Sparta won him a beautiful country house at Scillus, near Olympia (the site of the games); there he wrote many of his literary works, including a biography of Agesilaus, an idealized novel on the subject of Cyrus I of Persia (the sixth-century creator of the Persian Empire), and four works on Socrates: a fictionalized version of his defense speech at the trial, a collection of conversational pieces, a dialogue on household management, and a description of a symposium. Although he may have returned home in his declining years, it is fair to say that Xenophon was far from a conventional Athenian. Whether he had become alienated by the horrors of the Thirty Tyrants and the aftermath (for which his History of Greece is the primary source), or whether he was simply perverse by inclination, he seems to have allied himself with persons most unwelcome to Athenian ideology: Persian kings, Spartan kings, and Socrates.6

  Plato (ca. 424–347 BC), the most famous of all philosophers, was another native Athenian aristocrat and an almost exact contemporary of Xenophon’s, but whereas Xenophon’s life was characterized by experimentation and adventure, Plato spent most of his adulthood beavering away at his writing (thirty-seven works are transmitted under his name, at least twenty-six of which are certainly genuine). His one big foray into realpolitik may have been a trip to the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse (ruled 367–357 and 346–344 BC). According to a surviving letter that purports to be written by Plato himself, he was invited over to Sicily on two occasions, first by Dionysius’s father (during his own reign) and second (early in the new king’s reign) by his philosophically inclined uncle, Dio. On both occasions, the plan was to curb the young man’s lavish appetites and to put into practice the Platonic ideal of the “philosopher king.” Dionysius, however, was congenitally indulgent and cruel. Dio was exiled, only to return with an army and depose Dionysius. Whether Plato’s Sicilian sojourn really took place all depends on the question of the authenticity of the letter. In any case, Plato developed a reputation throughout later antiquity as a head-in-the-clouds idealist, as otherworldly as his mentor Socrates himself, and the Sicily story came to be seen as a sign of his inability to translate his ideals into practice. Lucian, the playful satirist of the second century AD, wrote a fantasy story ironically titled The True Stories. In it he claims to have visited the underworld and to have met all the famous figures of the past, except for Plato; for “it was said that he was living in his imaginary city in the republic and under the laws that he himself had composed.” The joke is on the titles of two of his best known works, the Republic and the Laws, both blueprints for hypothetical cities.7

  Both Plato and Xenophon wrote apologies, accounts of the trial of Socrates. Convergences between the two might be taken as evidence that they are both testaments to the actual words spoken in court, but in fact that assumption crumbles once we realize that Xenophon is responding to Plato. Xenophon was not there in person; his account is simply a blend of Plato and a now-lost version by one Hermogenes, together with an incalculable amount of his own invention. It would be wonderful to have Socrates in his own words, but in truth he is lost to us. Although there is surely some of the historical Socrates in Plato and Xenophon, the more valuable evidence they offer is for the creation of a myth. The paradigm of the heroic individual who cheerfully faces death for her or his beliefs has exerted a powerful grip on history ever since and offered a template for any number of heroically principled deaths.8

  Herein lies the central critical problem with Socrates. He is, as a well-known classicist once observed, like a ring doughnut: rich around the outside but absent in the center. What was he really like? What did he really think and teach? The problem is exacerbated by the fact that an earlier but wholly contradictory picture survives, in the form of Aristophanes’s Clouds. Given that the play was originally produced in 423 BC (and revised for reperformance at some point in
the next six years), it is in fact the only substantial Socratic picture from his own lifetime. In the play, he appears as a blend of two different types of intellectual. The protagonist, Strepsiades, visits his “Thinktank” (phrontistērion) because he wants to learn the art of rhetorical argumentation, how to make the weaker argument seem the stronger. Socrates excels at this, naturally. But he is also the model of a pre-Socratic cosmologist like Anaxagoras, theorizing about the nature of the universe. Aristophanes has him worship the clouds of the title and disbelieve in the existence of the Olympian deities. The Socrates of Plato and Xenophon is nothing like this; in fact, in Plato’s version of the defense speech, Socrates explicitly blames his public perception as a religious skeptic on Aristophanes’s play. Did then Aristophanes simply invent these traits? It is far from impossible: he was, after all, a comic writer, with all the license that goes with it. Yet it is a striking fact that Aristophanes’s Socrates contains none of the traits visible in Xenophon’s account, or that of the early Plato: there he is primarily an ethical philosopher, whose primary interest is in discussing moral dilemmas with individuals. This disparity might lead us to ask whether there is not an element of artful construction in theirs too. Or perhaps over a career of some twenty-five years in the public eye as Athens’s best known philosopher, perhaps he changed course? Perhaps he started out as the Aristophanic cosmologist and sophist and ended up at the ethical investigator?9