Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  This view has been buttressed by a tendency to use official state inscriptions as the main sources for the history of Greek religion. Some of the reasons for this are perfectly sound: whereas literary texts give us the perspectives of individuals, often hypereducated and hyperprivileged, the inscriptions found all over the Greek-speaking world often record decisions made collectively. They are better evidence for what groups as a whole thought. Yet there is a downside too. Official inscriptions, naturally, give the official, ideologically sanctioned versions of events. They tend to promote the fiction that societies work smoothly and seamlessly. It is, then, hardly a surprise that ancient inscriptions barely mention heterodox views of the gods. Normative sources will only ever paint a normative picture of a society. Imagine a history of twenty-first-century British politics that relied solely on the parliamentary records in Hansard: it would tell you much about the institutional workings of Westminster government but very little of the complex diversity of attitudes and practices of real people.

  Not all inscriptions, however, are of this public kind. One intriguing case tells, precisely, of a ritual “malfunction” when someone refused to believe. In around 320 BC, a number of dedications were set up to the healing god Asclepius, near his shrine at Epidaurus (a small town in the Peloponnese). Among them is the case of a man who lost the strength in his fingers. Arriving at the sanctuary, however, he mocked the other stories of miracle cures inscribed there and refused to believe in them. When he slept in the sanctuary (a common type of ritual activity, known as incubation), Asclepius appeared to him in a dream. His fingers were cured, but the god chided him: “Because you disbelieved things that are not unbelievable, your name from now on shall be Disbeliever (Apistos).” Aside from the story’s wonderful self-consciousness—a miracle inscription about someone who didn’t believe in miracle inscriptions—it also provides precious evidence for religious skepticism in practice, as espoused by a regular, everyday Greek. Nothing is known about his social background, but there is no reason to assume that he was wealthy. Certainly the inscription itself is of a pretty rudimentary type, the language lacking in any grand, rhetorical pretension.

  Of course, because it is a temple inscription, this is a morality tale, and the disbeliever gets his comeuppance. But surely the initial reactions of “Apistos” must have been relatively common. It does not require a post-Enlightenment mentality to come up with the idea that miraculous stories of divine salvation are open to suspicion. Miracles, by their very definition, test the limits of plausibility. Greeks could see that just as well as Evans-Pritchard’s Azande. There is a comparable story told of Diogenes the Cynic, Greek philosophy’s most subversive wit. It is said that while another man was marveling at a series of temple dedications put up by survivors of sea storms, Diogenes retorted that there would have been many more if the nonsurvivors had also left dedications. The one-liner’s subtext is that “miraculous” experiences have nothing to do with divine intervention and the power of prayer and everything to do with the normal laws of statistical probability. Like Apistos (before his dream), Diogenes disbelieves the miracle stories. Indeed, Diogenes’s central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.8

  In this book I seek to tell the story of Greek atheism over a thousand-year period, against the backdrop of huge historical changes: the emergence of Greece from its “dark ages” into a world of literate city-states; the development of citizenship and democracy; the conquests of Alexander the Great and the fragmentation of his empire; the subsuming of the Greek-speaking world into the Roman Empire; and, finally, the arrival of Christianity. The Christianization of the classical world did not happen overnight, nor was it a uniform process. There were many different varieties of Christianity, each with its own (conflicted) relationship to the Greek intellectual tradition that preceded it. Even so, despite this fluidity, the Christian Empire did change things fundamentally. Christianity marked the end of a long period during which many respectable thinkers had explored radical ideas about the nature of the gods, even to the point of dismissing them altogether. Pre-Christian atheism was certainly not uncontroversial, and there were periods of severe repression. But as a rule, polytheism—the belief in many gods—was infinitely more hospitable toward disbelievers than monotheism. Under Christianity, by contrast, there was no good way of being an atheist. Atheism was the categorical rejection of the very premise on which Christians defined themselves.

  This book thus represents a kind of archaeology of religious skepticism. It is in part an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium. But there is topsoil to dig through too, of a very different kind. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the formative era for modern atheism, classical learning was ubiquitous (among the educated at least). In that period, those who campaigned for a world without gods could appeal to the authority of Epicurus and Lucretius, or refer to Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene, in full confidence that they would be understood. Since the early twentieth century, however, classical awareness has shrunk with alarming rapidity. Much of the blame for our collective blindness to the long history of atheism lies with an educational system that fails to acknowledge the crucial role of Greco-Roman thought in the shaping of Western secular modernity. This loss of consciousness of that classical heritage is what has allowed the “modernist mythology” to take root. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that eighteenth-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods.

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  PART ONE

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  Archaic Greece

  NEW HORIZONS

  1

  Polytheistic Greece

  The territory that we today call Greece—and which the Greeks have since antiquity called Hellas—is a peninsula jutting down southward into the central Mediterranean. Sited at the point where the African tectonic plate collides with the Aegean, it is prone to seismic activity and volcanoes and possesses a fractured, jagged coastline, further shivered into thousands of islands, the largest of which (Crete) lies immediately to the south. The predominantly limestone landscape is notable for its steep, rocky mountains (about two-thirds of the peninsula is hilly or mountainous) and fertile plains fed by rivers.1

  Greece is a country of natural borders: mountain ranges, valleys, gulfs, rivers, and seas. To travel from one part to another is often challenging. Everyone knows of Thermopylae, the narrow pass between Mount Oeta and the sea, where the invading Persian army led by Xerxes I was held for a while by a small group of Spartans and Phocians. Long-distance travel by land in Greece always involves confronting physical obstacles. It was for this reason that Greeks turned to the sea. During the middle of the second millennium BC, the Minoans (based on the island of Crete) developed overseas trading networks. Large galleys with steep sterns allowed them to navigate the open seas, exchanging their olives, grapes, wool, and timber for crafted goods from the Near East. Thanks to contact with Egypt they acquired, amongst other skills, the art of writing.

  Minoan culture collapsed rapidly, perhaps thanks to ecological disaster in the form of a massive volcanic eruption on Thera (modern Santorini). In the Minoans’ stead emerged a new power, based now on the mainland: the Mycenaeans. They too ran a maritime economy, trading far afield, but they also adapted their predecessors’ shipping technology for new, military purposes, expanding overseas into Crete and the eastern Aegean. Records kept by the Hittites in Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the fourteenth century BC make reference to kings of “Ahhiyawa,” probably a form of “Achaea,” a name for the Greek mainland that appears in Homer. Indeed, if Homer’s legend of the expedition to Troy has any historical basis, it would have occurred around this time. The Mycenaeans may also have been the “sea peoples” named in Egyptian inscriptions of the reign of Rameses III in the twelfth century, t
he marauders who caused havoc throughout the Nile delta and along the Syro-Palestinian coast. Archaeology also suggests links with the Hebrew Bible’s Philistines. Like its Minoan predecessor, the Mycenaean palace culture declined suddenly, from about 1100 BC, for reasons that remain unclear. The period up until 800 is conventionally known as the “dark age,” since evidence is sparse. The art of writing was lost. Monumental buildings fell into ruin. Local societies were probably dominated by warlords who gained their fragile power through charisma and force rather than in stable, dynastic succession.2

  When civilization reemerged in the eighth century, it was again the sea that stimulated it. The emergence of long-distance marine trade in the second millennium BC had meant that the entire Mediterranean as a whole had become a game board, and Greece and Italy, with their central geographical locations, occupied the most powerful positions on it. Overseas trade, colonization, and intermarriage meant much greater interaction with neighboring peoples and the opportunities to learn new technologies. They thus powered a huge expansion in Greek wealth between the eighth and the sixth centuries BC, the era known as the archaic period. By every index, prosperity seems to have risen rapidly. Life expectancy shot up, and health and diet improved (as indicated by dental conditions and heights of surviving skeletons). Houses grew in size. The mainland Greek population seems to have doubled. During this period, Greece reacquired literacy and borrowed from its neighbors many of the distinctive cultural features for which it is known today: temples, statues, painted ceramics, and epic poetry.3

  The most significant characteristic of all was the development of a new mode of social organization, the city-state. By the eighth century BC, we can see the first signs of the emergence of the polis (the root of the English “political,” “policy,” and “police”). The polis (at least the larger variety) would gradually develop a particular form, which followed wherever Greek culture went: it would typically have city walls separating the urban hub from the agricultural hinterland, an acropolis (“high polis”) or citadel, a temple associated with a presiding deity, a water supply, and areas of shared space devoted to different kinds of communal activity (commercial, religious, political, juridical, recreational). In the course of the archaic period, the larger polis would come to be adorned with the stunning marble architecture that we now think of as typically Greek, with its troupes of columns, its pediments, its triglyphs, metopes, and friezes. And, most of all, acres of writing. The Greeks of the polis inscribed their laws, decisions, and offerings on stone, presenting the ancient viewer with the powerful impression of an ordered, civilized community—and the modern viewer an invaluable record of their values and priorities.4

  The culture of the polis was financed by international trade and colonization. Greece was ideally placed to exploit the opportunities opened up by long-distance sea trade, and not just geographically. The new trading economy was powered not by large, bureaucratic imperial powers but by the enterprise of individuals and smaller communities. The absence of political centralization worked to Greece’s advantage, stimulating competition between states in both technological innovation and the exploitation of overseas markets.

  Competition was also stimulated during the archaic period by external rivals, chiefly the Phoenicians, who similarly benefited from a noncentralized city-state structure. The Canaanite inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon, in modern-day Lebanon, were a highly developed, skilled, literate people who spoke a Semitic language not too distant from Hebrew. By the eleventh century BC they were trading with Cyprus; in fact, it was probably they who founded Larnaca, the modern capital. By the late tenth they were in Crete too. Within one hundred years their reach had extended to Sardinia and modern Tunisia. In time, their taste for precious metals took them as far west as mineral-rich Spain and to the “tin islands” in the Atlantic (often, rather fancifully, identified with the British Isles). By the early first millennium BC, the Phoenicians had turned the entire Mediterranean into a trading network, or at least an interrelated complex of multiple networks. Silver, for example, could be mined in Spain, worked in Greece, then sold in the Levant.5

  Archaic Greece was formed by interaction with its eastern and southern neighbors. It was the Phoenicians who inspired the Greek adoption of the script still in use today. The letter aleph was originally named in Phoenician and its predecessors for its resemblance to an ox, while beth means “house.” The Greeks took over these signs as alpha and beta—and so the “alphabet” was born. This kind of mimetic adoption of others’ technologies (for alphabetic writing is indeed a technology) is typical of Greek practice of the era. Greece was not “European” in the sense that we understand the word today. It found itself in a vibrant eastern Mediterranean trading bloc, with strongest cultural links to Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia (Turkey), whose western seaboard they populated in such wealthy cities as Miletus, Ephesus, and Halicarnassus. But relationships were not always harmonious, particularly with the Phoenicians. Disadvantaged by their position on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians founded their own colonies in Italy and Sicily, which vied with the Greeks’ own newer settlements. In particular in the late ninth century they built a capital on a northeastern coastal spur of what is now Tunisia, just across the sea from Sicily, the Greeks’ primary western base. This new Phoenician capital was known as Qart ḥadašt, the “new town,” translated by the Greeks as Karkhedon and by the Romans as Carthago. Had the Greeks been slower to exploit their advantage and had the dice fallen differently, Carthage might have come to dominate the Mediterranean, and the languages of medieval Europe might have been Semitic rather than Indo-European. But as it turned out, the Greek overseas expansion prevailed. Carthage remained strong but was eventually obliterated by the Romans in the Punic Wars of the third century BC.6

  It was, however, the very diversity of archaic Greece that was its characteristic feature. There was no national hub, no capital, no single, stable core radiating Hellenism outward. Around 1,200 separate Greek poleis have been identified for the period between 650 and 323 BC, each with its own customs, traditions, and mode of governance. In the archaic period, power in many cities swung between bands of aristocrats (a constitution known as “oligarchy”) and the rule of single men, “tyranny” (the word that at this stage lacked negative connotations). There were of course regional powers, but no single state exerted influence over the entirety.7

  Greece was not politically unified until the time of the Roman emperor Augustus. Until that point, the idea of Greece as a totality was a hazy, imaginary ideal rather than any kind of political reality. In the Histories of Herodotus, the fifth-century historian, the Athenians are said to have rejected out of hand an alliance with the Persians against the other Greeks, on the grounds that “we are all Greeks: we share blood and language; we have temples and rituals in common; we practice the same kind of customs.” In lieu of any national unification, Greeks were held together solely by a sense (however fictitious) of common descent, and by shared religion and culture. Formal mechanisms reconciling all of this multiplicity were few: chiefly the Olympic Games and the oracular shrine at Delphi, and the shared investment in the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod. Delphi and Olympia began to achieve their central, Panhellenic status from the eighth century onward. It was at this time, too, that the mythological epics were being forged, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These project an image of Greek cultural solidarity, through the story of a shared expedition to go and rescue a Greek woman (Helen) abducted by a foreign power. Such shared institutions aside, however, Greek culture was but the aggregate of numerous related but distinct regional cultures.8

  Language use provides a neat example of Greece’s highly regionalized nature: there was a high level of dialectical variation in the archaic period, with no one form achieving dominance. On Lesbos, in northwest Anatolia, and in the northeastern region of the mainland a branch called Aeolic was spoken (and had its own subdivisions). In southwest Anatolia, in the northwestern part of the mainlan
d and the Peloponnese, and on Crete, Doric was used. The remaining parts of western Anatolia and Athens employed Ionic. In Arcadia and on Cyprus a different dialect (Arcadocypriot) again was found. The poems of Homer and Hesiod were composed in Ionic, which may be expected to have given a certain prestige to that particular dialect, but in fact epic language was so different from anything actually spoken that the effects were minimal. All these dialects were recognizably the same tongue grammatically but different at the levels of morphology and local vocabulary. For an approximate parallel, imagine a nineteenth-century conversation in English between a Glaswegian, a New Yorker, and an Afro-Caribbean.9

  Greek religion too was an expression of these multiple regional identities. Ancient polytheism—the worship of many gods—was fundamentally different in kind from the modern monotheisms (Islam, Judaism, Christianity). There was no desire or attempt to impose theological orthodoxy. The idea of a common place of pilgrimage like Jerusalem, Mecca, or Santiago de Compostela is alien to Greek polytheism. Greece simply had no political or religious hub. Delphi, Olympia, and the island of Delos, for sure, were universally acknowledged centers, and respected as such. During the quadrennial Olympic Games, a truce forbade the invasion of Olympia and the forcible prevention of travelers to the site. But most Greeks will have understood religious practice and belief as a much more local matter. There were private cults within the household, or in rural shrines and caves. There were village rituals within the countryside areas. And there were the major festivals of the cities, which happened at fixed times in the year.10