Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  For if we must speak as that majesty of nature that we have come to understand

  Demands, he was a god—a god, famous Memmius,

  Who first uncovered those rational principles underlying life

  That we now call “wisdom,” and who through his art

  Brought life out of the deep currents and dark shadows

  And into such tranquillity and such clear light.16

  It is common enough in the modern world for atheists to have their anti-religious rhetoric turned back against them: science is “just another belief system,” a religious skeptic is mocked as the “high priest of atheism,” and so forth. But Lucretius’s words go well beyond a loose sense of equivalence, and emphatically claim divinity for Epicurus. “He was a god—a god, famous Memmius.” What did Lucretius mean by this? At one level, he was merely developing Epicurus’s own instructions in his will that his community of followers should treat him with honors that bordered on worship. Lucretius himself was surely aware of the cult-like reverence that the charismatic figurehead enjoyed. But in fact his words nowhere mention actively worshipping Epicurus: the point is, rather, that thanks to his achievements he deserves to be ranked among the gods. This is in fact a deeply, albeit subtly, subversive claim, since it converts the idea of “god” from a metaphysical to a metaphorical one. A god is simply a high-achieving mortal who has attained a perfectly happy existence—which, incidentally, must involve acceptance of mortality (which contradicts the very premise of deity in the literal sense). Epicurus’s victory over religio is so complete that he has eviscerated the very idea of divinity as a special category of existence.

  The poet proceeds to expand on the theme of Epicurus’s divinity by adopting a line of argument that goes back to the fifth-century sophist Prodicus, via Euhemerus. Ceres (the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Demeter), Lucretius argues, introduced the cultivation of corn to mortals; Liber (the Roman Dionysus) invented wine. Prodicus too had interpreted Demeter and Dionysus as mortals who had been granted divine status as thanks for their beneficence toward their fellow humans; that Lucretius uses the same two examples suggests that he intends a direct allusion. Epicurus’s divinity, then, is of this kind: he is to be understood not as a supernatural being (for nothing exists outside of nature) but as a human who has achieved superhuman things. In fact, by removing the necessity of fear and anxiety, he performed an even greater benefit than inventors of nonessential foodstuffs: “For that reason, he is all the more entitled to his reputation among us as a god.”17

  Where, then, did religion come from? Why did such a monstrous deception arise? Lucretius gives an answer in the midst of a long section that recalls the “culture narratives” of the fifth-century Athenian sophists, telling of humans’ emergence from a state of nature into their civilized state. Even in those days, he writes, people saw both in sleep and occasionally while awake images of larger-than-life individuals of stunning appearance. (Are these dim glimpses of real gods, or just phantoms? He makes no comment at this point.) These primitive beings assumed that these individuals must also have superhuman powers and intellects, eternal life and a blessed existence. Next they perceived the orderliness of the heavens and the seasons and assumed that these beings must have been responsible for the universe’s intelligent design—and that natural disasters were therefore signs of displeasure. This theory provokes another lament on human folly:

  O unhappy human race, who attributed

  Such deeds to the gods, and gave them bitter wrath too!

  What weepings and wailings did they produce for themselves, what

  Injuries to us, what tears for future generations!

  It is no “piety” to parade yourself often in public wearing a veil,

  Nor to turn towards a bit of stone and go up to every altar,

  Nor to stretch yourself out on the ground and raise your hands

  Before the shrines of the gods, nor to spatter altars

  With the blood of beasts, nor to make vow after vow.

  Piety, rather, is the ability to survey the universe with untroubled mind.18

  True piety, then, should consist not in petty conformity to human religious convention but in the power to comprehend and marvel at nature’s immense power. Divinity is a quality not of transcendent beings but of the world we inhabit: it is there in the sublime stuff of things, from the star-studded ether to the thrill of thunder to the charging stream. Lucretius was famous in antiquity for his magnificent, Turneresque depictions of nature’s grand power, but there is more to such purple passages than vivid displays of poetic skill: he wanted his verse to capture the magic of the world around us and to teach us that we should seek “divinity” in matter, not in some imaginary god.

  For all this, though, Lucretius, like his master Epicurus, can still insist on the reality of gods. The most famous instance is the prayer to Venus—“First of the line of Aeneas, the pleasure of humans and gods alike”—that opens the poem. It seems mightily disquieting to have a deity presiding over an Epicurean poem, until we realize that Venus—the Roman equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite—is not literally the goddess of myth but a symbol of the generative power of nature. As in the description of Epicurus as a “god,” he is using divinity as a metaphor, eviscerating it of its conventional meaning. But elsewhere he certainly speaks of gods as if they are real, or real in a sense. Epicurus, he says, opened up to him a vision of the gods in their “tranquil abode,” untroubled by the seasons and provided for by an unfailingly bounteous nature. We might take these gods too as figurative, merely as embodiments of the serenity toward which Epicurean philosophy steers us. Yet he seems also to locate them in real space, in the “void.” At another point, he speaks of the gods existing outside of our world; they cannot come into contact with us, their nature being “thin” and fundamentally different from ours. He promises to explain what he means by this at a later point, but (frustratingly) does not.19

  But perhaps we should take this broken promise not as a sign of Lucretius’s forgetfulness or of the unfinished state of the poem, but as a token of Epicureanism’s general slipperiness on the question of the divine. When it came to the gods, the Epicureans’ contract with their readers was never quite fulfilled. From earliest times, this philosophy had always promised a little more than it had delivered in theological matters. There had always been a fundamental incompatibility between Epicurus’s claim that “the god is an indestructible and blessed being” and a view of reality as composed of impermanent combinations of matter. The Epicureans’ gods are indeed, as Lucretius put it, “thin” in nature: thin to the point nearly of disappearance, but not quite. Like distant traces of memory, they stubbornly refuse to be erased entirely. Were the Epicureans atheists, as their opponents often held them to be? Certainly atheism was the logical extension of their worldview, and certainly they felt themselves to be at loggerheads with conventional religion. But for some reason they felt unable to sever the ties completely.

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  PART FOUR

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  Rome

  THE NEW WORLD ORDER

  The Hellenistic period also saw the expansion of Rome from a regional capital to the dominant force in the Mediterranean. The decisive events for Rome were the Punic Wars, fought between 264 and 146 BC against Carthage, the Phoenicians’ capital in North Africa (in modern Tunisia). It was the utter destruction of Carthage—famously urged by Cato the Elder, who ended every speech “Carthaginem esse delendam”—that left Rome as the unrivaled superpower controlling the center of the Mediterranean, and thus the profitable trade routes between West and East. Rome began gobbling up other kingdoms and states. The first overseas territory was Sicily, a dividend of the First Punic War (264–241 BC); from then on, the Empire grew steadily, more typically by annexation of client kingdoms than by conquest. In 133 BC, the Hellenistic ruler Attalus III bequeathed his territories to Rome; the Bithynian king Nicomedes IV did much the same in 74 BC. Brutalities of the most terrifying kind cer
tainly did occur, however. When, in the aftermath of the Third Punic War the Achaean League (a union of independent Greek states based in the Peloponnese) reacted against Roman intervention in Greece, the response was uncompromising: in 146 BC the general Mummius destroyed the entire city of Corinth. The remains that partially stand today are all of later date, after Julius Caesar refounded it as a colony for his veterans in 44 BC. More Greek blood was shed in the first century BC, when Mithridates of Pontus, a kingdom on the shore of the Black Sea, expanded his territories rapidly, annexing parts of Anatolia and pushing into the Aegean Sea. The Greek cities on the Ionian coast and on the mainland were forced to take sides. Some chose the party that history favored: one such is Aphrodisias, whose splendid remains testify to this day to Rome’s gratitude. Others were less fortunate: among them was Athens itself, ruled by a puppet tyrant in liege to Mithridates, until it was sacked by the Roman general Sulla in 87–86 BC.1

  As Rome gradually took control of the Mediterranean, it quickly learned from the Hellenistic empires it displaced the style and ceremony of an imperial power. From the Greeks they took grandiose architecture, idealizing artwork, and ennobling literature. Sometimes they took these in a quite literal sense: after the sack of the Sicilian city of Syracuse in 212 BC (despite the ingenious defensive weaponry pioneered by Archimedes), the parade of loot through Rome took four days. Rome took everything it could from the Greek world, including thousands of slaves, many of whom gave the aristocratic Roman young their learning.2

  A decisive moment in the expansion of Roman power came when Octavian, the adopted heir of Julius Caesar, defeated the navy of Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) off the western coast of Greece at the battle of Actium, 31 BC. Although a small affair in military terms, it was a highly significant event symbolically. In the first place, it put an end to the civil wars that had raged between different Roman factions throughout much of the first century BC. Second, it began the process that led to a political revolution, whereby one man—an emperor, but the Romans would call him princeps rather than imperator—ruled much of the known world. Third, it meant that the entire Mediterranean basin was now in effect subordinate to Rome, since the defeat of Antony meant also the defeat of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies of Egyptian Alexandria and the last of the Hellenistic monarchs to hold out against Rome. Octavian quickly changed his name to Augustus, and with that changed the course of history.

  The eastern frontiers of the empire continued to shift over the coming centuries, but the vast majority of the Greek-speaking world was now subordinate to Rome. Having taught Rome the language of power, the Greeks now learned what it meant to be imperial subordinates. Yet many of the elite, at any rate, actually prospered in the new world, acquiring citizenship, power, and prestige. The empire brought a measure of political stability and peace and so allowed for the creation of a vast marketplace, of ideas as much as of material stuff. Different religions, in particular, prospered: Mithraism, the cult of Isis, Judaism, and eventually Christianity. In the course of the fourth century AD, in an extraordinary development that could scarcely have been predicted even one hundred years earlier, the youngest of these became the official cult of the Roman state.

  The interconnected, centralized, bureaucratized world of the Roman Empire was entirely different in kind from the loose agglomeration of city-states that made up archaic and classical Greece. The structural challenge presented by a vast empire was how to bind together all those diverse regions into one whole. This was achieved with phenomenal success. In its Augustan guise, the empire survived for three hundred years; once refounded by Constantine in Byzantium, it lasted until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The Romans were experts in governance: the empire owed its perdurance to a number of finely honed techniques. Unlike the Hellenistic monarchies, the Romans co-opted regional rulers and aristocratic elites, persuading them that their own interests were identical to those of the ruling power. One mechanism for doing so was the sharing of Roman citizenship, which also gave the beneficiaries access to Roman law. In AD 212 (under the emperor Caracalla) a decree was passed extending that citizenship to all male inhabitants of the empire, while all women were to have the same rights as Roman women.

  The empire was also integrated by a number of symbolic mechanisms that connected the center to the periphery: images of the emperor, inscriptions detailing his responses to the city’s requests, public postings of news from Rome. Above all, the army and the law were ever-present reminders of the Roman order. One Greek orator in the second century AD compared the whole world under Roman rule to a single city on a feast day: “It has laid aside its old dress and the carrying of weapons, and has been allowed to turn to adornments and all kinds of pleasures.” Regional variety had not in fact disappeared (there is some rhetorical exaggeration here), but it was constantly weighed against the norms demanded by Rome. One neat illustration of this process is naming. Greeks with Roman citizenship often adopted the Roman habit of taking a forename (praenomen), a family name (nomen), and an individualizing name (cognomen). For Greeks, the first two were typically Roman (the nomen reflecting the Roman who had granted the family citizenship), and their regular Greek name became the cognomen. Hence Plutarch’s full name was Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, and the historian, philosopher, and politician Arrian was Lucius Flavius Arrianus. Those Greeks with citizenship had Romanness etched into their very identities.3

  Religion provided the most powerful mechanism of symbolic integration. As they had done under many of the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Greeks treated their ruler as a god, building temples to him and holding festivals and sacrifices in his honor. In this way, cities came together as civic communities, as they had always done, but also validated their participation in the wider empire. Worship of the emperor was an important test of provincial loyalty to the Roman cause. The Jewish rebellion against Rome was presaged by a refusal to offer sacrifice to Nero. In 250, the emperor Decius precipitated the first major wave of Christian persecutions (perhaps unintentionally) by insisting that everyone in the empire should be certificated by a magistrate as having performed a sacrifice to the Roman gods and for the well-being of the emperor. The idea of an imperial authority using political means to impose religious observance had its roots in the sporadic practice of the Hellenistic Greek world (we might think of Antiochus III demanding that all the Greeks of Mesopotamia worship him), but it now became the expected norm. Within less than one hundred years’ time, however, the roles had been reversed: Christianity became the normative religion, and sacrificing to “pagan” gods had become illegal. Now the image of a unified Roman Empire revolving around the powerful imperial hub was mirrored by a new kind of religious symbol: the entirety of creation revolving around a single, omnipotent god. Political centralization had effectively paved the way for theocracy.4

  13

  With Gods on Our Side

  In the worlds of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece, religion was never a driver of historical events. No war was ever fought for the sake of a god, no empire was expanded in the name of proselytization, no foe was crushed for believing in the wrong god. Political and military decisions were made for human reasons and analyzed in those terms. Nevertheless, whatever the mundane motives, success in war could be seen as a sign of divine support. From the Iliad onward, victory was interpreted by some as evidence of the gods’ favor. Having gods on one’s side—or, at least, being able to persuade others that they were—came to be seen as a decisive factor in a state’s fate. The cult of Tykhe (“Fortune”), for example, flourished from the fourth century BC onward and expanded throughout the Hellenistic world. Nike (“Victory”) appeared earlier, but again spread in Hellenistic times. Both seem to have been directly promoted by Alexander the Great, who was keen to claim (as a son of Zeus Ammon) that he had divine support. The congealing of the Greek-speaking world into imperial blocs was accompanied by a stealthy but steady amplification of propaganda promoting the idea that the world was as it was destined to be and jus
t as the gods wanted it.

  It was, however, with the Romans that the idea of a divine mandate for empire really took hold. The second-century BC Greek philosopher Panaetius, who did much to introduce Stoicism to Rome, taught that the cosmos is governed by providence, which permeates it in much the same way that the soul permeates the body (the influence of Plato’s Timaeus is palpable). Every act and action, therefore, is the result of divine will. Panaetius, the first major philosopher to relocate to Rome, thought that little could be said about the gods themselves but did write a tract On Providence. Stoic philosophy, congenial as it was to an imperial ideology, gradually percolated its way into the Roman elite, albeit often translated and hybridized. Essentially, Stoicism taught that happiness is achieved not by pursuing appetites but by living according to nature: one’s own nature, but also that of the universe itself. Everything that happens in the universe is directed toward the best outcome; our duty as individuals is to discern, as best we can using our rational powers, what that outcome is and to bend our lives toward facilitating it. If all the world is a play, the Stoics were fond of saying, our job is simply to play our part, whatever it is, to the best of our abilities. There was nothing in philosophical Stoicism that required obedience to a particular political dispensation—and there were Stoics in the later time of Nero and Vespasian who took a principled stance against the autocratic rule of emperors—but it was certainly a system that was in theory compatible with an imperialist outlook. Once the more nuanced and technical aspects of philosophical Stoicism had been whittled away, it was no giant step from a belief in universal divine providence to a belief that the Roman Empire was ordained by the gods to govern the world in the best possible way.1