Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Page 23

  The idea that the rise of the Roman Empire was providentially decreed was first explored by the Greek historian Polybius in the second century BC. Polybius’s family had disapproved of Roman control of Macedonia, for which crime he was relegated to Rome to tutor the sons of the conquering general Lucius Aemilius Paullus. His own history of the period 264–146 BC, however, is remarkably pro-Roman. Rome’s political constitution, an optimal blend of the democratic, the aristocratic, and the monarchical, has “from the beginning followed the path of nature.” Polybius was not a philosopher, but he certainly could see Rome’s dominion over much of the known world in providential terms: “Fortune has bowed practically all the world’s interests toward one region, and forced them all to assent to one and the same aim.” Polybius could on occasion be critical of Roman actions (such as Mummius’s brutal sack of Corinth in 146 BC), but in general he saw the interests of the world—that is to say, those of the Greek-speaking world—as best served by obedience to their new masters. Other Rome-based Greek historians like Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of Halicarnassus followed suit.2

  It was, however, in the age of Augustus (ruled 27 BC–AD 14), Rome’s first emperor, that the providential vision of Rome’s imperial mission reached its greatest expression. The Aeneid, Vergil’s epic poem in twelve books of intricately crafted Latin hexameters, tells how a Trojan prince fled the smoking ruins of Troy after the Greek victory and eventually ended up in Italy, where he would found a new city. Aeneas, the prince in question, was the son of the goddess Venus; his son was Iulus, the founder of the Julian family, to whom Augustus’s adoptive father Julius Caesar belonged. At one point early on in the first book, Jupiter, king of the Roman gods, addresses Venus with a grand prophecy of future glories:

  I set no limits on the Romans’ achievements, nor any time-frame;

  I have given them empire without end.3

  There is no room for chance: empire will be Rome’s, because Jupiter has decreed it thus. History is written in the stars. Nor in fact is there any space for human free will. Aeneas is, in the very first sentence of the epic, driven from Troy “by fate.” When he pitches up on the shores of modern Tunisia, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful widow who is founding a city, Carthage (which would later become Rome’s great nemesis). Yet despite a whirlwind romance, ending in an intimate scene in a cave, Dido and Aeneas were not meant to be. Jupiter orders Mercury, messenger of the gods, “to bear his mandates through the swift breezes” and to command Aeneas to leave Carthage to found the new city in Italy. Human desires are not to stand in the way of destiny, and the Roman Empire was the culmination of destiny’s great plan for the world.4

  For Homer, Vergil’s literary model, fate is a hazy and indeterminate thing. For the Roman poet, by contrast, it assumes a philosophical force. Vergil’s worldview is shaped by Stoic theory. The Aeneid offers a vision of a city that from its very foundation was destined to rule the world, and of a royal family marked out from the start for unrivaled greatness. Augustus’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra (which is prophesied in the poem) is the culmination of the gods’ benevolent plan for humanity. In spite of the many-sided complexity of this poetic vision—Dido’s heartrending suicide is proof enough that the poet is compassionate toward the losers too—the Aeneid is most fundamentally a reflection of Augustus’s vision of a global empire secured for him by divine mandate.

  Augustus was the gods’ favorite, and his own favorite god was Apollo, whose cult he established on the Palatine Hill. Statues of Apollo sprang up all over Rome; the god’s signature laurel leaf appeared on coinage. Apollo represented harmony; his opposite number was Dionysus, to whom the defeated Antony had assimilated himself. In a sense, Augustus was divine. “We have believed that Jupiter reigns, thundering in heaven,” writes the poet Horace (a contemporary of Vergil’s), “but Augustus will be treated as a god amongst us.” At Rome, emperors were treated as gods once they had died. Vespasian’s witty last words were “Dammit—I think I’m becoming a god.” Not all made the grade: one cheeky satire on the emperor Claudius has the dead emperor refused admission to heaven and thrown down to the underworld instead. In many Greek-speaking cities of the eastern empire, however, Hellenistic practice continued, and Augustus and his successors were accorded cult worship within their own lifetimes. Many ancient historians have tended to see this process as motivated by the Greeks’ own craving for a means of expressing the giddying hierarchy of Roman power within the religious “language” of their own city religion. This is true enough, but it tells only part of the story: the imperial center surely supplied resources, materials, and craftsmen for elaborate temples and statuary. But it would be misleading to think that the deification of emperors was not a straightforward fiat. The ancients were very aware that emperors were made of flesh and blood, and those who had not grasped it immediately came quickly to learn that many were (like Claudius) unworthy of adulation. As so often in political ideologies, there was an element of fuzziness here. The divinity of the emperor sat in an uncertain space between reality and metaphor.5

  Religious propaganda played a crucial role in persuading a sizeable majority of the populace not to resist the gods’ designs for Rome. Imperial ideology was extraordinarily persuasive on the whole, holding together in a single geopolitical vessel fifty million inhabitants of a vast, culturally and linguistically diverse territory. Rebellions against Rome were in fact surprisingly few (Spartacus’s slave revolt was a rare anomaly). Like all ideologies, however, it was also contested. Although many aristocrats enjoyed the benefits brought by the Pax Romana in terms of power, stability, and wealth, the empire was not universally popular. It is hard now to trace a culture of resistance: history has not only been written by the victors but also been selectively preserved by them. Given that ideas of divine providence and imperial ideology were so closely intertwined, however, atheism now took on a political slant too. The atheistic literature of the period thus offers a welcome glimpse into the world of the resistance.6

  Plato in the Laws identified three kinds of disbeliever: those who believed that there were no gods, those who believe the gods have no interest in human well-being, and those who think their favor can be bought by simple trades like prayers and sacrifices. In the era of the Roman principate, the first two categories were often conflated. Disbelief in providence was in effect disbelief in gods: the religious heretic was “atheistic [atheos], unholy, one who rejects divinity and denies providence.” Part of the reason for this lies in the influence of Epicureanism, with its “thin” gods who have no influence on our world. Epicureans were often thought of as atheists precisely because they denied providence.7

  But the Epicureans were not actively engaged in resistance to Roman hegemony. Epicureanism was fundamentally an apolitical philosophy. Its adherents disdained active engagement in civic life: that kind of questing after public recognition, they thought, led only to stress and distraction from the real aim, serene tranquility. “Live unnoticed” was one of its precepts. Political theory was thus not a mainstream concern. To locate those who rejected the providentialist view of the empire we must look elsewhere.

  Shortly after Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, a Greek intellectual called Dionysius relocated from Halicarnassus, on what is now the west coast of Turkey, to Rome. Halicarnassus, a city steeped in Greek culture (it was, most notably, the birthplace of the great historian Herodotus), had been ravaged by war. A traditionally pro-Roman city, it had been treated savagely by Mithridates VI of Pontus in his campaigns against Rome between 88 and 63 BC. Even after Mithridates’s defeat by Pompey the Great, Rome’s notorious civil wars between the followers of Julius Caesar and their rivals took their toll on the region. Dionysius arrived in Rome in his thirties, full of optimism that Rome’s new leader Octavian offered the best hope of ending the bloodshed that had bedeviled the eastern Mediterranean. As well as establishing himself as a masterful literary critic and teacher of rhetoric, he also wrote a
history of Rome from its foundation, which partly survives.8

  Dionysius’s Roman Antiquities tells the early history of Rome’s rise, up to the point where Polybius’s work started. Although an unwearying promoter of Rome’s interests, he remained a Greek and saw the world through Greek eyes; his target audience for the Roman Antiquities was Greek as well. His aim, rather, was to embed in the collective consciousness of his fellow Hellenes two ideas, both equally bold. The first was that the Romans are in fact ethnically Greek. The second was that Roman rule was in the best interests of the Greeks. It is no coincidence that Dionysius and Vergil were contemporaries; both paint their mythical stories about the Roman past with eminently Augustan colors, telling in their different ways of the inevitability of Roman domination of the known world.9

  Dionysius wrote as he did not because his pro-Roman views were mainstream, but precisely because they were not. His work is powerfully polemical. He tells us a little about those who held opposing views. Dionysius protests that in his day, “almost all of the Greeks” base their views of early Rome on “false opinions” about “wandering, vagabond barbarians” who achieved their position of dominance “by chance, thanks to some fluke wrongly gifted to them.” As he continues, he adds a little more detail: “The more malicious are fond of levelling open accusations against Fortune for supplying the lowliest of barbarians with the successes that are due to the Greeks. And yet why do I speak about normal people, when even some historians have set down such views in writing, indulging with their unjust, untrue accounts barbarian kings who hate the Empire, whom they ended up submitting to and sharing their lives of pleasure?”10

  Who were these historians who wrote anti-Roman accounts, these lickspittling popinjays of foreign courts who denied the providential nature of the empire? Of the various candidates the closest fit is one man: Metrodorus of Scepsis, a sometime courtier of Rome’s nemesis Mithridates VI of Pontus. Metrodorus was probably born around 140 BC and came from a humble background in Scepsis (northwestern Turkey). Having studied with Carneades in Athens, he developed a brilliant oratorical style of his own invention and a sophisticated mnemonic technique. He wowed audiences, and a wealthy woman sought him out for marriage. While Mithridates was pursuing his doomed attempt to rival Rome for dominance in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, Metrodorus moved to his court and enjoyed great favor, rising to the position of minister of justice. He was the starriest of a circle of Greek intellectuals based there, including Aesopus, Heracleides of Magnesia, and Teucrus of Cyzicus. For reasons unknown, however, he eventually turned his back on Mithridates. On an embassy he advised the Armenian king Tigranes that Mithridates’s terms might not be in his best interest; Tigranes told Mithridates, and Metrodorus was apparently (details are murky) done away with. Life with a warlord was perilous.11

  Unsurprisingly, given his allegiance to Mithridates, Metrodorus did not paint the Romans in flattering colors. Over half a century later, the poet Ovid wrote of the “man of Scepsis” who attacked Roman customs in his “bitter writings.” Pliny the Elder records that he “acquired a nickname from his hatred of the very name of Rome” (what was this nickname? “Romehater”?). Is Metrodorus then one of those attacked by Dionysius? He certainly fits the bill: there is no one else we know of who could be described as a notoriously anti-Roman writer who was sponsored by a foreign king. He was not primarily a historian, but he did write a work (now lost) called On History.12

  Metrodorus’s attack on malicious and ignorant Greeks has two components: he argues that Romans are unworthy rulers (“wandering, vagabond barbarians”) and that they see the empire as the result of chance rather than divine predestination. Metrodorus seems to have argued that Rome’s rise to power in the Mediterranean was the result of fortune rather than providence. In his youth, he studied in the Academy at Athens: he was a student of Carneades’s and an associate of Clitomachus’s, both of whom were instrumental in the codification of philosophical atheism. Could it be that Metrodorus was prompted by the atheistic arguments circulating in the Academy to propose a new type of history of Rome’s rise, one that stressed the absence of benevolent divine influence?

  Whatever Metrodorus’s exact role in this, it is clear that there were Greeks in the first century BC whose resistance to Rome came in the form of histories stressing the role of chance in the rise of Roman power. The opposition may well have begun in the court of Mithridates, but it spread far beyond. As so often with imperial history, we have to reconstruct the story of the losing side from hints and asides in the dominant narrative. Almost all of our sources for the Roman Empire are “butter-side up” accounts, created by the beneficiaries of empire. But with enough care and patience we can begin to tune our ears to pick up the signals when a hegemonic source is engaging with a genuine counterhegemonic position.

  The central focus for anti-providentialist history was Alexander the Great. What would have happened if he had chosen instead to turn westward and confront the nascent power of Rome? In raising such questions, anti-providential historians engaged in what is now called “what if” or “counterfactual” history (What if the Romans had invented steam power? What if the Nazis had won World War II?). Speculation on the question of who would have won in an outright war between the Macedonians and the Romans had an obvious cultural urgency, especially for Greeks still pining for their freedom. But even more than this, such meditations attacked ideas of the providential destiny of Rome. If history is to be seen as a series of chance occurrences and unintended consequences, rather than as the relentless progress of a divinely scripted drama, then Rome’s grip on the world can be seen as weaker and less permanent than it might appear. Anti-Roman history was “Epicurean” in a loose, nontechnical sense, in that it stressed the role of chance and the absence of divine predestination.13

  Alexander was a powerful figure to conjure with. Some conquering Romans liked to compare themselves to him: Julius Caesar’s sometime collaborator Pompey, for example, who took the name Magnus (“the Great”) in imitation of his hero, or the emperor Trajan. But the Romans could also be more ambivalent about him, treating him as the embodiment of tyrannical ambition. And the Greeks too could use him as a stick with which to beat the Romans. One of the most popular texts in all of antiquity—in fact the most widely circulated and translated text apart from the Bible—was a fantastical biography of Alexander known as the Alexander Romance. Although at the heart of it is the story of the campaigns against Darius II and the Persians, it is a highly inventive work of fiction: Alexander turns out to be the illegitimate son of Nectanebo, the last pharaoh of Egypt; he meets talking birds; in some versions (it was a work of great textual fluidity, which circulated in multiple different forms) he even plumbed the depths of the eastern ocean in a diving bell. All recensions, however, have a scene in which a Roman embassy approaches Alexander to pledge fealty: “We crown you,” their ambassador tells him, thus ceding kingship to him. It is just about possible that the embassy really happened, but the Romans surely never acknowledged him as their king. In the inventive world of the Alexander Romance, the episode exists not to reflect reality but to reassure the text’s readers (probably largely Greco-Egyptian) that Romans are not invincible and that their own imperial heritage is prouder.14

  Some Greeks, however, pushed further and imagined scenarios in which the Macedonian and Roman forces engaged on the battlefield. In a digression from his history of early Rome, the Roman historian Livy (writing at the time of the emperor Augustus) takes time out to castigate “the most trivial of the Greeks” who claim the Parthians (Rome’s great enemy to the east, the successors of the Persians) as superior to the Romans and argue that the Romans in Alexander’s time bowed to him in submission. Livy proceeds to argue that Roman might is more impressive, in that Alexander was just one man who managed to achieve much success, whereas for generations successive Roman generals have been victorious. What is more, each Roman had to achieve what he did despite a political system that only allowed power o
n a temporary basis, whereas Alexander, as a sole ruler, had no obstacles. All this, he argues, tells against Alexander’s likelihood of success in an imaginary battle. What is more, Alexander had fewer and less disciplined troops and less sophisticated weaponry.15

  On the other side of the fence sat Plutarch, the eminent Greek philosopher of the late first and early second centuries. Plutarch was no anti-Roman agitator; he was in fact a Roman citizen and counted many powerful Romans among his friends. He was also well read in Latin literature, including (probably) Livy himself. On the other hand, he was a proud Hellene who tended to see the world through Hellenocentric lenses. So when he intervened, perhaps in his youth, in this controversial debate over Alexander and the Romans, he was walking a tightrope. His surviving speeches are a masterful balancing act. The question he sets himself is whether each owed success to fortune or to virtue. In the combustible context of these debates, these were highly loaded terms. Fundamentally, what was at issue was whether success was down to intrinsic superiority (“virtue”), or external circumstances (“fortune”). His solution is ingeniously diplomatic. Plutarch is insistent that Alexander prospered because of his virtue, and that if anything luck was against him. The picture of Alexander that emerges is as positive and laudatory as one could imagine. He comes across as a philosopher in action, one who spread high-minded ideals across the known world. “A few of us read Plato’s Laws,” he opines, “but myriads of people have used and continue to use Alexander’s laws.” Alexander is depicted as the man who gave the civilizing power of Greek culture to the world.16

  The Romans, by contrast, however individually virtuous, have benefited repeatedly from Fortune’s favor. When the Gauls attacked the Capitol in the early fourth century BC, for instance, the sacred geese were spooked and awoke the slumbering Romans. Cases like this point to the enormous benefits that Fortune has bestowed on the city. Plutarch also points to the presence in the city of temples to Fortune: the Romans venerate her as a goddess. At first sight, then, Plutarch seems to be pretty unambiguous here. Alexander owes his success to his own qualities, the Romans owe theirs to Fortune. But here comes the twist. Fortune, Plutarch argues, means something different at Rome. The Greek word tykhē, like the English “fortune,” has two distinct meanings: “chance” (in the sense of randomness) and “fate” (predestination). Plutarch’s claim is that the advent of the Roman Empire has shifted the meaning of the word from the first to the second. “When she [Fortune] approached the Palatine and crossed the Tiber, she seems to have taken off her wings, stepped out of her sandals, and abandoned her untrustworthy and unstable globe. Thus did she enter Rome to stay, and that is how she is today.” The references to wings, sandals, and the wobbly globe are all part of the iconography of tykhē in the first sense, of an unstable and fickle entity. Tykhē was now semantically transformed, Plutarch argues, from “mere chance” to “providential destiny.” This is an ingenious solution contrived by a bicultural writer who could not afford to offend either side. Whereas the now lost anti-Roman, anti-providential historians seem to have argued that Rome’s success was down to nothing more than a series of lucky breaks, and that it is impermanent, Plutarch claims that it was due to Fortune in the other sense: guaranteed by divine ordinance, and permanent.17