Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Page 24

  Plutarch is no less ingenious in his handling of the old counterfactual question: Who would have won if Alexander had confronted the Romans? Perhaps his solution is in fact too ingenious, to put the question to bed. At the end of his essay on the Romans, he ascribes Alexander’s young death (he was “like a shooting star”) also to the Romans’ good fortune, hinting that had he lived longer that might have spelled trouble for them. But what actually would have happened (we are all clamoring to know)? “I do not think it would have been settled without the spilling of blood” is Plutarch’s curt response. The speech finishes without giving any further explanation. Older classical scholars, with their characteristic instinct to resort to wooden philological method, assumed that the ending had been lost: no one could conclude like that. But it makes perfect sense once we take into account the fact that Plutarch’s whole strategy had been to appease both sides. It is a mischievous ending, certainly, and one that draws attention to its own inconclusiveness. But what it discloses, ultimately, is the author’s real achievement in these texts: to take one of the most controversial issues of the day, a focal point for anti-Roman sentiment, and speak on it at great length without offending Romans or Greeks.18

  Plutarch’s tour de force is best understood as an act of brinkmanship. He was well aware that there were historians of Rome who denied the role of providence in their narratives of Rome’s rise; these were Livy’s “most trivial of the Greeks.” They will have written history without divinity so as to subvert Rome’s claim to divine favor and to open up the future possibility of a different world order. Perhaps Metrodorus himself was the first to argue that Roman power would never have risen had Alexander not fortuitously (for Rome) died young. Plutarch dances on the lip of this particular precipice but pulls himself back at the last minute. It must have been seen as a wonderful display of rhetorical skill. The value of these speeches to a history of atheism, however, is that they seem to shadow the kind of arguments that truly anti-providential historians would have used.

  Do the gods superintend the universe? Do they steer it on an optimal course? These are abstract, philosophical questions, but they also have a powerful political resonance in a system that was dominated by a single ruling power. The living Roman emperor, after all, was hailed as a god himself, at least in the Greek-speaking parts of the empire. Stoicism and Platonism, both of which held that there is a benign creator god who manages the world’s affairs, were easily compatible with Roman imperial ideology. One of our most valuable sources for Stoic thought, indeed, is the second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose self-addressed handbook can be read even now, under the title Meditations. A providential view of the world suggests that the current political dispensation is for the best and that it is the job of individuals to subordinate themselves to that dispensation.

  An anti-providential view, on the other hand, implies that the world is run as it is thanks to happenstance rather than divine design and that the current order is not necessarily the best one, or indeed likely to be the only one. Lucian, the Greco-Syrian satirist of the second century AD, imagined a debate between the Stoic Timocles and the atheist Epicurean Damis, which culminated with a metaphor of the universe as a ship. The image is intended by Timocles to imply that there is a divine captain in charge, ordering everything and ensuring the safe passage to its ultimate destination, for the benefit of all the passengers. The Epicurean Damis, however, points out that not every ship is well run. He evokes instead a filthy, badly designed ship bobbing around purposelessly, with a wretched crew full of miscreants. That analogy is by implication as toxic for the ideology of the Roman Empire as it is for the Stoic conception of the cosmos. If there is no deity steering the universe, then there is no need to assume that the imperial system is run by skillful pilots of the ship of state. Debating the role of divine providence in the management of human lives had become a highly political act.19

  14

  Virtual Networks

  When we look for atheists in classical and Hellenistic Greece, the picture we see sometimes looks to be composed of scattered dots. There were certainly isolated instances of individuals who, in their different ways, opposed mainstream ideas of religion: fifth-century BC pre-Socratics and sophists, Skeptics amassing atheist arguments, Epicureans promoting a materialist view of the world and the idea of “thin gods,” even the odd disbelieving Stoic like Persaeus. There were creative writers like Euhemerus and Hermocles of Cyzicus, exploiting the theological implications of ruler deification to undermine traditional worship of the Olympians. These people were called atheoi by others and may perhaps have chosen the label for themselves. How do we join up these dots? Can we see atheism as a significant social force in antiquity? And, more to the point, did the ancients themselves see it that way? Did anyone ever stand back and allow a pattern to form before their eyes, as with a pointilliste painting?

  In a sense, scattered dots are exactly what one would expect to see in a pre-Enlightenment, pre-mechanized world. There were disbelievers in Greek antiquity just as there were everywhere, but there was no obvious role for mass-movement atheism in a culture where ensuring the stability of the state—which depended on the favor of the gods—was prized above all else. Atheism has prospered in the West since the eighteenth century because society has a role for it: in an advanced capitalist economy based on technological innovation, it has been necessary to claw intellectual and moral authority away from the clergy and reallocate it to the secular specialists in science and engineering. It is this social function that has allowed atheism to emerge as a movement composed of individual atheists. The situation in Greece was different in two respects. First, there was no clergy monopolizing writing and learning in the first place and so no need for atheism to attack clerical authority. Priests controlled access to only one kind of knowledge: knowledge of the future, through oracles and prophecies. Second, while there was certainly plenty of technological progress—in fields as diverse as architecture, hydraulics, siege warfare, and medicine—there was no collective ideal of society moving forward through innovation. Greeks never envisaged the future as technologically different from the present. There was no Greek science fiction. When they wanted to imagine societies operating on different principles, they evoked either the deep past or distant lands (think of Euhemerus and his journey to the imaginary Panchaea). As a result there was no sense of a battle between science and religion to steer society’s future.

  Yet there is evidence from the pre-Christian Roman Empire, I believe, for a social movement promoting the idea that a world without gods is a preferable one—not a large-scale movement, to be sure, but one significant enough to create waves.

  The reasons for the rise of atheism in the Roman Empire are in fact to be found half a millennium earlier, in classical Athens. In Hellenistic and Roman times, Greeks’ sense of heritage was sharpened, refined, narrowed: while individual cities of course retained their own discrete traditions, Greekness itself was increasingly indexed to a sense of shared cultural legacy rooted in classical Athens. The most visible sign of this change was the dominance of the Attic dialect current in fifth- and fourth-century BC Athens, whether in the simplified form known as the koinē, or “common” tongue, or the full-blown type taught in the elite schools of the Roman Empire and promoted in handbooks of proper Greek usage that still survive. (Of words for “little pomegranate,” for example, one authority writes: “The ignorant write rhoïdion, with the diaeresis; we say rhoidion.”) This preference for Attic as “high Greek” is still with us, in the literary or “purified” (katharevousa) form of modern Greek. But the cult of classical Athens went well beyond language use and into the formation of literary canons promoting writers such as Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, and the tragic poets. By the time of the Roman Empire, elite Greeks re-enacted episodes from classical history in public competitions of improvised oratory: to perform the role of an Athenian father extolling his dead son’s achievements in the battle of Marathon, for examp
le, was the height of intellectual sophistication. Some chose to be associated with famous names from the past: the historian and philosopher Arrian, for example, referred to himself as “the new Xenophon,” occasionally even just “Xenophon,” as a tribute to his Athenian literary model. Until relatively recently, the classicizing bent of Greek culture under the Roman Empire was dismissed by many scholars as evidence of a moribund spirit, interested more in museology than in originality. Postmodernism, however, has shown that recycling the past is a form of creativity in its own right. Classicism is now seen as a tool that Greeks of the Roman period used to make sense of their own world, rather than as facile imitation.1

  For the Athens-obsessed Greeks of the Roman period, the fact that the democratic city had seen a coterie of public intellectuals known as atheoi was a significant fact that required explaining. The presence of Socrates, the classical philosopher par excellence, on the fringes of this group was an additional prompt. Atheism was thus seen not just as an abstract philosophical position but as a part of Greece’s collective history, the (Athenocentric) story it told about itself. Even though the fifth-century BC atheoi were subject to the comic poets’ mockery, even though they were associated with theomachy by the tragic poets, even though they were sometimes subject to criminal prosecution, their presence in classical Athens gave them a legitimacy in the eyes of later Greeks. A sense of rootedness in the prestigious classical past played a pivotal role in the creation of atheism as a habitable intellectual space in the Roman era.

  Atheists of this later era could sustain themselves thanks to the fantasy of connection to the great classical atheists: Diagoras, Protagoras, Critias, even Socrates himself. Such connections—let us call them “virtual networks”—required one particular invention of the Hellenistic era: doxography. Doxography (the word is in fact a nineteenth-century coinage) was one of the favored genres of late Greek literary and philosophical production. Inspired by the precedents of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and by the emergence of great libraries at Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, and elsewhere, ancient intellectuals increasingly set about collecting, editing, and archiving the opinions (doxai) of those who went before. Surviving philosophical doxographies (varied in kind) include works written by Cicero, Philodemus, Arius Didymus, Alcinous, Aetius, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, and others. Doxographies were not just digests for readers who could not face wading through the originals; they were creative works in their own right. Scholars have tended to look down on the doxographers and treat them simply as repositories for the views of more original (but now lost) predecessors. But it is overhasty, not to mention haughty, to despise the major literary movements of previous ages. Doxography existed not to service the needs of modern fragment hunters but to help ancient readers make sense of the chaotic patterns of earlier thought, by lending them form. In a sense the very idea of coherent philosophical “schools” in antiquity—Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Skeptics—is an effect of the doxographical enterprise, which tidied up the conflicting opinions of different individuals into a cogent body of knowledge. When we say “the Stoics believed that…” we are paying unwitting tribute to the efforts of the doxographers.2

  The doxography of atheism is particularly significant because of the relative marginality of atheism in antiquity. To be an atheist was, for most, to be a member of a virtual rather than a face-to-face community. There were no real-world schools of atheism that allowed one disbeliever to engage in dialogue with another. It was doxography alone that offered that network, linking together disparate individuals and weaving together their disparate beliefs into a shared set of doctrines that collectively made up a philosophy of atheism.

  The earliest atheist doxography is found in Plato’s Laws. Plato’s Athenian stranger refers to a body of “clever modern types” who make three different but related kinds of claim: that there are no gods, that the gods exist but have no care for mortals, and that the gods do care for mortals but can be easily bought off. Plato never names names, so this is not a doxography in the strong sense of a compendium of the views of particular thinkers, and indeed his vagueness adds to the suspicion that this is rather an attempt to caricature the kind of thing that those kinds of people believe. What Plato is offering is not an open-minded itemization of the views of the atheists but a broad-brush depiction of the kind of religious heresy that his ideal state would outlaw.3

  Plato’s vague attack on the “clever modern types” is one thing. The earliest doxography of atheism to use specific names was compiled by Epicurus. The evidence survives in Philodemus’s On Piety, that masterpiece of modern classical detective work reconstructed from the charred papyri preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. One of the fractured columns of Philodemus’s restored text reads as follows, in the translation of Dirk Obbink:4

  [missing text]…those who eliminate the divine from reality Epicurus reproached for their complete madness, as in Book 12 he reproaches Prodicus, Diagoras, and Critias among others, saying that they rave like lunatics, and he likens them to Bacchant revellers, admonishing them not to trouble or disturb us.

  The reference must be to book 12 of On Nature, Epicurus’s huge work detailing his theories of matter and the cosmos. Epicurus’s objection to “those who eliminate the divine from reality” seems to have been on the grounds not that they impiously misunderstand the nature of divinity but that their “ravings” trouble and disturb the serenity of mind that he craved for his followers.5

  Like Plato, Epicurus may well have been motivated to demonize disbelievers precisely because his own position was so perilous. As an extreme materialist whose concept of “thin” divinity was suspect in the eyes of many, he knew himself to be open to the charge of atheism. Despite this, the Epicurean school, one of the great success stories of ancient philosophy, continued to flourish until at least the third century AD—even as it continued, also, to attract charges of atheism. It is no doubt for this reason that Epicureans were always defensive on the matter of the gods and brandished their founder’s atheistic doxography with great gusto.

  One of the unlikeliest examples of this phenomenon has produced one of the most exciting stories of modern classical studies. Oenoanda is a smallish city in the region of southern Turkey that was known in antiquity as Lycia, perched in the northern mountainous region of the Xanthus River Valley. From the late nineteenth century onward, fragments were found of an Epicurean inscription apparently from the stoa (the portico around the central agora, or meeting place), fragments that eventually disclosed a massive, monumental summary of Epicurean doctrine. Since the late 1960s, the site has been excavated and the inscription painstakingly reconstructed. It is worth marveling at the fact that its author, one Diogenes, was permitted to set up this complex philosophical guide—the largest inscription known of from anywhere in Greco-Roman antiquity—in a public site in this tiny, remote citadel. What the inscription shows, among many other things, is that the Epicureans continued to circulate a negative doxography of atheism. The crucial passage is from the (sadly fractured) sixteenth column:6

  They inveigh excessively against the most holy ones [i.e., the Epicureans] as atheists. And it will become clear that it is not we who remove the gods, but others. […] Diagoras of Melos, who has certain others as companions in his opinions, directly denied the existence of the gods, battling vigorously against all those who believe. In terms of underlying meaning Protagoras of Abdera had the same opinion as Diagoras, but he phrased it differently, so as to avoid the excessive brashness of the claim. For he said that he did not know whether the gods exist. This is the same as saying that he knows that the gods do not exist. For if he had said, instead of the first phrase, “I do not know that they do not exist,” perhaps the roundabout way of speaking would have just about persuaded us that he was not removing the gods once and for all. But what he actually said was “that they exist,” not “that they do not exist”; and so he was doing exactly the same thing as Diagoras, who spent every waking minute saying that h
e did not know that they exist. Therefore, as I say, in terms of underlying meaning Protagoras had the same opinion as Diagoras.