Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  Those who have considered the case of Aemilianus and his community have sometimes concluded that he was not an atheist in our sense, but a Christian. But there were very few Christians in North Africa in the mid-second century AD, and it is hard not to conclude that those who would count Apuleius’s prosecutor among their number have been prompted to do so by an ideologically based desire to swell their ranks.7

  Atheism does not seem to have been especially controversial in the early Roman Empire. Those like Aemilianus no doubt lived relatively unmolested, so long as they participated in the civic lives of their communities (which may have included the bare minimum of religious observance). There were no restrictions on the articulation of atheistic beliefs or prosecutions. Even so mainstream a figure as Pliny—this is Pliny the Elder, the Roman military and naval commander and victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79—on occasion expressed himself a religious skeptic. The second book of his encyclopedia the Natural History promotes a naturalist view of the world as united by a single, all-pervasive cosmic power (not unlike that of the early pre-Socratics). This theory has little room for any conception of deity. “I think of it as a sign of human imbecility to try to find out the shape and form of a god,” he writes. “Whoever ‘god’ is—if in fact he exists at all—he consists in pure sense, sight, sound, soul, mind: he is purely himself.” Pliny goes on to poke fun at the multiplicity of gods found in different houses, cities, and countries: “From this we can infer that there are more deities than humans!” Illogicalities are also mocked: gods marry without producing children; some of them are always old, others always young; all sorts of odd, implausible, and immoral stories are told about them. Like Prodicus and Euhemerus, he argues that religious belief originated in the celebration of human achievements: the names of the gods, and even the stars themselves, were born (he claims) from the “merits of men.” It is ludicrous to think that any divinity that might exist would pay any attention to humanity. The idea that Fortune, in the sense of mere chance, is a deity is also absurd, but no more credible is the notion that everything is predetermined. The conception of divinity, he asserts, derives from a human need for a belief in justified rewards and punishment for moral and immoral behavior. As a whole, Pliny’s disquisition suggests that the idea of deity is a human construction. “God,” he says at one point, “is one mortal helping another.” We make our own divinity through our behavior toward others.8

  Pliny was no radical; he was simply a reflective, intelligent, well-read individual who had no reason to suppress these skeptical thoughts. Certainly, atheism could still be imagined as countercultural. Demonax of Cyprus was a second-century AD philosopher given to speaking his mind whatever the consequences. The satirist Lucian of Samosata, in his biography of him, suggests that he saw himself as an atheist in the classical mode. His accusers at Athens, Lucian writes, “brought against him the same charges as Anytus and Melytus brought against Socrates, claiming that he had never been seen sacrificing, and that he alone of all had never been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.” His response to the first accusation was that the gods have no need of sacrificial offerings; to the second he replied that he was worried about joining the cult since if the rites were unimpressive he would not be able to stop himself from turning the uninitiated away from the mysteries, and if they were he would feel that he had to tell everyone. In other words, by not allowing himself to be initiated he has stopped himself from profaning the Mysteries—as Diagoras of Melos, classical Athens’s atheist par excellence, had famously done (or been accused of doing) in 415 BC. Demonax was implicitly acknowledging his own atheism but taking steps to avoid causing the kind of ruckus that his predecessors created. The Athenians were amused at his answer and dropped the stones they were about to hurl at him.

  Among the many philosophical jokes Lucian records, there are a few that suggest mockery of conventional religion. One of his friends asked him to go to the sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius to pray for his son. “You obviously think Asclepius is pretty deaf,” Demonax replied, “if he cannot hear us praying here.” Someone asked him if he thought that the soul was immortal, and he replied, “Oh yes, immortal in the way that everything is.” When he met a seer making public prophecies for money, he told him he could not justify the fee: “If you think you can change destiny, then whatever you ask for you’re charging too little; but if the future turns out as the god has decreed it, what use is prophecy?” Demonax seems to have been a philosopher in the Cynic mode (“He seemed to follow the man of Sinope in his dress”): aggressively satirical, an enemy of dogma rather than a doctrinaire adherent to any particular philosophical code. This made him more of an assailant of existing ideas about religion than an active evangelist for atheism.9

  If Demonax remains an obscure figure, his biographer, Lucian (ca. AD 120–180), is one of the most influential ancient Greek writers of all. Born in Mesopotamian Samosata (near Adıyaman in modern Turkey), he attained literary fame across the empire. His squibs and fantasies have often earned him the label of atheist. One tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia tells us about his nickname: “ ‘Blasphemer’ or ‘slanderer’—better, in fact, to call him ‘atheist,’ because in his dialogues he went so far as to ridicule religious discourse…The story goes that he was killed by dogs, because of his rabid attacks on the truth, for in his Life of Peregrinus he inveighs against Christianity, and (accursed man!) blasphemes against Christ himself. For that reason he paid the penalty befitting his rabidity in this world, and in the life to come he will share the eternal fire with Satan.” No more temperate was the sixteenth-century Catholic Inquisition, which placed his work on their list of proscribed books. Conversely, however, he was also championed by the early modern humanists, who saw him as a fearless mocker of religious flummery. Thomas More and Erasmus were both keen translators and literary imitators; later on he would inspire Voltaire and Swift.10

  Lucian won his reputation as an atheist, and as Satan’s eternal companion, primarily because he satirized Christians. He was in fact the earliest non-Christian writer of Greek to mention the new cult of Christ, whom he cheerfully mocked as “the impaled sophist” (assimilating the Roman practice of crucifixion to the Greek anaskolopisis, or “impaling,” used for the most degraded criminals). But Christians, who were few in number at this time, are not in fact his primary target. He is much more concerned with exposing the logical fallacies of mainstream Greek ideas about the gods and the ludicrous ritual practices of the pious.11

  Was Lucian actually an atheist, as the Byzantine encyclopedia claimed? This is a question that has divided scholars. It is, in fact, probably the wrong question to ask. Most of his writings are dramatic dialogues and fictions, texts that do not reveal their author’s opinion. He revels in the play of multiple literary identities, weaving in references to “Lukinos” (a play on his own Greek name, Loukianos), “the Syrian,” “Tykhiades” (“Child of Fate”), and similar. Lucian never sits his readers down and confesses his innermost thoughts. Nor does he feel any strong obligation to be consistent: he can quite happily mock religion in one text while attacking someone for impiety in another. Like his biographical subject Demonax, he was not so much a dogmatic atheist as a merciless mocker of pretentiousness and folly, and it just so happened that religion offered a number of highly visible targets.12

  When Lucian trains his sights on religion it is usually religion of a very traditional variety. Like other intellectuals of the day, he was saturated with the ancient literature of archaic Greece and democratic Athens. His was a learned, refined form of humor, targeted at those who knew their Thucydides, Euripides, and Plato. His Dialogues of the Gods, for example, pokes fun at the deities of Homer and mythology and places them in comically prosaic situations. Pan tries to get Hermes to recognize him as his father, which will mean addressing the awkward issue of why he (the son) is half goat…who, then, is the mother? Hermes (the messenger god) protests to his mother that it is not fair that the younger gods have to do
all of the errand jobs. Hera reveals to Zeus that that nice young man Ixion, who has been coming around to dinner, has been making passes at her. The fun here lies in the clash of literary registers: the Olympian gods are supposed to manifest themselves solemn and dignified in sublime poetry, not whine about practicalities in knockabout farce. There is nothing intrinsically atheistic about these dialogues, but they are hardly flattering either.

  More trenchant are his mockeries of religious institutions. One essay deals with animal sacrifice, the climax of any Greek or Roman ritual. “What the numbskulls do at their sacrifices, festivals and processions in honour of the gods,” he begins, “what they pray for and vow that they will do, what they think about them—well, I doubt anyone is so downcast or depressed as not to roar with laughter at the daftness of their actions.” This was a potentially scandalous stance to take, from the perspective of mainstream religion. Lucian’s attack, indeed, goes to the heart of the underlying principles of Greek ritual. Sacrifice, in ancient religion, was a form of exchange. It depended upon a contract of reciprocity between gods and humans: if we do well by the gods in our devotional acts, the logic ran, they will do right by us. Lucian quickly pinpoints the logical fallacy and skewers the rationale. “So, it seems that none of their actions is done without some kind of payment. They sell us the good things in life. You can buy your health in exchange for a calf, say. Four bulls will get you wealth, a hundred a kingdom.” But (Lucian reasons) this makes no sense: if the gods really are gods, and as powerful and mighty as we say they are, what need do they have of human offerings? And why are they so greedy that they wreak horrible vengeance on humans who fail to sacrifice? Does a bit of sacrificial smoke matter that much to them?13

  Lucian deals with religion with the kind of uncompromisingly rationalist literalism that makes myth seem ludicrous. Humor is a weapon: it creates an us-against-them scenario and co-opts the reader in its aggressive mockery of the other side’s intellectual failings. (The same tactics are adopted in modern anti-religious polemic: think, for example, of Bertrand Russell’s miniature celestial teapot orbiting around the sun.) This tactic implies not just an individual stance against organized religion but also an attempt, quite possibly successful, to identify with a network, however virtual, of like-minded individuals.14

  Another squib deals with funerals, in a similar vein: it is ludicrous, he mocks, to think that weeping and wailing about the dead make any difference. Heavily influenced here by the Cynics, Lucian sees death as proof that vanity and pretension are temporary and insubstantial. Cynics thought that the world of human culture is an illusion—tuphos, “delusion,” was their word, and a favorite Lucianic word too—and that death returns us to our true, organic role in the natural world. Diogenes the Cynic was said to have left instructions for his body to be tossed outside the city walls for the animals to feed upon. In one of Lucian’s dialogues, Charon, the underworld’s ferryman, visits the upper world with Hermes and cackles at the baubles that attract the living. “Is that gold, that bright, shiny substance? Pale yellow, with a tinge of red? I am always hearing of it, but this is the first time that I have seen it.” Hermes confirms that it is, and that it is the reason for all sorts of wars, crimes, and abuses. “People are incredibly stupid, from what you say,” responds Charon; “imagine conceiving such a passion for something pale and heavy.” The Dialogues of the Dead, meanwhile, stages a series of encounters in the afterlife in which various historical and mythical individuals bemoan or mock the ludicrous behavior of the living.15

  From this perspective, organized religion is just another form of tuphos, “delusion.” The idea of powerful, anthropomorphic deities whose favor can be bought by ritual action and pious attitudes is one of the ridiculous absurdities of human culture: “These rites and beliefs on the part of the masses seem to me to call not for someone to criticise them, but for some Heraclitus or Democritus: the one to ridicule their daftness, the other to bewail their dumbness.” Democritus was known as “the laughing philosopher,” Heraclitus as “the weeping philosopher.” In English idiom, Lucian is saying that it is hard to know whether to laugh at organized religion or to cry.16

  Satirists are not bound to be consistent: there are certainly other works of Lucian’s that feature the Olympian gods in a fairly conventional guise, sitting on Olympus and pulling mortal strings as they do in Homeric epic. But his Olympians always seem nervous and unsure of their position, as if their status were precarious and likely to be snatched away at any moment. One of his flights of fancy has Timon, the legendary misanthrope of classical Athens (who would later be the subject of one of Shakespeare’s plays), inveighing against Zeus for his failure to punish wrongdoers. “Where now is your ‘roaring flash,’ ” he appeals, “where is your ‘thumping thunder,’ your ‘blazing, flashing, crashing bolt’? All that has turned out to be nonsense and poetic vapidity—nothing more than the clatter of language.” No wonder, he continues, Salmoneus thought he could get away with imitating your thunder. “You are getting the reward for your laziness: no one sacrifices to you or garlands you, except thoughtlessly at the Olympic Games (and even then not because he thinks it necessary, but out of support for traditional practice). Little by little, O most noble of the gods, they are treating you like Cronus, forcing you out of your position of esteem.” Zeus, Timon protests, has grown old and ineffectual—and as a consequence traditional religion has lost its appeal to the masses. Now, in Lucian’s little plot, all this abuse from this “grimy, squalid, disheveled man…mouthy and overbold (no doubt one of the philosophers)” causes Zeus to sit up and take note. Zeus sends riches to Timon as recompense for his virtuous life and the many sacrifices he had performed, thus re-establishing the correlation between human action and divine reward that had fallen into abeyance. But the twist in the tale is that Timon rejects the offer of wealth, on the grounds that money only brings trouble. Timon—personifying Lucian’s own aggressively cynical stance—is interested only in vengeance on malefactors, which he then proceeds to enact gleefully, beating up the parasites who have mistreated him over the years. Even though Zeus is represented as a real figure, and capable of rewarding mortals, it would be hard to extract a positive theistic message from the dialogue. The implication is rather that if you feel frustrated about the way the world is treating you, it is better to take matters into your own hands than to wait for gods to sort things out.17

  As king of the gods, Zeus stands, by metonymy, for traditional theology as a whole. To defeat Zeus is to defeat religion as conventionally understood. And indeed Lucian takes great pleasure in pitching an overconfident Zeus into discussion with clever intellectuals who show the incoherence of his reasoning. In one dialogue, Zeus Refuted, the king of the gods is confronted by one Cyniscus (“Little Cynic”), who quizzes him about predestination, including an old chestnut that has puzzled all readers of Homer’s Iliad (where Zeus admits himself powerless to save his own son Sarpedon): Are gods subject to fate, or can they change it? And then again, if our lives are predestined, how can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Zeus has no answers. The dialogue simply closes with the god expressing frustration: “You are an overbold sophist. I’m not going to put up with this anymore.”18

  Yet another dialogue, Zeus the Tragedian, opens with Zeus lamenting in tragic style. When interrogated by the other gods, he reveals that the source of his woes is a debate that has been going on in Athens, between a Stoic Timocles and an Epicurean Damis, on the question of whether the gods intervene in human affairs, and even whether they exist or not. At first, Timocles carried the audience with him, but after a while he tired and the audience began to shift toward Damis’s side. Zeus was so aghast that he brought night in. The following day, the gods eavesdrop on the conversation and are distressed to find the disbeliever, Damis, entirely dominant.

  Damis’s compendium of different atheistic arguments reduces Timocles to aphasia. It is, in effect, a dramatization of the kind of doxography we find in Sextus Empiricus and Aët
ius, a neat example of how we might expect a real atheist to argue when faced by a committed theist. The debate turns on two related questions: whether the gods intervene in our world and whether they exist at all. Damis initially argues that they cannot intervene, since they have never punished him for denying their role—nor, indeed, have they punished Timocles for his many (unspecified) crimes. Surely any gods that exist have no time to watch over every single instance of justice and injustice. Timocles responds with an argument that goes back to Plato’s Laws (and has often been repeated ever since): he points to the regularity of nature and the cycles of organic creation, which suggest to him a providential ordering. Damis counters that the regularity of nature proves only that it is now regular, not that it was intentionally created that way. Discussion now turns to Homer, whom they both agree to be the best poet, but Damis has no difficulty in showing that his poetic skill is not dependent on his theology, which is inventive and self-contradictory. The tragic poets are no more trustworthy. At this point, Timocles changes tack, arguing that religion is culturally universal: Are all the nations on the planet therefore wrong? This is one of the theist arguments that Sextus Empiricus puts forward, and Damis comes up with exactly the same counterargument, which is that the fact that many people believe something to be the case does not prove that it is true. And in fact, he proceeds, many peoples believe things about the gods that others find ludicrous: that they enjoy all kinds of exotic sacrifice (including human sacrifice), or that (in the case of the Egyptians) they take the form of animals. Timocles now turns to the predictive power of oracles; Damis points out that oracles tend to be produced in highly ambiguous language that can be taken either way (he uses the famous example from Herodotus: the priestess at Delphi told Croesus of Lydia that if he attacked Cyrus he would “destroy a great empire”). Damis’s critique of the efficacy of oracles perhaps reflects the similar views of Oenomaus of Gadara, a Cynic who wrote in the early second century AD (remembered, as it happens, by the Jewish tradition as an interlocutor of rabbis and the greatest of the Greek philosophers). “Can’t you hear Zeus when he thunders?” asks Timocles, accusing Damis of being a theomakhos. Damis replies that he hears thunder, but there is no proof that Zeus is behind it—and he takes the opportunity to remind Timocles that the Cretans have a tomb of Zeus, which suggests that they think he was a mortal. Timocles’s penultimate argument is an analogy from sea voyaging. To sail a ship you need a captain, who will order all the different groups to do their jobs. Damis, however, turns the example on its head, and points out that many ships are run incompetently; who is to say that the universe is not the same? Finally, Timocles comes up with a philosophical syllogism: “If there are altars, then there are gods; there are altars, therefore there are gods.” The logic is, of course, inadequate, and it takes Damis no time at all to dismiss it. But what is interesting is that it is an (intentionally, on Lucian’s part) garbled version of the syllogistic argument for the existence of gods of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism: “It would be reasonable for someone to honour the gods; it is not reasonable to honour beings that do not exist; therefore gods exist.” The gods, in conclusion, acknowledge the force of Damis’s arguments but console themselves that only the Greek intellectual elite have realized all of this; the run of humanity will continue as before.19