Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  Lucian’s dramatization of the debate between Damis and Timocles is, of course, comically exaggerated, but it does show in broad outline how a debate between an atheist and a theist might have proceeded. There are realistic touches: in this elite culture obsessed with the public display of intellectual brio, it is highly likely that public dialogues such as this occurred, with people (and, in Lucian’s fantasy, gods too) gathering around to watch the intellectual fireworks. The satire even hints at the idea that atheism might expand and spread throughout the Greek world, when Zeus worries that “if people are persuaded that there are no gods at all, or that we have no thought for humans, we shall go without sacrifices, presents and honours on earth, and will sit idly in heaven beset by famine.” Echoing Aristophanes’s Birds, where the citizens of Cloudcuckooland try to starve the gods out of heaven by usurping their sacrifices, Zeus imagines a time when respect for the gods has died. The implications of this are immense: through his fictional characters, Lucian explores the possibility that arguments against the existence of gods could ultimately persuade everyone not to practice religion.20

  There is one last piece of evidence suggesting that atheists were recognizable figures in the communities of Roman Greece and that their ideas were taken seriously. Plutarch (ca. AD 45–120) was a prodigious writer of histories, a moralist, a theological philosopher in the Platonic tradition, a Roman citizen, a priest at Delphi, and a proud Boeotian who boasted that he had turned down career advancement to stay in his home town of Chaeronea (where Philip of Macedon confirmed his subjugation of Greece). He was, however, a far more interesting character than that description suggests: a sometime vegetarian who believed that animals are rational beings, the author of a daring love story in which an older woman abducts a younger man (he was, within the narrow confines of ancient moralism, something of a feminist), the only ancient source to preserve the mythical romance of the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris, and the writer of a tract On the Face That Appears on the Moon. He also composed one of the most moving pieces of classical literature, a philosophical consolation addressed to his wife after the death of their daughter. Though bookish and pious, he was a rounded personality; though orthodox in many respects, he was thrilled by arcane knowledge and oblique perspectives.21

  It was this fascination with the out of the way, coupled with a nigh-obsessive religiosity, that led him to address the question of atheism. He did not, however, confront it directly. One of his many surviving tracts is called On Superstition, and it deals with what he saw as a false, bastardized form of religion: deisidaimonia, literally “fear of the demonic.” Deisidaimonia had long inspired condescension in aristocrats of Plutarch’s kind. Already in the late fourth century BC, Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus had included the deisidaimōn in his comic gallery of Characters: the type of person who is constantly worrying about ritual purity, about chance incidents such as animals crossing his path, always seeing visions and demanding their interpretation. Plutarch takes over Theophrastus’s characterization and amplifies it, using a range of supercilious stereotypes: superstition is associated with defilement (“He sits outside his house with sackcloth on and wearing filthy rags; and often he rolls naked in the mire as he confesses his multiple sins and wrongdoings”) and seen as characteristic of old women (always an easy target for stereotypers) and Jews. Plutarch was writing in the aftermath of the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70 (which at one point he seems to blame on Jewish superstitious scruples: he claims they were unwilling to fight on the Shabbat), when a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment was rippling through the empire. The caricatured nature of his attack suggests that this may not be his real target.22

  In fact, despite its ostensible target of the deisidaimones, On Superstition is really an oblique attack on atheism. Plutarch’s strategy throughout is to compare the superstitious man to the atheist. “The atheist,” he writes, “thinks there are no gods; the superstitious man wishes there were none, but believes in them against his will; for he is afraid not to believe.” His argument is that both superstition and atheism share a common ignorance, for both misunderstand the nature of the divine, which is thoroughly benevolent. (Plutarch’s argumentation in this tract is thoroughly perverse: everything that is good in your life you should attribute to the gods, everything that is bad you should blame on other causes!) For Plutarch, the gods are always benevolent; any attribution to them of hostile intent is necessarily a misunderstanding of their nature. Faced with the traditional poetic idea that the gods visit terrible sufferings on mortals, it is—Plutarch concedes—entirely rational to disbelieve in the gods. So atheism is a more intellectually respectable response than belief in the idea of malign divinity. But atheism and superstition alike are based on the same erroneous assumption that gods can do wrong.23

  Who were the atheoi thus targeted? A clue comes in the form of the title. An ancient list of Plutarch’s works (the Lamprias catalogue) gives number 155 as “On Superstition, against Epicurus.” Modern editors have tended to assume that this is a slip, based on the fact that on the first page Plutarch mentions those who think the universe is created from “atoms and void,” which is an unambiguous reference to the Epicureans. The essay as a whole, however, makes perfect sense as a critique of Epicurean arguments against the existence of gods as conventionally understood. What Plutarch is doing, fundamentally, is attacking the kind of argument rooted in myth used by the Epicureans Lucretius and (in Lucian’s Zeus the Tragedian) Damis. Lucretius’s famous line “Such is the terrible evil that religion was able to urge” was motivated by an analysis of King Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his own daughter to Artemis, when his fleet was becalmed at Aulis: this, Lucretius argued, sprang from a false, and religiously inspired, belief that the winds are the work of gods rather than natural forces. Plutarch eviscerates this line of attack, not by refuting but by redirecting it: what it shows, he says, is not that religion is wrong, but that that myth fundamentally misrepresents divinity. It is a case of superstition to believe, for example, that when the mythical Niobe boasted of her children’s beauty Artemis shot them down, just as it is atheistic to disbelieve in gods on that basis. Only the pious understand the essentially benevolent nature of divinity.24

  Atheism was a widespread and well understood phenomenon in the early Roman Empire. This was partly thanks to the popularity of Epicureanism, a philosophical system that considered gods at best remote and uninterested in human affairs. But atheism was also larger than Epicureanism: now understood as a respectable philosophical position, it presented itself as an alternative to traditional theism, a legitimate option available in the newly globalized marketplace of religions and philosophies. It was now possible to imagine the possibility of a world that had left religions behind: the Olympians would be, as Lucian envisaged it, starving for want of sacrificial smoke. Within two centuries of Plutarch and Lucian, however, that dream was dead: the religious landscape of the Roman Empire had been entirely reshaped, and there was no room in it for disbelievers.

  16

  Christians, Heretics, and Other Atheists

  In AD 293, the emperor Diocletian partitioned the empire between four rulers, a division of power known to modern scholars as the tetrarchy (“empire of the four”). There were now four imperial offices: a senior “Augustus” and a junior “Caesar” for both the eastern and the western halves of the empire. Equally radical was the reform of succession: each Augustus was to be replaced not by a biological or adopted son but by the Caesar (who would in turn be replaced centrally). The dynastic principle of family inheritance was gone.

  When Diocletian resigned in 305, following his own twenty-year rule, he must have thought that he had found a permanent solution to the instability that had bedeviled imperial succession of the previous fifty years (a half century that had seen twenty-six different men lay claim to the title of emperor, sometimes simultaneously and in conflict with one another). Instead, with a depressing predictability, the co-regents began warring among themselves. When Constantius I, t
he western Augustus, died in York in 306, his son Constantine was immediately proclaimed Augustus in his stead. In the same year, Maxentius, himself the son of a former western Augustus, had himself proclaimed emperor in Rome. Constantine and Maxentius were set on collision course. The issue was resolved finally when Constantine marched on Rome and defeated him at the battle of the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312.

  The challenge facing Constantine was the same one that Diocletian had sought to address: how to hold together an enormous empire that had in recent memory come perilously close to irreparable fragmentation. Constantine chose a different set of solutions, which were even more far-reaching than Diocletian’s. He reformed the coinage, introducing the 24-karat gold solidus that in the eastern empire remained the standard currency for six hundred years: now all could trade with confidence, knowing that they could trust the money in their pocket. Like other tetrarchs before him he founded a new capital, but his was the most successful: he orchestrated the shift of the center of empire to Byzantium, at the mouth of the Black Sea, which he refounded as Constantinople (“the polis of Constantine”). This fortress city remained the hub of the eastern empire until 1453, when the Ottomans conquered it and made it their own capital. (Its modern name, Istanbul, reflects its historic uniqueness to its Greek inhabitants: when they visited it they simply went “to the city,” eis tēn polin.) Though the tetrarchic system endured vestigially, Constantine re-established the principle of dynastic succession. Most significant of all, he paved the way for the adoption of Christianity as a state religion. It is unclear when he became a Christian and what was the extent of his commitment. The story that he converted before the battle of the Milvian Bridge on seeing a Christogram or a flaming cross in the sky beforehand (with the convenient label In hoc signo vinces: “In this sign you will conquer!”) was a propagandistic fiction. He certainly did not stop supporting non-Christian practices, but he did facilitate the spread of the new religion. His Edict of Milan in 313 permitted all citizens to worship whichever god they chose (in sharp contrast with Diocletian’s policy of Christian persecution). He encouraged the association of the imperial hierarchy with the new religion with financial support, building programs and promoting Christians to high office. He also arbitrated in theological disputes. In AD 315 he rejected the cause of the Donatists, a sect of North African puritans who rejected those who had renounced Christianity during Diocletian’s persecution. In 325 came the Council of Nicaea, which amongst other things decided in favor of the proposition that Christ’s divine nature was essentially identical to that of the father. Opponents of this belief, the followers of Arius (who claimed that the son was subordinate and lesser), were now heretics. The profession of faith established at this council, the Nicene Creed (“I believe in one God…”), is still used today by Catholics and others. Christianity was still only one religion among many in the empire, but Constantine had placed it at the heart of his imperial program and expressed a strong personal commitment to it. It was under Constantine that the crucifix emerged as the iconic symbol of Christianity, and the Chi-Rho Christogram (☧) was adopted on the imperial military standard. Political and theological authority had become closely interlinked.1

  It is important to be clear that the Christianization of the empire emerges out of Roman history, rather than being something superimposed on it from without. Many of us have grown up with a conventional, confessionally influenced portrait of a persecuted but resilient network of devotees fired by the word of their god and evangelizing across the empire, despite brutal persecution, sweeping away the tired old ritualized practices until the popular support was so powerful that the emperor himself could not withstand it. In fact, ancient Christians were not an especially distinctive sect, however much they liked to claim that they were (Clement of Alexandria, for example, speaks of a “third race,” alongside the Greeks and barbarians). It is easy to be seduced by ancient stories of brutal torture and martyrdom, which imply an ongoing war between virtuous Christians and the thuggish emissaries of the Roman state, but many of these stories are creations of the post-Constantinian era, heavily embroidered, born of a time when such persecution as there had been was a distant (and burnished) memory. Christianity in fact never seems to have been outlawed by the Romans. The only systematic persecutor was Diocletian, founder of the tetrarchy, who followed up his decrees against the Manichaeans (AD 299–302) with a short-lived edict against the Christians in 303 ordering the destruction of scriptures and buildings and the prohibition of Christian assembly for worship. There were assuredly other instances of intense anti-Christian hostility, and some Christians were indeed treated brutally, but these were isolated incidents rather than a broader pattern. The Christian idealization of martyrdom, and the polishing of martyr myths, began in earnest in the fourth century, paradoxically when there was nothing to fear from the state: rather, the myth of collective victimhood was projected as a means of galvanizing the international community in celebration of the heroic sacrifice of their predecessors.2

  Most normal Christians were not separated from their non-Christian neighbors by a huge gulf: they wore the same clothes, bore the same names, ate the same food, lived in the same towns. Early Christians, like other inhabitants of the Roman Empire, were more concerned with getting by than with histrionic assertions of their difference from others. Nor did becoming Christian necessarily mean rejecting other forms of religious practice. Some Christians were borderline Jews. Even after Christianity became Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD, many still clung to the old ways: even as late as the sixth century, there were those who acknowledged the Olympian gods. Polytheism and Christianity could exist side by side without any obvious friction. On the marvelous silver Projecta casket of the late fourth century (now in the British Museum) a Christian inscription accompanies a relief depiction of Venus. A fourth-century Roman called Firmicus Maternus wrote both an astrological work that treated the planets as traditional Roman deities and an anti-pagan tract On the Error of Profane Religions. Did he convert in the interim, as scholars tend to assume? Maybe, but maybe he simply saw no great contradiction. In the fifth century, the brilliant epic poet Nonnus of Panopolis wrote a versification of the Gospel of John and an account of the adventures of the “pagan” god Dionysus (in forty-eight books!). It was, as one scholar has put it, “easy to be a Christian and something else.”3

  Christians certainly expanded in numbers with astonishing speed, but not until the third century. One scholar has “guesstimated” that in AD 200, a mere 0.35 percent of the Roman Empire—perhaps two hundred thousand people—were Christians. Most Greeks and Romans had at this stage little awareness or understanding of the cult of Jesus. For example, Herodian’s historical account of the Roman Empire, written in the mid-third century, contains not a single reference to Christianity. The same guesstimating scholar, however, has also reckoned that the numbers grew by around one million in the first half of the third century and by around five million in the second. By AD 300, they accounted for 10 percent of the population. Christianity could no longer be overlooked by Greco-Roman polytheists. This massive expansion raises the question not just of why Christianity grew so rapidly but also—more difficult to explain in confessional terms—why it grew rapidly then. Perhaps amid all the political instability of the third century, the promise that each individual, regardless of sex or social station, could be saved in the afterlife by turning to Jesus acquired a greater appeal to citizens of the empire. We shall never know the motivations of those millions of ordinary people who have left no written trace behind them.4