Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  Place was central to Greek religion. The Greeks had innumerable gods who could come in many forms: alongside the twelve Olympians (Zeus, Hera, and the extended family), there were rustic gods such as nymphs of the woods and springs, and the half-goat Pan; there were local deities like the Muses; primeval forces like Earth and Hestia (“Hearth”); imported divinities like Thracian Bendis and Egyptian Isis; abstractions like Peitho (“Persuasion”) and Nike (“Victory”); heroes, deified humans, like Ajax and Achilles (and in time historical individuals like Alexander the Great and any given Roman emperor); and an almost limitless assortment of minor beings whose roles were limited to specific ritual functions (like Aglaurus, by whom young men in the territory of Athens swore their oaths). The crucial point, however, is that in almost every case, a god was associated with a particular building in a particular location. The Olympians, whose worship was common to the Greeks, were regionalized by the addition of a surname. Apollo, for example, was called “Pythian” at Delphi, “Sminthian” at Hamaxitus, “Cynthian” on Delos, and “Acraephian” in Acraephius. “How shall I sing of you,” runs one hymn to that god, “you who are sung of in so many ways?” Sometimes these names simply described the town in question. On other occasions, the surnames were more oblique and mysterious even to the Greeks themselves: so Zeus was called Apomyios (“the Fly-Repellent”) in a cult at Olympia, and Apollo Lykeios (“the Wolf-God”) in one area of Athens—inadvertently lending his name to Aristotle’s Lyceum, and hence to French lycées and Italian licei. Each of these manifestations of the god was different in the sense that the traditions, rituals, and clergy were wholly specific to that particular site. A priest of Apollo attached to one temple, for example, would not have been qualified to perform rituals in a different Apollonian sanctuary, even though he would have recognized the god to be in some sense the same one.11

  The Olympian gods were the same but different throughout the Greek-speaking world. Take Artemis, for example, who at Brauron near Athens presided over a ritual involving young girls of marriageable age dressing as bears; who near Ephesus on the Anatolian coast occupied the largest temple in the region and was depicted in the guise of a pre-Greek deity with a profusion of what have been variously interpreted as breasts, eggs, or even bull’s testicles; and who at Patrae was worshipped, as Artemis Laphria, with a huge fire onto which were thrown wild animals of all kinds, including the cubs of bears and wolves. She is the same deity in all cases but also fully individualized to match the local culture and environment. This combination of diversity and cohesiveness was the perfect expression in the religious sphere of the plurality that was so distinctive to Greek culture generally.

  Just as there were no mechanisms for creating moral or spiritual orthodoxy across the whole of Greece, so within the individual cities themselves the power of religious institutions was curtailed. Not that religion occupied a marginal position: sacred festivities took up a large part of the city’s annual calendar (a formidable 120 days in classical Athens), and temple buildings were the most visible sign of a city’s splendor, the material embodiment of its very identity. The Greeks devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to keeping the gods happy. But there were close limits to the power of human clerics. The job of priests was to sacrifice, not to pronounce on ethical or spiritual issues. The idea of a Greek priest or priestess using his or her influence to sway public debates on (for example) the definition of marriage or the treatment of the poor was unthinkable. Priesthood was a role within the community, not a spiritual calling. There was no formal religious training, there were no convents or seminaries. Some positions were hereditary, others were short-term and awarded by the state. The holding of other offices was not excluded. A priesthood was simply one of a number of civic jobs that a successful (which usually meant privileged) citizen could expect to hold. The playwright Sophocles, for example, was a priest of the hero Halon, and perhaps of the healer god Asclepius too, yet he also served Athens as a military commander, a controller of the public finances, and an emergency commissioner in the aftermath of the disastrous assault on Sicily in 415–413 BC. Priests never seemed to have banded together as a unified body: there were no guilds or corporations of priesthood in Greek cities.12

  Scholars have disagreed on this point, but it now seems pretty clear that the Greeks did distinguish categorically between the sacred and the secular realms. In democratic Athens, for example, the Council divided its items for discussion into three categories: “the sacred,” “questions connected with heralds and embassies” (that is, foreign policy), and “the profane.” They also distinguished between sacred and profane buildings, and between money destined for religious and for nonreligious purposes. These categories are, of course, likely to have been less distinct in practice (for example, the treasury of Athena located within the Parthenon was deemed “sacred,” but its resources were on occasion used to equip the military). And equally obviously we should not assume that their sacred-secular distinction maps exactly onto our own. The important point is that they recognized that religion should have a defined place within the city and should not (ideally) transgress into other realms. This does not mean that religious activities such as prayers, libations, and sacrifices did not feature in “secular” contexts (they did). It means simply that those in charge of religious matters had no jurisdiction over secular matters. To say (along with one respected scholar) that religion was “embedded in all aspects of life, public and private” seems to misrepresent the situation.13

  There are other areas of Greek civic life that we would define as “secular.” Crucially, the gods had little to do with the law. Legal judgment was never theologized in ancient Greece: verdicts were pronounced in the name of the city rather than that of the gods. Nor was invocation of the gods by the participants required. A large body of speeches composed for performance in court survives (from democratic Athens, the source of most of our written evidence for early Greece). Dr. Gunther Martin has patiently analyzed this material for its religious content and shown that there are huge variations in practice: while there were some who fulminated in vague terms about divine intervention and pollution, others (notably the famous orator Demosthenes) put forward an essentially secular worldview. How much religion a legal orator included depended on what kind of persona he wished to project and not on the requirements of the context.14

  Even the deities themselves were different in kind to their monotheistic cousins. The defining feature of the god of the modern monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that he is transcendent and remote. Christianity has grappled since its very inception with the question of Christ’s transcendence: How can a god be born into human flesh? How can a deity be of this world? In the fifth century AD, the Christian Church found itself locked in a battle between “monophysites” (who believed that Christ’s human and divine aspects were fully integrated) and “dyophysites” (who thought he had distinct human and divine natures). When in AD 451 the Council of Chalcedon attempted to pronounce definitively on the issue, many Eastern churches rejected the outcome, a schism the effects of which are still felt today. This was not a problem that presented itself in traditional Greek religion, since gods were thought (except by a few philosophers) to be entirely of this world. They may have dwelled on the most remote, elevated mountain in Greece (standing at nearly ten thousand feet, the peak of Olympus would not be scaled until the early twentieth century), they may have been capable of flight, but they nevertheless belonged to the same ecosystem as we do. As well as Olympus, they inhabited the local temples and shrines that dotted the Greek landscape: these were the homes of the gods among mortals. They could appear to humans too, usually in human form: they could fight, share food, and even mate with them.

  It is tempting for those raised on a modern, monotheist conception of religion to see this polytheism as deficient. Where is the spiritual dimension? Where is the sense of an eternal, omnipotent deity? Where is the grace? Where is the idea of a spirit that survives after
death? To understand Greek religion one needs to cast off such assumptions and see it on its own terms, as an articulation of local identity within the community. But even so, all of these features were in fact available to ancient Greeks, particularly from the classical period onward. If you wanted a sense of mystical communion with the divine and the promise of eternal life, for example, you could join a mystery cult and become a devotee of Dionysus. A number of Dionysiac texts etched onto gold leaves have survived in burial sites across Greece and southern Italy, giving instructions on how to survive in the afterlife. (Typically, initiates are told to follow the path between the white cypress trees and the marsh until reaching the lake of Memory; there, they are to instruct the guards that they are children of the gods and that they need to drink.) Those who wanted to purify their bodies and cleanse their souls could follow the philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 570–500 BC) and take up a vegetarian diet and a life of seclusion. Greeks of the classical period and later had plenty of options for a contemplative life pondering the divine, whether through mystery cults, philosophical schools, or other, more personal and inventive forms of communication with the divine. It was not that the Greeks were by constitution not “spiritual”—it was just that they were not required to be by their state religions.15

  The organized religion of the ancient Greek city-states was not designed for personal communion with the divine. For sure, many participants must have felt emotionally involved in the drama of ritual sacrifice, transported even. Ritual necessarily involves immersion in the experience of otherness. But there are many dimensions to religious experience, and this personal, emotional aspect is only one of them. It is, certainly, central to modern practice (particularly in Protestant Christianity), but in fact the ancient Greek sources rarely speak of it, prioritizing instead the sense of collective involvement with the community. Viewed in terms of its effects on society as a whole rather than the individual, civic cult existed to foster local identity within the polis and a looser sense of attachment to Greek culture as a whole. It was an articulation, in the idiom of religion, of that sameness-but-difference that characterized the kaleidoscopic culture of Greece as a whole.

  The story of the ancient Greek world, from the archaic age through to late antiquity, is one of both expansion and centralization. Expansion because Greek became the dominant language and culture in the eastern Mediterranean and much of the Near East, and centralization because in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC various powers competed to absorb territories into their international empires, until finally in the late first century BC Rome became the undisputed controller of the Mediterranean. In 27 BC Greece became a single province, known by the Homeric name Achaea. The effect of incorporation into the Roman Empire was not entirely dissimilar to that of capitalist globalization in the modern era. There were markers of Romanness everywhere: inscriptions, legal institutions, Roman citizens, coins, soldiers. Most strikingly of all, Greek cities housed temples dedicated to the worship of the living emperor, whom they competed with one another to praise. Conversely, however, there were all sorts of counterassertions of traditional identity: long-dead cults were revived, antique dialects were reinvented, classical names came back into fashion. The Roman Empire was defined by the tension between the centripetal pull of Rome and the centrifugal push of the provinces. That story will be told in more detail in later chapters. The crucial point for now is that with centralization came the possibility of imposing a single religious order on the entire empire. The explanations for the rise of Christianity are many and contested, but one thing is indisputable: when Rome’s rulers began to adopt it as the official cult of the empire in the fourth century AD, their aim was not just to spread spiritual succor. The challenge they faced was how to hold together a huge, diverse, multi-ethnic and multilingual territory (sometimes with multiple armies afoot) without the instruments of modern nationhood. Imposing a single, central belief system based around a single (albeit triform) god must have seemed an attractive gamble. Whatever the effects religion generates at the emotional level for those who practice, it is also at the structural level an allegory of political power. Just as in the archaic period the many gods of Greek polytheism met the needs of a complex assemblage of independent states, so the one god of Christianity reflected the aspirations of the political classes of the later Roman Empire.

  Monotheism and polytheism are different in kind. Neither, for sure, exists in any pure form. In Christianity, the Trinity is a kind of polytheistic relic, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have their angels, divine beings translated into a lower register. Conversely, polytheisms can often look to one particular god as supremely powerful (a phenomenon known as “henotheism”). If we accept, however, that we are talking about tendencies rather than absolute states, clear differences can be identified. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann speaks of the “Mosaic distinction,” which is to say the change wrought by Moses in Israelite memory when he revealed Yahweh’s will to his chosen people. According to Assmann, the ancient polytheist view was that gods are transferable between cultures, so that religion had no external boundaries. Ancient Near Eastern cultures in the second millennium BC were already producing lists of equivalences between deities, which were essential to any kind of international diplomacy: you had to be sure that you both agreed on which gods were in charge of which pacts. Greeks too thought that the world’s gods were essentially the same, even though they might be worshipped in different forms. “The Assyrians,” writes Herodotus, “call Aphrodite ‘Mylitta,’ the Arabians ‘Alilat,’ and the Persians ‘Mitra.’ ” The same goddess, just different names. Monotheism, on the other hand, puts up firm barriers between insider and outsider: the one god demands absolute loyalty. It is this absolutism and inability to include alternative perspectives that (so Assmann’s theory goes) has made for monotheism’s inglorious history of holy war. Polytheism, on the other hand, was by design pluralist, capacious, and flexible; no one ever fought a war in the name of Zeus, Baal, or Amun (although plenty of wars were, of course, fought in antiquity all the same).16

  The history of atheism in antiquity suggests that Assmann was right. Certainly, atheism was not always approved of in Greek polytheism. Occasionally it was forcibly repressed. In general, however, it was tolerated by the religious because there was little interest in generating religious orthodoxy. Priests were there to manage ritual and temple finance, not to tell people what to believe, and in any case there was no orthodoxy, no revealed truth, no sacred word. There were (as in all societies) plenty of people with strong views on the nature of the gods, but all they could do was clamor to be heard above the hubbub. There were no social mechanisms whose jobs were to create consensus in the matter of religion, and in any case society as a whole invested little in defining the nature of divinity precisely. This meant that for much of Greek antiquity atheism was not treated as a heretical position, the “other” of true belief; it was seen rather as one of the many possible stances one could take on the question of the gods (albeit an extreme one). It was only in Christian late antiquity that atheism began to be constructed in systematically antithetical terms, as the inverse of proper religion, a threat to the very foundations of human civilization. Until that moment—borrowing from Assmann, we might speak of “the Christian distinction”—atheism was an integral part of the cultural life of Greece.

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  Good Books

  Sacred scripture is one of the major reasons why monotheism demands orthodoxy. When gods reveal their thoughts to mortals in written form, then mortals can be held to account by reference to fixed texts. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have of course argued endlessly over the interpretation of specific passages of their scriptures, but their texts themselves are imagined as nonnegotiable contracts with the divine, inspired or authored as they are by God himself. Even as a physical artifact, the sacred book is inviolable: it should never be besmirched, let alone damaged. This conception is rooted in ancie
nt Near Eastern traditions associating the written word with supernatural powers. In Egypt, the god Thoth was credited with the invention of literacy. Although Egyptians used writing for a variety of administrative purposes, they had one particular script (known to the Greeks as “hieratic”) that was ultimately restricted to priests. Books in Egypt could be imagined to possess magical properties. The first tale of Setne Khaemwas (from the third century BC or so), for example, showcases a wise magician who understands the properties of all kinds of writing and who quests after the ultimate source of magical power: the Book of Thoth himself. The processes that led to the creation of the Hebrew Bible as divine scripture reflect the same kind of belief in the sacro-magical power of writing. Hebrew was known as “the sacred language” from early times and its alphabet invested with numinous power. From antiquity onward, Torah scrolls were treated as objects of veneration, and imagined to have (for example) health-giving properties. This Jewish idea that the book embodied the divinity of its sacred subject matter shaped the formation of the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. From antiquity onward, the idea of a material book as the ultimate source of truth has persisted. The Roman emperor Justinian passed a law in AD 530 requiring the presence of “holy scriptures” in court throughout proceedings; in the United Kingdom, as recently as 2013 the Magistrates’ Association reaffirmed the need for witnesses to swear on sacred texts.1