Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religion is structured around the idea of holy scripture. For Greeks, by contrast, the idea of a text having magical properties was fundamentally alien. In fact, it was the Greeks who named Egyptian writing systems “hieroglyphic” and “hieratic,” precisely to mark the difference from their own literature, which was not hieros (sacred) in this way. Some religious sects associated with Dionysus, certainly, made use of texts (inscribed bone plates have been found in a Greek colony in Olbia in the Black Sea, for example, and gold leaf tablets in Greece), and popular magical spells could be cast on papyri and metal plaques. But in general the Greeks did not associate writing with divinity, except when they were describing Egyptian or Jewish culture. Writing was not considered a highly specialized skill, as in Egypt, nor was it the preserve of scribal elites, as in Israel. Anyone could write, providing she or he had the skills and the money to afford expensive materials. Although literacy levels were low by modern standards, and Greece remained throughout antiquity a largely oral society, it is likely that there were more readers and writers here than elsewhere in the world.2

  So the Greeks had nothing comparable to sacred scripture. What they did have were Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod’s Theogony. These were their earliest poems, composed at some point in the eighth or seventh centuries BC at the dawn of Greek literacy, and the bedrock of their culture. It was unimaginable that a Greek would not know the epic tales of Troy: how the Trojan prince Paris ran off with Menelaus’s wife Helen, and Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raised a Greek expedition, sailed to Troy, and sacked it after a nine-year siege; or how Odysseus journeyed home after the war, to be reunited with his wife Penelope. These stories were central to Greek identity: they spoke of Greeks’ moral and military superiority over other peoples, of the terrors of distant sea travel, and of the central importance of home, family, and community. Throughout antiquity, the Homeric poems in particular achieved a level of dissemination comparable to that of the Bible in nineteenth-century Europe. To judge from surviving papyrus fragments, the only continuous texts that schoolchildren read in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt were by Homer, Euripides, and Menander, and they did so in the proportions 6:2:1.3

  What the Greek epics were not, however, were theological or liturgical works. Excerpts might be performed at festivals, but there is no evidence that they were used in a specifically ritual context. The performers themselves were not priests but rhapsodes, specialist singers known for their showy dress and gesture. These might claim to be divinely inspired (as the rhapsode Ion does in Plato’s dialogue of the same name), but their aim was to thrill, inspire, and instruct, not to fill their audiences with a sense of the godhead. Relative to Israel and other cultures of the ancient Near East, Greece handled its national literature in a strikingly secular way (from a monotheistic perspective).

  Not that the poems themselves are free of gods. Hesiod’s Theogony takes as its theme the arrival of the Olympian order, headed by Zeus, and the defeat of the various monsters and Titans who threaten their supremacy. In the Iliad, gods fight on either side of the conflict between Trojans and Greeks; Zeus, however, stands aloof and sees to it that the outcome happens in accordance with Fate. The Odyssey features a much reduced pantheon: Athena and Hermes help Odysseus return home, while Poseidon, angered by the blinding of his son the Cyclops, seeks to obstruct him. Zeus, meanwhile, has decreed that Odysseus will return to exact vengeance on the suitors, in the interests of justice. Epic poetry certainly endorses the power of the Olympian gods and sometimes (as in the Odyssey) presents Zeus as the guarantor of morality. If you asked any ancient Greek what the Olympian deities were like, and how they managed the universe, the answer would probably refer to or derive from the Iliad, the Odyssey, or Hesiod’s Theogony. Herodotus, the historian of the fifth century BC, wrote that “Homer and Hesiod were the first to compose accounts of the origins of the gods, and give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms.” These texts were seen to be foundational in every sense, including the religious.4

  It is, however, hard to derive a coherent or moral view of the gods from these poems, particularly from the Iliad, the central text. The poem opens with a description of the carnage caused by the war—bodies strewn around to be consumed by dogs and birds—and mysteriously claims that “the plan of Zeus was coming to pass.” It looks as if the king of the gods has some kind of program that he is working through—but it is not at all clear what it is. Ancient readers had no more idea than we do now. One later writer claimed that the Earth was overpopulated, and so Zeus wanted to kill off some of its inhabitants. Some modern scholars have argued that Zeus’s plan was to take revenge upon the Trojans for the kidnapping of Helen (but why then so much suffering on both sides?). There are other theories, but they all suffer from the same flaw: they assume that Zeus is, like the Judeo-Christian god, steering human history providentially. There is very little evidence for this in the rest of the Iliad. In general, the Iliadic gods, mathematically split as they are in their support for the Greeks and the Trojans, seem strikingly uninterested in human morality. Although they can at times show pity for their favorites, they can also express contempt for “insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are: for a while they flourish and grow warm with life…but then later they fade and die.”5

  What is more, the gods’ own behavior can be disturbingly immoral. In the Odyssey, the blind bard Demodocus sings of Aphrodite’s affair with Ares, and how Hephaestus (her cuckolded husband) traps the two of them for all of the gods to laugh at. Nor are they always omniscient or omnipotent. Even Zeus: in the Iliad, Hera borrows Aphrodite’s girdle to seduce him, leaving him to sleep in postcoital bliss while the pro-Trojan gods manipulate the course of the war in his absence.6

  The Homeric and Hesiodic poems were comparable to the Hebrew Bible in terms of their cultural significances but very different in their depiction of gods. To portray deities as by turns weak, stupid, comic, and possessed of awesome cosmic power may seem to a modern eye remarkably cavalier. But it is not; the point is rather that the epic gods are performing a very different set of cultural functions. Within Greek polytheism, gods were not expected to be just or omnipotent, or at least not all of the time. Zeus, certainly, could be invoked in his capacity as overseer of morality. In general, however, gods represented facets of human existence: the urges that drive us, the skills that enhance our lives, the problems that beset us. For example, the dying Hector prophesies that Achilles will perish at the hands of “Paris and Apollo” (22.359–360): this means not that the two of them will effect a simultaneous assassination, but that Paris will shoot him with his bow (for Apollo is the god of archery). Similarly, Aphrodite represents the power of sexual allure, Hermes the possibility of swift movement, Ares war, Zeus kingship, and so on. This may give a rather reductive impression of these complex beings, who have different aspects at different times, and in a narrative poem like the Iliad or the Odyssey receive individual characterization too. But the central point is that we should not expect the transcendent power and morality of the gods of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The gods of the Greeks are grounded in the lived reality of the world.

  More than that, however, judging the Greek epics by the standards of the Bible risks mistaking the different role that the Greek poems played in society. The Iliad and the Odyssey are about what it is to be a human, not a god. The Iliad focuses on Achilles, whose raging anger against his leader Agamemnon drives him to withdraw from the battle against the Trojans and pray for his own side’s destruction. This hostility against his own people is the poem’s major crisis. It is only the death of his close friend Patroclus at the hands of Trojan Hector that prompts him to rejoin the war, transferring his hatred from Agamemnon onto Hector, whom he kills and mutilates. In the course of events, Achilles gradually comes to terms with the fact that humans die and that all death causes pain to loved ones: a moving scene in the final book has him bond in so
rrow with Priam, the father of his adversary Hector. The Odyssey is about Odysseus’s reintegration into the civilized society and family life on his home island of Ithaca, after the barbarous violence of the Trojan War, and the challenges of his wanderings abroad. Both poems express that distinctively Greek idea that life is best lived in compact local communities in which individuals treat one another with respect and generosity. Not that either raging Achilles or tricky Odysseus is a straightforward paradigm of ethical behavior; the point is rather that societies should be flexible and open enough to absorb such magnificently unusual beings. The challenge addressed by these poems was, as ever in early Greek culture, how to keep together the regional community, the “city-state,” within the loose structure of Greece as a whole.

  It would be misleading to deny any kind of divine savor to the epic poets. Their narrator claims inspiration from the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (“Memory”). The language in which they are composed is not everyday Greek: the diction is elevated and archaic and embedded in a verse form (the dactylic hexameter) that has a religious aura to it: it is sometimes used, for example, for oracles. The divinity of the Homeric poems, however, has nothing to do with the revealed word of a god. Rather, they cast themselves as huge, sweeping accounts of events that happened long ago; they are based on knowledge that would be normally inaccessible to a mere mortal, in a predominantly oral culture. The Muses are there to guarantee the factual accuracy of the singer’s tale. “Tell me, Muses, dwellers in the halls of Olympus, tell me—for you are goddesses and everywhere so that you see all things, while we know nothing except by report…”7

  Some ancients felt that the Homeric poems could and should be more religious than they are. One early philosopher, Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 570–475 BC), suggested that epic depictions of the gods were the result of human beings, with all of their moral failings, projecting their own capacity for adultery and deception onto the gods. In the fourth century, Plato was even more aggressive in his condemnation: Homer, Hesiod, and the other poets, in his view (or at least that of Socrates, whom he reports), were dangerous peddlers of untruth whose misrepresentations of the gods and heroes as immoral would infect the populace, particularly the young, with dangerous ideas. Interestingly, Plato’s primary anxiety is directed toward Hesiod’s story of Cronus castrating his father Uranus: like so many an authoritarian, he instinctively associates social order with patriarchal phallic power. What better image for the terrifying effects of morally subversive thought than that of a son castrating a father? Plato has Socrates counsel the banishment of all such poets from the ideal city that he is imagining. In the place of the Homeric gods, he proposed (in Timaeus) a transcendent deity who presided over an unchanging, ideal world, separate from our own earthly one. For Plato, gods had to be perfect, remote, and untouched by the decadence of our own existence: the polar opposite of the divinities presented by Homer and Hesiod.8

  For other ancient readers, the theological “failings” of the epic poets could be compensated for by allegorical readings. Allegorists took the apparent contradictions of the Homeric poems as invitations to read deeper into the text, which they took to be a world of codes and ciphers for alternative truths about the nature of the universe. The poems were only irreligious if you read them literally: “If Homer meant nothing allegorically, he was impious through and through, and sacrilegious fables, loaded with blasphemous folly, run riot through his epics.” But of course (so this author argues) he meant everything allegorically. This tradition seems to have begun already in the sixth century BC with the now shadowy Theagenes of Rhegium, who was particularly troubled by the battle between the gods in book 20 of the Iliad. Theagenes argued that Homer was in fact speaking obliquely about the incompatibility of physical properties: dryness “fights with” wetness, heat with cold, light with heavy. Theagenes associated Apollo, Helios (the sun god), and Hephaestus with fire, water with Poseidon and the river god Scamander, Artemis with the moon, Hera with the air (the two words are anagrams in Greek: ēra and aēr). He also saw gods as oblique ways of talking about human faculties: Athena signifies the intellect, Ares folly, Aphrodite desire, Hermes reason. In the fifth century BC, Metrodorus of Lampsacus decoded Homer’s text systematically into a symbolic representation of the world. The original texts of Theagenes and Metrodorus are now lost, but in 1962 an allegorical commentary on a now lost mystical poem based on Hesiod, dating to the late fifth century, was discovered near Thessaloniki: the surprise discovery of the so-called Derveni papyrus opened a window onto the ingenious practices of the early allegorists.9

  This kind of allegorical approach in effect removes the divine element completely, treating the Homeric “gods” as concealed ways of thinking about the physical universe. But allegory could also serve to theologize the epic text, to enhance its numinous glow. In late antiquity, when Greeks wanted a sacred text of their own to set against the Jewish and Christian Bible, neoplatonists reinterpreted the poems of Homer to match their own conception of divinity. When the sleeping Odysseus is returned to his native Ithaca thanks to the magical ships of the Phaeacians, his possessions are left for him in a cave of the nymphs, which has two entrances, one for gods and one for humans. In the third century AD, Porphyry of Tyre—the author of a separate tract Against the Christians—read this episode as an allegory of the physical universe, with its hidden portal toward the divine that is accessible only to philosophers. The story of Odysseus depositing his goods in the cave and taking on the role of a beggar becomes a parable for the need to offload worldly possessions, reject the superficial allure of this world, and turn toward the contemplation of the divine. So far from bundling Homer’s divine system out of the way like embarrassing elderly relatives, Porphyry takes it up a level: in his hands, the Odyssey becomes a spiritual allegory, a cogent expression of Platonic theology and (presumably—this is unstated) a rival to Christian scripture.10

  Allegory was, however, a niche area, the province of rarefied intellectuals. And crucially, these intellectuals had no particular authority to interpret Homer—for Homer was not scripture, and there was no priesthood dedicated to the explication of his meaning. Homer was the common property of all Greeks, and each could make of him what she or he wanted. For most of those who encountered the epic poets, these tales had nothing to do with theology, and indeed had very little to do with normative morality. Without the ingenious contortions of allegory, the only ethical “messages” that can be derived from the Homeric texts are neither abstract nor complex: treat your fellow humans with compassion, look after strangers, don’t appropriate others’ property, don’t sleep with the wrong people. It is hard for modern westerners to imagine the centrality of the epic poets without recourse to the analogy of scripture, but that is exactly what we must do. These texts lay at the heart of the Greeks’ culture not because a god had imbued them with sacral power, but because they were collectively prized for their narrative energy, because they had permeated every social membrane via a kind of narrative osmosis. When modern European scholarship on Homer began in the eighteenth century, the analogy that was drawn was with not the Bible but with folk narrative: that may well be more accurate, insofar as the dissemination of Homer in the archaic period seems to have been an entirely “bottom-up” process, driven by a popular desire to share these stories rather than any externally imposed plan. There is no evidence for any kind of centralized institution enforcing their circulation. There were certainly professional singers and (later) rhapsodes, who seem to have organized themselves into schools, but nothing suggests that they were part of a coordinated plan to indoctrinate; rather, like premodern European storytellers and folk singers, they learned their trade and then traveled to meet local demand.11

  The absence of an institutionalized clerical structure around the epic poems also made for a certain freedom of interpretation. You could find your own truths in these texts. Most Greeks took the Iliad, at any rate, as basically historical: they might agree that it was poetically e
xaggerated in places, and embellished with supernatural grace notes, but that it described a real war featuring real people called Agamemnon, Achilles, Helen, and Paris was not seriously in doubt. The Odyssey was a different matter. The most troublesome episode was Odysseus’s long tale of his adventures at sea, which he relates to Alcinous and his courtiers in books 9 to 12. Whereas most of the poem is relatively “realistic” (according to the standards of ancient epic), this is the part of the story that tells of his confrontation with giant Laestrygonians, the one-eyed Cyclops, Circe the witch who turned his men into pigs, the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. Since Odysseus had by this stage lost all of his crewmen, who could validate the truth of these fantastic claims? It did not help his case that he was famed for his deceit (the wooden horse at Troy, for example, had been his idea). “Stories told to Alcinous” became proverbial for tall tales.12

  Ultimately, Odysseus’s untrustworthiness infected the perception of Homer. Later generations of Greeks would find all sorts of ways of undermining Homer’s accounts, sometimes replacing them with their own, whether playfully or in earnest. Xenophanes (the critic of anthropomorphic religion) said that the mythical stories of giants and centaurs were “fictions.” One tradition, reported by the historian Herodotus among others, claimed that Helen never went to Troy at all. Herodotus claims to have this story from Egyptian priests, whose predecessors had heard it from Menelaus himself. Others claimed that Homer had been bought off by Odysseus and had airbrushed his rival Palamedes out of the Iliad. One orator, writing under Roman occupation, claimed to have proven that Troy was never captured (a sop to the Romans, who claimed descent from the Trojans). Another writer claimed to have discovered in a Cretan cave an eyewitness diary from the time of the Trojan War, which he had had translated; this gave a very different version of events. None of these claims was blasphemous: there was nothing heretical about undermining the Homeric text, since it was not sacred scripture. To call Homer a liar might be seen as foolish, unpersuasive, silly, or sophistic—but it was not a religious crime.13