Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  In fact, the nonscriptural nature of Greek epic had a significant effect on the development of logical thought. As a sophisticated, literate culture emerged, Greek thinkers became skeptical toward the more fantastical constructions of the epic poets and, stimulated by the desire to find new ways of talking about the world, built around the idea of naturalistic plausibility. This could not have happened had they been constrained by a belief in the god-given truth of scripture. Take, for example, Hecataeus of Miletus (ca. 550–476 BC). Only fragments survive now, but in antiquity he was held to be an early historian, a precursor of Herodotus. We can get a sense of how revolutionary he was from the preface to his work The Genealogies: “I write things as they seem to me to be true,” he asserted, “for the stories of the Greeks are many and ridiculous.” The Genealogies seems to have been a retelling of the mythical Greek past, with the divergent traditions harmonized and the supernatural elements surgically removed. The emphasis on Hecataeus’s own good judgment perhaps suggests that he cast himself as a voice of commonsensical sanity in a world of storytellers and gullible audiences. In another snippet that has been preserved, he writes that “Hesiod says that Aegyptus had fifty children; I think he had fewer than twenty.” Setting himself against the authority of inherited tradition and the great poets, Hecataeus attacked mythology by insisting on the same standards of plausibility that we observe in the world around us. No one in early fifth-century Miletus had fifty children; why should a mythological king of Egypt have been any different?14

  We can get a flavor of how Hecataeus and his like proceeded from a curious surviving text that followed him down this rationalizing path, written perhaps some 150 years later. We know next to nothing about Palaephatus, its author; the assumption that he was an Athenian writing in the late fourth century BC is little more than a guess, based on various bits of evidence in a medieval encyclopedia.15 But scholarly difficulties aside, the text is a wonderful example of the filtration of myth through a rational system. Here he is, for example, on centaurs:

  What is said about the Centaurs is that they were beasts with the overall shape of a horse—except for the head, which was human. But even if there are some people who believe that such a beast once existed, it is impossible. Horse and human natures are not compatible, nor are their foods the same; what a horse eats could not pass through the mouth and throat of a man. And if there ever had been such a shape, it would also exist today.16

  Palaephatus interprets the mythological stories about centaurs instead as a mangled memory of the first horse riders, adding the detail that they were so named because they had taken to horseback to kill bulls (an etymological pun: bulls are tauroi). This delightful inventiveness is typical of the author. The passage also reveals a lot about how the relationship between past and present could be imagined. At one level, nature is conceived of as unchanging throughout the ages (a reasonable pre-Darwinian assumption): a horse would at no point in the past have been able to digest human food. But human beings have (in Palaephatus’s mind) clearly developed intellectually over time. In the past, humans expressed themselves symbolically through myth; nowadays, however, we respect the physical laws of the world and grasp the impossibility of breaking them.

  There is a kind of schizophrenia to this attitude. Although he rejects myth as a narrative form that can admit supernatural elements, Palaephatus still thinks that myths must have, as the English cliché goes, a “kernel of truth” to them that can be rescued. This is not so far from the modern practice of taking (for example) the biblical story of the parting of the Red Sea to reflect a folk memory of a real tsunami, or the story of Atlantis as a recollection of the Santorini volcanic eruption. Although he casts himself as a skeptical modern, Palaephatus is not ready to let go of the past. His standard method is to report the familiar version of a myth and then to counter “the truth is as follows…” There is always a truth hidden in mythology somewhere, no matter how deeply.17

  Epic myth was the Greeks’ collective memory. It was unthinkable to reject it entirely: not because it was sacred, but because the past defined who the Greeks were. But figures like Palaephatus also thought of themselves as separated by a huge intellectual gulf from the more naïve world that produced such stories. That separation was marked by different attitudes toward the divine. Palaephatus was not quite a disbeliever, but gods play an extremely minimal role in his worldview. There are only eight references in the forty-five chapters, six of which are banal, incidental, and insignificant. Only in two cases does he seem, at least on first sight, to express some kind of belief. In myth, the hunter Actaeon glimpses Artemis bathing, and she exacts revenge by turning him into a deer, whereupon his own hounds maul him to death. To prove the implausibility of this story, Palaephatus comments that “it seems to me that Artemis can do whatever she wants; but it is not true that a man can turn into a deer or vice versa.” Again, the Europa of myth was abducted by Zeus, who had turned himself into a bull; he swam from Tyre to Crete, where they consummated their union. Palaephatus’s response is similar: it is not possible for a bull to swim that far, and Zeus could have found a better way to get her to Crete. We can take these cases as evidence that he thought omnipotent deities to be real—but that is not the only way of reading them. His real point is that the myth does not make sense on its own terms. If you believe in an omnipotent Zeus, it falls to you to explain why he had to turn himself into a bull in order to transport a young woman to Crete. Omnipotent gods are part of the problem of myth, but not part of the solution. The rewritten “true” versions he proposes do not contain deities. For Palaephatus at any rate, rejection of epic ideas about the gods had become a definitive way of being modern.18

  The Greeks’ lack of sacred scripture was not in fact a lack at all. It facilitated the great cultural revolutions of the classical period, which saw theological explanations for the way of the world displaced and new, naturalistic explanations coming in. To have a shared cultural reference point that could be debated, explored, or rewritten without fear of blasphemy was a huge cultural stimulus, without which the Greek intellectual tradition would, conceivably, have been hobbled from the start.

  3

  Battling the Gods

  The Greeks did not have sacred scripture, but they did have myth. Huge amounts of it. Greece teemed with stories. These myths could have religious elements, but they had no intrinsic connection with religious practice. Greek religion was an expression of the community through shared sacrifice and feasting on the sacrificial meat. A myth was something completely different: a story told about people, gods, or demigods from long ago, which put its finger on an issue of collective importance.

  What was myth for? First of all, it created a shared set of stories that encapsulated the values of an entire people. Knowing the stories of Achilles, Heracles, Medea, and so forth was a central part of what it meant to be Greek. On a smaller scale, there were also myths that were specific to a particular region, like the Athenian story of Aglaurus, who jumped to her death from the Acropolis when she saw Erichthonius, a primal being with a serpent’s tail: this kind of local myth was important for binding together members of a polis community but was probably not widely known outside. Not that “Greek mythology”—the English phrase gives the false impression of a system—was fixed and unalterable. Given the regional diversity of the Greek world, and the absence of sacred texts or strong centralizing institutions, myths naturally circulated orally in multiple forms. Like religion in general, myth reflected the plural nature of Greek culture: a figure like Heracles would have been known by all Greeks, but specific details will have varied from locale to locale.1

  Secondly, myth could explain why things are the way they are. The past was the key to the present. Prometheus once tried to trick Zeus at a feast by wrapping bones in fat, dressing the inedible parts so as to look edible. That is why mortals now sacrifice those indigestible bits to the gods, keeping the rest (conveniently!) for themselves to consume. Why are there different ethnic groups
within Greece, each speaking a different dialect? Because Hellen, the original Hellene (Greek), had three sons, Dorus (founder of the tribe called the Dorians), Xuthus (whose sons Ion and Achaeus give their names to the Ionian and Achaean lines), and Aeolus (founder of the Aeolians). This type of myth—“etiological” is the technical term—represents a strong, normative statement about the way the world should be. We do what we do for a reason!2

  Finally, in the absence (in the earliest phase of Greek culture) of systematic philosophy, myth was used to explore issues of contemporary relevance. Some myths, in some tellings, could be relatively conservative, embodying the dos and don’ts of popular morality. The Oedipus story, for example, can be taken at its simplest level to express the principle that prophecies always come true. Oedipus believes himself to be the child of Polybus and Merope, the Corinthian royal household. On hearing the oracle that he is destined to marry his mother and kill his father, he leaves home never to return. He ends up at Thebes, unbeknownst to him the city of his biological parents, whom he duly proceeds to dispatch and bed. Thus we can deduce that no one can escape the plans the gods have laid for us. Sophocles’s play Oedipus the King is a literary masterpiece of huge complexity, crammed with allusions to other literature and contemporary philosophy. But in its most stripped down form, the myth makes a simple point that can be grasped by anyone.

  Stories are good for articulating ethical truths because they show causal links between actions and their results. In Homer’s Odyssey, the suitors’ outrageous behavior provokes Zeus to punish them with a brutal death at Odysseus’s hands. Appropriating others’ property, therefore, is bad and frowned upon by the gods: don’t do it! Complex narratives can offer richer and more ambivalent explorations of moral issues, by multiplying the different actors and their motivations, introducing subplots, and blurring the relationship between cause and effect. In the full version of the Odyssey, for example, we learn that Odysseus himself is a far from straightforward character: acquisitive, self-indulgent, and mendacious. The story becomes a way of working through the question of what kinds of self-interested behavior are to be rewarded and what kinds punished. Myth becomes a prompt for ethical reflection.

  Amongst other things, myth offered the chance to explore humanity’s relationship with the gods, in all its varieties. Many of the best known and most enduring stories were of this kind. We have mentioned Prometheus. In Hesiod’s telling, Zeus exacts punishment for the meat trick by withholding fire from mortals. Prometheus goes on to steal it back (in a fennel stalk), for which Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle peck at his liver. Hesiod was a peasant farmer, who scraped a subsistence out of the soil near a small Boeotian village: the story expresses the precariousness of human livelihood and our dependence upon the gods’ favor. A later Athenian tragedy, Prometheus Bound, offers a very different analysis. Here, fire is a symbol of human technology: this divine spark, once prized from Zeus’s jealous grasp, raised us from cave-dwelling troglodytes to our current position between the beasts and the gods.

  Stories like this portray, if not open warfare, then at least skirmishing between the divine and the human orders. Mortals are vulnerable and weak, their ephemeral existence under constant threat. Gods are immortal and unaging and live a life of luxurious abundance without toil. But this difference is not imagined as stable and permanent. The gods’ power is constantly challenged. In Hesiod’s creation myth the Theogony, Mount Olympus is assailed by monsters and Titans, who yearn to overthrow Zeus’s rule. The battle is close, but the Olympians triumph. There are also numerous smaller skirmishes. Take the fate of another Titan: “Far-seeing Zeus cast the aggressor Menoetius down to Erebos, smiting him with his smoky thunderbolt, because of his arrogance and overweening vigour.” Zeus’s power is repeatedly threatened by opponents of one kind or another.3

  In myth, the gods seem ever embattled. They face crisis after crisis, war after war. Myth dramatizes not just the gods’ power, but also others’ aspirations to it. The privileges of dominion and immortality are the objects of constant craving and envy. Such stories capture—through narrative rather than philosophical exposition—an essential theological aspect of the Greek gods. They are not omnipotent in the way that Yahweh, Allah, and the Christian God are. They could in principle be defeated. In fact, the Prometheus of Athenian drama claims to be in possession of a prophecy predicting precisely that: Zeus will one day bear a son who will overthrow his father. In other words, atheism was a narrative possibility within Greek myth. A world without gods could be imagined. The possibility that the Olympian gods might cease to exist (or at least to hold power over the cosmos, which amounts to the same thing) was built into the Greeks’ story-world.4

  It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of divine power in Greek antiquity. For those brought up in monotheistic traditions, the ingrained assumption is that “power” means omnipotence and eternal rule: as the Christian hymn has it, “Immortal, invincible, God only wise.” These are the attributes of the transcendent deity of monotheism. Now in fact the idea of an all-powerful deity is a far from straightforward concept. The critique of omnipotence is usually traced back to the twelfth-century Arab philosopher Averroës, but in fact a version of it is already found in the Roman writer Pliny the Elder: “Not even a god can do anything: for he cannot, even if he wanted to, kill himself…” (Pliny goes on to list a number of things that it is impossible for a god to do, e.g., make humans immortal, change the past, or make twice ten equal something other than twenty.) But this is rarefied argumentation. The gods of Greece were in general beset by no such problems. The ancient polytheist god, even the king of the gods, has power of a different kind. Zeus’s authority consists in his monopolization of violence (bia) and force (kratos). On the Athenian stage, Bia and Kratos appear personified as two thugs who serve as Zeus’s enforcers. From a Greek point of view, divine power means brute force, the ability to battle down your foes. Not for nothing is Zeus the wielder of the thunderbolt, the ancient equivalent of the atom bomb: if the power of the Olympian order is in dispute, the thunderbolt settles matters definitively and irrevocably. For the Greeks, divine authority was defined, ultimately, by firepower.5

  The god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam holds power in the absolute. The power of Greek gods, by contrast, is relative to others: it consists in the ability to beat down rivals (whether mortal or immortal), to quell dissent, to emerge victorious in battle. For example, the Iliad contains an episode telling of grumbling on Olympus. Hera picks a public fight with her husband Zeus, whom she accuses of favoring another goddess. Zeus’s response, however, is uncompromising: “Sit down in silence, and obey my word,” he tells her, “otherwise all the gods on Olympus will not help you as I draw close and lay my invincible hands upon you.” Hera “was seized with fear and sat down in silence, curbing her heart.” It is this kind of power that makes Zeus the king of the gods: the power to impose his will on others, even his awesome wife.6

  There is a reason for this difference. Greece was, fundamentally, an honor-based society, and honor was generated—for humans and gods alike—through success in competition with others. It is no accident that sport is one of the Greeks’ most enduring legacies, for competitiveness lay at the very heart of the Greek concept of (particularly male) honor. Individuals can increase their own standing in the public’s eyes only by decreasing that of another. If I want to move up a notch on the honor board, I need to move you down: this is a form of what game theorists call a “zero-sum game.” Hera’s challenge to Zeus in the Iliad follows this logic: it is an attempt to enhance her own standing by diminishing his. (Being a goddess, Hera is not constrained by the normal protocols of female decorum.) In the event, her submission ensures the opposite outcome. Zeus wins, at her expense. This kind of vigorous striving between peers was not a sign of social breakdown; quite the contrary, it was absolutely central to the normal functioning of Greek society. To be powerful, one needs to display power, and to display powe
r one needs to defeat rivals.7

  So, myths of cosmic war were a means by which Greeks could explore the possibility of a world without gods. They had a special word for “battling the gods”: theomakhia, which is anglicized as “theomachy.” It could be used to describe a brawl between gods: toward the end of the Iliad, for example, the gods supporting the Trojans and those supporting the Greeks come to blows. But for the Greeks it more commonly described a nondeity taking on a deity. Euripides’s Bacchae, one of the best known examples of the tragic drama that blossomed in fifth-century BC Athens, tells of one such theomakhos, a young Theban ruler called Pentheus (“Sorrowful”) who will not accept the divinity of Dionysus, a god from Lydia (in western Turkey) who has just arrived in his city. The god’s cult involves women indulging in orgiastic frenzies in the wild mountains beyond the habitable space of the city. (Or, at least, this is how the cult is stylized through the distorting lens of drama: there is scant evidence for any such behavior in reality.) In the play, Pentheus seems to see the god as a rival to his own power within the city and strives to oppose his worship wherever possible. He also pours scorn on the religious activity itself, which he sees as a cover for lewd behavior. His opposition to the new cult is both metaphysical and ritual. Yet he gets his comeuppance. Lured by the disguised Dionysus to go and spy on the women, he finds them turning all of their deranged, ecstatic violence onto him. The final scene shows Pentheus’s own mother, Agave, rejoicing that she has killed a lion with her bare hands—until the Dionysiac illusion wears off and she sees her own son’s head in her hands, probably represented dramaturgically by the mask worn by the actor. Revenge upon the young theomakhos is exacted in the grisliest way possible.