Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Read online

  Like all myths, those of theomachy can be taken, at the simplest level, as morality tales. The point is a fairly straightforward one: you should not vie with the gods. Pentheus should know how the zero-sum game operates, and that gods’ maintenance of their power depends on exemplary punishment of those who challenge them. But theomachy myths are not just about duty and devotion. This was not a Protestant culture demanding absolute obedience. There is something subtler and more interesting going on underneath the mythic surface. The widespread nature of these myths suggests that Greeks thought that it was in the nature of humans to envy divine prerogative. Rebelling against the gods seems to be expected of us. What the stories tell us about, as well as the gods’ jealous guarding of their privileges, is humans’ deeply ingrained desire to shrug off the shackles of mortality, to approach godliness.

  Let us be clear on this point. In ancient Greece, the idea of humans encroaching on the gods’ territory was not inherently blasphemous. It was expected that certain charismatic individuals came closer than most of us to divinity. Homer’s Iliad regularly describes the effulgent heroes in their prime as “godlike.” The Phaeacians who help Odysseus return in the Odyssey are agkhitheoi, “close to the gods.” Many of the heroes of myth, indeed, received real cult honors, as Helen and Menelaus did in the Menelaion at Sparta from the seventh century onward. Hero worship was more than a metaphor in ancient Greece. Nor was this honor limited to mythical figures. The real-life, contemporary athletes praised by Pindar for their success in the Olympics and other games borrow the godlike luster of the Homeric poems. Humans could be accorded religious rites if they performed some distinguished athletic or military act. In later times, great leaders like Alexander the Great would be worshipped. Once again, the lesson is that we should not be misled by monotheist models of a god who is impossibly remote from the human realm. Greeks saw immortality as a sliding scale, not as an absolute point. Take a figure like Heracles or the healer Asclepius: god, hero, or human? The Greeks themselves were undecided in the matter.8

  In ritual too, humans could play the role of deities. In the Athenian spring “flower festival” (Anthesteria), participants dressed as satyrs, half human and half goat. There was also a mysterious “sacred marriage,” a sexual union between the wife of the city’s senior magistrate and Dionysus; this may have involved the magistrate himself masquerading as the god. Herodotus has a story about the former tyrant of Athens, Pisistratus, who engineered his own return by appearing on a chariot with a tall woman called Phye, who played the role of Athena granting her blessing to his reinstatement. Herodotus is visibly contemptuous of the Athenians for falling for the trick (“They’re supposed to be the cleverest of the Greeks!” he sniffs), but it has been plausibly argued that he misreads the scene. Greek role-playing rituals like this—and as a royal procession into the city, Pisistratus’s entry was indeed a form of ritual—rested not on anything so crude as outright deception, but rather on a collective acquiescence in the masquerade. It is an odd feature of ritual that it allows people to believe they are experiencing divinity even as they know full well that the mechanics are conjured entirely by humans. (This is not just a premodern phenomenon: modern consumers happily succumb to the numinous aura of branded products in full awareness that they are being guided by nothing more than advertising.)9

  There were, then, manifold ways in which humanity could achieve a kind of divinity. This is the context in which we should locate the phenomenon of theomachy, of humans battling against the gods. Jealousy of divine privilege was not “sinful”: early Greece had only a weak idea of what was “sinful” because there were no god-sent commandments to break. (The Greek translators of the Bible had to adapt a rare word, alitērios, to express this fundamentally alien idea.) Rather, stories of theomachy explored the perfectly natural tendency of humans to yearn to better themselves, to procure for themselves a happier life, a life that they associated with divinity. If theomachy was “wrong,” that was not because it contravened any heaven-sent rule book but because it was (at least in myth) a horrible misjudgment of the odds.

  But battling the gods did have more profound, metaphysical implications too. According to the logic of the zero-sum game of honor, any competition puts status at risk. Were humans to defeat gods in any way, this would raise all sorts of questions about the nature of divinity. In the Iliad, intriguingly, there are moments where that golden generation of heroic warriors confronts and comes close to overmastering their divine counterparts. The Greek warrior Diomedes, mid-rampage, wounds first Aphrodite, goddess of love, and then—even more impressively—Ares, god of war, himself. Later, Achilles (who is half divine, through his mother Thetis) confronts the river god Scamander, although he comes swiftly to regret it when faced by the surging power of the torrent. Neither Diomedes nor Achilles suffers any serious consequences as a result of his actions. The point of these episodes is to dramatize the near godlikeness of the individuals in question, to show that they come as close as a mortal possibly could to crossing the boundary into the divine. But elevating humans in this way also threatens to demote the god. Aphrodite and Ares in particular are left nursing their resentment.10

  In its most extreme form, theomachy expresses a kind of atheism, through the narrative medium of myth. To confront the gods was to deny their potency, what made them gods. For stories along these lines we must turn to an epic poem called the Catalogue of Women, written in the sixth century BC. It does not survive in its entirety: what we know of it is pieced together from fragments of papyri found in Egypt. Luckily, these are extensive: it must have been a best seller in the Roman period. At first sight, its contents do not look particularly riveting: it is in effect a family tree for the Greeks, dividing them ethnically between various descendants of Hellen, the first Greek. It is called the “Catalogue of Women” because it is structured around a list of women who have been impregnated by gods. But despite these unpromising signs, it seems to have been in fact a whirligig compendium of baroque myths, by turns gruesome and erotic—which no doubt explains why later readers were so keen to get their hands on it.

  One particular family catches the eye, the house of Aeolus. With their heartlands in Thessaly, a notoriously wild place toward the north of Greece, the Aeolians were always easy to associate with uncivilized behavior. A surviving fragment of the Catalogue introduces Aeolus’s sons grandly as “kings, ministers of justice,” but this billing is at best ironic in view of what follows: “Cretheus, Athamas and Sisyphus with his shimmering wiles, and lawless Salmoneus, and arrogant Perieres…” “Shimmering” is aiolos, an obvious pun on their progenitor’s name. So far as we can judge, Cretheus and Athamas did not do much wrong, by the permissive standards of myth, but the rest were a reprobate lot who carried wrongdoing in their very DNA. And what is interesting for our purposes is that their crimes were of a piece: they all, in their different ways, engaged in theomachy.

  In the first generation of descendants of Aeolus we meet Sisyphus, he of the “shimmering wiles.” The founder of the city of Corinth, Sisyphus is best known now (thanks to Albert Camus) for his punishment in the underworld: he was condemned to roll a rock up a hill, a rock that would tumble down each time he had almost reached the peak. There are different traditions relating to the crime that prompted this punishment; it is impossible now to tell for sure which version the now-fragmentary Catalogue contained, but the following is the likeliest. Zeus abducts Aegina, the daughter of Asopus; Sisyphus then angers Zeus by telling Asopus where she is. When Zeus sends Death to punish him, Sisyphus captures Death in chains, with the result that humans can no longer die. In time the god Ares releases Death and hands Sisyphus over to him, but once in the underworld he tricks his way out and lives until old age catches up with him. The fantasy of tricking death is a motif found in folklores across the world. What is distinctive about the Sisyphus myth, however, is that the wily king actually succeeds, not once but twice. He is punished in the end, of course, but here is a human who has come close
to erasing the line between mortals and immortals, by defeating mortality itself.11

  Then there was Alcyone, another of Aeolus’s offspring. A scrappy papyrus fragment summarizes the Catalogue’s version of the story: “Ceyx the son of the star Phosphorus [“Bringer of Light”] married Alcyone the daughter of Aeolus. The two of them were arrogant. They loved each other; she […] called him Zeus, he named her Hera. Zeus was angered at this and metamorphosed them into birds.” Their names, indeed, reflect their birdiness: kēux means “tern,” and alkuonē “kingfisher.” The crucial point for us, however, is that they attempt to make themselves into gods. A later encyclopedia adds the detail that Ceyx “wanted to be worshipped as a god.” This husband and wife team seem to have offended the gods by replacing them as the objects of religious worship. Their particular type of theomachy consisted in denying the gods by setting themselves up as substitutes.12

  Salmoneus, the brother of Sisyphus and Alcyone, was perhaps the most intriguing of them all. In this case we have a fuller papyrus fragment detailing the Catalogue’s account of his misdeed, which can be filled out with later accounts. Here is how one late version summarizes the story (enough details correspond to confirm that it is the same version as in the Catalogue):

  And being arrogant and wishing to put himself on an equality with Zeus, he was punished for his impiety; for he said that he was himself Zeus, and he took away the sacrifices of the god and ordered them to be offered to himself; and by dragging dried hides, with bronze kettles, behind his chariot, he said that he was making thunder, and by flinging lighted torches at the sky he said that he was making lightning. But Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt, and wiped out the city he had founded with all its inhabitants.13

  This marvelous story has comic features: the idea of using kitchen utensils to compete with Zeus the Thunderer looks more like a jokey parody than a worked-up statement of philosophical atheism. Yet the story does also have a theoretical dimension. Divinity, from this perspective, is reduced to a list of easily imitable signs: a name, a noise, a flash in the sky. The implication of Salmoneus’s performance is that there is nothing more to the gods than these, and if humans can replicate them, humans can achieve everything that the gods can. There is something that verges on the postmodern in Salmoneus’s replication of “brand Zeus,” in much the same way as a forger would the logo of a clothes designer. Indeed, other ancient authors who tell the story of Salmoneus emphasize that his crime was, precisely, to imitate Zeus: the Greek concept of mimēsis carries hints of fabrication and deception. It is possible, then, that the original version of the Salmoneus myth was a parable about the dangers that lurked in humans’ capacity to fabricate gods through ritual, drama, and statuary (which was spreading through Greece at exactly this time, in the sixth century). If gods can be fashioned by mortal imitation, how real can they be?14

  We can push the argument further. Two ingenious scholars have made the observation that the way in which Salmoneus’s kettles and hides are described is almost identical to later accounts of the bronteion, the theatrical device for replicating the sound of thunder (brontē) when plays called for it. Now, when the Catalogue was composed, theaters probably did not exist in any significant sense in Greece; the earliest evidence we have is from a little later, at the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries. But dramatic forms certainly preexisted the theater proper, and surely these early forms of drama will have involved imitation of the gods. The bronteion will have been used for ritual purposes prior to the spread of theater, and this is probably how the poet of the Catalogue knew the device. We might add that there is evidence also that the theater had a device called a keraunoskopeion, which generated the effect of lightning; again, this may have its roots in older, ritual action. In other words, the Salmoneus story was not just a joke: it was a meditation on the metaphysical implications of a culture that was beginning to manufacture divinity in the human realm, through sculpture, painting, and theater. If gods can be constructed, the story wonders, do they really exist at all?15

  The answer that the Catalogue gives is a (literally) resounding “yes.” Zeus’s booming thunderbolt reasserts his power against the upstart theomakhos. It is significant that Zeus punishes Salmoneus with a thunderbolt, the very object that the mortal thought he could replicate: this action is not only a punishment, it is also a reenactment of metaphysical differentiation, a dramatization of the fact that lightning is substantively different from a burning stick thrown into the air. As so often in myth, the question posed is answered in the most conservative way possible, by re-establishing the truth of tradition. But a conservative answer does not make the question a conservative one. In acknowledging that Salmoneus needs punishment, the poem in effect also signals, in narrative form, that the human manufacture of “fake” gods was the source of major cultural anxiety in the sixth century.

  The conservative narrative shape of theomachic myth should not surprise us. Part of the role of myth, after all, was to lay down the law about the way in which Greek culture should operate. But it is important to underline the point that the myth presents battles against the gods as crises of power, not manifestations of sinfulness. Salmoneus and his siblings were “arrogant” (hubristai, hence the English “hubris”), not evil. Theomakhoi were imagined as fools for taking on a losing battle against the gods, for thinking that humans can aspire to divinity—but nothing more. Atheism is not inherently evil, the antithesis of religiosity, but a human urge to usurp the gods’ power.

  Greek myth was folk wisdom, the narrative glue that bonded communities together, not the hectoring of a priest seeking to dictate how, what, and why you should believe in gods. It was often moralistic, certainly, but it could also be playful, funny, and experimental. Myths, after all, were first and foremost stories, not homilies. Yet there was too, or so I have argued, a philosophical dimension to such stories. Although they end up reaffirming the power of the gods by showing them beating down the upstart humans who challenge them, theomachies also explore (albeit temporarily and provisionally) the possibility that the divine order might be overthrown and that humans could live self-sufficiently, without the gods. That tells us that such atheistic ideas were current enough in contemporary culture to be worth exploring, and countering, in myth. How these ideas were expressed in wider culture we can only guess. It is impossible to tell whether there were many Ceyxes, Alcyones, and Salmoneuses in sixth-century BC Greece or whether such views were confined to elite groups. But the fact that these figures appear in popular myth suggests at least that the atheistic type was understood by enough people to give the stories appeal and purchase.

  4

  The Material Cosmos

  As a rule, Greek religion had very little to say about morality and the nature of the world. Certainly, there was a sense that it was the job of the gods to oversee the governance of the universe: Apollo’s task was to steer his solar chariot across the heavens, Aphrodite ensured that the natural world kept on reproducing, and Zeus oversaw the punishment of wrongdoing. But although Greek religion carried with it an implicit sense of cosmic order (which is why cultic activities needed to be performed in set ways at set times), it was not ultimately there to encourage speculation on the nature of the universe, and still less to enforce belief in a specific way imagining it. Collective ritual practice, centered on sacrifice, was all about doing rather than speaking. The priest’s job was to look after the provision of animals, the ritual procedure itself, and the preparation and distribution of meat. Sacrifice was not a spiritual experience but a sensory drama: onlookers went for the songs, the spectacular open-air procession leading the beast to the altar, the shriek of the dying animal, the savor of the roasting flesh.

  When Greeks pondered the nature of the world, they did so through the medium of philosophy, not organized religion. This gulf between metaphysical speculation and the priesthood had profound implications. Greek philosophy was never state sponsored or regulated. In time, schools were created, and these had their own i
nstitutional structures. Some, indeed, became dogmatic, and almost religious in their preoccupation with the tenets of their founders. But they always kept their distance from official hierarchies and indeed often found themselves fiercely critical of mainstream beliefs and practices.

  Early Greek philosophy survives now, insofar as it survives at all, in snippets and summaries preserved by later writers. What this fragmentary mosaic, laboriously reconstructed by modern scholars, indicates is a surprising set of concerns, for anyone brought up to believe that philosophy is all about logic and subtle argumentation. The pre-Socratics, as they are often called, were not a unified movement of thinkers but an assorted group drawn from all over the Greek-speaking world, over a period of over 150 years, from the sixth to the fifth centuries BC. But they did share a range of concerns. A striking number of them were centrally interested in explaining the material nature of the world around us, in replacing the traditional, epic conceptions of a cosmos dominated by anthropoid deities with newer, “scientific” models based on the properties of material substances. “Scientific” should keep its scare quotes, for although there were methodological and observational dimensions to pre-Socratic reasoning, there was also a lot of wild guesswork too—unsurprisingly, given the absence of microscopes and telescopes. Thales, for example, said that the Earth does not fall through space because it rests on a sea: this, we might say, is an unscientific answer to a genuinely scientific question (why does the Earth appear to us not to move?). The story of the pre-Socratics is not one of the orderly victory of rationalism over myth, of the steady march toward objective truth about the world. What it does tell us, however, is that ways of conceptualizing reality and its relationship with the divine were shifting, and new types of question were being asked. Paradigms were shifting, in the full sense of that phrase intended by its coiner, Thomas Kuhn: ways of understanding the world were becoming possible that had not been conceivable before.1