Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Page 9

  This cultural revolution was bankrolled by what was in effect an Athenian empire, which exacted tribute from other Greek states, particularly the islands we now call the Cyclades. This “Delian League” was named after the island of Delos, around which the other Cyclades wheel (hence their name). The league was formed in the aftermath of the Persian invasions of Greece, firstly by Great King Darius I in 492–490 BC and secondly by his son and successor Xerxes I in 480–479 BC. Athens’s role in the resistance was decisive, particularly in the famous victories at Marathon in 490 BC, Salamis at 480 BC, and Plataea in 479 BC. The united Greek opposition to Persia—although in reality far from all the Greek states resisted—became part of Greece’s collective mythology, particularly filtered through Athens’s self-serving lens. The defeat of the Persians passed immediately into propagandistic folklore, like Agincourt, Yorktown, or Stalingrad. The names of Marathon and Thermopylae still resonate and still carry ideological heft: they conjure images of brave, hardy, resistant freedom fighters beating back innumerable hordes of despotically governed Persians. The historical reality of events is now barely perceptible behind this mythical veneer. We have no idea, for example, what the Persians’ perspective was on these events. Even Herodotus’s Histories, our fullest source and probably accurate in outline, glazes his account with triumphalism.2

  In the aftermath of the invasions, hostilities with Persia rumbled on inconsequentially until around 450 BC, during which time Athens began to style itself as Greece’s primary protector against the barbarian threat and consolidated its naval supremacy in the eastern Aegean. The Delian League was established in principle as a bulwark against further invasion, but in reality it was an extortion operation. Vast amounts of tribute were exacted from the member states. Already in 454 BC the league’s treasury had been moved to Athens, a clear sign of where the real priorities lay. The Parthenon itself was the treasury’s ultimate destination; it had, in fact, been constructed for this purpose, not (or not solely) as a regular cult temple.3

  War defined much of Greek history, and that between the Greeks and the Persians was not the last major conflict of the fifth century. In 431 BC, the Spartans, seemingly aggrieved at Athenian expansionism, declared war on Athens and began ravaging Attica, the wider territory incorporating the city. Pericles’s strategy in response was to avoid direct engagement with the fearsome hoplite warriors of Sparta and rely on their fleet instead. Walling up the citizenry within the city, however, encouraged a terrible plague that decimated the population. After Pericles himself died, more aggressive Athenian generals took the war to Sparta and won decisive victories. A short-lived truce was declared in 421 BC. In 415 BC, the Athenians attacked the city of Syracuse on Sicily, which had ethnic links to Sparta; the entire Sicilian expedition was, however, a disaster and cost Athens a sizeable proportion of its army. Sparta renewed war and built fortifications in Attica, thus turning the screw on a populace dependent on its ability to import grain. Athens finally capitulated in 404 BC. At Spartan insistence, the democratic system was abandoned, and a short-lived junta was instituted, the reign of the “Thirty Tyrants,” which saw mass executions. The thirty were toppled and democracy was restored. The victory of Philip II of Macedon over a combined Theban and Athenian force at the battle of Chaeronea in 336 BC, however, marked the end of the city’s classical period.4

  Athens was a city of paradox. It is easy to admire its political idealism, its promotion of freedom of speech and equality before the law, and its cultural vibrancy. Yet it could also be repressive and brutal. Women had no role in political life and little public recognition, outside of religion. Slave owning was widespread among the populace; absolute numbers are hard to estimate, but the unfree were certainly more numerous than the free. Life was harsh for them, most notoriously for the workers in the silver mines at Laurion: “Neither weak nor maimed nor elderly nor a feeble woman meets with sympathy or relief; all are forced by blows to endure their labour until they die horribly in the midst of this compulsion.” It must have been nigh intolerable for prostitutes, rowers in the navy, and field workers. As an imperial power, too, Athens was harsh and unforgiving toward her allies. Noncompliance was treated with the utmost severity; secession from the “alliance” could be punished by mass execution and collective enslavement.5

  These moral contradictions permeated every aspect of Athenian life, including its handling of religion. On the one hand, building on the findings of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals explored atheism with new levels of philosophical sophistication. For the first time it became possible to explain the travails of human existence—war and disease—without reference to the gods. On the other hand, Athens went through repressive phases in which atheists were persecuted. These phases were without parallel in the history of Greece, a civilization that was generally unconcerned with enforcing religious orthodoxy.

  5

  Cause and Effect

  Pre-Socratic philosophy posed fundamental questions about the nature of the world and the cosmos. Drawing on Near Eastern expertise in astronomy, calendars, and mathematics, the earliest Greek cosmologists explained celestial phenomena like thunder and rainbows not as extraordinary manifestations of divine intention but as the products of material causes, events that are explicable in terms of the laws of nature. In this conception of things, “god” was redefined as the sum of all the hidden motors of the physical world, rather than the anthropoid deity of myth and cult.

  Pre-Socratic materialism was revolutionary. It was contagious too. By the fifth century BC, the role of the gods had been radically diminished in a number of fields. Homer’s Iliad, that founding text of Greek culture, begins with a preface telling of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon and then proposes a question: “Which of the gods was it who set these to strive in battle with each other?” The answer is instantaneous: “The son of Leto and Zeus,” which is to say Apollo. In Homer’s poem, where the Muse-inspired narrator can range freely from the Trojan plain to Mount Olympus and beyond, to posit a god—and a specific, identifiable god—as the cause of a momentous human event is uncontroversial. Big events demand big explanations. Athens of the late fifth century BC, however, brimming with intellectual inventiveness and thrumming with a sense of its own modernity, could no longer straightforwardly accept divine causality in this way.

  Blaming gods for human actions had begun to look like evasion of responsibility. At some point in the 420s, for example, the Sicilian sophist Gorgias wrote Encomium to Helen. This was a self-consciously and playfully paradoxical defense, legalistic in form, of the actions of Helen in leaving her husband Menelaus, eloping with Paris to Troy, and catalyzing the Trojan War. Helen was at the time viewed in almost entirely negative terms, constructed misogynistically as an adulterous Jezebel. Gorgias’s counterargument was that she must have gone to Troy with her lover involuntarily: (a) if she was abducted, it was not her fault; (b) if some god made her go, that too was a form of coercion; (c) if she fell in love, that too was involuntary, since Eros is a god; (d) if she was persuaded by Paris, even that excuses her, for persuasive language is itself a mighty power. The speech is a “little game,” he confesses at the end. The joke is that if you start diminishing the significance of personal responsibility by invoking external forces like gods, then the door is opened for all sorts of moral exculpations. If you have been persuaded to commit a crime—well, you are not responsible then, are you? Is not Peitho (“Persuasion”) herself not a goddess?

  Euripides, the most sophisticated of the Athenian playwrights, picks up the baton in his Trojan Women, which was performed in 415 BC. The play is set in the smoking aftermath of the sack of Troy and centers on the attempts of the female survivors to come to terms with their losses. One powerful episode has Hecuba, the mother of Paris and widow of King Priam, let fly at Helen for causing the war. The scene is structured like a legal trial, with Helen offering a defense speech before Hecuba speaks for the prosecution. Helen’s attempt to argue her innocence in effect borrows
from Gorgias: it was not my fault, she argues, since Aphrodite promised me to Paris, and who can fight the will of the gods? Hecuba’s scathing reply is that she speaks of Aphrodite when she should be speaking of her own aphrosynē, her folly—a nice play on words. In this mythical law court, blaming the gods is easily exposed as a rhetorical tactic designed to shift responsibility.1

  The law courts, indeed, were a crucial place for testing such questions of personal culpability. Greek courts existed well before the foundation of Athenian democracy in 508 BC, even if they were fitted out with new democratic purpose in the fifth century. In Athens at any rate, it seems to have been the tyrants of the sixth century who set up courts, as a way of restricting the power of aristocrats and building popular support. But whatever the local circumstances, Athens was also responding to a trend that had swept across most of Greece in the sixth century: law courts were part of the tide of reforms promoting collective citizenship that swept through archaic Greece. Courts were an essential way of arming citizens against abuse and of ensuring that power was disseminated through the state rather than concentrated in the hands of wealthy individuals.2

  Inevitably, the Athenian legal system ended up being highly normative. There is a large surviving body of Athenian legal speeches, mostly from the fourth century BC; they survive because later Greeks, who prized rhetoric highly, canonized figures like Lysias, Aeschines, and Demosthenes. Scholars of social history have mined these texts for evidence of Athenian views on everything from gender and sexuality through the family to economics and political theory. No one speaks with such confidence about collective values as a lawyer, which is precisely why these texts are so revealing. But crucially religion plays a very small role in this. Of course, some crimes are religious in nature. Lysias, for example, defends one of his clients against the charge that he has removed one of the sacred olive trees that dotted the Athenian landscape (these were supposed to be offshoots of the original olive planted by Athena). And there are times when these orators strive to present their clients as pious types and their opponents as contemptuous of religion (although this is actually a rather rare strategy: much more emphasis is placed on responsible citizenship and on the treatment of fellow human beings). But there is never any sense that the court is itself an instrument of the gods’ will, or indeed that the gods’ intentions were under scrutiny at all. Athenian law was not theological. It existed solely to determine human responsibility for human action; those who tried to shift the blame onto the gods were mocked.3

  The muting of divine explanations in law courts was part of a wider trend in Athens. The search was on for nonsupernatural causes for pretty much everything: the movement of the stars, the functions of the body, individual moral agency, political history. There was an extraordinary synergy afoot; this was one of those thrilling phases in history when humans working in different areas of culture all begin to speak the same intellectual language. And the law court, this iconic feature of the new political landscape, became the most immediately identifiable symbol of a new way of thinking. Vast fields of inquiry, in nature and human society alike, had opened themselves up to empirical testing, rational theorization, and debate between specialists.4

  Although Athens is by some distance the best-documented ancient city for this period, we can see the effects of this process across the entire Greek-speaking world. The medical writings associated with Hippocrates of Cos (although in fact few if any of the texts linked to him are likely to have issued from his pen) offer a valuable non-Athenian parallel. Like the Athenian lawyers, the Hippocratic writers treated religion as a normal part of everyday life, but nevertheless they roundly rejected divine explanations for illness. Medical practitioners were not likely to be outright atheists—many of them were attached to temples of Asclepius—but they did reject explanations of illness based on divine intervention. The whole premise of Hippocratic medicine is that health is determined by our own distinctive physiological natures, modulated by the choices we make about our “diet” (the Greek diaitē refers not just to eating but to the entire bodily regimen, including sleep, exercise, and sexual practice).5

  Take the treatise On the Sacred Disease. The disease in question is epilepsy, but it swiftly becomes clear that it is “sacred” only in the popular imagination. The English word derives from the Greek epilēpsis, which means quite literally a “seizure” or “possession,” as if by a malevolent supernatural force. On the Sacred Disease, however, argues that the illness can be explained by factors that are entirely internal to the human organism. “It appears to me,” writes the author in the introduction, “to be in no way more divine or sacred than other diseases; it has a natural cause, from which it originates, like other illnesses. People consider its nature and its cause as divine out of ignorance and wonder.” The origin of this misattribution, he continues, lies with religious charlatans: “mages, purifiers, conjurors, and self-promoters, who pretend to be pious and to have some special insight.” “The god,” he opines on two occasions, “is not responsible”; the use of the language of legal culpability is striking. It is as if he is standing before a court and arguing the case against those who would explain epilepsy in terms of divine seizure.6

  It would, to be sure, be anachronistic to understand the Hippocratic agenda in terms of a battle between (atheistic) science and religion. For a start, the explanation offered is not straightforwardly scientific. The claim that in cases of epilepsy veins transmit phlegm from the liver to the brain is based not on empirical observation or testing but on a priori assumptions (which are, as it happens, entirely wrong) about the way the body works. Hippocratic doctors did not dissect human bodies. What is more, this is an argument not for the nonexistence of the gods but more narrowly for their limited explanatory role in human pathology. The writer of this tract does not dispute that there is divine presence in the world; in fact, part of his argument is that those who attribute epilepsy to divine causes are actually being offensive to the gods, by blaming such seizures on them. The argument is, rather, that the human body operates according to regular physical laws. Like Xenophanes explaining rainbows or lightning, the Hippocratic writer takes an apparently mysterious phenomenon—in this case, epileptic seizures—and posits intelligible natural causes, while at the same time deriding the naïveté of those who invoke gods. Medicine is, we might say, locally rather than globally atheistic: it seeks to disprove not the existence of gods but their influence in this particular domain.7

  The most visible and influential sign of this new “forensic” approach to the world came in the shape of the writing of history. The desire to record the past is a feature of all literate societies, but what distinguished fifth-century history from other ancient narrative traditions—those found, say, in the Iraqi epic Gilgamesh, in the poems of Homer, or the Hebrew Torah—were the excision of any mention of direct divine involvement in human affairs and the idea that the truth about the past needs careful sifting from competing reports. Like so many of the great intellectual developments of the period, the writing of history began in western Anatolia. Herodotus (ca. 480–420 BC) came from the southern town of Halicarnassus, present-day Bodrum. Like the Ionian pre-Socratics whom he resembles intellectually in many ways, he benefited from the confluence of traditions. Of mixed Greek and Carian ancestry, he lived in a city that had been under Persian occupation till the beginning of the fifth century BC; he also traveled far and wide in the eastern Mediterranean. His Histories, a huge nine-book account of hostilities between Greece and the Near East (culminating in the fifth-century invasions by the Persians Darius and Xerxes), testifies to this huge cultural and geographical sweep, ranging from the Mediterranean to Egypt, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Scythia (the area to the north of the Caspian Sea).8

  Herodotus seems to have written his great work in Athens in the 420s or so; he certainly mentions Athens and Athenian sources more than one would otherwise expect. In many places he exhales the distinctive intellectual air of the late fifth century,
and nowhere more noticeably than in his preoccupation with “causes,” aitiai, the word that is also central to the Hippocratic view of the body. Herodotus aims, he tells us in his prologue, to memorialize not just the wondrous events of the Greco-Persian Wars but also “the cause [aitiē] of their fighting with one other.” Like a Hippocratic doctor, he knows that amazing phenomena (like the Persian Wars) can be traced back to intelligible origins. In Herodotus’s case that means picking one’s way back through time. The ultimate cause of the hostilities lay in the actions of one sixth-century Anatolian monarch. “I know who it was who first initiated the injustices perpetrated against the Greeks…Croesus was a Lydian by birth, the son of Alyattes, and ruler of all the nations this side of the river Halys.” There is no Homeric-style attempt to blame hostilities on gods. History, for Herodotus, means the study of human events, “the great, wondrous deeds wrought by Greeks and barbarians.”9

  The Histories are a magnificent experiment in genre bending, an amazingly adventurous attempt to underpin the writing of political and military narrative with pre-Socratic principles. Time and again, he derides implausible or non-natural explanations. The Athenians are “foolish” for falling for the schemes of the former tyrant Pisistratus, who put a tall woman in a chariot to pose as Athena and acclaim his own impending return to the city. How did king Croesus cross the river Halys with his army? “The common story among the Greeks,” we are told, goes that the philosopher Thales rechanneled the river from in front to behind the army. This, however, is nonsense, since it would give them no route back on the return journey. No, he concludes, they must have used bridges. It is not plausible to claim that the Nile floods are caused by snow melting, since the river flows from hotter climates in the south. Every explanation must be “plausible” (oikos), which is to say in keeping with what we know about the way the world works.10