Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  Herodotus’s conception of divinity is also pre-Socratic. Scholars have argued fiercely over whether his references to the gods are just window dressing for what is basically a rational historiography or whether they are expressions of a traditional piety undislodged by his modernist commitment to naturalistic explanation. Both positions are wrong; each rests too heavily on an anachronistic science/religion distinction. The point is rather that like Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophanes, Herodotus typically uses “god” not as a religious category—as an anthropoid being or as an object of cult—but as an extension of his rationalistic system, as a figurative way of expressing the hidden coherence of things. Certainly, he is captivated by religion in all its forms: his kaleidoscopic portrait of cultural differences reveals the huge variety of types of cult practice and conceptions of the divine, from Babylonian sacred prostitution through Egyptian worship of the Apis bull to Scythian horse sacrifice. He does suggest that individual gods are capable of acting in the world: on a number of occasions, violations of the sanctity of a temple are swiftly followed by punishment. When Herodotus reflects in his own voice about the forces that steer human fortune, however, he refers to the supernatural primarily in abstract terms as “the god” or “the divine” (to theion). This divine principle exists in order to regulate the moral symmetry of the world: to make sure that there is retribution for wrongdoing (sometimes several generations later) and that the fortunes of individuals and communities both wax and wane. Communicating only through ambiguous oracles that humans struggle to decode, the divinity oversees what Herodotus calls tisis (payback), the reciprocity that underlies everything. Herodotus sees history writing as an exercise in exposing the moral patterning of political history by setting out over a long chronology the pendulum swings of human fortune (for “human prosperity never holds still in the same place,” as he says). As in the pre-Socratic cosmologies, then, “god” in this sense means not the god of religion but an abstract, underlying system that the author claims to disclose thanks to his painstaking research. God is the moral logic that holds the historical cosmos together.11

  If Herodotus is the historical equivalent of an Anaximander or Xenophanes, equating divinity with the rational ordering of his world, then his great successor Thucydides’s counterpart would be the god-free Hippo of Samos. Thucydides was a wealthy Athenian who recorded the turbulent, protracted war between Athens and Sparta that engulfed most of Greece from 431 BC until the final Spartan victory in 404 BC. Unlike his predecessor, Thucydides witnessed the war he described at first hand, having served as a general (albeit not a particularly successful one). If Herodotus describes a world full of wonders, then Thucydides exhibits a cynical verisimilitude. There is no room in his system for divine intervention or moral patterning in human fortunes. Great swings in fortune do occur, as when Athens lurches from a period of great prosperity under Pericles to a disastrous plague that decimates the population (in 430 BC). But there is no rationalization of this change in terms of cosmic principles, no Herodotean reflection that “the god gives a taste of the sweet life but then proves himself jealous in this matter.” For Thucydides, there is no explanation at all: it is just cruelly ironic.12

  According to his ancient biographer, Thucydides studied philosophy with the pre-Socratic materialist Anaxagoras and “as a result was whispered to be an atheist.” Some modern scholars have agreed with the latter assessment. We will of course never know about the personal beliefs of the historical Thucydides who wrote the words, but his History of the Peloponnesian War certainly testifies to a striking vision of human action that is entirely free from divine intervention. This is a significant moment in intellectual history: the gods are no longer the motors of human action, even metaphorically.13

  Religious beliefs and practices, certainly, are attributed to all parties, but never with any meaningful issue. Contrariwise, there are a number of points where they are associated with delusion or manipulation. This is most obvious in his handling of oracles (which had been so central to Herodotus’s sense of the divine). In the aftermath of the plague, the Athenians call to mind an oracle predicting “Doric [i.e., Spartan] war and plague [loimos],” which the older citizens alleged to have been sung of old. (Thucydides’s use of the word “allege,” phaskein, suggests that he is doubtful that there was any oracle at all—but that is beside our current point.) The problem, however, is that the word loimos sounds very much like limos (famine), and a dispute arises as to what the oracle had actually foretold. On this occasion, Thucydides says, loimos won out: since a plague is what had actually occurred, “they adjusted their memory accordingly.” But, he speculates, if another Doric war arises and this time famine (limos) occurs, “they will probably recite the verses in the other way.” Oracles in Thucydides reveal not the gods’ plan for the world but humanity’s capacity to fool itself that the arbitrary processes of fortune are somehow predestined.14

  Thucydides’s story of the disastrous unfurling of the Peloponnesian War centers not on divine laws governing the cosmos but on “human nature,” to anthrōpinon. And this nature, in his construction, is dark and brutal. One of his most engagingly repellent characters is Cleon, the popular leader; the Greek word is dēmagōgos (the modern idea of the demagogue is largely rooted in Thucydides’s portrayal of him). Cleon began his rise to power in the 420s, after the death of Pericles and during the first phase of the war with Sparta. At this point, the financial contribution of the Athenian allies was indispensable to the war effort. So when, in 428 BC, the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos attempted to revolt from the league and side with Sparta, there was much consternation at Athens. Cleon fulminated that an example must be made of the Mytileneans, for “a human being naturally treats with contempt one who treats him well, and admires him who is unyielding.” This is a bully’s charter in the guise of a statement about human nature. In any event, Cleon is narrowly overruled and the Mytileneans are spared, but the whole event has the air of a grim farce: the Athenians have already sent one ship with orders to slaughter the entire population of Mytilene, and the ship carrying the revised orders arrives only just in time. If there is a message here about human nature, it is that it is weak, indecisive, violent, and corruptible.15

  Thucydides’s history is full of such moments of bleak irony. In a replay of the Mytilene debacle, the Athenians found themselves in 416–415 BC debating whether to slaughter the adult male population of the neutral island of Melos, which lies off the southeastern coast of Greece. Thucydides states a set-piece debate between Melian and Athenian representatives. The Melians invoke divine justice: we know you are more powerful, they say, but “we have every confidence that the gods will arrange an outcome that will not see us defeated, since we are innocent and we stand against unjust men.” The Athenians have no time for this pietistic argumentation. Divine favor will in fact be on their side, they reckon, since “we follow the belief that divinity and humanity alike are subject in all things to one law of nature: where you have the power to do so, you dominate.” This “law” is not a regular feature of Greek religious thought: the Athenians have simply given a religious coloring to a principle that supports their own position. They proceed to massacre the menfolk of Melos and enslave the women and children.16

  The History culminates with the grandest folly of all. Thucydides never reaches the end of the war, which came in 404 BC: he may have died first. At any rate, his work finishes—famously, midsentence, as if he died at his desk, pen in hand—in 411 BC. Whether the ending is of Thucydides’s design or not, however, the story of an Athenian expedition to Sicily that occupies books 6 and 7 (out of 8) makes a fitting climax. In the 410s the Athenians were desperately straitened by the war effort, and badly needed new resources. Between 415 and 413 BC they mounted a campaign against the legendarily wealthy island of Sicily, long home to Greek-speaking colonies. Despite early successes, it ended in disaster. Thucydides gives a heartrending account of the bedraggled retreat of the Athenian forces, their sub
sequent massacre by better equipped and fed forces from the Sicilian city of Syracuse, and their enslavement. Some seven thousand survivors, he estimates, ended up working the stone quarries of Syracuse. “There were many of them, crowded together in a narrow pit where, since there was no roof over their heads, they suffered first from the heat of the sun and the closeness of the air—and then, when the cold autumn nights drew in, the change in temperature brought disease among them…There were bodies piled on top of each other of those who had died from their wounds or from the change of temperature or other such causes, so that the smell was intolerable. At the same time they suffered from hunger and thirst: for eight months, the allowance for each man was half a pint of water per day, and a pint of corn.” How far the mighty Athenians had fallen into shame and indignity: the Sicilian expedition was “the greatest action that we know of in Greek history: to the victors the most brilliant of victories, to the vanquished the most disastrous of defeats.”17

  When in 415 BC the Athenians debated whether or not to go to Sicily, there were two main protagonists. On the one side was the charismatic, exuberant young Alcibiades, who saw an opportunity for brilliant military success and fancied himself as the general who could deliver it. On the other side was the cautious Nicias, whose instincts were generally pacific (he had in fact already negotiated a short-term peace settlement with the Spartans in 421 BC). Alcibiades won the debate by promising the Athenians the earth, but—another grim irony—the reluctant Nicias was mandated to lead the troops; Alcibiades accompanied him but once in Sicily was swiftly recalled. In Thucydides’s portrait, Nicias is a judicious, moral, and well-meaning man—“least of the Greeks of my time did he deserve to come to so miserable an end” as he did, executed by the Syracusans—but also vacillating and superstitious.18

  In particular, Nicias prevaricated at a crucial moment because of religious scruples. In 413 BC the Spartans came to the aid of the Syracusans, and that tipped the balance against Athens. The Athenian forces, beset by sickness, decided to sail away from the camp secretly. On the decisive evening, however, there was a lunar eclipse. Nicias, who was (Thucydides tells us) “overly susceptible to religiosity [theiasmos] and that kind of thing,” delayed the escape by twenty-seven days. The Syracusans had no such scruples and turned the screw on the ailing Athenian force. Eclipses, of course, were exactly the sort of natural phenomena that Greek intellectuals had been busily explaining in accordance with physical laws for the past 150 years. Nicias’s piety is seriously misdirected—and disastrous.19

  Questions of religion overshadow Thucydides’s entire account of the Sicilian Expedition. Athenian houses and temples had outside them herms, statues made from rectangular blocks of stone with a head at the top, sometimes adorned with male genitals. One night before the expedition, most of these had their faces mysteriously damaged—by whom, no one knew. “The whole business,” Thucydides writes, “was taken very seriously, as it was regarded as an omen for the expedition.” This looks at first sight like a Herodotean divine sign, and indeed in terms of the unfurling of his story it does serve as a cautionary note. But Thucydides is in fact completely uninterested in this popular tittle-tattle. His attention is focused upon the political use made of the scandal. Some, he writes, took the mutilation “as evidence of a revolutionary plot to overthrow the democracy.” A witch hunt began, and it was alleged that Alcibiades, who was supposed to be leading the Sicilian expedition, had been one of a number of young men who had drunkenly defaced herms at an earlier stage and had parodied the Eleusinian Mysteries. (That is why he was later recalled from Sicily and stripped of his command.) Thucydides notes wryly that Alcibiades’s shrillest accusers were those who most envied his influence with the people, and those who most desired to replace him. The contrast with Herodotus could not be stronger: mysterious omens are treated not as signs of divine prognostication but as opportunities for cynical human manipulation.20

  Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.

  6

  “Concerning the Gods, I Cannot Know”

  “Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or whether they do not, or what form they have, for there are many impediments to knowledge, including obscurity and the brevity of human life.” Such was the explosive start to Protagoras’s On the Gods. The second part of the claim—the idea that the form of the gods might be unknowable to humans—was uncontroversial. Even in Homer, the gods adopt human shape and voice to appear among mortals; what they are like on Olympus is unknown. Protagoras, however, said that he could not be sure that the gods existed at all. That was an extraordinary claim.

  Protagoras was the star intellectual of his day. Born in the early fifth century BC in Thracian Abdera, he won the admiration of Pericles, who entrusted him with creating a legal code for Thurii in southern Italy, a newly founded colony (whose founding members included a young Herodotus). He visited Athens for a period in the 430s and became the elder statesman of the sophists (sophistai, “specialists in wisdom”), the experimental intellectuals gathering around Pericles in Athens. The sophists made their money teaching the children of rich young Athenians. They placed a heavy emphasis on rhetoric, for in a democratic city the only way that the elite could exert direct political influence was by being more persuasive. But they also expounded on a wide range of issues, from morality through the interpretation of Homer and linguistic theory to the origins of human civilization. The sophistic movement was, ultimately, responsible for expanding the compass of philosophical enquiry, so that it now included not just cosmology and theology but also the more human spheres of ethics, logic, epistemology, and aesthetics.1

  Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, although written some forty years after the death of its subject, paints a vivid picture of the febrile excitement surrounding one of his return visits to Athens in the late 420s:2

  Last night, or rather very early this morning, Hippocrates, the son of Apollodorus and the brother of Phason, gave a tremendous thump with his staff at my door; someone opened to him, and he came rushing in and cried out: “Socrates, are you awake or asleep?” I knew his voice, and said: “Hippocrates, is that you? And do you bring any news?” “Good news,” he said, “nothing but good.” “Delightful,” I said, “but what is the news? And why have you come here at this unearthly hour?” He drew nearer to me and said: “Protagoras has come!” “Yes,” I replied, “he came two days ago: have you only just heard of his arrival?” “Yes, by the gods,” he said, “only yesterday evening.”3

  This passage captures the knuckle-whitening anticipation of a superstar’s arrival in town, the swiftness of the news grapevine, the competition between fans to be more in the know. Protagoras is, it turns out, lodging at the house of Callias, one of the wealthiest men in Athens. With some difficulty, Socrates and Hippocrates gain admission to Callias’s house, where the cream of Athenian intellectual life is assembled: among them Pericles’s son Xanthippus and the sophist Hippias of Elis. Prodicus of Ceos is snoozing in a pile of sheepskins. Also present are the physician Eryximachus, the tragic poet Agathon, and the impossibly charismatic (but also impossibly fickle) politician Alcibiades, three figures who also feature in Plato’s Symposium. Even Critias is there, at this stage a young poet and intellectual and not yet the vicious leader of the Thirty Tyrants who grabbed power after the Spartan defeat of Athens. A more stellar cast could hardly be imagined. When Protagoras came to town, all of the gilded youth wanted to know.

  “Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or whether they do not, or what form they have…” We only have the opening sentence of On the Gods, but there are hints elsewhere that may help us t
o reconstruct Protagoras’s argument. This cannot have been a simple statement of agnosticism. According to his philosophical principles, if the gods cannot be known, they have no real existence. “When things are real,” he said elsewhere, “their being is equivalent to their appearance.” This sounds rather mystifying in English, but in Greek it is clearer. If something “appears,” it appears to someone: it is perceived by her. In other words, things can only exist when they are perceived to exist. Trees that fall in deserted forests make no sound. It follows, then, that gods that cannot be perceived do not exist.4

  Protagoras’s claim that being is equivalent to appearance is part of a wider argument about relativism. Relativism is the theory that there are no universal truths: every society, every community, indeed every individual has a different conception of what is the case. A brief digression on Protagoras’s theory of relativism will help us fill out his ideas about the gods. In the passage immediately following the claim that being is equivalent to appearing, Protagoras proceeds to discuss a series of cases where the truth of the matter is, as he puts it, “nonevident” (adēlon). The first is a simple one. If I am sitting down, you can only determine that that is the case if you are in the same room as I am. It is only “evident” for those who can witness it. The second case is that of the moon: it is only evident when you can actually see it. This is a more complex issue, since in a world before telescopes (and without awareness of different hemispheres) it was not self-evident that the moon exists when it cannot be seen. Protagoras was quite right to caution his contemporaries against the automatic assumption that things that are not visible continue to exist. His final example is of a different kind. Honey, he says, may taste sweet to one person but bitter to another (if that person has a fever, for example). The sweetness, then, is not an intrinsic property of the honey itself; rather, it is the judgment of the person tasting it. This is a different kind of “appearing”: the “nonevident” issue here is not whether the honey exists, but what properties it has. Each of the three cases, however, is alike in that it puts the emphasis upon the subjectivity of truth. The fact that Protagoras is sitting down, the existence of the moon, and the sweetness of honey are true only for the individuals to whom these things appear to be the case.