Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  The Great Dionysia, Athens’s major theatrical festival, lasted five days. Three of these days were each given over to four plays by a single poet: three tragedies, followed by a satyr play (a jokey drama featuring actors dressed as satyrs). One more was probably devoted to poetic performances known as dithyrambs and one to various comedies. For tragedy and comedy there was a competition, judged by individuals randomly chosen from the tribes of Athens. The results were inscribed on stone; in a number of cases, these inscriptions survive.

  The origins of ancient theater are uncertain. Corinthian pottery from 630 BC onward shows padded dancers, which may suggest some kind of early ritual performance in costume in honor of Dionysus. All that can be said for sure, however, is that dramatic festivals began to appear in the late sixth century BC in Athens and elsewhere, and that the Athenian variety came to be an iconic expression of democratic identity in the fifth. The interplay between the chorus, an anonymous collective body, and the named actors neatly encapsulated the dynamics of a society that was constantly anxious about the relationship between individual and community, and between elite and mass. Tragedies, moreover, typically focused on mythological characters from the heroic past and afforded the Athenians an opportunity to think about the continuities and discontinuities between the age of aristocratic dominance and the democratic present. Comedy, meanwhile, was all about the contemporary world and explored the spectators’ immediate concerns in a playful idiom. A vibrant, successful, cosmopolitan city like Athens needed mass media to hold it together, to supply a shared narrative for its diverse population. Theater gave this imagined community a sense of cohesion and solidarity.1

  There is another major difference between ancient and modern theater. The Great Dionysia was above all a religious event, a public holiday devoted to the god Dionysus that was formally marked on the civic calendar. The theater complex was also dedicated to Dionysus, who had a temple nearby. The festivities were inaugurated with blood sacrifices. But if the context was religious, the plays themselves were not liturgical. They were written for the occasion by playwrights who had no special religious role. Their primary purpose in putting on these plays was competitive: they sought to win the first prize in the most prestigious literary festival in Greece. There is no mention in the ancient inscriptions of plays redounding to the glory of Dionysus; what counted in the competition was skill in composition.

  Nevertheless, many modern commentators continue to insist that Greek drama was fundamentally religious. The fault lies in part with Aristotle, and his claim in the Poetics that tragedy derived from dithyramb (a type of hymn sung to Dionysus) and poetry connected with satyrs, and comedy from songs accompanying phallic processions. The phrasing is a bit obscure, but it can be taken to suggest that the earliest forms of what we would now call tragedy and comedy were in fact ritual in nature, cult songs to Dionysus. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elaborate structures were built around this claim: following the prevailing romantic view of Greek culture at the time, scholars sought to derive tragedy and comedy from some kind of primal moment when Greek literature and religion were tightly interwoven. The Greek word for “tragedy” is tragōidia, which seems to suggest a song (oidē) for a goat (tragos). In fact it is entirely unclear what tragedy had to do with goats, but the romantic-influenced scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed that tragedy had been originally connected either to goat sacrifice or to dancing choruses of people dressed ritually as goats. This is all fantasy. Even Aristotle’s talk of satyr plays and phallic songs is likely to have been guesswork: he probably had no historical sources to draw on. Aristotle knew no more than we do about the real origins. And in any case, even if tragedy was originally connected to ritual in this way, that tells us nothing about its social role in the fifth century BC.2

  Tragedy in particular has been assumed to be essentially religious also on the basis of its content. Many of the plays have religious themes or feature gods. Many of the plays are of a formulaic “transgression and punishment” type: mortals overreach themselves and are knocked down by jealous deities, who are keen to assert their position of authority. So—goes this line of thinking—the plays project a religiously conservative ethos, encouraging viewers to accept their authority. (This is less true of comedy, which can satirize not just religion but even the gods: in Aristophanes’s Frogs, for example, Dionysus, the god of the theater itself, is portrayed as a bumbling, timorous fool.) In tragedy, going against the gods is always a bad thing to do and inevitably leads to disaster, whether we think of Oedipus’s believing that he has dodged Apollo’s prophecy, Hippolytus’s offending of Aphrodite by renouncing sex, or Pentheus’s refusing to accept the cult of the new god Dionysus. Yet even these cases cannot prove that tragic drama was primarily a religious form. For a start, the gods of tragedy are not straightforwardly the gods worshipped in the city of Athens. In Greek polytheism, religious ritual is always localized: you pray not to Athena as an abstract deity but as her specific manifestation in your local sanctuary. The gods of tragedy are not the cult deities of Athens but the literary figures portrayed in the mythological poems of Homer and Hesiod. Even more troubling is the fact that, despite all the talk of divine justice, the gods of tragedy seem cruel, vindictive, and petty. Near the start of Euripides’s Trojan Women, for example, Athena announces that now that Troy has been sacked brutally she will no longer support the Greeks; instead she wants to ruin their voyages home. “Why do you leap from mood to mood in this way?” asks her fellow god Poseidon. “Whether you hate or love someone, you hate or love too forcefully.” In the same poet’s Hippolytus, Aphrodite’s decision to kill off the play’s central figure simply for choosing to avoid sex seems selfish and severe, as does Artemis’s promise at the end to take revenge for Hippolytus’s death by killing one of Aphrodite’s favorites. The gods of tragedy rarely embody the kind of benevolent justice that a pious moralist would want to attribute to them.3

  Athenian drama could indeed be said to be “religious,” but only in the sense that it was profoundly interested in questions about gods of the most contemporary, indeed challenging kinds. It was not just Critias, the author of the Sisyphus fragment, who reacted to the atheist revolution. Already, in the 420s, in the glow of the sophistic movement, tragedies and comedies began to explore the question of whether gods exist. The ideas canvassed by Protagoras, Democritus, and Prodicus reached a broad audience thanks to the theater.

  Aristophanes’s comedy Knights, his fourth play (produced in 424 BC) is a complex, allegorical satire on Aristophanes’s nemesis, the politician Cleon, who is played as one of the slaves in the household of Demos (“People,” or “State”). The play opens with two other slaves complaining about the new slave and engaging in some banter about how to evade him:

  SECOND SLAVE: The best option open to us is to go to some god’s statue [bretas] and prostrate ourselves before it.

  FIRST SLAVE: What do you mean, statatatue [bretetetas: the slave acts as if he cannot even pronounce the word]? Do you really believe in gods?

  SECOND SLAVE: Of course.

  FIRST SLAVE: What’s your proof?

  SECOND SLAVE: The fact that I’m cursed by them. Won’t that do?

  FIRST SLAVE: Well, it’s good enough for me.4

  It’s a nice joke: being godforsaken is offered as evidence that the gods must exist. But it is more than a joke; it is also a comment on intellectual fashions. The second slave suggests that believing in gods is old-fashioned (“Do you really believe in gods?”) and demands instead a tekmērion, “proof.” The use of this particular word, which has a specialist ring to it, suggests that Aristophanes is having fun by giving a slave a bit of contemporary philosophical jargon.

  Aristophanes certainly associated fashionable thinkers with disbelief in the gods. In 423 BC he unveiled Clouds, a satire on contemporary intellectuals. The title alluded at once to pre-Socratic speculation about the nature of the heavens and to the fluffiness (as he saw it) of thei
r ideas. The play was unsuccessful, so he revised it; the version that survives was produced at some point between 420 and 417 BC. A satire on the new intellectual culture of Athens, it centers on a figure called Strepsiades (“Twister”) who wants an easy way out of paying for the gambling debts racked up by his horse-mad son Phidippides (“Easy-on-the-Horses”). Hearing of a school of rhetoric run by Socrates that can teach pupils to make any argument seem overpowering, he signs up for it. In the course of the play he learns how to make the weaker argument seem stronger before defiantly rejecting all this nonsense and putting the school to the torch. Socrates—a distorted parody of the real philosopher—is portrayed as pretentious, vain, self-serving, and ethically dangerous. His disciples reject all forms of traditional morality, including belief in the Olympian gods (“You swear by Olympian Zeus! What idiocy; to think that someone of your age should still think that Zeus exists!”). The Clouds of the play’s title are represented by the chorus: they are the goddesses worshipped by Socrates and his coterie. “They are the only true deities,” proclaims Socrates, “all the rest are nonsense.” “What?” replies Strepsiades. “By Earth! You don’t count Olympian Zeus as a god?” “What do you mean, Zeus? Stop babbling: Zeus doesn’t even exist!” Socrates goes on to argue his case using “evidence” (sēmeia)—presumably these are the kind of “proofs” for the existence of a god that the first slave in Knights was craving.5

  Tragedy responded to the sophists in subtler ways, projecting the issues onto a mythical canvas, so that the connections with contemporary culture become suggestive rather than explicit. One of the greatest examples of Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, is a case in point. The date is not certain, but 428 BC or so seems likely; this would place it precisely in the eye of the sophistic storm. Sophocles has often been thought to be the most religiously minded of the three major tragedians, but Oedipus the King paints a more complex, challenging picture than this. Oedipus is centrally about divine prophecy and humans’ attempts to assert control over lives that have already been predestined. The young Oedipus was given a prophecy by the Delphic oracle that he would marry his mother and kill his father. He has left his hometown of Corinth to avoid fulfilling the oracle and resettled in Thebes, where he has become king and married Jocasta, the wife of the old king Laius. In the course of the play he discovers the truth: that he was actually born in Thebes to Jocasta and Laius; that they exposed him to die on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron, on hearing the same prophecy about his future; and that he was rescued and brought up in Corinth. He had killed his biological father Laius in a fight on the way into Thebes. So unbeknownst to everyone, Apollo’s prediction has already come true: despite his best attempts to do otherwise he ended up both killing his father and marrying his mother. In his grief, he puts out his own eyes and totters off into exile.6

  An Athenian spectator would have seen all sorts of parallels between the play and contemporary life. When the play opens, Thebes is being ravaged by plague (Apollo’s vengeance for Oedipus’s unwitting murder of his father). Athens too suffered terribly from a ghastly plague in the years between 430 and 426 BC, the result of Pericles’s policy of confining the citizens behind the city walls while the Spartans, during these opening years of the war between the two states, laid waste to the fields outside. Viewers are likely to have seen an immediate, if indirect, connection between the two situations. And then Oedipus himself, who is characterized as a rational intellectual, will surely have reminded viewers of Pericles, the general and unofficial leader of Athens, who died from the same plague in 429 BC. Oedipus’s claim to intellectual distinction rests on his having freed Thebes from the curse of the Sphinx, having solved her riddle using his intelligence alone. The hints seem unmissable: in the myth, Thebes has a much-loved leader who prides himself on his rational abilities, but whose overconfidence leads to his ruin; in Athens too, the much-feted leader Pericles, proud of his links to contemporary intellectuals but ultimately the cause of a terrible plague.

  Pericles was also one of a circle of intellectuals who were linked in the public imagination with atheism. Among these was Anaxagoras, who had been impeached at some point in the 430s on the charge of “not believing in the gods.” The architect of the impeachment had been a seer called Diopeithes. He, we are told, “brought in a bill providing for the public impeachment of such as did not cultivate the gods, or who taught doctrines regarding the heavens, directing suspicion at Pericles by means of Anaxagoras.” This lends a contemporary complexion to the scene in Oedipus the King where Oedipus confronts the blind Tiresias, a seer who uses the flight of birds to tell the future. It is Tiresias who first claims that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius and the source of the pollution that is afflicting the land. Oedipus responds furiously, setting his own intellectual achievement in solving the Sphinx’s riddle against the prophet’s insights. “Tell me now,” he sneers, “what makes you the lucid prophet? Why, when the dog-bard [i.e., the Sphinx] was here, did you not come up with some utterance that would deliver the citizens from their fate? After all, the riddle was not a common-or-garden one: it called for prophecy. But you came forth with no revelation derived from birds or gods. I was the one who came along, ‘know-nothing Oedipus’: I stopped her, using my native intelligence, not bird-lore.” In other words, Oedipus opposes rational human intelligence to divine mumbo-jumbo. Jocasta’s brother Creon, he thunders, must be aspiring to the throne and must have paid this “mage, weaver of tricks, fraudulent vagabond priest” to come up with prophecies against him. All of these insults involve exactly the kind of charges that Sophocles’s contemporaries would level at religious cranks. Calling him a “mage” (magos) associates him with the Persian magi; “fraudulent vagabond priest” links him to the priests of new cults that were being introduced into Athens from abroad, worshipping the Phrygian Great Mother, Sabazios, and Bendis. Beyond this general assimilation of Tiresias with some of the outlandish religious practices current in Athens at the time, he also looks—from certain angles—oddly like Diopeithes himself. Both, notably, are seers associated with Apollo. And around the time that Sophocles’s play was performed, Diopeithes was being pilloried by comic poets for his eccentric religious behavior, mocked as a “madman” and envisaged as performing undignified, ecstatic dances to drumbeats. Aristophanes sarcastically calls him “the great Diopeithes” and implies (just as Oedipus does for Tiresias) that he invented oracles to suit his own needs. The fit between Tiresias and Diopeithes is not exact, nor is that between Oedipus and Pericles/Anaxagoras, but ancient audiences would surely have seen enough common ground to realize that issues of contemporary import were being addressed in the play.7

  Oedipus’s attempts to evade the oracle have profound theological significance. To doubt the efficacy of prophecy is to doubt the gods’ ability to predetermine the future. Later in the play, Oedipus’s wife (and, it will transpire, mother) Jocasta believes that she and Oedipus have proven Apollo wrong by escaping the implications of the oracle. She comments, “As a result, I wouldn’t look this way or that as far as prophecy is concerned, in the future.” To be sure, she is not denying the existence of the gods as such. But there is no minimizing the force of her words: prophecy, she says, does not work. It should be ignored. This is a powerfully heretical position, in ancient terms.8

  The antireligious theme reaches a climax in a song that the chorus subsequently sings, concluding with what must have seemed an even more shocking claim:

  No more shall I go in reverence to the untouchable

  Belly-button of the world,

  Nor to the temple at Abae,

  Nor to Olympia,

  If prophecies shall no longer be manifestly

  Fitting for all mortals.

  But, O Zeus the mighty, if you are properly so called,

  Ruler of all, let not this pass you by,

  You and that eternally immortal rule of yours.

  The old prophecies concerning Laius are fading

  And now men give them no
value.

  Nowhere is Apollo glorified with honours;

  Religion is no more.9

  This is extraordinary stuff. The major prophetic centers of Delphi, Abae, and Olympia are, the chorus say, to be avoided. This neglect will have consequences for the very authority of the king of the gods, who is addressed as “Zeus the mighty, if you are properly so called, ruler of all.” Now, it is quite right to say, as commentators on this passage usually do, that there are parallels in regular prayers for expressions of uncertainty about the proper form of address to a deity. It is imperative, in Greek religion, to get the god’s ritual name right. But the words of Sophocles’s chorus are anything but formulaically banal. The ode poses a logical problem, in a precise and focused way: How can Zeus truly be called “mighty” if the gods have lost control of foreknowledge? Mistrust in oracles affects belief in the gods’ power in general, not just in the prophetic centers. So the chorus concludes: religion—ta theia, “god stuff”—is no more. There is surely a sophistic argument lying behind this reasoning: If divine predictions do not come true, then the gods are not in control of the universe and what need is there to worship them? The very phrase “ta theia” would have sounded jarringly modern to an Athenian audience of the later fifth century BC: it is a word drawn from contemporary intellectual life, not from poetry. And we know from other sources that there were those who denied the truth of prophecy, from the pre-Socratic Xenophanes onward. A character in Euripides’s Helen opines (in terms that recall Oedipus’s attack on Tiresias) that “the words of the prophets are base and full of lies…naked intelligence and good advice are the best prophet.” Sophocles’s chorus is declaring itself convinced by such arguments, on the basis of what they have seen before their eyes.10