Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  What does this have to do with On the Gods? The one surviving sentence suggests that what Protagoras was centrally interested in were the questions “How can you know whether the gods exist?” and “How can you know what form they have?” The first of these corresponds to the sitting Protagoras and the moon. If you cannot see the moon (or the sitting Protagoras) you have no evidence that it exists. It is “nonevident.” Similarly, if you cannot see the gods, they are “nonevident” to you. The second question of On the Gods, concerning what they look like, corresponds to the sweetness of honey. If we agree (for the sake of argument) that gods exist, then the next problem we are faced with is the fact that different cultures imagine them in different ways. Xenophanes had already observed that “Africans say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired.” If Protagoras knew Herodotus, either from their days in Thurii or from Athens, he may well have heard also of Egyptian animal gods, and of the multifarious deities of the Babylonians, Syrians, Iranians, and Scythians. The gods are perceived differently by different peoples—just as the taste of honey varies depending on the taster. It is likely, I think, that On the Gods argued on the basis of the variety of religions across the known world that there is no universal truth about the nature of the gods. Their nature is “nonevident”: there is no stronger reason to believe, like the Thracians, that they have red hair than to agree with the Ethiopians that they are black-skinned.5

  This is a powerful argument, and a radical one. Later generations would claim that the Athenians exiled him for On the Gods and publicly burned his books. If this report is true, it underlines Athens’s schizophrenic attitude toward its intellectuals. If it is not true, it is even so evidence that he gained a reputation for atheism in later years. Modern scholars, with their penchant for painting the Greeks as pious, have sometimes claimed that Protagoras’s real aim was not to deny the existence of gods but to shift the focus onto the celebration of religion as a human social practice: “His agnostic sentence at the opening of On the Gods,” one critic has written, “created the space for an anthropocentric, humanistic religion that knows—not the gods but the good things the gods bring.” But the evidence for this is slim, and the unwarranted language of divine beneficence (“the good things the gods bring”) reveals the author’s own theistic agenda. It is true that Plato’s Protagoras portrays its subject speculating about early human civilizations in a way that suggests that gods do exist: “Man, having a share of the divine attributes, was at first the only one of the animals who had any gods, because he alone was of their kind; and he used to raise altars and images of them.” If this is genuine Protagoras, then not only could he talk about gods as really existing but he also thought that humans worship them because they have a natural, built-in propensity to do so. But in fact there is no reason to assume that Plato—who was about five years old at the time that the visit of Protagoras he is describing took place—is recording the myth verbatim. The reference to the gods is a fleeting one and irrelevant to the main point being argued (which is that virtue can be taught). It is highly likely to be a Platonic curlicue rather than part of any authentically Protagorean doctrine. On the Gods was almost certainly (as its opening sentence suggests) a discourse attacking the assumption that gods have an objective existence, as opposed to a celebration of humans’ subjective experience of them.6

  There were, however, those who took an interest in the anthropology of religion—and did so to devastating effect. Among the Athenian intelligentsia awaiting Protagoras’s lecture in Plato’s vignette, curled up in the sheepskins, was Prodicus of Ceos. Prodicus was another sophist with a reputation in antiquity for atheism. Until the 1970s it had been hard to explain what had won him this fame, but then came a re-edited version of a book called On Piety by the first-century BC philosopher Philodemus. On Piety was not transmitted via the conventional route for classical texts, namely manual recopying in the Middle Ages: it was among the ancient books recovered from the so-called Villa of the Papyri in the town of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples. Like all 1,800 or so of the Herculaneum scrolls, it had been carbonized and buried by the pyroclastic flow from the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Further damage had been done by early attempts to unroll the scrolls: the outer layers had been destroyed in order to access the inner parts of the sheet. In the case of the first book of On Piety, the scroll had also been cut in two, and the halves had been catalogued separately, and later generations had been unaware that the two belonged together. To make matters worse, several fragments, and all the early drawings, had been spirited away from Italy to Oxford. The reunited and reconstructed text, which was published in 1996 by Dirk Obbink, is one of the great achievements of modern classical scholarship.7

  It is, however, book 2 of On Piety, which is still not fully published, that shows there were at least two fifth-century thinkers who attacked religion as a construct of human society. One was Democritus (ca. 460–380 BC), the pre-Socratic philosopher of atoms and void. His interests, however, were extraordinarily broad and extended into the anthropology of religion. Democritus, we can now be sure, argued that humans originally lived like animals; they then formed communities to prevent attacks from other beasts; that led to communication and language; then clothing and agriculture; then shelter and fire. Civilization, this theory proposes, developed as a result of human ingenuity in response to dire need. What is more, religion was (Democritus argued) part of this civilizing process. Early humans noted the turning of the seasons; “Quite reasonably, therefore,” says Philodemus (paraphrasing Democritus), “they also posited an agent behind these occurrences, and worshipped it.” The logical conclusion to draw from these observations is that conventional religion is based on error: early humans simply misunderstood phenomena that should be explained through scientific materialism. What is more, since civilization has now moved on, we no longer need these primitive modes of explanation.8

  The second person who saw religion as a product of human culture was Prodicus himself (ca. 460–390 BC). Like Democritus, he wrote on a huge range of subjects, including linguistics, ethics, and cosmology (this is an appropriate moment to recall that the distinction between pre-Socratic philosophers and sophists was not hard and fast). Again as with Democritus, none of his original texts survive, so we depend on reconstructions from other sources. The Philodemus papyrus is indispensable. The relevant passage (which, unfortunately, is fragmentary) reads:

  […] says that the gods of popular belief do not exist, nor do they have knowledge, and that the ancients in admiration […] the fruits of the earth, and absolutely everything that is useful for life.9

  Prodicus is not named in the gappy papyrus, but it must be him: there are plenty of other indications that he was associated with the belief that early humans attributed divinity to aspects of nature that benefited humanity (whereas Democritus included harmful aspects too). Prodicus’s book on the subject was probably called The Seasons and seems to have tied the emergence of religion closely to the development of farming (perhaps with a nod to Hesiod, the poet-farmer who was so instrumental in the creation of Greek theology). What is significant about the Philodemus passage is that it couples this “anthropological” reading of early religion with a strongly atheist argument: “The gods of popular belief do not exist, nor do they have knowledge.” It looks, indeed, as if he imagined a two-stage process. First, these primitives deified the four elements (earth, fire, water, air) and the sun and the moon. A second stage of deification came with the working of the land: they treated as gods those who discovered certain nourishing foodstuffs, so that the inventor of wine was worshipped as Dionysus, that of bread as Demeter, those of shipping as Castor and Pollux. One additional point to emphasize is that Prodicus was (we know from other sources) interested in the creative use of etymology, the study of the origins of words. In a separate part of Philodemus, Prodicus is included among those who “change the letters of” (paragrammizousi) the names of the gods. It is likely, I think, that amo
ng these letter changes was the derivation of “Hera” (in Greek Ēra) from “air” (aēr), which is attested in later sources. Prodicus’s pantheon, therefore, may have looked something like this:10

  Zeus = ? the heavens?

  Hera = air

  Poseidon = water

  Hephaestus = fire

  Gaia = earth

  Demeter = the inventor of crops, agriculture, bread

  Dionysus = the inventor of wine

  Castor and Pollux = the inventors of shipping

  Whether he completed the list, and how far down the Greeks’ long list of divinities he proceeded, we shall probably never know. The important point is that, like Democritus, he saw religion as the invention of early humanity as it emerged from a state of nature, and therefore not as integral to humanity but as a cultural invention. Now, the Philodemus passage specifies that “the gods of popular belief do not exist,” which might be taken to mean that Prodicus thought that there were indeed true gods—just not those of myth and cult. Yet the choice of translation matters greatly: an alternative would be “all those considered as gods by humans,” i.e., in effect, “the so-called gods do not exist.” On balance, it seems to me likely that Prodicus was an out-and-out atheist, denying the existence of any gods, given that he was always associated in antiquity with the complete denial of divinity.11

  How far such heretical ideas percolated beyond a narrow circle of wealthy intellectuals into popular culture is hard to tell, but there is some indication that they found their way into the popular theater. In Athens, drama was mass entertainment. Plays were composed in huge numbers throughout the fifth and fourth centuries BC and performed onstage before thousands of people. By chance, one dramatic speech—again it is, frustratingly, now a fragment without its wider context—survives that shows how a full version of the kind of argument made by Democritus of Prodicus might have played out, and how it might have been received in popular culture. It was rescued from oblivion by later philosophers interested in the development of atheist thought. Its authorship is unclear: one ancient source says it is by the tragedian Euripides, while others give it to Critias. Critias is probably the better candidate, since it is likelier that a dramatic fragment should have been wrongly attributed to a famous dramatist than to someone who is not otherwise known to have written plays. Critias was famous for two things: being the ringleader of the Thirty Tyrants in the bloodthirsty coup that followed Sparta’s victory over Athens in 404 BC, and being Plato’s uncle. The latter is more important for the purposes of this text. He was one of those who (in Plato’s description) gathered at Callias’s house to greet Protagoras, a member of the hyperintellectual inner circle, and well placed to transmit cutting-edge ideas.

  The speaker is the mythological character Sisyphus. That in itself is very interesting. Sisyphus was one of the sons of Aeolus and so belonged to the second generation of that mythical family (including Salmoneus, Alcyone, and Bellerophon) that seemed to have theomachy running through its veins. In the Hesiodic Catalogue, Aeolus’s family seem always to be trying to deny the privilege of the gods or claim it for humans. In this fragment, however, Sisyphus’s atheism takes the form of a sophistic account of the origins of religion:12

  There was a time when humans’ life was unordered,

  Bestial and subservient to violence;

  When there was no reward for the noble

  Or chastisement for the base.

  And then, it seems to me, humans set up

  Laws, so that justice should be tyrant

  And hold aggression enslaved.

  Anyone who erred was punished.

  Then, when laws prevented them

  From performing open acts of force,

  They started performing them in secret; and then, it seems to me,

  Some shrewd man, wise in his counsel,

  Discovered for mortals fear of the gods, so that

  The base should have fear, if even in secret

  They should do or say or think anything.

  So he thereupon introduced religion,

  Namely the idea that there is a deity flourishing with immortal life,

  Hearing in his mind, seeing, thinking,

  Attending to these things and having a divine nature,

  Who will hear everything said among mortals,

  And will be able to see everything that is done.

  If you plan some base act in silence,

  The gods will not fail to notice.

  If anything, in fact, this is a more radical critique than those of Democritus and Prodicus. Those two saw religion as a bottom-up process, driven by early humanity’s desire to master a natural world that they barely understood. For them, religion begins as a cognitive process and only then becomes institutionalized. To Critias’s Sisyphus, however, it is from the very start a process of social control. There is no romanticization of the primitive here. Religion is the creation of a “shrewd man,” who sought nothing more than the imposition of order on a naïve people. Sisyphus describes a two-stage process to curtail wrongdoing: first law is introduced, and then when that fails to prevent secret criminality, religion. The French philosopher Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, his history of the modern penal system, that eighteenth-century Europe saw a shift from the chastisement of criminal acts to a new focus on controlling the person. He takes as paradigmatic of this shift Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison called the Panopticon, in which prisoners are visible to guards at all times but never know whether or not they are being observed. On Sisyphus’s account, a similar shift occurred with the invention of religion: the wise man concocts “the idea that there is a deity… / Who will hear everything said among mortals, / And will be able to see everything that is done.” After the invention of religion, Sisyphus says, society is no longer restricted to punishing public manifestations of disorder; it can now convince its citizens that their innermost thoughts are subject to moral evaluation. The world has become a kind of religious Panopticon.13

  After the passage quoted above, Sisyphus goes on to play with Democritus’s ideas about primitive humanity’s fear of the natural elements. The shrewd inventor of religion, Sisyphus proclaims, “said that the gods dwell in that place where / They would most terrify humans, / From whence he knew mortals’ terrors come, / And the benefits for their miserable lives.” He located the gods in the heavens, in other words. Democritus had claimed that primitive people spontaneously associated the gods with the natural features of the cosmos that are most terrifying or beneficial; Sisyphus by contrast thinks this belief was imposed on them from above. Religion is a fiction enforced from above in an attempt to secure social order.

  What happened next in the play? Given that all that survives is this fragment, we can only guess, but the guess is an educated one. Whenever he appears in myth, Sisyphus is associated with crimes against the gods. Every visitor to the ancient theater would have known, moreover, that when Homer’s Odysseus visits the underworld, he sees Sisyphus heaving that famous rock up the hill. However the story was tweaked, his destiny was surely to be punished horribly. This certainly puts a different complexion on his theory of religion: in Critias’s play, it is highly likely that it was precisely for his intellectual theomachy that he was chastised. But at the same time as viewers were encouraged to revel in the defeat of the atheist, they were surely encouraged to applaud this spectacular display of intellectual showmanship, deliciously marinated in the rich flavors of contemporary sophistry. Sisyphus may have been the villain of the piece, but like Milton’s Satan he surely got the best lines.14

  7

  Playing the Gods

  Imagine the theater of Dionysus in Athens, during the springtime festival of the Great Dionysia. Imagine not the warm, hushed gloom of an evening inside, alongside five hundred middle-class peers in frocks and suits, but a noisy, rambunctious crowd of more than ten thousand making merry under the harsh, unforgiving sun of Athens. The audience is seated not in serried rows, their gaze funneled tow
ard the only source of light; they are spread out on wooden benches across an immense horseshoe-like arc on the slopes of the Acropolis, their gaze drawn as much to the city in front of them and to their fellow audience members as to the stage. Sometimes they are chatting, snacking, laughing; at other times they are deathly silent, riveted by the action. The audience is here not because they have chosen to spend their leisure time at the theater—the idea of “leisure time” does not really exist in a world without nine-to-fives and weekends—but because the entire city is summoned to annual festivals. This is not a celebration of elite privilege, a time for chiffon and tuxedos, but an event in popular culture. There are exclusions, for sure. If women are present, their numbers are small. Of the city’s 100,000 or so slaves (around 40 percent of the total population), few are likely to be present. Even free men without citizenship—the so-called metics—may not have had an automatic right to attend. But despite these restrictions, Athenian drama is an inclusive, diverse experience, with a carnival-like atmosphere.