Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  Most would agree that the picture of Socrates as an ethical philosopher, glimpsed dimly through Xenophon and Plato, is likely to be historically accurate, at least for his later years. But agreeing to this does not resolve the wider problem of how and why Xenophon and Plato have distorted that picture. The crucial point is that both of these authors composed in the aftermath of his trial and execution. As apologists for a man condemned as a state criminal, they were placed in a very difficult position, particularly in the matter of religion. Their central mission was, in different ways, to rescue their hero from the atheistic opprobrium poured on him by the state.

  This awkwardness is visible everywhere in the opening words of Xenophon’s Recollections of Socrates. Here Xenophon explicitly—and perhaps there is an element of protesting too much—rebuts the charge against Socrates, focusing on the accusation that he “does not recognize the gods that the state recognizes.” How can this be? Xenophon wonders. He sacrificed regularly and consulted oracles. Everyone knew this. He even claimed to be guided by a daimonion, a “divine thing,” which is hardly consistent with the idea of disbelieving in gods. What, then, is the problem? But there is indeed a problem, which Xenophon is sweeping under his finely woven Persian carpet. Socrates’s daimonion was not simply (as Xenophon suggests) a god like any other one in the city but a personal connection to the divine that bypassed the processes of state religion. In democratic Athens that was an issue: it was tantamount to setting oneself above one’s peers, in religious terms.10

  It is Plato more than Xenophon who is responsible for transforming the picture of Socrates. Almost all of his philosophical treatises come in the form of dialogues between Socrates and one or more others. In the early Plato, as in Xenophon, the apologetic project is never far from the surface. But while Xenophon tries to present him as a regular Athenian, in religious terms, Plato takes the bull by the horns. His Socrates is a pious one—but in a wholly new way, which threatens to subvert the very foundations of conventional Athenian religious sensibility.

  Euthyphro, a dialogue between Socrates and the self-proclaimed religious expert of the title, is one of Plato’s very earliest dialogues (perhaps even his earliest). It is set in the run-up to the trial, and the discussion is prompted by Euthyphro’s incredulity that Socrates of all people could be tried for impiety. This leads them into a discussion of the nature of piety and holiness. Euthyphro, it transpires, is being accused of unholiness by his own family, since he has decided to prosecute his own father for murder. The dialogue is really about unsettling Euthyphro’s overconfident belief that he knows what piety and holiness are. Time and again he tries to define these terms, and every time he fails when probed by Socrates. At the end of the dialogue he suddenly declares himself in a hurry and rushes off, leaving the discussion unresolved. In the context of the trial, the implication of the dialogue is that “piety” is a much more complex field than most people, including Socrates’s accusers, realize—and so his conviction for impiety turns on a misapprehension.

  Even more explicitly apologetic is (as the name suggests) the Apology, which purports to be Socrates’s defense speech at the trial in 399 BC. Here, Socrates is portrayed as directly addressing an accusation of atheism leveled at him by Meletus, one of the two prosecutors:

  SOCRATES: At any rate tell us, Meletus, how do you say that I corrupt the young? Is it that you think it is obvious, according to the terms of the prosecution that you brought, that it is by teaching them “not to recognize the gods the state believes in, but other new divine powers instead”? Isn’t that how you say that I corrupt them with my teaching?

  MELETUS: That is exactly what I say.

  SOCRATES: In that case, Meletus, do tell me (I beg you by these very gods that we are talking about!) to clarify the situation for both me and the jurors. For I do not understand: Is it that you are saying that I teach people that there are indeed some gods, and the accusation is that they are not those of the city? (I can tell you I do recognize that there are gods, and I am not guilty of being an out-and-out atheist!) Or is it that you say I don’t recognize gods at all, and I teach this position to others?

  MELETUS: The second option: that you do not recognize gods at all.

  SOCRATES: You are extraordinary, Meletus! Why do you say this? Do I not even recognize the sun or the moon as gods, as other people do?

  MELETUS: No by Zeus, judges, he does not! He says that the sun is a stone and the moon made out of earth.

  SOCRATES: Do you think it is Anaxagoras you are accusing, my dear Meletus? Do you hold these men in such low esteem and think them so illiterate that they don’t realize that it is the books of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae that are full of that kind of statement? Do the young men learn such things from me, when they can sometimes buy them for a drachma—and that is when the prices are high!—in a corner of the marketplace, and mock Socrates for passing them off as his own? Especially when they are so bizarre? Is that what you think of me, by Zeus? That I do not recognize the existence of any god?

  MELETUS: No, by Zeus, you do not: not in the least.

  SOCRATES: You cannot be believed, Meletus. I am not even sure that you believe yourself. Men of Athens, this man seems to me to be altogether aggressive and impulsive and to have brought this accusation simply out of aggression, impulsiveness and youthful naivety.11

  This is essentially the same argument as Xenophon’s: that it is contradictory both to claim that he is an atheist and to argue that he believes in the daimonion, which is a form of divinity. As in Xenophon, there is an underlying flaw in the reasoning: the daimonion may be an altogether different kind of divinity to the gods of the city. Socrates may well be a kind of atheist, if his conception of deity is so radically different from anyone else’s that no one else would recognize it as a deity at all. Meletus, at least as Plato portrays him in the ensuing exchange, was not bright enough to make that point. One modern philosopher, however, has done some of Meletus’s job for him and argued that Plato’s Socrates was indeed guilty of a kind of impiety and deservedly convicted. According to Myles Burnyeat, Socrates in the Apology can be seen to reject entirely the idea of the gods as traditionally understood, the individual gods of cult, and to replace them instead with an alternative “theology” that had but one law: humans are obliged to question the world around them, search out their own moral codes, and live by them. Socrates was famously the subject of an oracle issued by Delphi, which named him the wisest of all men. In the Apology his interpretation of this offers him a divine mandate for questioning everything that he comes across. “Men of Athens,” he says, “I respect and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you, and as long as I have breath and strength in me, I shall never stop philosophising or exhorting you or point things out to any one of you I meet.” Significantly, for the Socrates of early Plato, this included attacking their uninterrogated beliefs about the gods. In Euthyphro, he protests that his prosecution is all down to the fact that he refuses to accept all the baroque mythological stories about the gods’ immoral behavior. This Socrates is still following in pre-Socratic footsteps, rejecting the epic conception of gods warring and cheating one another. But what is striking is that although he claims to have divine approval for his action, his program is anything but religious. It calls for no worship, no acts of devotion: the only requirement is that the individual live her or his life in the most moral way possible. Socrates himself would probably not have understood it in this way, and Plato certainly would not have done so, but to all intents and purposes this is what we would now call a humanist ethics. Do not accept inherited wisdom about anything, question everything, live only according to principles you can justify rationally: in this sense, Meletus was right about Socrates’s atheism.12

  In his subsequent writings, however, Plato promotes an ever more powerful metaphysical agenda. In the dialogues of the middle period, Socrates is found proposing a new theory of “forms,” which are otherworldly, abstract distillations of all of the things that we w
itness with our senses in the world around us. We may see or touch many individual examples of a chair, for example, but the form of the chair—the specific quality that makes each one of them a chair, and not a bench or a table—is something we can only grasp with our mind. The same goes for attributes: we may be able to point to individual things or people that are (for example) beautiful or just, but to understand the quality that unites all of them and makes them beautiful or just we need to seek the abstract form of beauty or justice. This concern seems to have grown directly out of the Socratic method. In his early phase, Plato typically represents Socrates as demanding definitions. What is piety? he asks Euthyphro. What is courage? he asks Laches. Typically, his interlocutors answer initially with individual examples: so, for example, one of his victims, Laches, answers that courage consists in “not running away in battle.” But, Socrates observes, that is simply an individual instance of courage. There are other types of courage that are not captured by that definition (modern examples would include telling one’s parents about one’s sexuality, for example, or confronting a bullying partner). These early dialogues tend to end in aporia, in the failure to reach any definitional resolution. This Socratic aporia seems to have spurred the middle-period Plato on, so that he developed a theory of abstract, otherworldly “forms” that can be accessed only by philosophical inquiry. To understand what courage is, we need to stop considering all of the individual examples and imagine what courage is in and of itself. That is the “form” of courage, the master definition that encompasses all particular manifestations of it.13

  What does this have to do with metaphysics? Plato had by this stage begun to correlate this distinction between particular instance and abstract form with a distinction between the mundane and the supernatural. The form of courage exists not in this world, but in a higher plane, accessible only to the mind. Socrates’s search for definitions had now metamorphosed into a theory dividing existence into two realms, our day-to-day environment and the higher realm of the forms. Plato built on this distinction, arguing that the world as we perceive it is a mere reflection of the truth, which is embodied in the forms. The famous cave analogy of The Republic makes exactly this point. The inhabitants of the cave believe that they can see reality, but in fact all they see are shadows projected onto the rock face; it is only the philosopher who can exit from the cave into the light of the sun and grasp reality for what it is. We need to journey intellectually beyond this world, the world of individual things perceived by our senses, and ascend into the sphere of pure thought. Around this time Plato also develops his theory of the immortal soul. His dialogue Phaedo, set on Socrates’s last day, argues for a kinship between the soul and the forms. On death, the souls of the virtuous are permanently released from the confines of the body, whereas those that are beholden to bodily pleasures are condemned to reincarnation. These theories depend on a series of parallel oppositions: body/soul, matter/spirit, this world/the next, senses/mind, particulars/forms. Whereas the Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues had thought it his mission to live a virtuous life in this world, the later Socrates puts the emphasis on escaping from it into a pure, transcendent realm of the soul, free from bodily impurity.

  There is nothing specifically godlike about the forms, but they do point to mid-period Plato’s emphasis on the otherworldly and the spiritual—something that is barely visible in the early period Socrates. But the divine reappears in spectacular form in Timaeus, a late dialogue that argues for a divine creator god whom he calls the demiurge (or “craftsman”). Timaeus is by some distance the most theistic of Plato’s dialogues—and it is no coincidence that it was the only one of his works that was read continuously throughout late antiquity and the medieval period. Here Plato takes the cosmic god of the pre-Socratics and transforms him into an active, designing, anthropomorphic deity. The demiurge forged the universe in a perfect, orderly way, with every element fitting together harmoniously. He created the celestial bodies, the world, the gods, time, animal life, and a superior race of human beings. Each human soul is paired with a star. If a man lives ethically, on death he returns to his star, but if not he is reborn as a woman (!). A badly behaved woman is then reincarnated as an animal. The Timaeus finally ties together all the various strands of Plato’s thought into one theistic whole. His intellectual journey, which began with the project to rehabilitate an atheist, ends here: with god.

  But the journey was not, in fact, quite ended. At the very end of his life, Plato returned to the traumatic topic of atheism. His very last work, The Laws, is an unusual text, a dialogue that—exceptionally—does not feature Socrates at all. The participants are an unnamed Athenian stranger (the central figure, who dominates the discussion), a Spartan called Megillus, and a Cretan Clinias. Their discussion is protracted and wide-ranging—this is Plato’s longest work, and it rambles somewhat—and deals with the question of what laws are to be established in the new Cretan colony that Clinias has been tasked with overseeing. The Laws is a companion piece to The Republic, Plato’s mid-period analysis of the ideal, utopian city, but it is much more focused on the realities of lawmaking. The Republic described an utopian state; The Laws, by contrast, offers a pragmatic second best to the ideal.14

  Among the areas requiring legislation is theology. The tenth book is devoted to precisely this question, and Plato here develops some of his most important and worked-out ideas about the nature of deity and in particular focuses on proofs that gods exist. These take two forms. The first is a cosmological one. The regular motions of the heavenly bodies demonstrate that a divine hand is at work. Anything that moves must have something that animates it, the Athenian supposes. In the case of living beings, that is the soul. In the case of the heavens, that is god. The second argument is a moral one: if we do not accept that humans have a share in the divine, in the form of our souls, then we cannot aspire to moral perfection, which is the property of the gods alone.

  These are not just philosophical arguments; they are also justifications for the legal repression of atheism. The Athenian pitches his arguments in response to “certain clever moderns,” some “young men” who hold disreputable views about the gods. There are, he claims, three types of position to which such people subscribe: they assert either that the gods do not exist; or that, if they do, they have no involvement in the affairs of humans; or that they do, but they are easily swayed by sacrifices and prayers. Is he talking about a real community? Does he mean that there was a sizeable movement among the young in Athens who held these three types of beliefs? One respected scholar has argued exactly this: that there was an “atheist underground” at Athens, on which Plato is here shining a light. He may well be right. But the primary target of this designedly nonspecific attack is, surely, the phantoms that have haunted Plato ever since the trial of Socrates. Book 10 of The Laws is ultimately about disavowing all traces of philosophy’s origins in (real or perceived) atheism.15

  Instilling belief in the gods, the Athenian insists, is absolutely essential to the functioning of a just society. Therefore, there must be penalties laid down against anyone who insults the gods, “either in deed or in word.” The qualification “or in word” is striking and reactivates memories of Diopeithes’s decree, almost one hundred years earlier, which had come up with the revolutionary stipulation that piety consisted in proper belief as well as proper action. Paradoxically, the Athenian stranger ends up parroting precisely the legislation that had done for Socrates. Plato seems to be the victim of a kind of intellectual Stockholm syndrome: having spent so long psychologically trapped by the traumatic effects of Socrates’s unjust execution for supposed impiety, he ended up designing a state that cannot tolerate anything other than one type of religious orthodoxy and punished disbelievers. Abuse, as they say, begets abuse.16

  Plato laid the ground rules for Greek philosophy, and his theistic swerve toward the end of his life had a major influence. For the Stoics, Timaeus’s model of cosmic design was the proof text. The Church Fathers,
too, expended much energy on blending Platonic and Judeo-Christian metaphysics and creationism. It is no exaggeration to say that the design-based arguments for the existence of God that proliferate even now were stabilized by Plato. And yet the execution of Socrates for “not recognizing the gods of the city” is an integral part of the story of how Plato came to that position. Before Plato’s theism there was Socrates’s playfully subversive humanism: based, to be sure, in a sort of divine revelation, but its ultimate message was that you make your own principles and you live by them.

  * * *

  PART THREE

  * * *

  The Hellenistic Era

  GODLIKE KINGS AND GODLESS PHILOSOPHERS

  In the fourth century BC, a new military and political power emerged in Greece. Few would have predicted the rise of Macedonia. It had certainly been a wealthy state from the sixth century onward, headed by a royal family bent on acquiring local Thracian territories. Archaeology has revealed grand royal designs in the form of spectacular tombs dating back to this period. For most Greeks farther south, however, until the time of Philip II, Macedonians remained a marginal presence, glimpsed only in the penumbra of Hellenism.