Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  One instance where the problematic nature of the king-god comes into focus appears in a poem by the brilliant poet Theocritus, who wrote in Egyptian Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II (ca. 283–246 BC). His name is today most closely associated with bucolic poetry, but he also wrote, among other things, an encomiastic poem for his king, which begins with a meditation on Ptolemy’s status. Zeus, Theocritus observes, is greatest of the immortals, and Ptolemy the most powerful of men. So far so good: Ptolemy exceeds other mortals in the way that Zeus exceeds other gods. But this means that Ptolemy is a man, not a god. He then, however, proceeds to move his ruler quickly up the scale:

  The heroes who in days gone by were born of demigods

  Had their wise bards when they performed excellent deeds.

  But I, who know how to speak of excellent things, would hymn

  Ptolemy; for hymns are the privilege also of the gods themselves.

  This is a masterpiece of calculated obfuscation. We meet the heroes “born of demigods,” who seem at first blush to offer a useful analogy for a king who sits somewhere between the divine and the mortal. But Theocritus seems to reject this comparison, suggesting that his song for Ptolemy is actually a “hymn,” and so more appropriate to a god than to a hero. Yet there is still some reticence in that final sentence: “Hymns are the privilege also of the gods themselves.” “Also” implies that hymns are appropriate for the gods as well as Ptolemy. He is not of their number. Or is he? Theocritus now imagines his king’s father, Ptolemy I, sitting alongside Alexander in heaven: “For the father has made him equal in honour [homotimos] with the blessed immortals.” Ptolemy’s status slides around between human, hero, and god. For some listeners the general point will have been clear enough: their king is more than human, in a way that mere language cannot quite capture. For others, the failure to specify exactly where Ptolemy sits in the hierarchy will have been a sign that Theocritus himself was not sure.12

  Another hymn to a deified ruler is even more potentially subversive. Demetrius “the Besieger,” who liberated Athens in 308 BC along with his father Antigonus, was acclaimed as king in the city and accorded divine honors. When he made his final visit in 290, he was welcomed with incense, libations, dancing, and hymns. One of these hymns, written in the ithyphallic meter by a certain Hermocles of Cyzicus, was recorded and has partially survived. It is an extraordinary document for anyone interested in the question of whether the Greeks believed their gods:13

  Oh, the greatest and dearest of the gods

  Are present for the city!

  For the situation has brought among us

  Both Demeter and Demetrius.

  Demeter has come to perform

  The most holy mysteries of Persephone;

  But he, serene (as a god should be), handsome

  And smiling: he is here.

  It seems a solemn thing: his friends surround him,

  And he himself is in the centre,

  As if his friends were the stars

  And he the sun.

  Welcome, son of a god, mightiest Poseidon,

  And of Aphrodite!

  The other gods are either far away

  Or they have no ears,

  Or they do not exist, or they pay no attention at all to us;

  But you we see present:

  You are made of neither wood nor stone. You are real.

  We pray to you…[there then follows a prayer for peace with the Aetolians]14

  What is truly amazing about this hymn is that it reverses the anticipated direction of skepticism. One might expect the existence of the Olympian gods to be unquestioned and the arrival of Demetrius, the newcomer to the pantheon, to be awkward. But in fact it is Demetrius’s visible presence (“the greatest and dearest of the gods / Are present for the city…he is here…you we see present”) that guarantees that he is a true god (“You are real”). The Olympian gods, by contrast, are presented as unreal, mere human artifacts (“wood and stone”—a reference to statues). Three options are imagined to explain the absence of the Olympian gods: either they cannot intervene in human affairs (they are “far away / Or they have no ears”), or they will not (“they pay no attention at all to us”), or “they do not exist” at all. One exception is made for Demeter, the goddess of agriculture (and of the nearby Eleusinian Mysteries)—but only because her name is embedded in Demetrius’s own name. The hymn in effect argues that Demetrius is the only god worth bothering about.15

  Hermocles’s hymn is exceptional. There is no other instance in which earnest belief in the reality of a ruler-god is so obviously bartered in exchange for belief in the Olympian gods. It probably should not be taken as evidence that the introduction of a ruler cult caused a mass outbreak of atheism toward the Olympians. But it does underline the general point, that when new religious “schemes of perception” come into play they can interfere with existing ones, and there is no guarantee that the older ones will survive better.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in the writings of one of the most striking figures of the early Hellenistic period, Euhemerus of Messene. Euhemerus wrote an account of a trip he supposedly took to the Arabian Ocean on the orders of King Cassander of Macedon, who ruled between 305 and 297 BC. The Sacred Inscription, as this work was known, became one the most famous of all ancient texts expressing religious disbelief. Euhemerus is found in every list of atheoi (atheists) that survives from antiquity. His name has even found its way into modern English, admittedly at the rarefied end of the spectrum: “euhemerism” is the retelling of myths so as to exclude or explain the supernatural elements. In fact the English word is a misnomer. This kind of rationalizing, which had its roots in the classical writers Hecataeus of Miletus and Palaephatus, continued apace, but what Euhemerus offered was something far more radical.16

  Euhemerus’s words do not survive verbatim, but we have a detailed summary courtesy of a later writer, Diodorus of Sicily (first century BC). Euhemerus’s claim was that he visited an island called Panchaea, an island of extraordinary beauty and fertility, where humans live in a utopian society. Of the three social orders, the priests, the farmers, and the soldiers, it is the priests who are the ultimate arbiters. The picture that is painted is of a people joyously submissive to a benign theocracy. “The priests are the rulers of all the others, and they adjudicate when there are disputes, and have authority over all public matters.” As the narrative progresses, we come ever closer to the beating heart of Panchaean society, the temple of Zeus Triphylios (“of the Three Tribes”) that stands on an acropolis. Euhemerus has much to say about the beauty and the grandeur of the temple. But, he says, it concealed a surprise: a golden pillar, inscribed with a record of the deeds of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus. The inscription revealed that the Olympian gods were originally human beings and an exceptional generation of rulers of Panchaea. It was Zeus himself who traveled around the world and instituted his own cultic worship. In other words, Panchaean society is sustained by a religion based upon the worship of a “god” who is no more a god than you or I.17

  In its original form, the Sacred Inscription was probably a mixed-genre work: a fast-paced travel story, a fictional proto-novel, a philosophical experiment with a utopia (rather like Plato’s Republic and Laws), and a vehicle for exploring the further implications of atheistic theories canvassed by the sophists of fifth-century BC Athens. Euhemerus was particularly impressed by Prodicus’s theory that divinities were named after human innovators: Demeter was the inventor of bread, Dionysus of wine, and each thereafter came to be treated as a god. Viewed in its historical context, however, it looks to have been a very different kind of theological critique than anything that went before: it seems hard to imagine that Euhemerus was not responding to the trend toward making royals divine. If Alexander and the Ptolemies could be made divine, why rule out the possibility that all of the gods are deified humans? Could it be that Zeus and his family founded their own ruler cults in much the same way that Hellenistic monarchs did?18


  Euhemerus almost certainly knew all about ruler cult. At this point we need to detach the author from the narrator of the Sacred Inscription. The narrator claims to have been sent out by Cassander of Macedon. There is no evidence of any ruler cult for that king. But it is likely enough that the whole story about Cassander is a fiction, like the rest of the story. The one piece of contemporary biographical evidence for the author Euhemerus comes from Callimachus, the poet of Hellenistic Alexandria, who refers malevolently to a temple just outside the city “where the chattering old man who invented / Panchaean Zeus scratches out his criminal books.” Euhemerus therefore probably wrote his Sacred Inscription in Alexandria, one of the locations where early Hellenistic ruler cult was practiced most intensely.19

  Euhemerus was not alone in reflecting on the implications of ruler cult. The third century BC also saw the foundation of one of the most famous philosophical schools. Stoicism was named for the Stoa Poikile, the “painted porch” in Athens where its founder, Zeno, taught. (This Zeno is not to be confused with the other philosophical Zeno of Elea, the pre-Socratic whose famous paradoxes were designed to show the impossibility of motion.) Zeno was from the city of Citium on Cyprus. In about 276 BC, he received a request to move to the Macedonian court at Pella, to become an advisor to King Antigonus “the Knock-Kneed” (the Macedonian Antigoni specialized in evocative nicknames!), who ruled from 277 to 239 BC, and to teach his son. Zeno declined but sent along his student, friend, and companion, one Persaeus, also of Citium. Like so much from this era, Persaeus’s philosophical output survives only in snippets. We do have a list of his books, however, which suggests that his primary interests were in political and sexual themes. In later antiquity, however, he was most remembered for his theory of religion. Cicero, the Roman orator and thinker of the first century BC, summarizes his views in his On the Nature of the Gods: “It was men who had discovered some great aid to civilisation that were regarded as gods, and that the names of divinities were also bestowed upon actual material objects of use and profit.” A fragmentary papyrus, recovered from the beneath the volcanic debris of Vesuvius, clarifies that Persaeus saw the development of religion as occurring in two stages: first the human inventors of various technologies were deified, then the objects themselves. He may have taken over this idea from the fifth-century BC sophist Prodicus, but he certainly lent them a new forcefulness in the changed cultural context of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Persaeus, unlike Prodicus, actually knew of cases in which exceptional humans had been granted divine cult (although there is no evidence to suggest that knock-kneed Antigonus himself was worshipped). Some scholars, it is true, have argued that Persaeus’s critique of religion was milder than this: either he was merely denying the gods of popular religion (and promoting instead a Stoic view of a cosmic intelligence), or he was claiming that the popular view of the gods, though misguided, contains a measure of insight into the true nature of divinity. But the Herculaneum papyrus seems to rule this out: “It is clear that Persaeus actually does away with and gets rid of the supernatural, or perhaps thinks that nothing can be known about it.” This evidence is hard to argue away. Persaeus saw all divinity as a human construction, and although there is nothing that can prove it conclusively, it is likely that he was inspired to claim this by the unfamiliar sight of humans who were treated like gods.20

  Philosophically speaking, Persaeus and Euhemerus built on the atheistic foundations laid by the sophists of fifth-century BC Athens. But on these foundations they constructed a new, contemporary edifice, one that reflected the changed political realities of the world in which they lived. For a mortal to become a god—or to become “godlike” in ways that defied specification—was now no longer the preserve of ancient heroes. Deification was now a cultural trope through which Greeks understood the world around them, a meme rather than a mytheme. But the possibility of humans becoming gods also challenged the divide between mortal and immortal, eroding further the idea (which had been assailed already by the “god battlers” of myth) of a special divine privilege.

  11

  Philosophical Atheism

  The Hellenistic era saw the dissolution of Alexander’s vast but thinly stretched empire into smaller units seized by his power-hungry successors. The Seleucid Empire, named for its founder Seleucus I Nicator (“the Conqueror,” ca. 358–281 BC), was centered on Babylon in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). The Ptolemies, who looked back to Ptolemy I Soter (“the Savior,” ca. 367–283 BC) were based in Egyptian Alexandria. The Antigonid dynasty, in Macedonia, was inaugurated by Antigonus I “the One-eyed” (ca. 382–301 BC). In time a fourth empire would emerge, the Attalids of Pergamum (on the western coast of what is now Turkey), after Attalus I claimed power in the 230s.

  The intellectual world too was reshaped: powerful, international philosophical schools vied for dominance in the way that their rulers did. The idea of rival philosophical sects dated back to fourth-century BC Athens, when Aristotle split from Plato’s Academy and set up his Lyceum. The two names refer to physical locations, in fact to gymnasia, where young men would congregate to hear the masters; one was named after the mythical Academus, from the cycle of stories connected to the Athenian hero Theseus, the other after Apollo Lyceus (“the Wolf”).

  In the Hellenistic age, new schools sprang up alongside the Academy and the Lyceum, centered initially in Athens but with a huge geographical reach. Many of the Hellenistic philosophers came from the farthest corners of the Greek-speaking world: from the Black Sea area, for example, and from modern Iraq and Tunisia. The labels attached to these various philosophical groups are no less resonant today: Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics. Modern, Western ideas about how life should be lived were largely formed in the laboratory of Hellenistic philosophy. Do you believe in a countercultural existence that defies society’s conventions? You are a Cynic. Or is life best when we dutifully play the hand that fate gives us, whatever it is, to the best of our abilities? In which case you are a Stoic. Or is the aim to remove the stress and anxiety that comes with society’s false demands? You are an Epicurean. Or do you reject any kind of dogma whatsoever? In that case you are a Skeptic.1

  These philosophical schools insisted primarily upon the values and ethics of lived experience: in this they followed the lead of Socrates rather than any of his rivals. Philosophy should be therapeutic, it was believed: it should make the user’s soul better. By placing the emphasis on the practical problems of existence, the Hellenistic schools created a less rarefied, more inclusive environment, at least for the male elite. By the first century AD most educated Greeks and Romans had at least a smattering of philosophical education, and many publicly identified with one school or another. Philosophy continued to fulfil many of the needs that we today think of as belonging exclusively to religion: it offered consolation to the suffering and bereft, it helped the perplexed understand their place in the cosmos, it explained why it was important to be good even if the world was not always good in return. The movement of philosophy into the mainstream also prepared the way for Christianity later to spread among the ruling elite of the Roman Empire, for it was initially taken as another form of philosophy of life. This process, indeed, was helped by the fact that the early Church Fathers, in the third and fourth centuries AD, largely reformulated Christianity so that it looked much more like a Greco-Roman philosophy.

  What role did the gods play in this philosophical revolution? It was the Stoics, most of all, who embraced and developed the theistic philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Stoicism was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium (on Cyprus) in the third century BC. Of all the Hellenistic philosophies, it most resembled a guidebook for living in the new historical reality of international empires. Orthodox Stoics believed in a world governed by an intelligent, designing deity, composed of matter but also identified with fire. True happiness comes from aligning oneself to the plan of that deity, to a life according to nature. Stoicism in effect advocated submission to a god who looks very much like an all-powerful cosmi
c king. And conformity to the divine plan, the Stoics taught, is the only form of moral virtue. In fact, they argued that it was not submission at all but liberation from the petty concerns of mundanity. The things that conventional society tells us are good—wealth, health, success in the eyes of others—are neither good nor bad, merely indifferent. If I fall ill, so be it: rather than bewailing my lot, I should respond virtuously to it. I may prefer to have good health than bad, and it is right to seek it out as much as I can, but if the divine plan necessitates my illness, so be it.2