Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  Stoicism was a comprehensive theory of life and the universe, covering gods, nature, matter, time, language, logic, and perception. In terms of ethics, however, it has always been associated with fortitude and endurance and indeed has inspired many (from antiquity to the present day) to resist terrible conditions. The famous teacher Epictetus (ca. AD 55–110), for example, was born into slavery. In one account he was crippled when his master deliberately twisted his leg till it broke. Epictetus is said to have smiled during the torture and to have calmly described the progress of the breakage. If this happened in Rome, his master will have been Epaphroditus, Nero’s henchman, who in the end conspired against the emperor and slit his throat. Epictetus was freed after Nero’s death but later suffered banishment under the equally feral Domitian. It was Stoicism that kept him smiling through those dark days. His teachings are preserved in the Discourses and Handbook, ghostwritten by the military historian and Roman consul Arrian (better known as the author of the best ancient account of the campaigns of Alexander the Great). Epictetus’s influential example has resonated throughout the ages and given us the modern idea of “stoic” behavior in the face of adversity. Take the case of James Stockdale, shot down above Vietnam on September 9, 1965. As his plane caught fire, he recalled reading Epictetus’s Handbook as a student at Stanford University. “I’m leaving the world of technology,” he told himself, “and entering the world of Epictetus.” Epictetus taught that we should not concern ourselves with what is beyond our control and focus only on what is eph’ hēmin, “up to us.” It was this message that saw Stockdale through nearly eight years of prison in Hanoi, which saw him tortured, shackled, and confined in isolation.3

  Stoicism urged more than the stiffening of the upper lip. Fundamentally, the Stoic ethical system taught its practitioners how to live in a world in which their power had been radically reduced. This is why an exiled former slave or, equally, a prisoner in 1960s Hanoi could find it so helpful. But it had a wider applicability in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, where individuals, and indeed entire communities, were often subject to the dominion of distant imperial forces. There was an implicit structural analogy between the divine governance of the cosmos and the worldly governance of kings and emperors. It is no surprise that one of the greatest Stoic philosophers of antiquity was also a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180). Not that Stoics were always on the side of mundane authorities when their values clashed with those of the authorities. In the dark days of Nero’s reign, the Roman senator Thrasea Paetus, fortified by Stoic principles, opposed the emperor to the point where he was tried and ordered to commit suicide. The famous Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger suffered the same fate at around this time, swept up (perhaps unjustly) in the recriminations that followed the anti-Neronian conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso in AD 65.

  In general, however, Stoicism encouraged obedience. This applied to religious practice too, even though this was not a position that followed necessarily from their idea of deity. The notion of a god who was a fiery cosmic intelligence could have been a deeply heretical proposition. The Stoic god was an amalgam of many of the most radical ideas of the pre-Socratic philosophers (Heraclitus’s fire, Anaxagoras’s nous or “mind”), blended with Plato’s idea of the cosmic craftsman. This could have led to a rejection of the existence of the Olympian gods, and hence of all civic cult. But in fact the Stoics took the opposite tack, claiming that the figures that we call Zeus, Hera, Athena, and the like are all different aspects of the cosmic deity: Zeus is associated with life (zēn), Athena with the rational faculty that stretches into the ether (aithēr), Hera with that in the air (aēr), and so forth. This kind of wordplay springs from the deeply rooted Greek idea that myth, however mythical, contains a grain of truth. But it was enough to ensure that the Stoics remained committed to civic religion. Among the Stoics only Persaeus of Citium, the friend of the founder Zeno, denied the existence of gods—and even he still insisted that the gods of the city should be worshipped in the normal way. In general, Stoicism preached submission to an all-powerful god of the cosmos.4

  Other sects were less pietistic. Amongst the most colorful were the Cynics (“doggish ones”), inspired by Socrates and his contemporary Antisthenes but thoroughly opposed to the highbrow intellectualism that Plato promoted. Cynicism was a philosophy of life, rather than of the mind. The only true path for the Cynic was the life “according to nature” (to use a phrase they favored): in other words, material goods are worthless, conventional society is there to be mocked, and power is there to be laughed at. It is hard to compile a list of Cynic beliefs as their writings were few and none have survived, and they were in any case comfortable with self-contradiction, having no time for dogma or rule books. All we have are the testimonies, usually either bewildered or amused, of others. Typically, however, Cynics mixed austerity in their personal habits with a refreshingly experimental approach to life. They did not believe in slavery; they mocked the powerful to their faces; they saw animals as moral exemplars, rather than tools for human exploitation; women were welcome (one important early Cynic was Hipparchia of Maroneia); in the ideal society, women and men would live intermingled and raise children together. The good life required escaping the false prison of social expectation, the tuphos (humbug). A well-known story has Diogenes of Sinope, a leading light of early Cynicism, masturbating in public, capping his performance with the witticism “if only it were possible to relieve hunger so easily.” Cynics, indeed, were also known for their mischievous sense of humor. There are huge numbers of jokes attributed to Diogenes. When Plato defined a human as a featherless biped, Diogenes offered him a plucked chicken. Seeing temple officials arresting a thief, he commented that “the big thieves are taking away the little ones.” With witty, pungent gags like these, the Cynics satirized convention without being drawn into a dogmatic position of their own.5

  As one might expect, the Cynics had no explicit doctrine on religion—after all, they had no explicit doctrine on anything. As a result, scholars wanting firm answers have struggled with them. Certainly, Diogenes mocked sacrifice and dedications to the gods for their ineffectiveness. His position on the gods seems to have been contradictory. On the one hand, he is said to have pointed (like Bellerophon in Euripides’s play) to the fact that the wicked often prosper as evidence for the nonexistence of gods. On other occasions he seems to have presumed their existence: “When the pharmacist Lysias asked him if he believed in the gods, he replied: ‘How could I not believe in them, when I consider that they despise you?’ ” The most probable conclusion is that the Cynics did not care much about gods, except when they offered good material for poking fun at the self-righteous or the immoral. There was no place for gods in their radically anti-dogmatic view of the world and no place for organized religion in their anti-establishment utopia. But nor, on the other hand, were they interested in grand assertions of the nonexistence of gods. Their stance toward life had strongly agnostic implications, even atheistic, but metaphysical reasoning would have struck them as pretentiously irrelevant. A poem by the Cynic poet Cercidas (third century BC) sums up this position beautifully. After airing the familiar complaint that the gods fail to punish the wicked and reward the good, and meditating on the inconstancy of fate, he concludes: “Better to leave all these things to those who gaze on the heavens…let our concern, rather, be worldly: with Paian [the god of health], Redistribution—yes, she is a goddess—and Nemesis [vengeance].” Cynics had their feet planted firmly on the ground; metaphysics were an irrelevance rather than an object of discussion.6

  The more robust challenge to conventional theology came from another philosophical movement that has left its mark on modern languages, now known as Skepticism. The Skeptics developed within Plato’s school, the Academy; they were inspired by the example of Socrates, who often debated with people to prove the fragility of their views rather than any positive claim on his own part. Skepticism took aim at belief systems or dogma (the modern English word can b
e traced back to the Skeptics). Any beliefs, it asserted, rested on shaky foundations. The aim of philosophy, then, was to challenge dogma and to reduce dependence on weak argumentation. Indeed, one group of Skeptics (the Pyrrhonists) argued that epokhē, “suspension of judgment,” was the route to happiness and tranquility. (Here we see a problem that always bedeviled Skepticism: Is this not a dogma itself? How, from a Skeptical perspective, can any positive belief be put forward, even about the benefits of suspension of belief?)7

  Religion, of course, is a form of dogma. The very existence of multiple, competing views about gods (what form they have, where they live) already shows the impossibility of secure knowledge. Arguments against conventional theology were promoted by one Skeptic in particular, Carneades (ca. 214–129 BC), the magnetic and influential head of the Academy. He was such an impressive speaker that even the teachers of rhetoric, traditionally contemptuous of the complexities of philosophy, would leave their schools to admire his performances—despite the unkempt hair and overlong nails, the result of his obsessing over his studies at the expense of personal grooming. He won a place in history by showcasing the potential of Greek philosophy for the first time in Rome. In 155 BC, at a time when Rome was now the power broker in Greece, he was part of a delegation sent by the Athenians to try to reverse a massive fine that had been levied on them. One report compares the effect of his arrival to a tornado ripping through the city: “Carneades’ charisma had extraordinary power, and a fame no less than its power; this gripped large and sympathetic audiences, and filled the city with hubbub, like a wind.” Thrillingly, and controversially, he made two speeches to the Senate on consecutive days: the first argued for the sovereignty of Roman justice, while the second proposed the essential bankruptcy of the very same notion. Only the venomously anti-Greek Cato stood against the winds of philosophical change: fearing that the young men would prefer gilded words to deeds of war, he inveighed mightily (and not without a certain rhetorical polish of his own) against these Siren-like visitors. “Rome will lose her empire,” he opined, “once she has become infected with Greek letters.” Whether as a result of pressure from Cato or not, the Senate expelled two Epicurean philosophers from Rome. But history was not on Cato’s side: the gusts howling through the city were winds of permanent change.8

  Part of the reason for the attraction Carneades still exerts is the mystery around his views. Like Socrates, he wrote nothing down. This absence fed the wonder, curiosity, and contentiousness of his acolytes. Nowhere was the debate more intense than in discussion of his views about the gods. The later tradition knew him best for his arguments that belief in gods is illogical.

  His first went as follows. If gods are superior to humans, then they must be able to sense things, because they cannot lack any capacity that humans have. In fact, they must have more senses than humans, because they are better than us. Yet sensation is a form of vulnerability to outside influence: if the gods can taste sweet things and bitter things, they can experience pleasure and distress in response to factors beyond their control. This means that gods are vulnerable, in that other forces can make them feel pain, and if they are vulnerable, they are in principle subject to decay.9

  Another of Carneades’s arguments attacked the idea that divinities can be morally rational. Its central principle was that the gods cannot be both entirely good and moral, since morality depends upon the possibility of doing wrong. If a god is good, Carneades reasoned, he cannot be prudent, because prudence implies the ability to choose among different available courses. If the god is entirely good, the wrong course will never occur to him. He therefore has no capacity to make rational moral choices. The same goes for justice: only humans can be just, since justice depends on the capacity to make wise judgments between options that present themselves. A perfect god simply would not have the option of taking the unjust path. Similarly with the avoidance of bodily pleasures: gods, surely, never display temperance because they are never tempted. Nor can they be brave, since they can never feel pain or suffering. The target of this argument was the Stoics, who saw rationality as defined by the capacity to make correct moral judgments. Since the argument proves that the gods cannot make moral judgments, it follows that the gods also (on the Stoic model) lack rationality.10

  His most famous argument, however, sought to show that gods cannot exist at all. It is a variant of the so-called sōritēs or “heaping” argument, which seeks to destabilize our belief in categories (such as the idea of a heap) that we normally take for granted. In its most basic form it goes as follows. I can get you to agree that a single grain does not make a heap. I can also get you to agree that two grains do not make a heap. Nor three. We then proceed like this sequentially, never reaching a cutoff point between a pile of individual grains and a heap. It is not the case, for example, that 300 grains are a heap, whereas 299 are not. I can get you to accept that there is no point where adding a single grain makes the pile become a heap. And the reverse is also true: if we begin with what we both agree to be a heap, there is no point where removing a single grain will cause the heap to stop being a heap. Therefore, since we feel we know what a heap is but cannot define it systematically, any claim that “this is a heap” is neither true nor false. The concept of the heap cannot be securely defined. Similarly if I have one coin I am not rich, nor if I have two, and so forth, so richness is not securely defined either. Carneades ingeniously applied the sōritēs argument to gods. If we accept that the Olympians are gods, then what about nymphs? And if we accept nymphs, then what about Pan? And what about the satyrs that follow Pan? But no one would call satyrs gods. So where does the dividing line exist between one kind of immortal and another? Or take water. Poseidon, identified with the ocean, is a god; so are many rivers; but would we say that every trickling stream is a god? How much water is required to qualify for divinity? As with the classic version of the sōritēs, there is no single point where adding an ounce of water will convert a mere stream into a deity. No secure definition of “god” is possible, since there is no sharp boundary that separates the divine from the nondivine.11

  It is often assumed by modern scholars that Carneades was not atheist, merely a Skeptic wishing to prove the weakness of traditional arguments for the nature. This, indeed, is what the great Roman statesman Cicero, who preserves many of his arguments, thought. Late in his life, in the midst of the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar (he played a major role behind the scenes), he took time out to write a philosophical dialogue, On the Nature of the Gods. The three speakers are Velleius (representing the Epicureans), Balbus (the Stoics), and Cotta (the Skeptics, with whom Cicero affiliated). “Carneades used to say these things,” says Cotta, “not in order to remove the gods (for what could be less fitting for a philosopher?), but to convict the Stoics of explaining nothing about the gods.”12

  But should we necessarily be taking Cicero at face value? After Carneades’s death, the Academy split two ways. In the one camp were those who cleaved to what they saw as the older, more fundamentalist form of Skepticism: these, led by Carneades’s successor in the Academy, Clitomachus (ca. 187–110 BC), argued that suspension of judgment (epokhē) was the ultimate aim of Skepticism. The other, led by Metrodorus of Stratonicea, believed that it was in fact legitimate for Skeptics to take reasoned positions on issues, as long as they accepted that these positions were in principle fallible. Now, Cicero was taught by Philo of Larissa, an adherent of the Metrodoran position. So it is unsurprising to find him arguing (through the mouthpiece of his character Cotta) that Carneades held the view that gods exist despite his arguments. Clitomachus, on the other hand, would probably have made a very different reading; he would surely have argued that Carneades meant to show that belief in the gods was impossible, and we should not commit either way.13

  Clitomachus himself was an interesting and important figure. He was born in Carthage (in modern Tunisia) with the name Hasdrubal, like the father of Hannibal, Rome’s famous assailant. Initially he taught philosophy at C
arthage in Punic, a Semitic language originating in Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) and closely related to Hebrew. He then relocated to Athens and was recognized for his talent by Carneades, who took him under his wing; eventually, Clitomachus succeeded him as head of the Academy. If Carneades’s fame was built partly on the absence of writing, then Clitomachus more than adequately compensated: he was said to have written more than four hundred treatises. Not one of these has come down to us, but it is clear from later sources that Clitomachus was deeply interested in the question of atheism, and indeed that he compiled a compendium of philosophical atheists: they included Protagoras, Prodicus, Diagoras, Critias, Theodorus, Euhemerus, and Epicurus. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Clitomachus, building on Carneades’s collection of anti-theistic arguments, may have invented the idea of atheism as a coherent movement with its own deep history. It is likely that he wrote a book called On Atheism, which distilled the history of religious skepticism up to his own day. Clitomachus can claim one of the foremost places in the history of religious disbelief: he not only identified and named atheism as a distinct philosophical position but also mapped out its different varieties.14

  The formative role of Skepticism in the creation of philosophical atheism cannot be overstated. Since there were swaths of arguments for the existence of gods (the Stoics were particularly fond of these), and since for the Skeptic every argument had to have a counterargument, they dedicated themselves assiduously to proving that gods cannot exist. It is a great shame that Clitomachus’s On Atheism does not survive, but its influence can be felt in the writings of a major Roman philosopher. In the late second or early third century AD, a man called Sextus wrote several huge works in Greek on Skepticism, which have survived largely intact. These, collectively, are the most important compendium of Skeptical arguments. About Sextus himself little is known. He followed the Pyrrhonian tradition of Skepticism rather than the Academic (that of Carneades and Clitomachus); the distinction is, fundamentally, that whereas the Academics can tolerate the belief that nothing can be determined, the Pyrrhonists reject even that as dogma (in fact, they would not even be willing to commit to the belief that they do not believe in dogma!). Sextus was a doctor, a fact reflected in the nickname Empiricus that still attaches to him today. (The empeirikoi, “Empiricists,” believed that observation and trial were a better guide to medicine than theory.) But beyond that, his value to us is primarily as a repertory for Skeptical ideas on all sorts of topics.15