Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

by Tim Whitmarsh

  Notes

  A Dialogue

  1. Quotation: Plato, Laws 888b. I have written this book for a broad readership. It has some of the trappings of academia, in the form of endnotes, bibliographical references, and (no doubt) a certain obsessiveness. On the other hand, it deals with a millennium of history in a small compass and cannot be comprehensive. Modern scholarship is cited primarily in the latest anglophone discussions, with a weighting toward works that will be accessible and affordable to a wide readership.

  2. A good, skeptical account of neurotheology is M. Blume, “God in the brain: how much can neurotheology explain?,” in P. Becker and U. Diewald (eds.), Zukunfstperspektiven im theologisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Dialog (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011), 306–14. Homo religiosus: K. Armstrong, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means (London: Vintage, 2010), 13–34.

  3. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, abb. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 106–7 (note especially that “faith and skepticism are alike traditional”).

  4. J. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 230 (quotation), 2–3 (Thomas Tailour).

  5. On the emergence of Israelite monotheism see especially M. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). I owe my understanding of these issues, such as it is, to discussions with Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou of the University of Exeter.

  6. Other histories of ancient atheism include P. Decharme, La critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs des origines au temps de Plutarque (Paris: Picard, 1904); A. Drachmann, Atheism in Pagan Antiquity (London: Gyldendal, 1922), useful but methodologically outdated; H. Ley, Geschichte der Aufklärung und des Atheismus, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1966), vitiated by its schematically Marxist stance. For more recent discussions see G. Dorival and D. Pralon (eds.), Nier les dieux, nier dieu (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2002); H. Cancik-Lindemaier, “Gottlosigkeit im Altertum: Materialismus, Pantheismus, Religionskritik, Atheismus,” in R. Faber and S. Lanwerd (eds.), Atheismus: Ideologie, Philosophie oder Mentalität? (Würzberg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2006), 15–33; J. Bremmer, “Atheism in Antiquity,” in M. Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–26; U. Berner and I. Tanaseanu-Döbler (eds.), Religion und Kritik in der Antike (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2009); D. Sedley, “The Pre-Socratics to the Hellenistic Age” in S. Bullivant and M. Ruse (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 139–51.

  7. Quotation from P. O’Sullivan, “Sophistic Ethics, Old Atheism, and ‘Critias’ on Religion,” Classical World 105 (2012): 174, with n. 36. For a recent contrast between Christianity and Greek religion see R. Parker, On Greek Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), the first two chapters of which are called, respectively, “Why Believe Without Revelation?” and “Religion Without a Church.” For a critique of the concept of embedded religion see B. Nongbri, “Dislodging ‘Embedded’ Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope,” Numen 55 (2008), 440–60.

  8. Inscription: no. 120 in P. J. Rhodes and R. Osborne, Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404–323 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 534–35 = Inscriptiones Graecae 42 1.121. The Diogenes story is told at Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 6.59 (where the bon mot is said to be otherwise attributed to Diagoras of Melos).

  Part One: Archaic Greece

  1. Polytheistic Greece

  1. For a “historical ecology” of the ancient Mediterranean see P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), and for the prehistoric period C. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013). More generally on early Greece see O. Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1993); J. Hall, A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200–479 BCE (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); R. Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2009). For a more general survey of Greek history see J. Boardman, J. Griffin, and O. Murray, The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and for a spritely survey of ancient Mediterranean cultures generally, R. Miles, Ancient Worlds: The Search for the Origins of Western Civilization (London: Allen Lane, 2010).

  2. Shipping: L. Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). J. Lesley Fitton, Minoans (London: British Museum Press, 2002) offers an accessible introduction to Minoan culture. On the Mycenaeans see R. Castleden, The Mycenaeans (London: Routledge, 1995). The warlord or “big man” in Greece: J. Whitley, “Social Diversity in Dark Age Greece,” The Annual of the British School at Athens 86 (1991): 341–65.

  3. Intermarriage at Pithecusae is argued for on the basis of archaeological evidence by J. N. Coldstream, “Mixed Marriages at the Frontiers of the Early Greek World,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 12 (1993): 89–107. Not all have been convinced (e.g., D. Ogden, Greek Bastardy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]: 322–23), but whether we call it “marriage” or not, cohabitation and miscegenation in early Italy seems likely (Hall, History, 257). I base my account of Greece’s expansion in the archaic period and beyond on I. Morris, “Economic Growth in Ancient Greece,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160 (2004): 709–42. The measurement of the Greek economy remains a controversial area, but the overall pattern of rapid growth is hard to deny.

  4. The emergence of the polis is one of the most widely studied phenomena in all of ancient history. The most important studies are those of the Copenhagen Polis Centre: see especially M. H. Hansen, “95 Theses About the Greek ‘Polis’ in the Archaic and Classical Periods: A Report on the Results Obtained by the Copenhagen Polis Centre in the Period 1993–2003,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 52 (2003): 257–82; M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.), An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), with an overview online at http://www.teachtext.net/​bn/​cpc/. For orientation see Hall, History, 67–92 (with useful bibliography); and Osborne, Greece in the Making, 128–30 and 220–30.

  5. On these developments see Broodbank, The Middle Sea, 460–95. Tin Islands: Strabo 3.5.11 (claiming there are ten of them).

  6. Carthage: see R. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed (London: Allen Lane, 2010), with 58–95 on the early period.

  7. Number of poleis: Hansen, “95 Theses,” 263–64.

  8. Herodotus 8.144.1–3. J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); J. M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Specifically on Macedonian ethnicity, see Hall’s “Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia Within Evolving Definitions of Greek Identity,” in I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2001).

  9. On the regionalized nature of archaic and classical Greece see C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (eds.), The Cultures Within Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). J. Ober, Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going on Together (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 69–91 has influentially introduced the anthropological concept of “thin coherence,” although he is speaking of the individual Greek state rather than Greek culture as a whole.

  10. Introductions to Greek religion include W. Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); J. Bremmer, Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Price, Religions; D. Ogden (ed.), A Companion to Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); R. Parker, On Greek Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

  11. “How shall I sing of you?”: Homer
ic Hymn to Apollo 19. For discussion of the tension between singularity and multiplicity of individual Greek gods, see H. S. Versnel, Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 40–87; also Parker, On Greek Religion, 65–73.

  12. 120 festival days in Athens: e.g., L. B. Zaidman and P. S. Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, trans. Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 102–4. Priests: see especially (mostly on Athens) R. Garland, “Priests and Power in Classical Athens,” in M. Beard and J. North (eds.), Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (London: Duckworth, 1990), 75–91. Biographical details on Sophocles’s career are recorded in the ancient Life of Sophocles, although they are not uncontroversial (e.g., M. Lefkowitz, Lives of the Greek Poets, 2nd ed. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012], 82).

  13. Council agenda: Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 43.4. More generally on the Greek distinction between sacred and profane, see W. R. Connor, “Sacred and Secular,” Ancient Society 19 (1988): 161–88, with the important modifications of S. Scullion, “ ‘Pilgrimage’ and Greek Religion: Sacred and Secular in the Pagan Polis,” in J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (eds.), Pilgrimage in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111–19. Scullion modifies the older view that “it is difficult to locate a ‘secular’ realm of any significance in the fifth-century Greek polis” (L. J. Samons II, Empire of the Owl: Imperial Athenian Finance (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000), 327). Sacred and profane buildings: Isocrates 7.66; finance: Demosthenes 24.9. More generally on the interpermeation of sacred and nonsacred finance, see Samons, Empire of the Owl. Quotation: Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks, 3.

  14. On the law courts see especially A. Lanni, Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). G. Martin discusses the orators’ religious strategies in Divine Talk: Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See his p. 205 on the vagueness of references to divine intervention.

  15. Mystery cults: W. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Orphic texts: F. Graf and S. I. Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); R. G. Edmonds III (ed.), The “Orphic” Gold Tablets and Greek Religion: Further Along the Path (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the idea of personal religion see Versnel, Coping with the Gods, 119–37.

  16. On the phenomenon of “divine translation” across the ancient Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean worlds, see M. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). Herodotus 1.131.1. For expansion and qualification of this point see T. Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 208–22. On the “Mosaic distinction” and its consequences for cultural conflict see J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and The Price of Monotheism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

  2. Good Books

  1. Setne Khaemwas: see, for example, G. Maspero, Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt, edited with an introduction by Hasan El-Shamy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95–118. For the general idea see J. Sawyer, Sacred Languages and Sacred Texts (London: Routledge, 1999), which sets the emergence of the Christian idea of the sacred text against a Near Eastern background. Torah scrolls: S. Sabar, “Torah and Magic: the Torah Scroll and Its Appurtenances as Magical Objects in Traditional Jewish Culture,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 3 (2009): 135–70. On the sacralization of the Hebrew Bible see S. A. Nigosian, From Ancient Writings to Sacred Texts: The Old Testament and Apocrypha (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Justinian: Codex Justinianus 3.1.14.1; and more generally on the sanctity of the Christian Bible in antiquity see C. Rapp, “Holy Texts, Holy Books, Holy Scribes: Aspects of Scriptural Holiness in Late Antiquity,” in W. Klingshirn and L. Safran (eds.), The Early Christian Book (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2006), 194–222.

  2. For good discussion of Greece’s lack of sacred scripture see “Sacred Texts and Canonicity,” in S. I. Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 633–35. W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) offers a sober analysis of likely literacy levels.

  3. A variety of interesting and up-to-date approaches to Homer can be sampled in R. Rutherford, Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; revised Cambridge University Press, 2013); I. Morris and B. Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden: Brill, 1997); D. Cairns (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). There are many introductions to Greek literature: see for example T. Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). School texts of Homer: see T. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 313 (I have rounded the figures: the exact numbers are fifty-eight papyri of Homer, twenty of Euripides, and seven of Menander).

  4. Herodotus 2.53.

  5. Homer, Iliad 1.5; Cypria fragment 1 in M. L. West, Greek Epic Fragments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). A coherent Homeric and Hesiodic theology is argued for (wrongly, in my view) by W. Allan, “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 126 (2006): 1–35. Insignificant mortals: Homer, Iliad 21.461–67.

  6. Ares and Aphrodite: Homer, Odyssey 8.266–366. Deception of Zeus: Iliad 14.154–377.

  7. Homer, Iliad 2.484–86.

  8. Xenophanes fragment 19 in D. W. Graham (ed.), The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Plato: Republic 377d–378e, 379c–380c.

  9. Quotation: Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 1, translated by D. Russell and D. Konstan, Heraclitus: Homeric Problems (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005). Theagenes of Rhegium: H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951), 8A2. Metrodorus of Lampsacus: Diogenes Laertius 2.11. Derveni papyrus: G. Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the origins of ancient allegory see D. Obbink, “Early Greek Allegory,” in R. Copeland and P. Struck (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15–25. This useful volume contains chapters on allegory throughout antiquity. On the religious-allegorical interpretation of Homer see especially R. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Greek and Jewish allegoresis: M. Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  10. Cave of the Nymphs: Homer, Odyssey 13.102–12. On Porphyry see R. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, 121–32; and Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs: Translation and Introductory Essay (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1983).

  11. There is little evidence for the performance of Homer. My sketch of the rhapsode is derived from Plato’s Ion.

  12. “Stories told to Alcinous”: e.g., Diogenianus, Proverbs 2.86 (in F. G. Schneidewin and E. L. von Leutsch, Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum, vol. 1 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1839; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1965]).

  13. Xenophanes, fragment 9.21–22 in Graham, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy; Herodotus 2.113–20 (different versions in Euripides, Helen, and (supposedly) Stesichorus’s now lost Palinode). Homer and Odysseus: Philostratus, On Heroes 43.12–16. Troy never captured: Dio Chrysostom, Oration 11. Eyewitness diary: Dictys of Crete, Journal. Generally on the accusations of fiction leveled at Homeric and Hesiodic g
ods see D. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and L. Kim, Homer Between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  14. Hecataeus, author 1 fragments 1 and 19 in F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Leiden: Brill, 1923–).

  15. Palaephatus is translated by J. Stern, Palaephatus: On Unbelievable Tales (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1996), whose rendering I adapt below. On the confused biographical tradition surrounding him see pp. 1–4.

  16. Palaephatus 1.

  17. B. J. Sivertsen, The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Story of Exodus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  18. Actaeon: chapter 6. Europa: chapter 15. The gods figure more heavily in the last seven chapters (46–52), but these are usually thought to be a later addition to the Palaephatean text (this hypothesis is probably right: they are very different in feel). See Stern, Palaephatus, 5, and 9–10, on his handling of the gods, an interpretation that I follow here. See also K. Brodersen, “ ‘Das aber ist eine Lüge!’: zur rationalistischen Mythenkritik des Palaiphatos,” in R. von Haeling (ed.), Griechische Mythologie und frühes Christentum (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, 2005), 44–57; and G. Hawes, Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37–91.

  3. Battling the Gods

  1. This account of the various functions of myth is necessarily brief. For a full account of the manifold ways in which it has been conceptualized see E. Csapo, Theories of Mythology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).