Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (16 page)

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.
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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.

I
n 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.

But this northern kingdom had many advantages. It had wide, fertile plains that were agriculturally rich. Easy maritime routes led down the Thermaic Gulf into the Aegean. It also had the distinction of sitting on two land axes: to the south it faced the Greek peninsula, and to the east there was the land route between Europe and Asia. In time, the way from Thessaloniki (founded in 315 BC) and Byzantium in Anatolia would become one of Europe’s major thoroughfares, thanks in no small part to the Roman road known as the Via Egnatia, built in the second century BC.

Already in antiquity, there was debate as to whether Macedonia was properly part of Greece or not. The mythical family tree of Greek ethnicity, captured in the sixth-century BC
Catalogue of Women,
recognized the existence of a man called Macedon, in the third generation of human existence. Macedon was the founder of the Macedonian dynasty. So the Macedonians were indeed acknowledged early on as part of the extended family of the Greek world. The mythical Macedon, however, is not listed as a descendant of Hellen, the ancestor of the Hellenes; he comes from a different branch of the human family. This sense that the Macedonians were not quite Hellenic was significant on the ground, too. Herodotus has a story that captures their marginal position in the generation before his own time. Alexander I—an ancestor of “the Great”—ruled from about 498 to 454 BC. According to Herodotus, he sought in his youth to compete in the footrace at the Olympic Games, which were open only to Greeks. His rivals sought to debar him on those grounds, but Alexander “proved himself to be an Argive, and was judged to be a Greek.” How he went about “proving” that the Macedonian dynasty originated in the Peloponnesian city of Argos, Herodotus does not tell us. But the important point is that it was not self-evident to all that the Macedonians were bona fide Greeks, even if the eventual decision of the Hellanodicae, the adjudicators at the Olympics, went in their favor. For most Greeks of Herodotus’s era, Macedonia was known as a powerful, expansionist northern kingdom and (certainly) a handy ally for Athens in their war with Sparta—but rather remote from their own immediate concerns.
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Land routes can present problems as well as opportunities. When the Persians expanded into the Balkans in 512–511 BC, Macedon stood directly in their way. It capitulated quickly; the Persians’ domination of the region lasted until they were finally pushed out of the mainland by the successes of the allied Greek forces in 480–479 BC. Toward the end of the fifth century BC and into the beginning of the fourth, however, Macedon became harder to ignore as a player in the political and cultural life of Greece. It was said in antiquity that the great Athenian poet Euripides spent time at the court of King Archelaus (who ruled between approximately 413 and 399 BC); whether this is true or not, he certainly produced a set of Macedonian-themed plays toward the end of his life. Athens’s most famous dramatist had found the ancient mythology of Macedon a fit subject—and that is a remarkable thing, whether or not he did actually spend time in the north.
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From the 350s onward, Philip II (“the Great”) began a series of campaigns against Athenian interests in the north. These drew the ire of the famous Athenian orator Demosthenes, whose speeches fulminating against Macedonian power (the
Philippics
) can still raise hairs. Despite Demosthenes’s best efforts, however, Philip’s rise remained unchecked, and he eventually won a decisive victory over a united force of Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea in 338 BC. The following year, all of the Greek states pledged allegiance to Macedon. Only Sparta refused to cede to the new rulers of Greece and join the so-called League of Corinth. Their resistance lasted a mere seven years.

After Philip’s murder in 336, his son Alexander III came to the throne and quickly set about inheriting his father’s title “the Great.” Passing through the Balkans, he advanced into the territory of the Persian Empire and began his famous eastern campaigns. He captured strongholds in Anatolia (the western part of modern Turkey), Syria and the Levant, and Egypt, before pushing into the heartlands of the empire, Mesopotamia. In 331 he captured the imperial capital, Babylon, just south of modern Baghdad. He then chased Great King Darius III into what is now Iran, where the latter was assassinated by conspirators. Proclaiming himself Darius’s successor, Alexander headed east into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India, before finally giving in to his weary army and agreeing to turn back. He died in Babylon in 323, aged thirty-two.
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The period between Alexander’s death and the Battle of Actium in 31 BC has been known to scholars since the nineteenth century as “Hellenistic,” after the Hellenizing (“Greekifying”) effects of these conquests on non-Greek peoples of the East. After Alexander’s death, different generals seized different territories, and the empire fragmented into four smaller units. The descendants of Antigonus ruled much of the Greek peninsula from the heartlands of Macedon. The Ptolemies, descendants of Ptolemy, son of Lagus, built a naval empire from the new Egyptian capital of Alexandria, as well as controlling the rich Nile lands. The successors of another general, Seleucus, held Mesopotamia and Syria. The descendants of Attalus (who inherited their lands from Alexander’s general Lysimachus) ruled much of western Turkey from their capital at Pergamum, modern Bergama. There were, in addition, numerous smaller confederations, including various leagues of free cities in mainland Greece.

The Hellenistic world offered a new set of models for Greek civilization: large, diverse territories were controlled imperially from grandiose capitals, dominated by royal dynasties. It was not the imperial ambitions themselves that were unparalleled (Athens had its empire) but the scale and scope of them, together with the reassertion of kingship as the normal mode of governance—and territorial expansion into the Near East. Greeks were now heirs to political traditions not only of the mainland, but also of the older imperial states of the East: the Seleucids of Mesopotamia fashioned themselves in the guise of Babylonian and Assyrian monarchs, while the Ptolemies of Egypt adopted pharaonic iconography. To accompany this new Greco-Oriental style of kingship, moreover, the Hellenistic kings gathered around themselves outstanding figures of literary, philosophical, and artistic prowess. The Hellenistic empires, like their predecessors in Athens, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, were empires of the mind as well as of physical terrain. The royal library and museum (Mouseion, “shrine to the Muses”) at Alexandria are well-known examples of Hellenistic intellectual centers, but Pergamum too had a vast library. Schools of philosophy and rhetoric flourished, first in Athens and later farther afield. Cities were adorned with magnificent temples, public gymnasia, and theaters in the Hellenic style and festooned with Greek inscriptions in prose and verse.
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The Hellenistic era saw the beginnings of the process of imperial centralization of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Levant that were fully realized only with Roman conquest. New styles of Greek kingship (based in part on Persian and pharaonic models) pointed toward the possibility of a theocratic world-empire centered on the charismatic power of the king, but political instabilities and constant interstate warring prevented this model from fully taking root. In most of the older Greek cities, life went on much as before, with the domestic political agenda dominating (the idea that larger, bullying states from without would periodically exert their influence was nothing new). Nevertheless, the idea of the king-as-god was established during this period and would come to have a decisive influence under Rome.

A
lexander III was a lustrous king. Portrait makers reveled in trying to capture his radiance. In a wonderful Pompeian mosaic (based on a lost Greek original) of the battle of Issus, the Persian king Darius is more immediately visible: higher up, and more central, and framed against the sky by a mass of spears. But Alexander is unmistakable at the heart of the Macedonian cavalry on the left-hand side of the image, his eyes wide, unyielding, and intense, his figure taut and full of coiled power. The Persian horsemen on the right are on the point of turning to flee in panic, as if they have suddenly realized their error in underestimating their enemy. The great sculptor Lysippus portrayed him as tall, muscular, and heroic; the tilted head pointed his eyes to the heavens but also carried a hint of sadness, perhaps already suggesting the mourning of his own premature end.
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The royal house of Macedon claimed descent from Heracles and Perseus, and Alexander was indeed in the eyes of many like a hero reborn, combining overachievement, virility, devotion to his comrades, and obsessive ambition in the space of a short life. It was an association he did little to discourage. He slept with the
Iliad
under his pillow. When he crossed over to Anatolia, he visited Troy and sacrificed at Achilles’s tomb. Even his intimate relationship with Hephaestion was reminiscent of Achilles’s friendship with Patroclus. One anecdote has a poet approach him and offer to write him up so that he becomes greater than Achilles; he slaps him down, saying, “I would rather be Homer’s Thersites than your Achilles,” naming the ugliest, most cowardly of the Homeric Greeks. It is apocryphal of course, but it testifies to the enduring interest in weighing Alexander against Achilles.
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Luster mattered to the ruler of vast tracts of territory and a multilingual populace, and to the inheritor of a foreign kingdom. Alexander needed to project a clear image of power that all could understand. His heroic self-presentation demonstrated clearly to all his subjects that they had a king who was touched with divinity. Indeed, aspects of it were derived from the near eastern monarchies themselves. It had been one of the clichés among the Greeks that the Persian Great King demanded
proskyn
ē
sis,
“prostration,” before him. When Alexander introduced the custom in his own court, along with Persian-style dress, his Macedonian companions bristled, but shrewder observers saw it as a political move to demonstrate to his Near Eastern subjects that he was no less awesome a ruler than his predecessor in the role, Darius III.
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Whether he was a god or not is a more complex question. Mortal kings in the Greek tradition had always had a divine tinge to them. The aristocrats who people Homer’s epics are often said to be “divine” or “godlike.” Some Greek families, indeed, traced their lineages back to gods or heroes. Sophocles’s
Oedipus the King,
performed in around 428 BC, has the chorus address a prayer to their ruler as “savior” (a title for deities), while insisting that they do not want to equate him with a god (which, of course, implies that that is exactly what they are in danger of doing). In Aristophanes’s
Birds,
the central character Peisetairus is sung a hymn by the birds of Cloudcuckooland that acknowledges him in divine terms (“He wields the thunderbolt, Zeus’s winged weapon!”). The language of divine kingship was always there, waiting to be activated. Toward the end of the fifth century there are signs that it was put to use. Lysander, the Spartan general responsible for the defeat of Athens in 404 BC, extracted unimaginable amounts of wealth from the captive city. “Out of the spoils,” one later historian writes, “he set up at Delphi bronze statues of himself and each of his admirals, as well as golden stars of the Dioscuri…Lysander was at this time more powerful than any Greek before him had been, and seemed to cultivate an arrogance and ostentatiousness that was greater even than his power. For he was the first Greek, as Duris [a historian] writes, to whom the cities set up altars and made sacrifices as to a god, and the first to whom songs of triumph were sung.” This is not just a fantasy of later historians: there is material evidence for the cult of Lysander on the island of Samos, on the other side of the Aegean. New modalities of kingship were emerging in the late fifth century BC, pointing the way toward the grandiosity of the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed Alexander’s conquests.
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Another ruler with divine pretensions was Dionysius I of Syracuse, in Sicily. A mercenary leader who had toppled the existing democratic government, Dionysius built an elaborate court structure around him that attracted musicians and intellectuals: Philoxenus of Cythera, the author of a still-extant poem about the love of the Cyclops Polyphemus for the nymph Galatea, the historian Philistus, perhaps even Plato himself (if we can trust the letters transmitted in his name). And like Lysander, Dionysius seems to have styled himself as an exceptionally luxurious, charismatic king. In 388 BC, for example, a deputation arrived from him at the Olympic Games and pitched camp in a tent adorned with gold and purple, “so that Dionysius might inspire the awe of Greece.” This, however, prompted the Athenian orator to deliver a lusty speech comparing Dionysius to the Persian Great King, the embodiment of despotic decadence in the eyes of many Greeks. Again like Lysander, he was probably worshipped in his own lifetime with divine honors, perhaps in the likeness of his near namesake, the god Dionysus.
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There is, of course, no such thing as a clean break in history: all new developments, rather, are adjustments of the ratio between change and continuity. There were intimations of Hellenistic swagger already in the court of Dionysius I and in the flamboyant self-styling of the victorious Spartan general Lysander. Yet neither carried the same conviction with other Greeks. Alexander, after all, had not just sacked one city. Between 334 BC, when he led his invading force across to Anatolia, and 323 BC, when he died in Babylon, he had comprehensively routed the Persian king Darius III in a series of battles and successfully laid siege to Sardis, Tyre, and Gaza. He had subdued the whole of the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia before heading through the Zagros Mountains into Persia and capturing the imperial capital Persepolis. He had journeyed east through Bactria (approximately modern Afghanistan) and into northern India.
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There was undoubtedly something godlike about this Macedonian conqueror. His propagandists portrayed him as more than human. He claimed as his father Ammon, an Egyptian ram god whom the Greeks treated as the equivalent of Zeus; this was confirmed to him by the oracle itself when he visited Siwah, an oasis in the western desert, in February 332 BC. To mark this ancestry he was depicted on coins wearing ram’s horns (the reason why many have thought the “two-horned one” of the Qur’an—Zul-Qarnayn—to be him). In the Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, hung a painting by Apelles portraying him with a Zeus-like thunderbolt. He is often found in the likeness of Apollo or Heracles, or with the Dionysiac attributes of panther skin and (perhaps) elephant scalp. In later times he was assimilated to the sun god Helios and depicted with a solar crown (an iconographic motif that would eventually metamorphose into the Christian halo).
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But being godlike is not the same as actually being a god. This distinction is in fact fiendishly difficult to draw. What did it mean when cities offered their rulers “honors equal to the gods” (
isotheoi timai
)? The very phrase communicates this uncertainty: to treat rulers in the same way as gods is not to say that they are gods. In fact, it is arguably to say that they are not (for the observation that x resembles y depends upon an awareness that x is not y: you would not say a monkey is like a simian or a stone is like a rock). But few in antiquity drew such stark distinctions. No doubt the ideological system depended on precisely not demanding precise clarifications. Rulers were like gods in that they were possessed of superhuman power and charisma, but they were also demonstrably mortal and capable of error.
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In many cases, certainly, there is evidence of actual religious worship of rulers. Cities might set up altars in honor of Alexander or one of his successors. There might be a priest whose job was to sacrifice on this altar; processions and games might be held, hymns might be sung. In Athens, we hear of an altar and a new priesthood commemorating the roles of the generals Antigonos “the One-Eyed” and his son Demetrius “the Besieger” as saviors, after they expelled the occupying garrisons of Ptolemy I and Cassander. New tribes were created in their name. Alternatively, a ruler’s statue might be placed in the temple of another god and become a “shrine-sharer” (
synnaos
): this was the honor decreed by the inhabitants of Pergamum for their king Attalus III, who was to cohabit with the healer god Asclepius. A related but slightly different phenomenon is the deification of dead kings, a phenomenon best attested to in Egyptian Alexandria, where there was a priest dedicated to the cult of both Alexander (as the city’s founder) and the ancestral ruling dynasty, the “brother-sister gods” (
theoi philadelphoi
). Nor was the phenomenon limited to individual cities: in Seleucid Mesopotamia, the entire Greek population was expected to join in the veneration of Antiochus III and his ancestors.
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But what did this ruler cult actually mean in practice? When the early queens of Egyptian Alexandria Berenice and Arsinoe II were praised in the guise of Aphrodite, what was going on in the heads of those present? Were these monarchs worshipped as actual gods, or (once again) as godlike? Was their divinity real or metaphorical? For a long time the scholarly consensus was that this is the wrong kind of question: to pose the question in terms of inner mental process is to impose an anachronistically Christian framework onto polytheistic antiquity. In a pre-theological world, it was said, no one cared to ask such literal questions. The Hellenistic ruler cult, according to this way of thinking, was instead an idiom, a way of expressing the new political reality. The citizens of Greek states were well used to the idea that they voted honors to their top citizens (even democratic Athens had a form of this practice). From the Hellenistic subjects’ point of view, then, treating their royals as gods was simply an extension of existing practice; it had no serious metaphysical implications. From this perspective, only the odd member of the intellectual elite paused to query the divinization of mortals conceptually (one poet speaks of the “impiety of granting divine honours to men”); for the rest, it was enough to perform the rituals.
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It may well be true that, in antiquity as now, many people lived their lives without questioning what they were told. But the idea that the divinity of Hellenistic rulers rarely presented itself as a problem seems, at the very least, intuitively wrong. Kings are not gods: they die. The issue is, as ever, one of sources. If we treat the official publications of states (which means in this case principally their inscriptions) as our evidence for Hellenistic ruler cult, then it stands to reason that we will end up concluding that it was largely unproblematic for its consumers. It was in the interests of those who ran cities to pretend that their institutions were straightforward, natural, and uncontested. If, however, we look to other kinds of sources then we can begin to disclose how the more quizzical onlooker may have felt. Recent scholars have begun to argue for a complex range of possible responses, from the accepting to the incredulous: often these will have been harmonized within the individual’s mind, but not always. Religion in general, after all, perpetuates itself by drawing connections between things that are not intuitively connected and naturalizing these connections through social mechanisms. “Religion,” one scholar has said, “is in the mind. It consists not so much in religious acts as in schemes of perceptions and thoughts whose meaningfulness is repeatedly reinforced by the performance of symbolic acts.” The social expectation that one should view Hellenistic monarchs as gods was precisely one such scheme of perception. What was problematic about it, however, was that it risked conflict with another one, according to which gods are viewed as by definition supernatural beings. That conflict could come in and out of focus at different times.
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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.
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