Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (21 page)

T
he Hellenistic period also saw the expansion of Rome from a regional capital to the dominant force in the Mediterranean. The decisive events for Rome were the Punic Wars, fought between 264 and 146 BC against Carthage, the Phoenicians’ capital in North Africa (in modern Tunisia). It was the utter destruction of Carthage—famously urged by Cato the Elder, who ended every speech
“Carthaginem esse delendam”—
that left Rome as the unrivaled superpower controlling the center of the Mediterranean, and thus the profitable trade routes between West and East. Rome began gobbling up other kingdoms and states. The first overseas territory was Sicily, a dividend of the First Punic War (264–241 BC); from then on, the Empire grew steadily, more typically by annexation of client kingdoms than by conquest. In 133 BC, the Hellenistic ruler Attalus III bequeathed his territories to Rome; the Bithynian king Nicomedes IV did much the same in 74 BC. Brutalities of the most terrifying kind certainly did occur, however. When, in the aftermath of the Third Punic War the Achaean League (a union of independent Greek states based in the Peloponnese) reacted against Roman intervention in Greece, the response was uncompromising: in 146 BC the general Mummius destroyed the entire city of Corinth. The remains that partially stand today are all of later date, after Julius Caesar refounded it as a colony for his veterans in 44 BC. More Greek blood was shed in the first century BC, when Mithridates of Pontus, a kingdom on the shore of the Black Sea, expanded his territories rapidly, annexing parts of Anatolia and pushing into the Aegean Sea. The Greek cities on the Ionian coast and on the mainland were forced to take sides. Some chose the party that history favored: one such is Aphrodisias, whose splendid remains testify to this day to Rome’s gratitude. Others were less fortunate: among them was Athens itself, ruled by a puppet tyrant in liege to Mithridates, until it was sacked by the Roman general Sulla in 87–86 BC.
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As Rome gradually took control of the Mediterranean, it quickly learned from the Hellenistic empires it displaced the style and ceremony of an imperial power. From the Greeks they took grandiose architecture, idealizing artwork, and ennobling literature. Sometimes they took these in a quite literal sense: after the sack of the Sicilian city of Syracuse in 212 BC (despite the ingenious defensive weaponry pioneered by Archimedes), the parade of loot through Rome took four days. Rome took everything it could from the Greek world, including thousands of slaves, many of whom gave the aristocratic Roman young their learning.
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A decisive moment in the expansion of Roman power came when Octavian, the adopted heir of Julius Caesar, defeated the navy of Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) off the western coast of Greece at the battle of Actium, 31 BC. Although a small affair in military terms, it was a highly significant event symbolically. In the first place, it put an end to the civil wars that had raged between different Roman factions throughout much of the first century BC. Second, it began the process that led to a political revolution, whereby one man—an emperor, but the Romans would call him
princeps
rather than
imperator
—ruled much of the known world. Third, it meant that the entire Mediterranean basin was now in effect subordinate to Rome, since the defeat of Antony meant also the defeat of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies of Egyptian Alexandria and the last of the Hellenistic monarchs to hold out against Rome. Octavian quickly changed his name to Augustus, and with that changed the course of history.

The eastern frontiers of the empire continued to shift over the coming centuries, but the vast majority of the Greek-speaking world was now subordinate to Rome. Having taught Rome the language of power, the Greeks now learned what it meant to be imperial subordinates. Yet many of the elite, at any rate, actually prospered in the new world, acquiring citizenship, power, and prestige. The empire brought a measure of political stability and peace and so allowed for the creation of a vast marketplace, of ideas as much as of material stuff. Different religions, in particular, prospered: Mithraism, the cult of Isis, Judaism, and eventually Christianity. In the course of the fourth century AD, in an extraordinary development that could scarcely have been predicted even one hundred years earlier, the youngest of these became the official cult of the Roman state.

The interconnected, centralized, bureaucratized world of the Roman Empire was entirely different in kind from the loose agglomeration of city-states that made up archaic and classical Greece. The structural challenge presented by a vast empire was how to bind together all those diverse regions into one whole. This was achieved with phenomenal success. In its Augustan guise, the empire survived for three hundred years; once refounded by Constantine in Byzantium, it lasted until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The Romans were experts in governance: the empire owed its perdurance to a number of finely honed techniques. Unlike the Hellenistic monarchies, the Romans co-opted regional rulers and aristocratic elites, persuading them that their own interests were identical to those of the ruling power. One mechanism for doing so was the sharing of Roman citizenship, which also gave the beneficiaries access to Roman law. In AD 212 (under the emperor Caracalla) a decree was passed extending that citizenship to all male inhabitants of the empire, while all women were to have the same rights as Roman women.

The empire was also integrated by a number of symbolic mechanisms that connected the center to the periphery: images of the emperor, inscriptions detailing his responses to the city’s requests, public postings of news from Rome. Above all, the army and the law were ever-present reminders of the Roman order. One Greek orator in the second century AD compared the whole world under Roman rule to a single city on a feast day: “It has laid aside its old dress and the carrying of weapons, and has been allowed to turn to adornments and all kinds of pleasures.” Regional variety had not in fact disappeared (there is some rhetorical exaggeration here), but it was constantly weighed against the norms demanded by Rome. One neat illustration of this process is naming. Greeks with Roman citizenship often adopted the Roman habit of taking a forename (
praenomen
), a family name (
nomen
), and an individualizing name (
cognomen
). For Greeks, the first two were typically Roman (the
nomen
reflecting the Roman who had granted the family citizenship), and their regular Greek name became the
cognomen.
Hence Plutarch’s full name was Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, and the historian, philosopher, and politician Arrian was Lucius Flavius Arrianus. Those Greeks with citizenship had Romanness etched into their very identities.
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Religion provided the most powerful mechanism of symbolic integration. As they had done under many of the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Greeks treated their ruler as a god, building temples to him and holding festivals and sacrifices in his honor. In this way, cities came together as civic communities, as they had always done, but also validated their participation in the wider empire. Worship of the emperor was an important test of provincial loyalty to the Roman cause. The Jewish rebellion against Rome was presaged by a refusal to offer sacrifice to Nero. In 250, the emperor Decius precipitated the first major wave of Christian persecutions (perhaps unintentionally) by insisting that everyone in the empire should be certificated by a magistrate as having performed a sacrifice to the Roman gods and for the well-being of the emperor. The idea of an imperial authority using political means to impose religious observance had its roots in the sporadic practice of the Hellenistic Greek world (we might think of Antiochus III demanding that all the Greeks of Mesopotamia worship him), but it now became the expected norm. Within less than one hundred years’ time, however, the roles had been reversed: Christianity became the normative religion, and sacrificing to “pagan” gods had become illegal. Now the image of a unified Roman Empire revolving around the powerful imperial hub was mirrored by a new kind of religious symbol: the entirety of creation revolving around a single, omnipotent god. Political centralization had effectively paved the way for theocracy.
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I
n the worlds of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece, religion was never a driver of historical events. No war was ever fought for the sake of a god, no empire was expanded in the name of proselytization, no foe was crushed for believing in the wrong god. Political and military decisions were made for human reasons and analyzed in those terms. Nevertheless, whatever the mundane motives, success in war could be seen as a sign of divine support. From the
Iliad
onward, victory was interpreted by some as evidence of the gods’ favor. Having gods on one’s side—or, at least, being able to persuade others that they were—came to be seen as a decisive factor in a state’s fate. The cult of Tykhe (“Fortune”), for example, flourished from the fourth century BC onward and expanded throughout the Hellenistic world. Nike (“Victory”) appeared earlier, but again spread in Hellenistic times. Both seem to have been directly promoted by Alexander the Great, who was keen to claim (as a son of Zeus Ammon) that he had divine support. The congealing of the Greek-speaking world into imperial blocs was accompanied by a stealthy but steady amplification of propaganda promoting the idea that the world was as it was destined to be and just as the gods wanted it.

It was, however, with the Romans that the idea of a divine mandate for empire really took hold. The second-century BC Greek philosopher Panaetius, who did much to introduce Stoicism to Rome, taught that the cosmos is governed by providence, which permeates it in much the same way that the soul permeates the body (the influence of Plato’s
Timaeus
is palpable). Every act and action, therefore, is the result of divine will. Panaetius, the first major philosopher to relocate to Rome, thought that little could be said about the gods themselves but did write a tract
On Providence.
Stoic philosophy, congenial as it was to an imperial ideology, gradually percolated its way into the Roman elite, albeit often translated and hybridized. Essentially, Stoicism taught that happiness is achieved not by pursuing appetites but by living according to nature: one’s own nature, but also that of the universe itself. Everything that happens in the universe is directed toward the best outcome; our duty as individuals is to discern, as best we can using our rational powers, what that outcome is and to bend our lives toward facilitating it. If all the world is a play, the Stoics were fond of saying, our job is simply to play our part, whatever it is, to the best of our abilities. There was nothing in philosophical Stoicism that
required
obedience to a particular political dispensation—and there were Stoics in the later time of Nero and Vespasian who took a principled stance against the autocratic rule of emperors—but it was certainly a system that was in theory compatible with an imperialist outlook. Once the more nuanced and technical aspects of philosophical Stoicism had been whittled away, it was no giant step from a belief in universal divine providence to a belief that the Roman Empire was ordained by the gods to govern the world in the best possible way.
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The idea that the rise of the Roman Empire was providentially decreed was first explored by the Greek historian Polybius in the second century BC. Polybius’s family had disapproved of Roman control of Macedonia, for which crime he was relegated to Rome to tutor the sons of the conquering general Lucius Aemilius Paullus. His own history of the period 264–146 BC, however, is remarkably pro-Roman. Rome’s political constitution, an optimal blend of the democratic, the aristocratic, and the monarchical, has “from the beginning followed the path of nature.” Polybius was not a philosopher, but he certainly could see Rome’s dominion over much of the known world in providential terms: “Fortune has bowed practically all the world’s interests toward one region, and forced them all to assent to one and the same aim.” Polybius could on occasion be critical of Roman actions (such as Mummius’s brutal sack of Corinth in 146 BC), but in general he saw the interests of the world—that is to say, those of the Greek-speaking world—as best served by obedience to their new masters. Other Rome-based Greek historians like Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of Halicarnassus followed suit.
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It was, however, in the age of Augustus (ruled 27 BC–AD 14), Rome’s first emperor, that the providential vision of Rome’s imperial mission reached its greatest expression. The
Aeneid,
Vergil’s epic poem in twelve books of intricately crafted Latin hexameters, tells how a Trojan prince fled the smoking ruins of Troy after the Greek victory and eventually ended up in Italy, where he would found a new city. Aeneas, the prince in question, was the son of the goddess Venus; his son was Iulus, the founder of the Julian family, to whom Augustus’s adoptive father Julius Caesar belonged. At one point early on in the first book, Jupiter, king of the Roman gods, addresses Venus with a grand prophecy of future glories:

I set no limits on the Romans’ achievements, nor any time-frame;

I have given them empire without end.
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There is no room for chance: empire will be Rome’s, because Jupiter has decreed it thus. History is written in the stars. Nor in fact is there any space for human free will. Aeneas is, in the very first sentence of the epic, driven from Troy “by fate.” When he pitches up on the shores of modern Tunisia, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful widow who is founding a city, Carthage (which would later become Rome’s great nemesis). Yet despite a whirlwind romance, ending in an intimate scene in a cave, Dido and Aeneas were not meant to be. Jupiter orders Mercury, messenger of the gods, “to bear his mandates through the swift breezes” and to command Aeneas to leave Carthage to found the new city in Italy. Human desires are not to stand in the way of destiny, and the Roman Empire was the culmination of destiny’s great plan for the world.
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For Homer, Vergil’s literary model, fate is a hazy and indeterminate thing. For the Roman poet, by contrast, it assumes a philosophical force. Vergil’s worldview is shaped by Stoic theory. The
Aeneid
offers a vision of a city that from its very foundation was destined to rule the world, and of a royal family marked out from the start for unrivaled greatness. Augustus’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra (which is prophesied in the poem) is the culmination of the gods’ benevolent plan for humanity. In spite of the many-sided complexity of this poetic vision—Dido’s heartrending suicide is proof enough that the poet is compassionate toward the losers too—the
Aeneid
is most fundamentally a reflection of Augustus’s vision of a global empire secured for him by divine mandate.

Augustus was the gods’ favorite, and his own favorite god was Apollo, whose cult he established on the Palatine Hill. Statues of Apollo sprang up all over Rome; the god’s signature laurel leaf appeared on coinage. Apollo represented harmony; his opposite number was Dionysus, to whom the defeated Antony had assimilated himself. In a sense, Augustus
was
divine. “We have believed that Jupiter reigns, thundering in heaven,” writes the poet Horace (a contemporary of Vergil’s), “but Augustus will be treated as a god amongst us.” At Rome, emperors were treated as gods once they had died. Vespasian’s witty last words were “Dammit—I think I’m becoming a god.” Not all made the grade: one cheeky satire on the emperor Claudius has the dead emperor refused admission to heaven and thrown down to the underworld instead. In many Greek-speaking cities of the eastern empire, however, Hellenistic practice continued, and Augustus and his successors were accorded cult worship within their own lifetimes. Many ancient historians have tended to see this process as motivated by the Greeks’ own craving for a means of expressing the giddying hierarchy of Roman power within the religious “language” of their own city religion. This is true enough, but it tells only part of the story: the imperial center surely supplied resources, materials, and craftsmen for elaborate temples and statuary. But it would be misleading to think that the deification of emperors was not a straightforward fiat. The ancients were very aware that emperors were made of flesh and blood, and those who had not grasped it immediately came quickly to learn that many were (like Claudius) unworthy of adulation. As so often in political ideologies, there was an element of fuzziness here. The divinity of the emperor sat in an uncertain space between reality and metaphor.
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Religious propaganda played a crucial role in persuading a sizeable majority of the populace not to resist the gods’ designs for Rome. Imperial ideology was extraordinarily persuasive on the whole, holding together in a single geopolitical vessel fifty million inhabitants of a vast, culturally and linguistically diverse territory. Rebellions against Rome were in fact surprisingly few (Spartacus’s slave revolt was a rare anomaly). Like all ideologies, however, it was also contested. Although many aristocrats enjoyed the benefits brought by the Pax Romana in terms of power, stability, and wealth, the empire was not universally popular. It is hard now to trace a culture of resistance: history has not only been written by the victors but also been selectively preserved by them. Given that ideas of divine providence and imperial ideology were so closely intertwined, however, atheism now took on a political slant too. The atheistic literature of the period thus offers a welcome glimpse into the world of the resistance.
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Plato in the
Laws
identified three kinds of disbeliever: those who believed that there were no gods, those who believe the gods have no interest in human well-being, and those who think their favor can be bought by simple trades like prayers and sacrifices. In the era of the Roman principate, the first two categories were often conflated. Disbelief in providence was in effect disbelief in gods: the religious heretic was “atheistic [
atheos
], unholy, one who rejects divinity and denies providence.” Part of the reason for this lies in the influence of Epicureanism, with its “thin” gods who have no influence on our world. Epicureans were often thought of as atheists precisely because they denied providence.
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But the Epicureans were not actively engaged in resistance to Roman hegemony. Epicureanism was fundamentally an apolitical philosophy. Its adherents disdained active engagement in civic life: that kind of questing after public recognition, they thought, led only to stress and distraction from the real aim, serene tranquility. “Live unnoticed” was one of its precepts. Political theory was thus not a mainstream concern. To locate those who rejected the providentialist view of the empire we must look elsewhere.

Shortly after Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, a Greek intellectual called Dionysius relocated from Halicarnassus, on what is now the west coast of Turkey, to Rome. Halicarnassus, a city steeped in Greek culture (it was, most notably, the birthplace of the great historian Herodotus), had been ravaged by war. A traditionally pro-Roman city, it had been treated savagely by Mithridates VI of Pontus in his campaigns against Rome between 88 and 63 BC. Even after Mithridates’s defeat by Pompey the Great, Rome’s notorious civil wars between the followers of Julius Caesar and their rivals took their toll on the region. Dionysius arrived in Rome in his thirties, full of optimism that Rome’s new leader Octavian offered the best hope of ending the bloodshed that had bedeviled the eastern Mediterranean. As well as establishing himself as a masterful literary critic and teacher of rhetoric, he also wrote a history of Rome from its foundation, which partly survives.
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Dionysius’s
Roman Antiquities
tells the early history of Rome’s rise, up to the point where Polybius’s work started. Although an unwearying promoter of Rome’s interests, he remained a Greek and saw the world through Greek eyes; his target audience for the
Roman Antiquities
was Greek as well. His aim, rather, was to embed in the collective consciousness of his fellow Hellenes two ideas, both equally bold. The first was that the Romans are in fact ethnically Greek. The second was that Roman rule was in the best interests of the Greeks. It is no coincidence that Dionysius and Vergil were contemporaries; both paint their mythical stories about the Roman past with eminently Augustan colors, telling in their different ways of the inevitability of Roman domination of the known world.
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Dionysius wrote as he did not because his pro-Roman views were mainstream, but precisely because they were not. His work is powerfully polemical. He tells us a little about those who held opposing views. Dionysius protests that in his day, “almost all of the Greeks” base their views of early Rome on “false opinions” about “wandering, vagabond barbarians” who achieved their position of dominance “by chance, thanks to some fluke wrongly gifted to them.” As he continues, he adds a little more detail: “The more malicious are fond of levelling open accusations against Fortune for supplying the lowliest of barbarians with the successes that are due to the Greeks. And yet why do I speak about normal people, when even some historians have set down such views in writing, indulging with their unjust, untrue accounts barbarian kings who hate the Empire, whom they ended up submitting to and sharing their lives of pleasure?”
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Who were these historians who wrote anti-Roman accounts, these lickspittling popinjays of foreign courts who denied the providential nature of the empire? Of the various candidates the closest fit is one man: Metrodorus of Scepsis, a sometime courtier of Rome’s nemesis Mithridates VI of Pontus. Metrodorus was probably born around 140 BC and came from a humble background in Scepsis (northwestern Turkey). Having studied with Carneades in Athens, he developed a brilliant oratorical style of his own invention and a sophisticated mnemonic technique. He wowed audiences, and a wealthy woman sought him out for marriage. While Mithridates was pursuing his doomed attempt to rival Rome for dominance in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, Metrodorus moved to his court and enjoyed great favor, rising to the position of minister of justice. He was the starriest of a circle of Greek intellectuals based there, including Aesopus, Heracleides of Magnesia, and Teucrus of Cyzicus. For reasons unknown, however, he eventually turned his back on Mithridates. On an embassy he advised the Armenian king Tigranes that Mithridates’s terms might not be in his best interest; Tigranes told Mithridates, and Metrodorus was apparently (details are murky) done away with. Life with a warlord was perilous.
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