Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (23 page)

Clitomachus’s arguments left a deep mark on the world around him, albeit indirectly. His successor as head of the Academy, Philo of Larissa, was of a less skeptical bent than his predecessors, believing that certain kinds of knowledge could be securely attained. After a peaceful start in 110 BC, however, Philo’s stewardship of the Academy was beset by difficulties. First, his philosophical compromise led two of his most talented students to rebel: in the 90s, Antiochus of Ascalon split off to found a school of Platonic revivalists, while on the other flank Aenesidemus left to pursue a radical skepticism. Even more unfortunate for Philo was the war that flared up between 88 and 63 BC between Rome and Mithridates VI of Pontus. Cities around the Aegean were forced to choose sides, and Athens backed the losing horse. Philo, however, relocated to Rome at the start of the war, and it was there that he met and taught one of the greatest prodigies of the age. Marcus Tullius Cicero was in his late teens at the time, and the exiled head of Plato’s school made a great impression on him.

It was no doubt through Philo that Cicero came to the ideas of Clitomachus and found out about the philosophical atheists. In around 45 BC, having patched up his relationship with Julius Caesar and returned to Rome, Cicero began work on a theological study called
On the Nature of the Gods,
a dialogue divided into three books. In the first book, Velleius puts forward the Epicurean view of the gods and is rebuffed by the Academic Cotta; in the second, Balbus argues the Stoic position; in the third, Cotta again replies, putting the Academic argument. Cicero seems to have depended heavily on Clitomachus for Cotta’s arguments, which are largely skeptical, arguing that the Stoics and the Epicureans make unprovable assumptions about the gods, which they cannot sustain. The crucial point for our purposes is that Cotta’s attack on the Epicurean “thin gods” also contains an atheist doxography, which classical scholars now believe derives ultimately from Clitomachus, via Philo. The Epicureans’ conception of the gods as incapable of intervening in our world, Cotta argues, is tantamount to atheism of the kind proposed by Diagoras, Theodorus, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Euhemerus; he briefly summarizes the positions of each. In Cicero’s text the doxography is put to a specific, anti-Epicurean use, and there is a hint of hostility toward the atheist position: Cotta attacks the Epicureans by saying that they are
no better than
the atheists. Cicero, after all, was a theist; he concludes
On the Nature of the Gods
saying, in his own voice, that he sides with the Stoic Balbus, who has argued for a providentially just god. But Clitomachus and his teacher Carneades were different kinds of beasts. From their point of view, the skeptical project depended on demonstrating that the arguments against the existence of gods must be just as strong as those for. Clitomachus’s writings almost certainly included a positive doxography of atheism, a distillation of all the very best arguments against divinity, going right back to classical times.
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Clitomachus’s
On Atheism
gave atheism legitimacy and in so doing created the possibility of engagement and identification with that tradition. It is in this sense that doxography functioned as a virtual network, joining together disbelievers across time and space, in much the way that electronic media do. The written text is, after all, a technology. The postclassical Greek-speaking world, indeed, was always already a textual network. Stretching out as it did over a vast space from Sicily to Iraq, it was too disparate to be held together by real-time interaction. What is more, until Roman conquest, there was no political unity either. Religion offered only a weak coherence, since there was so much variation in regional cult, which could also be intermixed with non-Greek divinity. What united the Greek world across all of this as an “imagined community” (to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase) was precisely the power of a shared sense of common texts, cultural traditions, and historical reference points clustering around Homer and classical Athens. The virtual community of ancient atheists was calqued on this process.
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Clitomachus’s doxography does not survive, but its importance to later antiquity is crystal clear. There are two other major atheist doxographers, both from the second century AD. The first is Sextus Empiricus, the richest mine for Hellenistic philosophical atheism, whom we met in chapter 11. The other is Aëtius, a shadowy figure whose doxographical work
The Tenets
has been reconstructed by modern scholars from various sources. What he offers, however, is sensational. Sextus, as a Skeptic, is interested only in demonstrating the equal power of arguments both for and against the existence of gods; he offers the atheist arguments only as a counterweight to theist ones. Aëtius, by contrast, is interested in atheism as a free-standing intellectual position. What is more, there is not a trace of moral judgment in his account: what he offers is simply a clear-sighted compendium of arguments used by those who do not believe. By the second century AD, atheism in the full, modern sense had acquired full legitimacy as a philosophical idea.
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Aëtius begins by noting that “some of the philosophers” deny the existence of gods together: as examples he chooses Diagoras of Melos, Euhemerus, and the author (whom he identifies as Euripides) of the Sisyphus fragment. This catalogue of names is of a familiar type, which suggests that it derives ultimately from Clitomachus. But this is not just a tired rehash. Aëtius uses forceful, mocking language to describe traditional views of the gods: the poets talk “nonsense” about divine omnipotence; Plato is full of “archaic, lunatic nonsense” when he claims that a god created the universe in his own image, pointing out the implication that this would mean that the god in question is spherical. “Nonsense,”
l
ē
ros,
is a word drawn from the savage satire of comedy. This ridicule is designed to perform a particular function: it is group-building rhetoric, designed to get the reader on the speaker’s side and giggling at the absurdity of traditional theism. As we read this, we are supposed to be reinforced in our skepticism.

Aëtius draws up three different types of argument. The first attacks the idea of omnipotence. If the god is omnipotent, can he make snow black, fire cold, and so forth? Surely not, Aëtius implies; so he cannot be omnipotent. This is an early version of now-familiar omnipotence paradoxes (“Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?” “Can God eat himself?”). The second is cosmological. Certain thinkers argue that the cosmos is created by a divine force. But creation is necessarily an event in time. If there was creation, there was a time before creation. What happened then? Did the god not exist during that time? That is unacceptable for any view of gods as eternal. Was he asleep? That too is unthinkable, for sleep suggests weariness, which is impossible for an omnipotent being. If he was awake, however, he was not yet fulfilled, since he had not completed his plan, and that too suggests that he has not always been complete in his blessedness. The final argument is one that goes back to Euripides’s
Bellerophon:
if the gods are in charge of moral punishment and reward, how do we explain wrongdoing in the world? With more than a tinge of misogyny (the crimes of women are always worse), Aëtius adduces the mythical instances of Clytemnestra murdering the “excellent” Agamemnon and Deianeira destroying Heracles.

To ask what Aëtius himself thought of such arguments would be to miss the point. His fundamental doxographic aim was not to evaluate or judge the ideas of others but to capture the kind of argumentation and rhetoric characteristic of this particular community. What is striking in this precious testimony, along with the argumentation, is the use of the language of mockery, which implies an attempt to reinforce group cohesion by stigmatizing those outside. This is exactly how communities sustain themselves, especially virtual ones that depend on texts rather than face-to-face communication. There are strong parallels, for example, with the letters attributed to the apostle Paul: there too we find the same combination of group-affirming arguments, appeal to tradition, and derision leveled at those poor, benighted fools who do not belong.

In his own his atheist doxography, Sextus Empiricus refers at one point to “the company [
tagma
] of the atheists.” Sextus uses the phrase metaphorically, to refer to the virtual community of disbelievers he himself has constructed by linking together different thinkers from different periods in time and space. The doxographic gaze, surveying Greek thought throughout the ages, sees patterns where others see mere arbitrary dots. What Aëtius suggests, however, is the possibility of a real community. Was there actually a movement toward atheism in the early Roman Empire? That is the question to which we now turn.
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B
y the second century AD, a long period of stability and opportunity had funneled power and resource upward into the hands of an elite keen to compete with one another for prestige. This was an “age of ambition,” to quote one eminent scholar. Behind this culture of aristocratic self-promotion was the concept of the Roman peace, Pax Romana. The Latin word
“pax”
means something subtly different from its English equivalent: not the absolute absence of war but its successful prosecution, so as to subjugate malcontents. “Pacification” is a better translation. The emperor Vespasian’s Temple of Peace was a monument to his crushing of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. “They make a desert and call it
pax,
” says an astute Scottish resistance leader in Tacitus’s account of the conquest of Britain.
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The Roman Empire was a highly integrated system, a masterpiece of hegemonic design. Practical decisions were made locally by centrally appointed governors and city councils formed of co-opted local elites; difficult decisions and questions of principle were referred to the imperial bureaucracy at the center. The provinces retained their autonomy in religious and cultural matters (although there was also in the Greek-speaking parts a tacit expectation that worship should be offered to the emperor). The illusion that Rome’s provincial subjects retained the autonomy and self-determination that they had enjoyed in the ancient city-state was offset by the ever-present awareness that Rome held the real power. One sage philosopher advised a young Greek with aspirations to political power in his city to keep reminding himself that “you rule, but you are also ruled…watch the boots above your head.”
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The equilibrium of the empire was maintained by the tension of two opposing forces. On the one hand, Rome, the hub of empire, drew the gaze of all: much of the known world was now subject to one imperial master, the ultimate authority in matters to do with politics, the law, and the military. This centralization, however, was balanced by an amplification of individual local, religious, and philosophical identities. In every part of the empire, international deities established themselves alongside traditional ones, among them the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Iranian fire god Mithras, the Syrian fish deity Atargatis, another Syrian Jupiter Dolichenus, and of course Yahweh in both his Jewish and his newer Christian guises. Ancient Greek philosophies such as Pythagoreanism and Platonism re-emerged in new, mystical guises alongside Stoicism and Epicureanism. Globalization was accompanied by what cultural theorists call “glocalization,” a retrenchment of regional, nonstandard, and subcultural identities as a response to the interconnectedness of the new world and the perceived threat of being subsumed into a homogeneous whole. Yet this multiplication of religious forms was itself a product of empire, and in particular of Rome’s status as a multicultural hub. “Throughout all the empires, provinces and cities,” observes a Christian writer of the second century AD, “we see people with their own individual rites (the Eleusinians worship Ceres, the Phrygians the Mother, the Epidaurians Asclepius, the Chaldaeans Baal, the Syrians Astarte, the Taurians Diana, the Gauls Mercury)—but the Romans worship the whole lot.” The imperial capital was the marketplace of the world, and in that marketplace anything could be acquired—including religious beliefs. Empire-wide networks facilitated the spread of new cults far and wide: the army was particularly important in this respect. Thus it was that, for example, sanctuaries of Jupiter Dolichenus, Mithras, and Isis ended up in Britain, in the distant northeast of the empire.
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But what of atheists? Now that it was a named and philosophically established position, and “virtual networks” had been created via doxographies, did atheism similarly spread across the known world? The evidence is more difficult to track than with religious cults, since disbelievers were not concerned to leave physical traces of their absence of belief. There are no shrines, statues, inscriptions, coins, or graffiti indicating their presence. Yet it seems clear that atheism did indeed flourish alongside the many cults of the empire, even if we must instead tease their traces delicately out of literary sources.

Lucius Apuleius of Madaura was one of the most colorful figures who trod the stage of the second-century AD Roman Empire (a stage, indeed, that was well set for polychromatic personalities). A number of his philosophical and rhetorical works survive, although he is remembered primarily for his riotous novel
The Golden Ass
or
Metamorphoses.
This tells of one Lucius, whose voracious curiosity sees him get mixed up in magic and transformed into a donkey; after a long string of ordeals, he is returned to human form and thereupon converts to the cult of Isis. Many have seen in his namesake Lucius more than a touch of Apuleius himself, who shared the same blend of adventurousness, mischief, and religiosity. (Augustine notoriously took
The Golden Ass
as an autobiography.) And indeed the author seems to have had adventures of his own with religion and magic. At some point in the 150s, on his way home to Madaura (the modern town of M’Daourouch in Algeria), he stopped off at Oea, now the Libyan capital Tripoli. There he fell sick, but his misfortune turned to advantage when he met, befriended, and eventually married a wealthy widow several years his senior called Aemilia Pudentilla. All went well until two parties with designs on Pudentilla’s fortune, Aemilianus and Rufinus, started stirring up trouble. Their plan was to win her children over to their side (which they did) and then prosecute Apuleius in court on the grounds that he had captured her heart by magic.

But they had reckoned without one of the greatest orators of the age. The trial was a high-profile affair, taking place in AD 158 or 159 before the proconsul of North Africa, Claudius Maximus, at Sabrata (modern Zowara). We have his masterful defense speech: modeled loosely on Socrates’s own defense at Athens in 399 BC, it patiently skewers all of the opposition’s arguments, ridiculing their claims and painting Apuleius as the model of philosophical bookishness and integrity. Apuleius also artfully turns the tables on the prosecution, arguing for their own moral failings. In particular, he paints himself as a paragon of religious observance and his prosecutor Aemilianus as constitutionally averse to ritual worship. The supposed magical objects he has been hoarding are in fact talismans associated with mystery cults and testify to his immersion in conventional religion. As for Aemilianus:

I know that there are some people, among them this Aemilianus, who enjoy mocking all things divine. I understand from several people at Oea who know him that to this very day he has never prayed to any god or visited any temple, while if he passes any shrine he considers it a wrong to raise his hand to his lips in reverence. He has never given a first-fruit offering of crops, vines or animals to any of the agricultural gods who supply his food and clothes. His farm has no shrine, holy place or grove. But why do I speak of groves or shrines? Those who have visited his estate say they have never seen there any stone where an oil offering has been made, or one branch where a wreath has been hung. That is why he has two nicknames. He is called Charon, as I have said, since he is grumpy in personality and appearance. But he is also called Mezentius, because he holds the gods in contempt.
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Apuleius presents his opponent as an out-and-out atheist, someone with no concern for worshipping the gods. Associating him with Mezentius was a rhetorical masterstroke: the latter appears in Vergil’s
Aeneid
as a
contemptor deorum
(despiser of the gods), a theomachic barbarian whom “pious Aeneas” must defeat to found Rome. Apuleius was implying that his accuser’s religious stance made him the embodiment of religious, moral, and social disorder and an enemy of Roman values.
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Was Aemilianus really an atheist? The obvious difficulty is that it is hard to know how much adjustment to make for Apuleius’s rhetoric. Exaggerated invective was a familiar feature of the ancient courtroom: listeners would have known that they should take such accusations with fistfuls of salt, much as they would the standard charges of adultery, poisoning, and a penchant for oral sex. But this will not quite explain Apuleius’s attack, since he suggests that Aemilianus is part of a community of like-minded individuals. “I know that there are some people,” he opines, “among them this Aemilianus…” Aemilianus is (according to Apuleius) one of a number of such people. The phrasing in fact recalls the doxographers’ descriptions of the atheists as a virtual network: “There are some of the philosophers, such as Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene and Euhemerus of Tegea, who say that the gods do not exist at all.” Do we have in Apuleius evidence for a comparable network in North Africa, but this time a network of real-life atheists?
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Those who have considered the case of Aemilianus and his community have sometimes concluded that he was not an atheist in our sense, but a Christian. But there were very few Christians in North Africa in the mid-second century AD, and it is hard not to conclude that those who would count Apuleius’s prosecutor among their number have been prompted to do so by an ideologically based desire to swell their ranks.
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Atheism does not seem to have been especially controversial in the early Roman Empire. Those like Aemilianus no doubt lived relatively unmolested, so long as they participated in the civic lives of their communities (which may have included the bare minimum of religious observance). There were no restrictions on the articulation of atheistic beliefs or prosecutions. Even so mainstream a figure as Pliny—this is Pliny the Elder, the Roman military and naval commander and victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79—on occasion expressed himself a religious skeptic. The second book of his encyclopedia the
Natural History
promotes a naturalist view of the world as united by a single, all-pervasive cosmic power (not unlike that of the early pre-Socratics). This theory has little room for any conception of deity. “I think of it as a sign of human imbecility to try to find out the shape and form of a god,” he writes. “Whoever ‘god’ is—if in fact he exists at all—he consists in pure sense, sight, sound, soul, mind: he is purely himself.” Pliny goes on to poke fun at the multiplicity of gods found in different houses, cities, and countries: “From this we can infer that there are more deities than humans!” Illogicalities are also mocked: gods marry without producing children; some of them are always old, others always young; all sorts of odd, implausible, and immoral stories are told about them. Like Prodicus and Euhemerus, he argues that religious belief originated in the celebration of human achievements: the names of the gods, and even the stars themselves, were born (he claims) from the “merits of men.” It is ludicrous to think that any divinity that might exist would pay any attention to humanity. The idea that Fortune, in the sense of mere chance, is a deity is also absurd, but no more credible is the notion that everything is predetermined. The conception of divinity, he asserts, derives from a human need for a belief in justified rewards and punishment for moral and immoral behavior. As a whole, Pliny’s disquisition suggests that the idea of deity is a human construction. “God,” he says at one point, “is one mortal helping another.” We make our own divinity through our behavior toward others.
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Pliny was no radical; he was simply a reflective, intelligent, well-read individual who had no reason to suppress these skeptical thoughts. Certainly, atheism could still be imagined as countercultural. Demonax of Cyprus was a second-century AD philosopher given to speaking his mind whatever the consequences. The satirist Lucian of Samosata, in his biography of him, suggests that he saw himself as an atheist in the classical mode. His accusers at Athens, Lucian writes, “brought against him the same charges as Anytus and Melytus brought against Socrates, claiming that he had never been seen sacrificing, and that he alone of all had never been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.” His response to the first accusation was that the gods have no need of sacrificial offerings; to the second he replied that he was worried about joining the cult since if the rites were unimpressive he would not be able to stop himself from turning the uninitiated away from the mysteries, and if they were he would feel that he had to tell everyone. In other words, by not allowing himself to be initiated he has stopped himself from profaning the Mysteries—as Diagoras of Melos, classical Athens’s atheist
par excellence,
had famously done (or been accused of doing) in 415 BC. Demonax was implicitly acknowledging his own atheism but taking steps to avoid causing the kind of ruckus that his predecessors created. The Athenians were amused at his answer and dropped the stones they were about to hurl at him.

Among the many philosophical jokes Lucian records, there are a few that suggest mockery of conventional religion. One of his friends asked him to go to the sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius to pray for his son. “You obviously think Asclepius is pretty deaf,” Demonax replied, “if he cannot hear us praying here.” Someone asked him if he thought that the soul was immortal, and he replied, “Oh yes, immortal in the way that everything is.” When he met a seer making public prophecies for money, he told him he could not justify the fee: “If you think you can change destiny, then whatever you ask for you’re charging too little; but if the future turns out as the god has decreed it, what use is prophecy?” Demonax seems to have been a philosopher in the Cynic mode (“He seemed to follow the man of Sinope in his dress”): aggressively satirical, an enemy of dogma rather than a doctrinaire adherent to any particular philosophical code. This made him more of an assailant of existing ideas about religion than an active evangelist for atheism.
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If Demonax remains an obscure figure, his biographer, Lucian (ca. AD 120–180), is one of the most influential ancient Greek writers of all. Born in Mesopotamian Samosata (near Ad
ı
yaman in modern Turkey), he attained literary fame across the empire. His squibs and fantasies have often earned him the label of atheist. One tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia tells us about his nickname: “ ‘Blasphemer’ or ‘slanderer’—better, in fact, to call him ‘atheist,’ because in his dialogues he went so far as to ridicule religious discourse…The story goes that he was killed by dogs, because of his rabid attacks on the truth, for in his
Life of Peregrinus
he inveighs against Christianity, and (accursed man!) blasphemes against Christ himself. For that reason he paid the penalty befitting his rabidity in this world, and in the life to come he will share the eternal fire with Satan.” No more temperate was the sixteenth-century Catholic Inquisition, which placed his work on their list of proscribed books. Conversely, however, he was also championed by the early modern humanists, who saw him as a fearless mocker of religious flummery. Thomas More and Erasmus were both keen translators and literary imitators; later on he would inspire Voltaire and Swift.
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