Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (6 page)

In ritual too, humans could play the role of deities. In the Athenian spring “flower festival” (Anthesteria), participants dressed as satyrs, half human and half goat. There was also a mysterious “sacred marriage,” a sexual union between the wife of the city’s senior magistrate and Dionysus; this may have involved the magistrate himself masquerading as the god. Herodotus has a story about the former tyrant of Athens, Pisistratus, who engineered his own return by appearing on a chariot with a tall woman called Phye, who played the role of Athena granting her blessing to his reinstatement. Herodotus is visibly contemptuous of the Athenians for falling for the trick (“They’re supposed to be the cleverest of the Greeks!” he sniffs), but it has been plausibly argued that he misreads the scene. Greek role-playing rituals like this—and as a royal procession into the city, Pisistratus’s entry was indeed a form of ritual—rested not on anything so crude as outright deception, but rather on a collective acquiescence in the masquerade. It is an odd feature of ritual that it allows people to believe they are experiencing divinity even as they know full well that the mechanics are conjured entirely by humans. (This is not just a premodern phenomenon: modern consumers happily succumb to the numinous aura of branded products in full awareness that they are being guided by nothing more than advertising.)
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There were, then, manifold ways in which humanity could achieve a kind of divinity. This is the context in which we should locate the phenomenon of theomachy, of humans battling against the gods. Jealousy of divine privilege was not “sinful”: early Greece had only a weak idea of what was “sinful” because there were no god-sent commandments to break. (The Greek translators of the Bible had to adapt a rare word,
alit
ē
rios,
to express this fundamentally alien idea.) Rather, stories of theomachy explored the perfectly natural tendency of humans to yearn to better themselves, to procure for themselves a happier life, a life that they associated with divinity. If theomachy was “wrong,” that was not because it contravened any heaven-sent rule book but because it was (at least in myth) a horrible misjudgment of the odds.

But battling the gods did have more profound, metaphysical implications too. According to the logic of the zero-sum game of honor, any competition puts status at risk. Were humans to defeat gods in any way, this would raise all sorts of questions about the nature of divinity. In the
Iliad,
intriguingly, there are moments where that golden generation of heroic warriors confronts and comes close to overmastering their divine counterparts. The Greek warrior Diomedes, mid-rampage, wounds first Aphrodite, goddess of love, and then—even more impressively—Ares, god of war, himself. Later, Achilles (who is half divine, through his mother Thetis) confronts the river god Scamander, although he comes swiftly to regret it when faced by the surging power of the torrent. Neither Diomedes nor Achilles suffers any serious consequences as a result of his actions. The point of these episodes is to dramatize the near godlikeness of the individuals in question, to show that they come as close as a mortal possibly could to crossing the boundary into the divine. But elevating humans in this way also threatens to demote the god. Aphrodite and Ares in particular are left nursing their resentment.
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In its most extreme form, theomachy expresses a kind of atheism, through the narrative medium of myth. To confront the gods was to deny their potency, what made them gods. For stories along these lines we must turn to an epic poem called the
Catalogue of Women,
written in the sixth century BC. It does not survive in its entirety: what we know of it is pieced together from fragments of papyri found in Egypt. Luckily, these are extensive: it must have been a best seller in the Roman period. At first sight, its contents do not look particularly riveting: it is in effect a family tree for the Greeks, dividing them ethnically between various descendants of Hellen, the first Greek. It is called the “
Catalogue of Women
” because it is structured around a list of women who have been impregnated by gods. But despite these unpromising signs, it seems to have been in fact a whirligig compendium of baroque myths, by turns gruesome and erotic—which no doubt explains why later readers were so keen to get their hands on it.

One particular family catches the eye, the house of Aeolus. With their heartlands in Thessaly, a notoriously wild place toward the north of Greece, the Aeolians were always easy to associate with uncivilized behavior. A surviving fragment of the
Catalogue
introduces Aeolus’s sons grandly as “kings, ministers of justice,” but this billing is at best ironic in view of what follows: “Cretheus, Athamas and Sisyphus with his shimmering wiles, and lawless Salmoneus, and arrogant Perieres…” “Shimmering” is
aiolos,
an obvious pun on their progenitor’s name. So far as we can judge, Cretheus and Athamas did not do much wrong, by the permissive standards of myth, but the rest were a reprobate lot who carried wrongdoing in their very DNA. And what is interesting for our purposes is that their crimes were of a piece: they all, in their different ways, engaged in theomachy.

In the first generation of descendants of Aeolus we meet Sisyphus, he of the “shimmering wiles.” The founder of the city of Corinth, Sisyphus is best known now (thanks to Albert Camus) for his punishment in the underworld: he was condemned to roll a rock up a hill, a rock that would tumble down each time he had almost reached the peak. There are different traditions relating to the crime that prompted this punishment; it is impossible now to tell for sure which version the now-fragmentary
Catalogue
contained, but the following is the likeliest. Zeus abducts Aegina, the daughter of Asopus; Sisyphus then angers Zeus by telling Asopus where she is. When Zeus sends Death to punish him, Sisyphus captures Death in chains, with the result that humans can no longer die. In time the god Ares releases Death and hands Sisyphus over to him, but once in the underworld he tricks his way out and lives until old age catches up with him. The fantasy of tricking death is a motif found in folklores across the world. What is distinctive about the Sisyphus myth, however, is that the wily king actually succeeds, not once but twice. He is punished in the end, of course, but here is a human who has come close to erasing the line between mortals and immortals, by defeating mortality itself.
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Then there was Alcyone, another of Aeolus’s offspring. A scrappy papyrus fragment summarizes the
Catalogue
’s version of the story: “Ceyx the son of the star Phosphorus [“Bringer of Light”] married Alcyone the daughter of Aeolus. The two of them were arrogant. They loved each other; she […] called him Zeus, he named her Hera. Zeus was angered at this and metamorphosed them into birds.” Their names, indeed, reflect their birdiness:
k
ē
ux
means “tern,” and
alkuon
ē
“kingfisher.” The crucial point for us, however, is that they attempt to make themselves into gods. A later encyclopedia adds the detail that Ceyx “wanted to be worshipped as a god.” This husband and wife team seem to have offended the gods by replacing them as the objects of religious worship. Their particular type of theomachy consisted in denying the gods by setting themselves up as substitutes.
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Salmoneus, the brother of Sisyphus and Alcyone, was perhaps the most intriguing of them all. In this case we have a fuller papyrus fragment detailing the
Catalogue
’s account of his misdeed, which can be filled out with later accounts. Here is how one late version summarizes the story (enough details correspond to confirm that it is the same version as in the
Catalogue
):

And being arrogant and wishing to put himself on an equality with Zeus, he was punished for his impiety; for he said that he was himself Zeus, and he took away the sacrifices of the god and ordered them to be offered to himself; and by dragging dried hides, with bronze kettles, behind his chariot, he said that he was making thunder, and by flinging lighted torches at the sky he said that he was making lightning. But Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt, and wiped out the city he had founded with all its inhabitants.
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This marvelous story has comic features: the idea of using kitchen utensils to compete with Zeus the Thunderer looks more like a jokey parody than a worked-up statement of philosophical atheism. Yet the story does also have a theoretical dimension. Divinity, from this perspective, is reduced to a list of easily imitable signs: a name, a noise, a flash in the sky. The implication of Salmoneus’s performance is that there is nothing more to the gods than these, and if humans can replicate them, humans can achieve everything that the gods can. There is something that verges on the postmodern in Salmoneus’s replication of “brand Zeus,” in much the same way as a forger would the logo of a clothes designer. Indeed, other ancient authors who tell the story of Salmoneus emphasize that his crime was, precisely, to
imitate
Zeus: the Greek concept of
mim
ē
sis
carries hints of fabrication and deception. It is possible, then, that the original version of the Salmoneus myth was a parable about the dangers that lurked in humans’ capacity to fabricate gods through ritual, drama, and statuary (which was spreading through Greece at exactly this time, in the sixth century). If gods can be fashioned by mortal imitation, how real can they be?
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We can push the argument further. Two ingenious scholars have made the observation that the way in which Salmoneus’s kettles and hides are described is almost identical to later accounts of the
bronteion,
the theatrical device for replicating the sound of thunder (
bront
ē
) when plays called for it. Now, when the
Catalogue
was composed, theaters probably did not exist in any significant sense in Greece; the earliest evidence we have is from a little later, at the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries. But dramatic forms certainly preexisted the theater proper, and surely these early forms of drama will have involved imitation of the gods. The
bronteion
will have been used for ritual purposes prior to the spread of theater, and this is probably how the poet of the
Catalogue
knew the device. We might add that there is evidence also that the theater had a device called a
keraunoskopeion,
which generated the effect of lightning; again, this may have its roots in older, ritual action. In other words, the Salmoneus story was not just a joke: it was a meditation on the metaphysical implications of a culture that was beginning to manufacture divinity in the human realm, through sculpture, painting, and theater. If gods can be constructed, the story wonders, do they really exist at all?
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The answer that the
Catalogue
gives is a (literally) resounding “yes.” Zeus’s booming thunderbolt reasserts his power against the upstart
theomakhos.
It is significant that Zeus punishes Salmoneus with a thunderbolt, the very object that the mortal thought he could replicate: this action is not only a punishment, it is also a reenactment of metaphysical differentiation, a dramatization of the fact that lightning is substantively different from a burning stick thrown into the air. As so often in myth, the question posed is answered in the most conservative way possible, by re-establishing the truth of tradition. But a conservative answer does not make the question a conservative one. In acknowledging that Salmoneus needs punishment, the poem in effect also signals, in narrative form, that the human manufacture of “fake” gods was the source of major cultural anxiety in the sixth century.

The conservative narrative shape of theomachic myth should not surprise us. Part of the role of myth, after all, was to lay down the law about the way in which Greek culture should operate. But it is important to underline the point that the myth presents battles against the gods as crises of power, not manifestations of sinfulness. Salmoneus and his siblings were “arrogant” (
hubristai,
hence the English “hubris”), not evil.
Theomakhoi
were imagined as fools for taking on a losing battle against the gods, for thinking that humans can aspire to divinity—but nothing more. Atheism is not inherently evil, the antithesis of religiosity, but a human urge to usurp the gods’ power.

Greek myth was folk wisdom, the narrative glue that bonded communities together, not the hectoring of a priest seeking to dictate how, what, and why you should believe in gods. It was often moralistic, certainly, but it could also be playful, funny, and experimental. Myths, after all, were first and foremost stories, not homilies. Yet there was too, or so I have argued, a philosophical dimension to such stories. Although they end up reaffirming the power of the gods by showing them beating down the upstart humans who challenge them, theomachies also explore (albeit temporarily and provisionally) the possibility that the divine order might be overthrown and that humans could live self-sufficiently, without the gods. That tells us that such atheistic ideas were current enough in contemporary culture to be worth exploring, and countering, in myth. How these ideas were expressed in wider culture we can only guess. It is impossible to tell whether there were many Ceyxes, Alcyones, and Salmoneuses in sixth-century BC Greece or whether such views were confined to elite groups. But the fact that these figures appear in popular myth suggests at least that the atheistic type was understood by enough people to give the stories appeal and purchase.

A
s a rule, Greek religion had very little to say about morality and the nature of the world. Certainly, there was a sense that it was the job of the gods to oversee the governance of the universe: Apollo’s task was to steer his solar chariot across the heavens, Aphrodite ensured that the natural world kept on reproducing, and Zeus oversaw the punishment of wrongdoing. But although Greek religion carried with it an implicit sense of cosmic order (which is why cultic activities needed to be performed in set ways at set times), it was not ultimately there to encourage speculation on the nature of the universe, and still less to enforce belief in a specific way imagining it. Collective ritual practice, centered on sacrifice, was all about doing rather than speaking. The priest’s job was to look after the provision of animals, the ritual procedure itself, and the preparation and distribution of meat. Sacrifice was not a spiritual experience but a sensory drama: onlookers went for the songs, the spectacular open-air procession leading the beast to the altar, the shriek of the dying animal, the savor of the roasting flesh.

When Greeks pondered the nature of the world, they did so through the medium of philosophy, not organized religion. This gulf between metaphysical speculation and the priesthood had profound implications. Greek philosophy was never state sponsored or regulated. In time, schools were created, and these had their own institutional structures. Some, indeed, became dogmatic, and almost religious in their preoccupation with the tenets of their founders. But they always kept their distance from official hierarchies and indeed often found themselves fiercely critical of mainstream beliefs and practices.

Early Greek philosophy survives now, insofar as it survives at all, in snippets and summaries preserved by later writers. What this fragmentary mosaic, laboriously reconstructed by modern scholars, indicates is a surprising set of concerns, for anyone brought up to believe that philosophy is all about logic and subtle argumentation. The pre-Socratics, as they are often called, were not a unified movement of thinkers but an assorted group drawn from all over the Greek-speaking world, over a period of over 150 years, from the sixth to the fifth centuries BC. But they did share a range of concerns. A striking number of them were centrally interested in explaining the material nature of the world around us, in replacing the traditional, epic conceptions of a cosmos dominated by anthropoid deities with newer, “scientific” models based on the properties of material substances. “Scientific” should keep its scare quotes, for although there were methodological and observational dimensions to pre-Socratic reasoning, there was also a lot of wild guesswork too—unsurprisingly, given the absence of microscopes and telescopes. Thales, for example, said that the Earth does not fall through space because it rests on a sea: this, we might say, is an unscientific answer to a genuinely scientific question (why does the Earth appear to us not to move?). The story of the pre-Socratics is not one of the orderly victory of rationalism over myth, of the steady march toward objective truth about the world. What it does tell us, however, is that ways of conceptualizing reality and its relationship with the divine were shifting, and new types of question were being asked. Paradigms were shifting, in the full sense of that phrase intended by its coiner, Thomas Kuhn: ways of understanding the world were becoming possible that had not been conceivable before.
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The rise of philosophy signaled nothing so simple as the rejection of divinity. Yes, Homeric and Hesiodic ideas about the gods were attacked and often rejected. The epic poets were increasingly seen as representatives of an archaism against which the philosophers defined themselves. Crucially, what is more, the pre-Socratics developed ideas about the material nature of the world around us: rejecting explanations for natural phenomena that invoked the gods of myth, they substituted ones based on the properties of physical stuff. Most pre-Socratics, however, retained some kind of role for the divine in their models of the world, but in a radically transfigured sense: gone were the anthropoid gods of myth and cult, replaced by abstract embodiments of nature and celestial order. Early Greek philosophy, one scholar has argued, was largely based on a kind of theory of intelligent design: the ordered circuits of the heavenly bodies, the procession of the seasons and the symbiotic relationships between different organisms were taken as evidence for the coherence of existence, which must point to the existence of a god. A god of this kind, however, was unlike anything known to the Greeks. When the pre-Socratics speak of divinity, we can often substitute “nature.” “God” often seems to be a metaphorical way of referring to the interconnectedness of all life. There is certainly no sense that these cosmic beings are divinities one can worship, or even interact with: the sources never speak of prayer, sacrifice, temples, or ritual.

The idea that the universe was made out of matter was a powerful and contagious one and did ultimately pave the way for a conception of a god-free reality. Only a few of these early philosophers went this far, but their example has been hugely significant for the development of atheism. The pre-Socratics mark the beginning of a journey leading ultimately to what modern atheists call “naturalism”: the belief that the physical world is the sum total of reality, that nature rather than divinity structures our existence.
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The pre-Socratics have another role to play in the making of modern atheism and secularism in that philosophy celebrates the critical spirit, the willingness to question received values. The idea that progress is made by breaking with the past, by rejecting and questioning, is not a self-evident one, and it calls for some explanation. The historian of science Geoffrey Lloyd has argued that this sense of a critical displacement of existing models was intrinsic to the very functioning of philosophy as a social institution. The emergence of Greek speculation on the world was driven, he argues, by the competitive structure of Greek society in the archaic era: from the earliest times we hear of public contests between wise men, competing for the acclamation of audiences. You had to appeal to a broad audience, but you also had to offer something new. In Lloyd’s view—and it is a plausible one—early Greek intellectual culture was fundamentally a response to the public-competitive nature of its surrounding society, which generated a continually self-renewing need for ideas that were at once innovative and accessible.
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For Lloyd, the explanation for this flourishing of ideas is political. Even the most repressive of Greek city-states, he claims, stimulated free expression and the diversity of opinion in a way that the societies of Egypt, Iraq, Persia, and India (for example) did not. Such political explanations have begun to look more problematic in recent years, as we have come more and more to recognize the Western-centered ideology that is often smuggled in with the idea of “freedom.” The idea of an essential difference between Greek culture and those of the Ancient Near East is not as widely accepted as it once was, and the idea that any such difference should be defined in terms of “freedom” looks uncomfortably close to Western propagandizing. Greek cities in the archaic era had many different types of constitution, few if any of them resembling a liberal democracy. Assassinations, coups, and other forms of political instability were far from unusual. Environments of this kind were unlikely in themselves to produce intellectual competition.
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What facilitated the emergence in Greece of philosophical speculation about the natural world was not a political system that resembled a modern Western state but a combination of factors. One was certainly the absence of state regulation of ideas and (relatedly) the absence of any sense of sacred revelation or sacred text. Neither the politicians nor the priests controlled ideas or writing. The massive economic boom that began in the eighth century was powered instead by a sudden trade surge; as a result, it was the innovators and creators who held all the cards, not the priests. There was certainly a kind of freedom (with a small “f”) in the absence of clerical control over the cultural sphere, but this had little to do with political apparatuses.

Another major driver, however, was contact with the cultures of the Near East, with their own ancient traditions of cosmological speculation. The initial pre-Socratic phase began in the sixth century not in mainland Greece but on the western coast of Turkey, a territory that the Greeks called Ionia, where Greeks had first settled as much as five hundred years earlier. These cities were multicultural environments, where different influences met and blended. In the late Bronze Age, much of the Ionian coast had been settled by Carians, a people originally from south-central Anatolia (roughly western Turkey). Ionia was under the control of the Hittite Empire until its collapse in the twelfth century BC; it was only afterward that Greek settlement began in earnest. Despite the passing of centuries, such ancient identities retained their vigor. The fifth-century historian Herodotus (from Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum), for example, was half Carian. The diversity of Ionia would have been amplified after King Cyrus the Great annexed the region for the Persian empire in the 540s BC. Empire always encourages migration from place to place and the traffic in ideas.
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According to popular tradition, the first Greek philosopher was Thales, a wealthy trader who was active in the port city of Miletus at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries. Anecdotal traditions testify to a deep interest in the material cosmos. The original absentminded professor, he is said to have fallen down a well while looking up at the stars. A more flattering story has him predict a solar eclipse. He was also believed to have introduced geometry to the Greek-speaking world. These insights almost certainly came as a result of contact with Babylonian science, mathematics, and astronomy. The Babylonians had been recording the movements of celestial bodies for at least half a millennium beforehand, and this practice had been systematized in the eighth century under Nabonassar, whose reign saw the introduction of intercalated dating (such as we still use today on February 29) and the identification of eighteen-year cycles of lunar eclipse. Miletus in Thales’s time was not yet under Persian control (that came in the aftermath of Cyrus the Great’s defeat of Croesus, in 546 BC), but its position on the edge of Asia made it an ideal mediator between Greek and Near Eastern thought. As a trader, Thales would have had a wide network of cultural contacts, particularly since his family had Phoenician roots. Everything suggests that pre-Socratic speculation on the cosmos, in its Ionian phase, originated in the Greeks’ discovery of Near Eastern science.
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The Ionian philosophers were a disparate bunch, but they shared the desire to explain natural phenomena in terms of a single material “origin” (
arkh
ē
) of the world. For this reason they are called “monists,” from the Greek
monos
(single). Thales focused on water as the primal matter (it may not be coincidence that his name seems to derive from the Phoenician
thal,
“moisture”: perhaps “Wetty” was his nickname?). He was followed in the mid-sixth century by two more Milesians. Anaximander had a more complex theory that everything derived from “infinity” (on which more soon), but he also gave a special role to wind. His student and near-namesake Anaximenes spoke of “air.” It is striking that each of them focuses on nonsupernatural explanations: the origins of existence, they taught, lie not in divine creation but in physical matter. Because the views of these earliest philosophers survive only in the summaries of later writers, who are never systematic and often distort them for their own purposes, it is hard to gauge what “matter” actually meant to them. Did they see matter as supreme and self-sufficient? Or did they distinguish it from “god”? Or did they imagine that the material world was itself animated by a kind of pantheistic presence, to the extent that matter was itself divine? It is impossible to be certain given the state of the evidence, but it is possible at least to reconstruct a kind of radical materialism that is compatible with modern atheistic naturalism.
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The argument would go like this: Thales probably did imagine a rational god who created and designed the universe. For Anaximander and Anaximenes, by contrast, the later reports suggest a thoroughgoing concern with material explanation. Particularly striking is the desire to explain thunder by natural means, given that this was traditionally thought to be the symbol of Zeus’s power. Anaximander thought this was the result of wind colliding with clouds, and Anaximenes had a similar explanation. Such matter-based accounts of natural marvels are a recurrent feature of the sources: Anaximenes in particular explains changes in the seasons by reference to the position of the sun in the sky, rainbows in terms of the effects of sunlight on cloud, and earthquakes as the result of the drying of the land after rainfall. Each of these explanations is also an implicit denial of divine activity: no need for the Horae (“the Seasons”), Iris (the goddess of the rainbow), or Poseidon, “the Earth-Shaker.” Cosmology could be explained naturally too. The heavenly bodies are, for both thinkers, nonsupernatural. Anaximander thought that the Earth is surrounded by a ring of fire that is largely veiled from our sight; what we see as stars are the gaps in the veil. Anaximenes thought that the stars were pieces of Earth that had been borne aloft on evaporated moisture and had subsequently caught fire. Even the creation of human life had a nonsupernatural cause. In an eerie presentiment of modern evolutionary biology, Anaximander claimed that primeval life originated from water; the original aquatic animals emerged onto land from the sea, containing other kinds of creatures (rather mysteriously) within them. Humans are thus latecomers to the animal kingdom. These theories are of course fanciful when judged by modern standards: if they occasionally approximate to what we know from science this is a matter of luck rather than intuition. But modern standards are the wrong standards to apply: in sixth-century terms, what Anaximander and Anaximenes were doing was trying to account for the world in new terms, using explanations drawn from the world around them rather than mythological deities. Everyone knows what fire, rock, air, clouds, and water are like, and we know that strange things happen when various combinations of them occur. These two thinkers tried to explain the sum of existence by extrapolating from tangible, observable reality. Geoffrey Lloyd’s idea that early Greek science was fundamentally competitive seems to be borne out: to win acclaim, these thinkers needed both to reject existing accounts in powerfully assertive ways and to appeal to a kind of truth that was plausible and accessible to their audiences.
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