Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (9 page)

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re-Socratic philosophy posed fundamental questions about the nature of the world and the cosmos. Drawing on Near Eastern expertise in astronomy, calendars, and mathematics, the earliest Greek cosmologists explained celestial phenomena like thunder and rainbows not as extraordinary manifestations of divine intention but as the products of material causes, events that are explicable in terms of the laws of nature. In this conception of things, “god” was redefined as the sum of all the hidden motors of the physical world, rather than the anthropoid deity of myth and cult.

Pre-Socratic materialism was revolutionary. It was contagious too. By the fifth century BC, the role of the gods had been radically diminished in a number of fields. Homer’s
Iliad,
that founding text of Greek culture, begins with a preface telling of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon and then proposes a question: “Which of the gods was it who set these to strive in battle with each other?” The answer is instantaneous: “The son of Leto and Zeus,” which is to say Apollo. In Homer’s poem, where the Muse-inspired narrator can range freely from the Trojan plain to Mount Olympus and beyond, to posit a god—and a specific, identifiable god—as the cause of a momentous human event is uncontroversial. Big events demand big explanations. Athens of the late fifth century BC, however, brimming with intellectual inventiveness and thrumming with a sense of its own modernity, could no longer straightforwardly accept divine causality in this way.

Blaming gods for human actions had begun to look like evasion of responsibility. At some point in the 420s, for example, the Sicilian sophist Gorgias wrote
Encomium to Helen.
This was a self-consciously and playfully paradoxical defense, legalistic in form, of the actions of Helen in leaving her husband Menelaus, eloping with Paris to Troy, and catalyzing the Trojan War. Helen was at the time viewed in almost entirely negative terms, constructed misogynistically as an adulterous Jezebel. Gorgias’s counterargument was that she must have gone to Troy with her lover involuntarily: (a) if she was abducted, it was not her fault; (b) if some god made her go, that too was a form of coercion; (c) if she fell in love, that too was involuntary, since Eros is a god; (d) if she was persuaded by Paris, even that excuses her, for persuasive language is itself a mighty power. The speech is a “little game,” he confesses at the end. The joke is that if you start diminishing the significance of personal responsibility by invoking external forces like gods, then the door is opened for all sorts of moral exculpations. If you have been persuaded to commit a crime—well, you are not responsible then, are you? Is not Peitho (“Persuasion”) herself not a goddess?

Euripides, the most sophisticated of the Athenian playwrights, picks up the baton in his
Trojan Women,
which was performed in 415 BC. The play is set in the smoking aftermath of the sack of Troy and centers on the attempts of the female survivors to come to terms with their losses. One powerful episode has Hecuba, the mother of Paris and widow of King Priam, let fly at Helen for causing the war. The scene is structured like a legal trial, with Helen offering a defense speech before Hecuba speaks for the prosecution. Helen’s attempt to argue her innocence in effect borrows from Gorgias: it was not my fault, she argues, since Aphrodite promised me to Paris, and who can fight the will of the gods? Hecuba’s scathing reply is that she speaks of Aphrodite when she should be speaking of her own
aphrosyn
ē
,
her folly—a nice play on words. In this mythical law court, blaming the gods is easily exposed as a rhetorical tactic designed to shift responsibility.
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The law courts, indeed, were a crucial place for testing such questions of personal culpability. Greek courts existed well before the foundation of Athenian democracy in 508 BC, even if they were fitted out with new democratic purpose in the fifth century. In Athens at any rate, it seems to have been the tyrants of the sixth century who set up courts, as a way of restricting the power of aristocrats and building popular support. But whatever the local circumstances, Athens was also responding to a trend that had swept across most of Greece in the sixth century: law courts were part of the tide of reforms promoting collective citizenship that swept through archaic Greece. Courts were an essential way of arming citizens against abuse and of ensuring that power was disseminated through the state rather than concentrated in the hands of wealthy individuals.
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Inevitably, the Athenian legal system ended up being highly normative. There is a large surviving body of Athenian legal speeches, mostly from the fourth century BC; they survive because later Greeks, who prized rhetoric highly, canonized figures like Lysias, Aeschines, and Demosthenes. Scholars of social history have mined these texts for evidence of Athenian views on everything from gender and sexuality through the family to economics and political theory. No one speaks with such confidence about collective values as a lawyer, which is precisely why these texts are so revealing. But crucially religion plays a very small role in this. Of course, some crimes are religious in nature. Lysias, for example, defends one of his clients against the charge that he has removed one of the sacred olive trees that dotted the Athenian landscape (these were supposed to be offshoots of the original olive planted by Athena). And there are times when these orators strive to present their clients as pious types and their opponents as contemptuous of religion (although this is actually a rather rare strategy: much more emphasis is placed on responsible citizenship and on the treatment of fellow human beings). But there is never any sense that the court is itself an instrument of the gods’ will, or indeed that the gods’ intentions were under scrutiny at all. Athenian law was not theological. It existed solely to determine human responsibility for human action; those who tried to shift the blame onto the gods were mocked.
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The muting of divine explanations in law courts was part of a wider trend in Athens. The search was on for nonsupernatural causes for pretty much everything: the movement of the stars, the functions of the body, individual moral agency, political history. There was an extraordinary synergy afoot; this was one of those thrilling phases in history when humans working in different areas of culture all begin to speak the same intellectual language. And the law court, this iconic feature of the new political landscape, became the most immediately identifiable symbol of a new way of thinking. Vast fields of inquiry, in nature and human society alike, had opened themselves up to empirical testing, rational theorization, and debate between specialists.
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Although Athens is by some distance the best-documented ancient city for this period, we can see the effects of this process across the entire Greek-speaking world. The medical writings associated with Hippocrates of Cos (although in fact few if any of the texts linked to him are likely to have issued from his pen) offer a valuable non-Athenian parallel. Like the Athenian lawyers, the Hippocratic writers treated religion as a normal part of everyday life, but nevertheless they roundly rejected divine explanations for illness. Medical practitioners were not likely to be outright atheists—many of them were attached to temples of Asclepius—but they did reject explanations of illness based on divine intervention. The whole premise of Hippocratic medicine is that health is determined by our own distinctive physiological natures, modulated by the choices we make about our “diet” (the Greek
diait
ē
refers not just to eating but to the entire bodily regimen, including sleep, exercise, and sexual practice).
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Take the treatise
On the Sacred Disease.
The disease in question is epilepsy, but it swiftly becomes clear that it is “sacred” only in the popular imagination. The English word derives from the Greek
epil
ē
psis,
which means quite literally a “seizure” or “possession,” as if by a malevolent supernatural force.
On the Sacred Disease,
however, argues that the illness can be explained by factors that are entirely internal to the human organism. “It appears to me,” writes the author in the introduction, “to be in no way more divine or sacred than other diseases; it has a natural cause, from which it originates, like other illnesses. People consider its nature and its cause as divine out of ignorance and wonder.” The origin of this misattribution, he continues, lies with religious charlatans: “mages, purifiers, conjurors, and self-promoters, who pretend to be pious and to have some special insight.” “The god,” he opines on two occasions, “is not responsible”; the use of the language of legal culpability is striking. It is as if he is standing before a court and arguing the case against those who would explain epilepsy in terms of divine seizure.
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It would, to be sure, be anachronistic to understand the Hippocratic agenda in terms of a battle between (atheistic) science and religion. For a start, the explanation offered is not straightforwardly scientific. The claim that in cases of epilepsy veins transmit phlegm from the liver to the brain is based not on empirical observation or testing but on a priori assumptions (which are, as it happens, entirely wrong) about the way the body works. Hippocratic doctors did not dissect human bodies. What is more, this is an argument not for the nonexistence of the gods but more narrowly for their limited explanatory role in human pathology. The writer of this tract does not dispute that there is divine presence in the world; in fact, part of his argument is that those who attribute epilepsy to divine causes are actually being offensive to the gods, by blaming such seizures on them. The argument is, rather, that the human body operates according to regular physical laws. Like Xenophanes explaining rainbows or lightning, the Hippocratic writer takes an apparently mysterious phenomenon—in this case, epileptic seizures—and posits intelligible natural causes, while at the same time deriding the naïveté of those who invoke gods. Medicine is, we might say, locally rather than globally atheistic: it seeks to disprove not the existence of gods but their influence in this particular domain.
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The most visible and influential sign of this new “forensic” approach to the world came in the shape of the writing of history. The desire to record the past is a feature of all literate societies, but what distinguished fifth-century history from other ancient narrative traditions—those found, say, in the Iraqi epic
Gilgamesh,
in the poems of Homer, or the Hebrew Torah
—
were the excision of any mention of direct divine involvement in human affairs and the idea that the truth about the past needs careful sifting from competing reports. Like so many of the great intellectual developments of the period, the writing of history began in western Anatolia. Herodotus (ca. 480–420 BC) came from the southern town of Halicarnassus, present-day Bodrum. Like the Ionian pre-Socratics whom he resembles intellectually in many ways, he benefited from the confluence of traditions. Of mixed Greek and Carian ancestry, he lived in a city that had been under Persian occupation till the beginning of the fifth century BC; he also traveled far and wide in the eastern Mediterranean. His
Histories,
a huge nine-book account of hostilities between Greece and the Near East (culminating in the fifth-century invasions by the Persians Darius and Xerxes), testifies to this huge cultural and geographical sweep, ranging from the Mediterranean to Egypt, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Scythia (the area to the north of the Caspian Sea).
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Herodotus seems to have written his great work in Athens in the 420s or so; he certainly mentions Athens and Athenian sources more than one would otherwise expect. In many places he exhales the distinctive intellectual air of the late fifth century, and nowhere more noticeably than in his preoccupation with “causes,”
aitiai,
the word that is also central to the Hippocratic view of the body. Herodotus aims, he tells us in his prologue, to memorialize not just the wondrous events of the Greco-Persian Wars but also “the cause [
aiti
ē
] of their fighting with one other.” Like a Hippocratic doctor, he knows that amazing phenomena (like the Persian Wars) can be traced back to intelligible origins. In Herodotus’s case that means picking one’s way back through time. The ultimate cause of the hostilities lay in the actions of one sixth-century Anatolian monarch. “I know who it was who first initiated the injustices perpetrated against the Greeks…Croesus was a Lydian by birth, the son of Alyattes, and ruler of all the nations this side of the river Halys.” There is no Homeric-style attempt to blame hostilities on gods. History, for Herodotus, means the study of human events, “the great, wondrous deeds wrought by Greeks and barbarians.”
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The
Histories
are a magnificent experiment in genre bending, an amazingly adventurous attempt to underpin the writing of political and military narrative with pre-Socratic principles. Time and again, he derides implausible or non-natural explanations. The Athenians are “foolish” for falling for the schemes of the former tyrant Pisistratus, who put a tall woman in a chariot to pose as Athena and acclaim his own impending return to the city. How did king Croesus cross the river Halys with his army? “The common story among the Greeks,” we are told, goes that the philosopher Thales rechanneled the river from in front to behind the army. This, however, is nonsense, since it would give them no route back on the return journey. No, he concludes, they must have used bridges. It is not plausible to claim that the Nile floods are caused by snow melting, since the river flows from hotter climates in the south. Every explanation must be “plausible” (
oikos
), which is to say in keeping with what we know about the way the world works.
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Herodotus’s conception of divinity is also pre-Socratic. Scholars have argued fiercely over whether his references to the gods are just window dressing for what is basically a rational historiography or whether they are expressions of a traditional piety undislodged by his modernist commitment to naturalistic explanation. Both positions are wrong; each rests too heavily on an anachronistic science/religion distinction. The point is rather that like Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophanes, Herodotus typically uses “god” not as a religious category—as an anthropoid being or as an object of cult—but as an extension of his rationalistic system, as a figurative way of expressing the hidden coherence of things. Certainly, he is captivated by religion in all its forms: his kaleidoscopic portrait of cultural differences reveals the huge variety of types of cult practice and conceptions of the divine, from Babylonian sacred prostitution through Egyptian worship of the Apis bull to Scythian horse sacrifice. He does suggest that individual gods are capable of acting in the world: on a number of occasions, violations of the sanctity of a temple are swiftly followed by punishment. When Herodotus reflects in his own voice about the forces that steer human fortune, however, he refers to the supernatural primarily in abstract terms as “the god” or “the divine” (
to theion
). This divine principle exists in order to regulate the moral symmetry of the world: to make sure that there is retribution for wrongdoing (sometimes several generations later) and that the fortunes of individuals and communities both wax and wane. Communicating only through ambiguous oracles that humans struggle to decode, the divinity oversees what Herodotus calls
tisis
(payback), the reciprocity that underlies everything. Herodotus sees history writing as an exercise in exposing the moral patterning of political history by setting out over a long chronology the pendulum swings of human fortune (for “human prosperity never holds still in the same place,” as he says). As in the pre-Socratic cosmologies, then, “god” in this sense means not the god of religion but an abstract, underlying system that the author claims to disclose thanks to his painstaking research. God is the moral logic that holds the historical cosmos together.
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