Battling the Gods

Why has history been written in this way, so as to favor religion? The answer is not straightforward. It is true enough, certainly, that some modern scholars have allowed their own religious values to percolate into their writing about antiquity. Even today, scholarly discussions of ancient atheism can prompt undignified tirades against “populist, fundamentalist atheism” and its “zealous preachers.” Classical scholars, however, are not usually known for their piety; quite the opposite, they have usually liked to see themselves as fiercely secular. The discipline of classics as we know it today, indeed, emerged in the nineteenth century as a result of a messy divorce from theological studies. Since then, historians of Greek religion have sought to define it by contrast with the monotheistic religions of the modern West, and particularly Christianity. But this itself has been part of the problem. So keen have classicists been to avoid “Christianizing” the Greeks (a cardinal offense in the academy!) that the standard textbooks have tended to describe Greek polytheism as in effect a straightforward inversion of modern Christianity (particularly in its Protestant guise): focused on collective ritual rather than individual contemplation, the public sphere rather than the private self, outward performance rather than inner belief, conformity to past practice rather than scripture. There is much in this portrait that is true, but rigid, schematic oppositions can be deeply misleading. It is demonstrably wrong to suggest that Greek religion was unproblematically “embedded” (to use the scholarly parlance) in society, fully naturalized in all of the day-today rhythms of the ancient city, to the extent that no ancient could imagine a world without religion.7 This view has been buttressed by a tendency to use official state inscriptions as the main sources for the history of Greek religion. Some of the reasons for this are perfectly sound: whereas literary texts give us the perspectives of individuals, often hypereducated and hyperprivileged, the inscriptions found all .over the Greek-speaking world often record decisions made collectively. They are better evidence for what groups as a whole thought. Yet there is a downside too. Official inscriptions, naturally, give the official, ideologically sanctioned versions of events. They tend to promote the fiction that societies work smoothly and seamlessly. It is, then, hardly a surprise that ancient inscriptions barely mention heterodox views of the gods. 

Post-Enlightenment stories of divine salvation are open to suspicion. Miracles, by their very 
definition, test the limits of plausibility. There is a comparable story told of Diogenes the Cynic, Greek philosophy’s most subversive wit. It is said that while another man was marveling at a series of temple dedications 
put up by survivors of sea storms, Diogenes retorted that there would have been many more if the nonsurvivors had also left dedications. 

Diogenes’s central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence 
to the contrary. In this book I seek to tell the story of Greek atheism over a thousand year period, against the backdrop of huge historical changes: the emergence of Greece from its “dark ages” into a world of literate city-states; the development of citizenship and democracy; the conquests of Alexander the Great and the fragmentation of his empire; the subsuming of the Greek-speaking world into the Roman Empire; and, finally, the arrival of Christianity. The Christianization of the classical world did not happen overnight, nor was it a uniform process. There were many different varieties of Christianity, each with its own (conflicted) relationship to the Greek intellectual tradition that preceded it. Even so, despite this fluidity, the Christian Empire did change things fundamentally. Christianity marked the end of a long period during which many respectable thinkers had explored radical ideas about the nature of the gods, even to the point of dismissing them altogether. Pre-Christian atheism was certainly not uncontroversial, and there were periods of severe repression. But as a rule, polytheism-the belief in many gods-was infinitely more hospitable toward dishelievers than monotheism. Under Christianity, by contrast, there was no good way of being an atheist. Atheism was the categorical rejection of the very premise on which Christians defined themselves. 

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 Athenian law was not theological. It existed solely to determine human responsrbility for human action; those who tried to shift the blame onto the gods were mocked.

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 svnergy afoot; this was one of those thrilling phases in history when humans working in different areas of culture all begin to speak the same imtellectual language. And the law court, this iconic feature of the new political landscape, became the most immediately sdentifiable symbel of a new way of thinking. Vast fields of inquiry, in narure and human 

society alike, had opened themselves up to empirical testing, rationa| theorization, and debate between specialists.* 

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 Hip. pocrates 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 diaité refers not just to eating but to the entire bodily regimen, including sleep, exercise, and sexual practice).° 

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 epilépsis, 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 charJatans: “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.°® 

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 docs 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 rain bows or lightning, the Hippocratic writer takes an apparently mysterous phenomenon—in this case, epileptic seizures—and posits intelligible natural causes, while at the same time deriding the naiveté 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.’ 

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 wo record the past is a feature of all literate societies, but what distinguished fifth-century history from other ancient narrative tradinonsthose 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 pase 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 south ern town of Halicarnassus, present-day Bodrum. Like the lonian preSocratics 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,