Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (11 page)

Whether he completed the list, and how far down the Greeks’ long list of divinities he proceeded, we shall probably never know. The important point is that, like Democritus, he saw religion as the invention of early humanity as it emerged from a state of nature, and therefore not as integral to humanity but as a cultural invention. Now, the Philodemus passage specifies that “the gods
of popular belief
do not exist,” which might be taken to mean that Prodicus thought that there were indeed true gods—just not those of myth and cult. Yet the choice of translation matters greatly: an alternative would be “all those considered as gods by humans,” i.e., in effect, “the so-called gods do not exist.” On balance, it seems to me likely that Prodicus was an out-and-out atheist, denying the existence of any gods, given that he was always associated in antiquity with the complete denial of divinity.
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How far such heretical ideas percolated beyond a narrow circle of wealthy intellectuals into popular culture is hard to tell, but there is some indication that they found their way into the popular theater. In Athens, drama was mass entertainment. Plays were composed in huge numbers throughout the fifth and fourth centuries BC and performed onstage before thousands of people. By chance, one dramatic speech—again it is, frustratingly, now a fragment without its wider context—survives that shows how a full version of the kind of argument made by Democritus of Prodicus might have played out, and how it might have been received in popular culture. It was rescued from oblivion by later philosophers interested in the development of atheist thought. Its authorship is unclear: one ancient source says it is by the tragedian Euripides, while others give it to Critias. Critias is probably the better candidate, since it is likelier that a dramatic fragment should have been wrongly attributed to a famous dramatist than to someone who is not otherwise known to have written plays. Critias was famous for two things: being the ringleader of the Thirty Tyrants in the bloodthirsty coup that followed Sparta’s victory over Athens in 404 BC, and being Plato’s uncle. The latter is more important for the purposes of this text. He was one of those who (in Plato’s description) gathered at Callias’s house to greet Protagoras, a member of the hyperintellectual inner circle, and well placed to transmit cutting-edge ideas.

The speaker is the mythological character Sisyphus. That in itself is very interesting. Sisyphus was one of the sons of Aeolus and so belonged to the second generation of that mythical family (including Salmoneus, Alcyone, and Bellerophon) that seemed to have theomachy running through its veins. In the Hesiodic
Catalogue,
Aeolus’s family seem always to be trying to deny the privilege of the gods or claim it for humans. In this fragment, however, Sisyphus’s atheism takes the form of a sophistic account of the origins of religion:
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There was a time when humans’ life was unordered,

Bestial and subservient to violence;

When there was no reward for the noble

Or chastisement for the base.

And then, it seems to me, humans set up

Laws, so that justice should be tyrant

And hold aggression enslaved.

Anyone who erred was punished.

Then, when laws prevented them

From performing
open
acts of force,

They started performing them in secret; and then, it seems to me,

Some shrewd man, wise in his counsel,

Discovered for mortals fear of the gods, so that

The base should have fear, if even in secret

They should do or say or think anything.

So he thereupon introduced religion,

Namely the idea that there is a deity flourishing with immortal life,

Hearing in his mind, seeing, thinking,

Attending to these things and having a divine nature,

Who will hear everything said among mortals,

And will be able to see everything that is done.

If you plan some base act in silence,

The gods will not fail to notice.

If anything, in fact, this is a more radical critique than those of Democritus and Prodicus. Those two saw religion as a bottom-up process, driven by early humanity’s desire to master a natural world that they barely understood. For them, religion begins as a cognitive process and only then becomes institutionalized. To Critias’s Sisyphus, however, it is from the very start a process of social control. There is no romanticization of the primitive here. Religion is the creation of a “shrewd man,” who sought nothing more than the imposition of order on a naïve people. Sisyphus describes a two-stage process to curtail wrongdoing: first law is introduced, and then when that fails to prevent secret criminality, religion. The French philosopher Michel Foucault argues in
Discipline and Punish,
his history of the modern penal system, that eighteenth-century Europe saw a shift from the chastisement of criminal acts to a new focus on controlling the person. He takes as paradigmatic of this shift Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison called the Panopticon, in which prisoners are visible to guards at all times but never know whether or not they are being observed. On Sisyphus’s account, a similar shift occurred with the invention of religion: the wise man concocts “the idea that there is a deity… / Who will hear everything said among mortals, / And will be able to see everything that is done.” After the invention of religion, Sisyphus says, society is no longer restricted to punishing public manifestations of disorder; it can now convince its citizens that their innermost thoughts are subject to moral evaluation. The world has become a kind of religious Panopticon.
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After the passage quoted above, Sisyphus goes on to play with Democritus’s ideas about primitive humanity’s fear of the natural elements. The shrewd inventor of religion, Sisyphus proclaims, “said that the gods dwell in that place where / They would most terrify humans, / From whence he knew mortals’ terrors come, / And the benefits for their miserable lives.” He located the gods in the heavens, in other words. Democritus had claimed that primitive people spontaneously associated the gods with the natural features of the cosmos that are most terrifying or beneficial; Sisyphus by contrast thinks this belief was imposed on them from above. Religion is a fiction enforced from above in an attempt to secure social order.

What happened next in the play? Given that all that survives is this fragment, we can only guess, but the guess is an educated one. Whenever he appears in myth, Sisyphus is associated with crimes against the gods. Every visitor to the ancient theater would have known, moreover, that when Homer’s Odysseus visits the underworld, he sees Sisyphus heaving that famous rock up the hill. However the story was tweaked, his destiny was surely to be punished horribly. This certainly puts a different complexion on his theory of religion: in Critias’s play, it is highly likely that it was precisely for his intellectual theomachy that he was chastised. But at the same time as viewers were encouraged to revel in the defeat of the atheist, they were surely encouraged to applaud this spectacular display of intellectual showmanship, deliciously marinated in the rich flavors of contemporary sophistry. Sisyphus may have been the villain of the piece, but like Milton’s Satan he surely got the best lines.
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I
magine the theater of Dionysus in Athens, during the springtime festival of the Great Dionysia. Imagine not the warm, hushed gloom of an evening inside, alongside five hundred middle-class peers in frocks and suits, but a noisy, rambunctious crowd of more than ten thousand making merry under the harsh, unforgiving sun of Athens. The audience is seated not in serried rows, their gaze funneled toward the only source of light; they are spread out on wooden benches across an immense horseshoe-like arc on the slopes of the Acropolis, their gaze drawn as much to the city in front of them and to their fellow audience members as to the stage. Sometimes they are chatting, snacking, laughing; at other times they are deathly silent, riveted by the action. The audience is here not because they have chosen to spend their leisure time at the theater—the idea of “leisure time” does not really exist in a world without nine-to-fives and weekends—but because the entire city is summoned to annual festivals. This is not a celebration of elite privilege, a time for chiffon and tuxedos, but an event in popular culture. There are exclusions, for sure. If women are present, their numbers are small. Of the city’s 100,000 or so slaves (around 40 percent of the total population), few are likely to be present. Even free men without citizenship—the so-called metics—may not have had an automatic right to attend. But despite these restrictions, Athenian drama is an inclusive, diverse experience, with a carnival-like atmosphere.

The Great Dionysia, Athens’s major theatrical festival, lasted five days. Three of these days were each given over to four plays by a single poet: three tragedies, followed by a satyr play (a jokey drama featuring actors dressed as satyrs). One more was probably devoted to poetic performances known as dithyrambs and one to various comedies. For tragedy and comedy there was a competition, judged by individuals randomly chosen from the tribes of Athens. The results were inscribed on stone; in a number of cases, these inscriptions survive.

The origins of ancient theater are uncertain. Corinthian pottery from 630 BC onward shows padded dancers, which may suggest some kind of early ritual performance in costume in honor of Dionysus. All that can be said for sure, however, is that dramatic festivals began to appear in the late sixth century BC in Athens and elsewhere, and that the Athenian variety came to be an iconic expression of democratic identity in the fifth. The interplay between the chorus, an anonymous collective body, and the named actors neatly encapsulated the dynamics of a society that was constantly anxious about the relationship between individual and community, and between elite and mass. Tragedies, moreover, typically focused on mythological characters from the heroic past and afforded the Athenians an opportunity to think about the continuities and discontinuities between the age of aristocratic dominance and the democratic present. Comedy, meanwhile, was all about the contemporary world and explored the spectators’ immediate concerns in a playful idiom. A vibrant, successful, cosmopolitan city like Athens needed mass media to hold it together, to supply a shared narrative for its diverse population. Theater gave this imagined community a sense of cohesion and solidarity.
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There is another major difference between ancient and modern theater. The Great Dionysia was above all a religious event, a public holiday devoted to the god Dionysus that was formally marked on the civic calendar. The theater complex was also dedicated to Dionysus, who had a temple nearby. The festivities were inaugurated with blood sacrifices. But if the context was religious, the plays themselves were not liturgical. They were written for the occasion by playwrights who had no special religious role. Their primary purpose in putting on these plays was competitive: they sought to win the first prize in the most prestigious literary festival in Greece. There is no mention in the ancient inscriptions of plays redounding to the glory of Dionysus; what counted in the competition was skill in composition.

Nevertheless, many modern commentators continue to insist that Greek drama was fundamentally religious. The fault lies in part with Aristotle, and his claim in the
Poetics
that tragedy derived from dithyramb (a type of hymn sung to Dionysus) and poetry connected with satyrs, and comedy from songs accompanying phallic processions. The phrasing is a bit obscure, but it can be taken to suggest that the earliest forms of what we would now call tragedy and comedy were in fact ritual in nature, cult songs to Dionysus. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elaborate structures were built around this claim: following the prevailing romantic view of Greek culture at the time, scholars sought to derive tragedy and comedy from some kind of primal moment when Greek literature and religion were tightly interwoven. The Greek word for “tragedy” is
trag
ō
idia,
which seems to suggest a song (
oid
ē
) for a goat (
tragos
). In fact it is entirely unclear what tragedy had to do with goats, but the romantic-influenced scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed that tragedy had been originally connected either to goat sacrifice or to dancing choruses of people dressed ritually as goats. This is all fantasy. Even Aristotle’s talk of satyr plays and phallic songs is likely to have been guesswork: he probably had no historical sources to draw on. Aristotle knew no more than we do about the real origins. And in any case, even if tragedy was
originally
connected to ritual in this way, that tells us nothing about its social role in the fifth century BC.
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Tragedy in particular has been assumed to be essentially religious also on the basis of its content. Many of the plays have religious themes or feature gods. Many of the plays are of a formulaic “transgression and punishment” type: mortals overreach themselves and are knocked down by jealous deities, who are keen to assert their position of authority. So—goes this line of thinking—the plays project a religiously conservative ethos, encouraging viewers to accept their authority. (This is less true of comedy, which can satirize not just religion but even the gods: in Aristophanes’s
Frogs,
for example, Dionysus, the god of the theater itself, is portrayed as a bumbling, timorous fool.) In tragedy, going against the gods is always a bad thing to do and inevitably leads to disaster, whether we think of Oedipus’s believing that he has dodged Apollo’s prophecy, Hippolytus’s offending of Aphrodite by renouncing sex, or Pentheus’s refusing to accept the cult of the new god Dionysus. Yet even these cases cannot prove that tragic drama was primarily a religious form. For a start, the gods of tragedy are not straightforwardly the gods worshipped in the city of Athens. In Greek polytheism, religious ritual is always localized: you pray not to Athena as an abstract deity but as her specific manifestation in your local sanctuary. The gods of tragedy are not the cult deities of Athens but the literary figures portrayed in the mythological poems of Homer and Hesiod. Even more troubling is the fact that, despite all the talk of divine justice, the gods of tragedy seem cruel, vindictive, and petty. Near the start of Euripides’s
Trojan Women,
for example, Athena announces that now that Troy has been sacked brutally she will no longer support the Greeks; instead she wants to ruin their voyages home. “Why do you leap from mood to mood in this way?” asks her fellow god Poseidon. “Whether you hate or love someone, you hate or love too forcefully.” In the same poet’s
Hippolytus,
Aphrodite’s decision to kill off the play’s central figure simply for choosing to avoid sex seems selfish and severe, as does Artemis’s promise at the end to take revenge for Hippolytus’s death by killing one of Aphrodite’s favorites. The gods of tragedy rarely embody the kind of benevolent justice that a pious moralist would want to attribute to them.
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Athenian drama could indeed be said to be “religious,” but only in the sense that it was profoundly interested in questions about gods of the most contemporary, indeed challenging kinds. It was not just Critias, the author of the Sisyphus fragment, who reacted to the atheist revolution. Already, in the 420s, in the glow of the sophistic movement, tragedies and comedies began to explore the question of whether gods exist. The ideas canvassed by Protagoras, Democritus, and Prodicus reached a broad audience thanks to the theater.

Aristophanes’s comedy
Knights,
his fourth play (produced in 424 BC) is a complex, allegorical satire on Aristophanes’s nemesis, the politician Cleon, who is played as one of the slaves in the household of Demos (“People,” or “State”). The play opens with two other slaves complaining about the new slave and engaging in some banter about how to evade him:

It’s a nice joke: being godforsaken is offered as evidence that the gods must exist. But it is more than a joke; it is also a comment on intellectual fashions. The second slave suggests that believing in gods is old-fashioned (“Do you really believe in gods?”) and demands instead a
tekm
ē
rion,
“proof.” The use of this particular word, which has a specialist ring to it, suggests that Aristophanes is having fun by giving a slave a bit of contemporary philosophical jargon.

Aristophanes certainly associated fashionable thinkers with disbelief in the gods. In 423 BC he unveiled
Clouds,
a satire on contemporary intellectuals. The title alluded at once to pre-Socratic speculation about the nature of the heavens and to the fluffiness (as he saw it) of their ideas. The play was unsuccessful, so he revised it; the version that survives was produced at some point between 420 and 417 BC. A satire on the new intellectual culture of Athens, it centers on a figure called Strepsiades (“Twister”) who wants an easy way out of paying for the gambling debts racked up by his horse-mad son Phidippides (“Easy-on-the-Horses”). Hearing of a school of rhetoric run by Socrates that can teach pupils to make any argument seem overpowering, he signs up for it. In the course of the play he learns how to make the weaker argument seem stronger before defiantly rejecting all this nonsense and putting the school to the torch. Socrates—a distorted parody of the real philosopher—is portrayed as pretentious, vain, self-serving, and ethically dangerous. His disciples reject all forms of traditional morality, including belief in the Olympian gods (“You swear by Olympian Zeus! What idiocy; to think that someone of your age should still think that Zeus exists!”). The Clouds of the play’s title are represented by the chorus: they are the goddesses worshipped by Socrates and his coterie. “They are the only true deities,” proclaims Socrates, “all the rest are nonsense.” “What?” replies Strepsiades. “By Earth! You don’t count Olympian Zeus as a god?” “What do you mean, Zeus? Stop babbling: Zeus doesn’t even exist!” Socrates goes on to argue his case using “evidence” (
s
ē
meia
)—presumably these are the kind of “proofs” for the existence of a god that the first slave in
Knights
was craving.
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Tragedy responded to the sophists in subtler ways, projecting the issues onto a mythical canvas, so that the connections with contemporary culture become suggestive rather than explicit. One of the greatest examples of Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s
Oedipus the King,
is a case in point. The date is not certain, but 428 BC or so seems likely; this would place it precisely in the eye of the sophistic storm. Sophocles has often been thought to be the most religiously minded of the three major tragedians, but
Oedipus the King
paints a more complex, challenging picture than this.
Oedipus
is centrally about divine prophecy and humans’ attempts to assert control over lives that have already been predestined. The young Oedipus was given a prophecy by the Delphic oracle that he would marry his mother and kill his father. He has left his hometown of Corinth to avoid fulfilling the oracle and resettled in Thebes, where he has become king and married Jocasta, the wife of the old king Laius. In the course of the play he discovers the truth: that he was actually born in Thebes to Jocasta and Laius; that they exposed him to die on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron, on hearing the same prophecy about his future; and that he was rescued and brought up in Corinth. He had killed his biological father Laius in a fight on the way into Thebes. So unbeknownst to everyone, Apollo’s prediction has already come true: despite his best attempts to do otherwise he ended up both killing his father and marrying his mother. In his grief, he puts out his own eyes and totters off into exile.
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An Athenian spectator would have seen all sorts of parallels between the play and contemporary life. When the play opens, Thebes is being ravaged by plague (Apollo’s vengeance for Oedipus’s unwitting murder of his father). Athens too suffered terribly from a ghastly plague in the years between 430 and 426 BC, the result of Pericles’s policy of confining the citizens behind the city walls while the Spartans, during these opening years of the war between the two states, laid waste to the fields outside. Viewers are likely to have seen an immediate, if indirect, connection between the two situations. And then Oedipus himself, who is characterized as a rational intellectual, will surely have reminded viewers of Pericles, the general and unofficial leader of Athens, who died from the same plague in 429 BC. Oedipus’s claim to intellectual distinction rests on his having freed Thebes from the curse of the Sphinx, having solved her riddle using his intelligence alone. The hints seem unmissable: in the myth, Thebes has a much-loved leader who prides himself on his rational abilities, but whose overconfidence leads to his ruin; in Athens too, the much-feted leader Pericles, proud of his links to contemporary intellectuals but ultimately the cause of a terrible plague.