Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (12 page)

Pericles was also one of a circle of intellectuals who were linked in the public imagination with atheism. Among these was Anaxagoras, who had been impeached at some point in the 430s on the charge of “not believing in the gods.” The architect of the impeachment had been a seer called Diopeithes. He, we are told, “brought in a bill providing for the public impeachment of such as did not cultivate the gods, or who taught doctrines regarding the heavens, directing suspicion at Pericles by means of Anaxagoras.” This lends a contemporary complexion to the scene in
Oedipus the King
where Oedipus confronts the blind Tiresias, a seer who uses the flight of birds to tell the future. It is Tiresias who first claims that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius and the source of the pollution that is afflicting the land. Oedipus responds furiously, setting his own intellectual achievement in solving the Sphinx’s riddle against the prophet’s insights. “Tell me now,” he sneers, “what makes you the lucid prophet? Why, when the dog-bard [i.e., the Sphinx] was here, did you not come up with some utterance that would deliver the citizens from their fate? After all, the riddle was not a common-or-garden one: it called for prophecy. But you came forth with no revelation derived from birds or gods. I was the one who came along, ‘know-nothing Oedipus’: I stopped her, using my native intelligence, not bird-lore.” In other words, Oedipus opposes rational human intelligence to divine mumbo-jumbo. Jocasta’s brother Creon, he thunders, must be aspiring to the throne and must have paid this “mage, weaver of tricks, fraudulent vagabond priest” to come up with prophecies against him. All of these insults involve exactly the kind of charges that Sophocles’s contemporaries would level at religious cranks. Calling him a “mage” (
magos
) associates him with the Persian magi; “fraudulent vagabond priest” links him to the priests of new cults that were being introduced into Athens from abroad, worshipping the Phrygian Great Mother, Sabazios, and Bendis. Beyond this general assimilation of Tiresias with some of the outlandish religious practices current in Athens at the time, he also looks—from certain angles—oddly like Diopeithes himself. Both, notably, are seers associated with Apollo. And around the time that Sophocles’s play was performed, Diopeithes was being pilloried by comic poets for his eccentric religious behavior, mocked as a “madman” and envisaged as performing undignified, ecstatic dances to drumbeats. Aristophanes sarcastically calls him “the great Diopeithes” and implies (just as Oedipus does for Tiresias) that he invented oracles to suit his own needs. The fit between Tiresias and Diopeithes is not exact, nor is that between Oedipus and Pericles/Anaxagoras, but ancient audiences would surely have seen enough common ground to realize that issues of contemporary import were being addressed in the play.
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Oedipus’s attempts to evade the oracle have profound theological significance. To doubt the efficacy of prophecy is to doubt the gods’ ability to predetermine the future. Later in the play, Oedipus’s wife (and, it will transpire, mother) Jocasta believes that she and Oedipus have proven Apollo wrong by escaping the implications of the oracle. She comments, “As a result, I wouldn’t look this way or that as far as prophecy is concerned, in the future.” To be sure, she is not denying the existence of the gods as such. But there is no minimizing the force of her words: prophecy, she says, does not work. It should be ignored. This is a powerfully heretical position, in ancient terms.
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The antireligious theme reaches a climax in a song that the chorus subsequently sings, concluding with what must have seemed an even more shocking claim:

No more shall I go in reverence to the untouchable

Belly-button of the world,

Nor to the temple at Abae,

Nor to Olympia,

If prophecies shall no longer be manifestly

Fitting for all mortals.

But, O Zeus the mighty, if you are properly so called,

Ruler of all, let not this pass you by,

You and that eternally immortal rule of yours.

The old prophecies concerning Laius are fading

And now men give them no value.

Nowhere is Apollo glorified with honours;

Religion is no more.
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This is extraordinary stuff. The major prophetic centers of Delphi, Abae, and Olympia are, the chorus say, to be avoided. This neglect will have consequences for the very authority of the king of the gods, who is addressed as “Zeus the mighty,
if you are properly so called,
ruler of all.” Now, it is quite right to say, as commentators on this passage usually do, that there are parallels in regular prayers for expressions of uncertainty about the proper form of address to a deity. It is imperative, in Greek religion, to get the god’s ritual name right. But the words of Sophocles’s chorus are anything but formulaically banal. The ode poses a logical problem, in a precise and focused way: How can Zeus truly be called “mighty” if the gods have lost control of foreknowledge? Mistrust in oracles affects belief in the gods’ power in general, not just in the prophetic centers. So the chorus concludes: religion—
ta theia,
“god stuff”—is no more. There is surely a sophistic argument lying behind this reasoning: If divine predictions do not come true, then the gods are not in control of the universe and what need is there to worship them? The very phrase
“ta theia”
would have sounded jarringly modern to an Athenian audience of the later fifth century BC: it is a word drawn from contemporary intellectual life, not from poetry. And we know from other sources that there were those who denied the truth of prophecy, from the pre-Socratic Xenophanes onward. A character in Euripides’s
Helen
opines (in terms that recall Oedipus’s attack on Tiresias) that “the words of the prophets are base and full of lies…naked intelligence and good advice are the best prophet.” Sophocles’s chorus is declaring itself convinced by such arguments, on the basis of what they have seen before their eyes.
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Oedipus the King
is a play that seriously explores the idea of a world without divine determination. It pushes as hard as one could, within the confines of a religious festival, the idea that the will of the gods does not dictate our lives. Later on, Oedipus—still deceived by events—refers to himself as a “child of Fortune,” meaning that he is illegitimate. But the word
tukh
ē
,
“fortune,” is another term that drips with materialist, antideterminist, nondivine philosophy; it is associated particularly with the philosopher Democritus, who believed in a world governed by chance. Oedipus revels in this world of indeterminacy. When he discovers himself to be deliciously free from divine determination—indeed, as he thinks, a bastard child with no parental obligation at all—he is
thrilled.
It is one of the most moving parts of the play.
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But, of course, Oedipus is proven wrong and his joy revealed to be delusional. His attempts to explore alternative theologies are crushed without compunction by the traditional divine order. “I am
atheos
!” he cries: it will have taken the ancient spectators a few seconds to work out that he means it in the older sense, “abandoned by the gods,” rather than the current “atheist.” He still sees himself as disconnected from the divine sphere, but he now recognizes its power. The plot arc of most ancient tragedy is fundamentally conservative: it tends to reaffirm the status quo, to restore an ideology that was threatened, and in particular to put a divine seal on events at the end. It is, in that sense, geared up to validate the divine orthodoxy. But it would be a rather unadventurous reading of
Oedipus the King
that took it as a straightforward, pietistic validation of the power of the gods. In any work of literature, the journey matters as much as the destination, and Oedipus’s tour of a world without divine providence resonates deeply against the intellectual backdrop of the time. It would be better to see the conservative shape of the plot line as creating a safe space in which dangerous religious ideas can be experimented with without causing offense.
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It was, however, Sophocles’s younger contemporary Euripides who was most closely associated with exploring the nature of atheism. In one of Aristophanes’s comedies, in which he appears as a character, an old ribbon seller protests that she has been put out of business by his plays: “He has persuaded all the men that there aren’t any gods.” Two hundred years or so after his death, an Egyptian called Satyrus wrote a biography of him, which stated that he was prosecuted for impiety (
asebeia
) by the demagogue Cleon—“impiety” being the charge concocted by Diopeithes to attack Anaxagoras and subsequently used against Diagoras of Melos and Socrates. These claims count for little in historical terms: Aristophanes, obviously, was a satirist and given to two-dimensional caricatures, while Satyrus was probably going on scurrilous reports derived from his own plays rather than hard biographical facts. Unfortunately, these two pieces of evidence have prompted a rather sclerotic reaction from certain modern scholars, who have lined up with folded arms to assure their readers that Euripides was not really an atheist. Fundamentally, their argument rests on a very simple critical move. Just because he has his characters say things that seem to deny the power of the gods, they observe, does not mean that he himself believes these things. We should, they caution, look to see what ultimately happens to the people in his plays who deny the gods: this being tragedy, they usually end up dying horribly. Now, as a general point this is undeniable. But the attack is aimed at the wrong target. No scholar in the twenty-first century should be claiming anything as simplistic as “Euripides was an atheist.” The age of biographical criticism is over: we cannot divine the author’s views solely on the basis of what his characters say. Nor should we be thinking of these complex, provocative, but ultimately open-ended plays as vehicles for a single, simple message (whether that is “I believe in gods” or “I don’t”). What matters is that of all the dramatists, Euripides has his characters deliver the most sophisticated attacks on traditional religion, using arguments that he surely mined from the rich seam of contemporary sophistic thought. Whether he was or was not personally an atheist, he was certainly captivated by atheistic ideas and rarely missed an opportunity to articulate them.
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Take, for example, the bizarre prayer that the Trojan queen Hecuba addresses to Zeus in extraordinary terms: “O vehicle of the earth and possessor of a seat on earth, whoever you are, most difficult to know, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of men: I pray to you.” This is like no ordinary prayer: it imports pre-Socratic language into a mythological setting in the distant past, in a way that seems deliberately anachronistic. One ancient commentator thought, no doubt correctly, that he could detect an allusion to the notorious arguments of Anaxagoras that the universe is built of matter and directed by a cosmic “mind.” But it also reflects a genuine question about Anaxagoras’s meaning: was his “mind” supposed to represent a natural energy, like the god of the Ionian pre-Socratics? Or was it simply the underlying structure of reality, which discloses itself to human rational thought?
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In
The Madness of Heracles,
produced probably toward the end of Euripides’s life (he died in 406 BC), the focus shifts onto the moral critique of religion. The play falls into four phases. In the first, Heracles’s family—his adoptive father Amphitryon, his wife Megara, and his children—are being persecuted by the wicked Theban king Lycus while he is away on his labors. When he announces that he will kill them the second phase begins: Heracles returns just in time to slay Lycus and his agents. The third phase is all about the vengeance of the goddess Hera, who is jealous of Heracles since his biological father is her husband Zeus. She sends Lyssa (the personification of insanity) and Iris (the messenger goddess) to drive him mad; he promptly kills his own children, thinking they are his enemies. Finally, he awakens from his madness and though grief-stricken is persuaded by Amphitryon and Theseus to live on and to move to Athens. The play gives plenty of opportunities for reproaching the gods for their injustice. First of all, Amphitryon berates Zeus for not looking after his son Heracles properly: “I am only a mortal,” he says, “but I outdo you in virtue, though you are a great god…You are a stupid kind of god, or by nature you are unjust.” The fact that Zeus’s son Heracles, of all people, was beset by suffering throughout his life logically implies that the gods either cannot or are unwilling to look after their own kin (a basic obligation of Greek ethics). The logical structure behind this argument suggests, again, that it is drawn from contemporary philosophical reasoning. Later in the play, Heracles, newly awoken from his trance and in a suicidal mood, also expresses skepticism about Zeus, “whoever he is.” Like the chorus of
Oedipus the King,
he echoes the conventional, pious prayer’s doubt about the correct naming of the god, but in a way that suggests that he may not exist at all. “Do not be angry, old man,” he says to Amphitryon. “I consider you my father, not Zeus.” Presently, Theseus tries to console him by saying that even the gods suffer: the myths portray them as cuckolded, punished, and imprisoned. Heracles replies that “I do not believe that the gods enjoy illicit unions, or that they chain each other up; I do not think, nor will I ever be persuaded, that one god can be master over another. A god has no need of anything, if he is truly a god. These are the wretched tales of singers.” Heracles appeals to a traditional critique (going back to Xenophanes, via Pindar) of poetic stories of divine immorality but does so in terms that suggest an underlying argument against the existence of divinity: if there are such things as gods, they will be entirely blessed, but if they are blessed, they will have no need of anything; hence they will not have any need to change anything (least of all in an immoral way). Ironically, Heracles is himself at this moment caught up in such a tale of divine immorality (Hera is behind his madness). In one sense that fact disproves his argument and reaffirms the traditional conception of the gods. But it also underlines the central theological problem of the play: where is Zeus, the all-powerful king of the gods, and why does he seem to have so little control over things?
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