Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

How
new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it
as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of
science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in
the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods,
Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost
unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices
of those who first refused the divinities.
Homer’s epic poems of
human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only
“sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or
mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than
sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized
religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on
sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos,
or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas
about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged
their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and
philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of
Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first
materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian
state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene
in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of
Samosata.
Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the
scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial
might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed,
however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems
and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth
century AD.