Atheism at the Agora: A History of Unbelief in Ancient Greek Polytheism [1 ed.] 9781003393085, 9781032492995, 9781032493039

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Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

ATHEISM AT THE AGORA A HISTORY OF UNBELIEF IN ANCIENT GREEK POLYTHEISM James C Ford

Atheism at the Agora

This fresh, comprehensive study of ancient Greek atheism aims to dismantle the current consensus that atheism was ‘unthinkable’ in ancient Greece, demonstrating instead that atheism was not only thinkable but inextricably embedded in the Greek religious environment. Through careful analysis of a wide range of source material provided in modern English translation, and drawing on philosophy, theology, sociology, and other disciplines, Ford unpicks a two and a half thousand-year history of marginalisation, clearing the way for a new analysis. He lays out in clear terms the nature and form of ancient Greek atheism as the ancient Greeks conceived of it, through a series of themes and lenses. Topics such as religious socialisation, the interaction of atheist philosophy and theology, identity formation through alterity, and the use of atheism in scapegoating are considered not only in broad terms, using a synthesis of modern scholarship to mark out an overview in line with modern consensus, but also by drawing on the unique perspective of ancient atheism Ford is able to provide innovative theories about a range of subjects. Atheism at the Agora is of interest to students and scholars in Classics, particularly Greek religion and culture, as well as those studying atheism in other historical and contemporary areas, religious studies, philosophy, and theology. Dr James C Ford is the director of Stoa Strategy Ltd and an honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. He has previously held teaching, research, and curatorial roles at Lancashire County Council Museums and the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, and Oxford. Ford has written and spoken on a range of topics including witchcraft and alterity, PTSD and memorialisation as healing for psychogenic injuries in the ancient world, Herodotus and unknowability, and LGBT history in Lancashire: his main research interests are in historical atheism.

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

Recent titles include: Power and Rhetoric in the Ecclesiastical Correspondence of Constantine the Great Andrew J. Pottenger The War Cry in the Graeco-Roman World James Gersbach Religion and Apuleius’ Golden Ass The Sacred Ass Warren S. Smith Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy In Honor of Professor Anthony Preus Edited by D. M. Spitzer Personal Experience and Materiality in Greek Religion K.A. Rask A Cognitive Analysis of the Main Apolline Divinatory Practices Decoding Divination Giulia Frigerio Processions and the Construction of Communities in Antiquity History and Comparative Perspectives Edited by Elena Muñiz-Grijalvo and Alberto del Campo Tejedor Didactic Literature in the Roman World Edited by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad and Christopher B. Polt Atheism at the Agora A History of Unbelief in Ancient Greek Polytheism James C Ford For more information on this series, visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Monographs-in-Classical-Studies/book-series/RMCS

Atheism at the Agora A History of Unbelief in Ancient Greek Polytheism

James C Ford

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 James C Ford The right of James C Ford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-49299-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-49303-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-39308-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For my father, Dr James A Ford, whose passion for history never overtook his duty to enrich the world with his presence.

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

1

Introduction: Clearing the landscape of Greek atheism

1

2

Foundations: Learning (un)belief in the Greek religious environment

23

Morality: Atheist ethics and immorality in the Greek imagination

49

Theology: Discourses of (a)theology and the evolution of Greek belief

71

Unknowability: The piety of agnosticism in Greek philosophy and practice

98

3

4

5

6

7

Othering: Mediating the legitimacy of (a)theism and the creation of Greek identity

121

Scapegoats: The threat of atheism to the ancient Greek city

143

Conclusion: Belief in unbelief

168

Bibliography Index

175 203

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Tom Harrison, whose supervision of my doctoral thesis immeasurably improved it; to Fiona Hobden, for her work and guidance; to Hugh Bowden and Christopher Tuplin, for their constructive feedback and encouragement; to various colleagues and friends at Liverpool and Manchester over the years; and to the late Judith McKenzie at Oxford, for her belief in me. Any errors and mistakes are entirely my own and should not reflect on them. Special thanks to my partner and all my family and friends, who have constantly supported and encouraged me, including forcing me to finally take the time to write this up. And to my early and ongoing inspirations and enablers in studying history: Julia Clayton, Martin Charlesworth, Hilary Anslow, and Gina Muskett.

1

Introduction Clearing the landscape of Greek atheism

Atheism in ancient Greece had, until recently, received very little scholarly attention since the work of Danish philologist A. B. Drachmann over a century ago, on Atheisme i det antike hedenskab (Atheism in pagan Antiquity, 1919). The major reason for the arrest of this scholarly field is the almost unbroken academic consensus that atheism did not exist in the ancient world. Where it is admitted that atheism may have existed, it is portrayed as a divergent, dangerous tendency of high philosophy, and energy is typically dedicated to excusing thinkers of atheism. Little room is made for other forms of atheism, for a history of atheist ideas, or for the ways in which the Greeks themselves thought about (and sometimes feared) atheism. Jan Bremmer, in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism, has offered what has often been treated as the authoritative summary of the nature, form, and existence of atheism in antiquity1: Antiquity was not that different from the Middle Ages in this respect. The ancient Greeks and Romans also moved in a landscape where temples were everywhere, where gods adorned their coins, where the calendar went from religious festival to festival, and where religious rites accompanied all major transitions in life.2 Consequently, atheism never developed into a popular ideology with a recognizable following. All we have in antiquity is the exceptional individual who dared to voice his disbelief or bold philosophers who proposed intellectual theories about the coming into existence of the gods without, normally, putting their theories into practice or rejecting religious practice altogether. If we find atheism at all, it is usually a ‘soft’ atheism or the imputation of atheism to others as a means to discredit them. This position is expressed with remarkable consistency by a range of world-leading scholars from a variety of academic traditions, including those notable for breaking from traditional conceptions of ancient religion. So Paul Woodruff in his article for the Cambridge Companion to Socrates argued that ‘true atheism’, which he conceives of as a ‘thinker who denied the existence of the gods’, is ‘elusive’ in ancient Greece: a surprising conclusion given his DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-1

2

Introduction

subject matter was Socrates who was convicted and executed for atheism, which he blamed on mistaken identity with contemporaries advocating atheistic philosophies.3 Likewise Glenn Most, in his article for the Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, after an ardent defence of ‘belief’ in the ancient world, considers atheism as ‘philosophers who denied altogether the very existence of the gods’, a phenomenon he states is ‘virtually unknown’.4 In a similar fashion Thomas Harrison moves from a passionate and eloquent argument for ‘reclaiming belief’, a campaign that has dominated his academic outputs against the consensus, and in the next breath argues that ‘complete unbelief’ was ‘scarcely imaginable’.5 Rubel and Vickers, who produced some of the best recent work on the political impact of atheism on fifth century Athens, maintain that atheism ‘is alien to most pre-modern societies and, in the truest sense of the word, “unthinkable”: it was possible to believe in different gods but ‘one could not believe in nothing at all’.6 This position developed and was sustained through various movements and counter-movements in classics. The view at the turn of the 20th century was that, as A. C. Pearson wrote in 1909, ‘atheism has not often been seriously maintained at any period of civilized thought’; it was ‘a mark of coarseness, depravity, or eccentricity’.7 This idea that atheism is a barbaric and unsophisticated philosophy incompatible with sophisticated Greek thought was never really abandoned; a view that found scholarly justification with preeminent French historian Lucien Febvre’s publication of the Problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle (The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century) in 1942 (trans. 1982). Febvre’s polemical work was intended as a response to the historian Abel Lefranc’s Pantagruel (1905), in which it had been argued that Rabelais, the French Renaissance polymath, was an atheist. Instead, Febvre argued, religion was embedded in the physical, cultural, political, linguistic, and conceptual environment of Rabelais’s 16th century France and atheism was impossible8: Today we make a choice to be a Christian or not. There was no choice in the sixteenth century. One was a Christian in fact. One’s thoughts could wander far from Christ, but these were plays of fancy, without the living support of reality. One could not even abstain from observance. Whether one wanted or not, one found oneself immersed from birth in a bath of Christianity from which one did not emerge even at death. Over the following decades, Febvre’s thesis became influential on scholarship of ancient religion and was transposed on to ancient Greece, with proponents arguing that religion in ancient Greece was similarly inextricable from thought and action in ancient Greece, and as a result that unbelief was equally ‘scarcely imaginable’.9 Although versions of Febvre’s ‘unthinkable atheism’ thesis remain predominant in Classics and Ancient History, there have been a number of destructive critiques of it in other historical fields, particularly in studies

Introduction

3

of medieval Europe which was the subject of Febvre’s work.10 Nearly four decades ago Michael Hunter laid out the fullness of the atheistic tradition in Early Modern England: how atheism was recognised and caricatured through Christian writings, even if little direct evidence remains from the atheistic perspective.11 In support of the idea that atheism was ‘thinkable’ in the Middle Ages, Susan Reynolds argued that ‘mankind had the same basic mental equipment’ and that the potential mentalities of different societies only substantially differ in the limits of their technological abilities, none of which were required for atheism.12 Atheism could exist in ‘even the most untouched and traditional societies’, including medieval Europe, though its form would be determined by the terms of each society.13 David Wootton, one of the most ardent critics of Febvre’s ideas and the histoire des mentalités, focused on the tremendous power that the Church exerted over its laity in medieval Europe, the pressure this created to public compliance, and the powerful deterrents it offered from any form of open divergence.14 He also warned of the difficulties with focussing on the beliefs of individual precursors.15 John Arnold has further explored the powerrelationship that was at the centre of medieval Christian religion; a coercive and aggressive force in which the sense of community was generated by exclusion rather than inclusion.16 But more forcefully than Wootton, Arnold clearly lays out the evidence that atheism was not only thinkable and believable, but a common feature of the medieval world. These scholars have demonstrated that atheism was thinkable in historical societies where this had previously been denied, that it should be understood as part of a discourse and a history of ideas rather than a search for individual beliefs, and that it plays a role within dominant belief structures. Despite the rejection of Febvre’s ‘unthinkable’ thesis in other fields including its own, its influence on scholarship on the ancient world has endured, and this has helped suppress a broader dialogue about atheism and unbelief in ancient Greece. A fresh interest in atheistic culture, provoked by the so-called ‘New Atheists’ in the 2000s, has resulted in a flurry of smallerscale studies of atheism in the ancient Greek world, and one recent trade book in English: Tim Whitmarsh’s Battling the Gods (2016).17 Whitmarsh’s book lays out clear evidence that atheism did exist in the ancient world in a solid, engaging format. However, Whitmarsh’s contribution is indebted to an old and largely unhelpful paradigm for looking at atheism in the ancient world: its focus is almost entirely on identifying atheists, with little interest in the role, place, and dynamics of atheism in Greek society, and it does not confront Febvre’s thesis and other bars to the study of atheism. No academic thesis has yet been produced which decisively confronts and answers the ‘problème de l’incroyance’ in Classics and offers a history of atheism as opposed to atheists. Febvre’s thesis was also influential in Classics because it offered a model for responding to ritualistic theories about ancient religion in the late 20th century. Since Fontenelle in his Histoire critique des oracles (1687), it had

4

Introduction

been argued that earnest ritual participation can be motivated by many culture-driven alternatives to genuine belief and can also coincide comfortably with the ridicule of those beliefs. This was easily applied to the ancient world. As Gibbon glibly observes18: The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. The pragmatic foundations of religion in Roman society, for Gibbon, were in collective participation in religious discourse and practice, and belief in the usefulness of that participation, regardless of (un)belief. Ritual participation does not require that the participant believes in the existence of any god or accepts any related supernatural propositions at all, and they may even have really believed that it was false: only sharing in the collective belief in the usefulness of religion to society or themselves.19 This ritual view of ancient religion came to the fore with the great ritualists of the late 19th century: Jane Harrison, Francis Cornford, and Arthur Cook,20 with a revival in the late 20th century, when it was argued that Greek religion had nothing to do with belief, which is an inappropriate and anachronistic category.21 In support of this, it was argued that there are no terms in Greek that unproblematically mean either ‘belief’ or ‘religion’ and it is debatable whether the Greeks would have found the idea of religion as a distinct concept at all intelligible.22 Instead, Greek religion could be defined through a ‘negative catechism’: unlike most modern religion it had no dogma, doctrine, or creed; no holy books, no priesthood, and no sense of personal faith.23 In a sense, this made space for disbelief in the ancient gods. But in studies of atheism, the ritual focus also resulted in the assumption that atheism would manifest in ‘rejecting religious practice altogether’ and the farthest reaches of Greek scepticism were consequently seen only as rejections of popular mythologies.24 The now beleaguered model of Polis Religion represents the most developed and persuasive form of a ritual interpretation.25 SourvinouInwood argued that religion was not an independent category in Greek society: religion operated through the framework of the polis, which articulated, anchored, legitimated, embraced, and mediated religious activity and discourse.26 In this traditional form the Polis Religion model has been criticised as exclusionary, particularly in its marginalisation of ‘unofficial’ cultic or ‘mystery’ practices, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were an exceptionally important part of Greek religious life, and its dismissal of individual belief.27 Responding to these criticisms, scholars like Julia Kindt have fruitfully adjusted the model with the aim of reducing the strict Durkheimian and structuralist nature of Polis Religion, and arguing that religion was grounded in rather than restricted to the polis, but

Introduction

5

the model continues to be problematic in emphasising and valuing certain areas over others.28 In studies of ancient atheism, the Polis Religion model has reinforced the view that atheism was limited to individuals espousing atheist ideas who must have been religious and political pariahs, expressing dangerous, extreme, individual beliefs that were punished by the state through asebeia laws.29 In response to both the Polis Religion model and the ritual school, a counter-movement has been pursued with great success that has injected belief back into studies of Greek religion.30 Ritual remains central, but as part of a package that included beliefs of different forms in many contexts.31 In the case of belief, the lack of a term for a set of ideas that is mapped and bundled in the same way as in our era, language, culture, and historical tradition does not indicate that the Greeks did not have any related concepts.32 The renunciation of discussions and terms around belief left ‘an unfortunate epistemological gap in the field’.33 However, this countermovement has not helped to invigorate studies of unbelief. Instead, these studies have partly used denial of atheism as a way to platform studies of belief: scholars have defended the existence of belief in the Greek world, but in arguing that it was ubiquitous they have often denied unbelief. This is a lot to unpick. A wide range of movements and countermovements all seem to agree that atheism did not exist in any substantial form. And yet we know that, as Reynolds argued, atheism is just as natural as belief; just as belief is indispensable to any study of religion so should be unbelief.34 However, while we can accept that Greeks generally did perceive a collection of ideas that can be loosely understood as standard ‘beliefs’, this does not help us discover the beliefs of individuals.35 P. J. Rhodes has argued that it is possible to discuss beliefs in a generalised way, as long as it is recognised that36: different kinds of investigation have their own procedures and their own degrees of certainty, and that for many purposes the fact that Ayer’s total certainty cannot be achieved is a fact which we should remember but by which we need not be discouraged. Historians do the best that they can with the evidence that they have. It is understandable and generally justifiable for historians to ‘reasonably suppose’, as Harrison does, ‘that the performance of ritual was accompanied by attitudes’; beliefs frequently coincided with or drove ritual performance.37 But there is a difference between societal and individual beliefs that Harrison, Rhodes, and other proponents of belief have sometimes elided: there are motivations and justifications for ritual participation that are unrelated to any supernatural beliefs.38 Ritual practice can be general evidence for belief in Greek society, but it is not valid to use ritual participation as evidence of specific beliefs of an individual in the face of even the least secure evidence of the contrary.

6

Introduction

Furley, in his article on Thucydides’ atheism, argued that attempts to determine an individual’s beliefs are ‘doomed to failure ultimately as there is simply no way of knowing’.39 I am inclined to agree with this. Furley is far from the first anthropologist to recognise this problem: Evans-Pritchard observed that ‘religious beliefs must always be treated with the greatest caution, for we are then dealing with what neither European nor native can directly observe’.40 Evans-Pritchard was able to live among his subjects and survey their responses: there are no surveys of ancient Greek beliefs, but even surveys would not help much. There is a fundamental epistemological problem as identified by A. J. Ayer (referenced by Rhodes above), the philosopher and proponent of logical positivism, who argued that the unfalsifiability of claims about the religious beliefs of individuals makes such claims scientifically unacceptable.41 There are many reasons why people report the (un)beliefs that they do, in the modern world and in ancient Greece; and equally as many that explain why they engage in ritual action, as their religious beliefs were always in competition with other aspects of their lives.42 This epistemological problem leaves a vacuum that scholars too often fill with suppositions about the plausibility or sensibility of beliefs in their view. This is far more impactful in studies of atheism than belief, as studies of atheism are almost always diagnostic and prosopological, that is, concerned with determining the beliefs of an individual; with a focus on ‘exceptional individuals’ in catalogues of atheists, whether excusing respected philosophers ‘falsely accused’ of this apparent offence or lauding heroic rationalists standing against the tide of religious naivety.43 This is a kind of Great Man Theory, an ordinary part of historical study for centuries but considerably criticised and largely abandoned in the Humanities, and mostly too in the Classics (studies on atheism being one of the exceptions).44 Aside from the epistemological issues, this sort of investigation cannot adequately capture broader social, political, and philosophical trends. Atheist prosopology is particularly dubious, as the evidence normally used is later material, caricature, topoi, personal attacks, and aischrology often embedded in trial or accusation records, and only those that survived and were recorded.45 Atheists were a marginalised group in the ancient world: the neglect of their history is typical for such groups, defined by dominant power structures, which determines the kind of knowledge that is recorded and survives.46 Responding to similar issues in the study of medieval irreligion, David Wootton argued that the study of historical atheism should be ‘not just as a search for unbelievers but also as a search for ways of thinking on which unbelief will later depend’.47 Conceiving of atheism as a ‘way of thinking’ involves construction of a history of ideas and of the form, function, and consequences of atheism in Greek society, just as with belief. This has the benefit of avoiding the epistemological issues with belief and allows for consideration of atheism within in its societal context. If discourses about

Introduction

7

belief and religion are embedded in the polis then it makes sense that, if belief is in a discourse with atheism, important aspects of atheism would manifest along parallel lines to those drawn by the polis, just as Greek religion does. The lines of acceptable discourse and the legitimation of views, for instance, could be played out in the courts, but in a much deeper sense discussions and evidence of atheism will be embedded in discourses on civic education, morality and justice, intra- and inter-polis political feuds, and attitudes towards foreigners. So far so good, but at this point it is clearly necessary to lay out what is meant by ‘atheism’. Undeniably, terminological and definitional issues have severely inhibited the systematic study of atheism.48 The meanings, definitions, and semantic ranges of even the broadest terms, of ‘atheism’, ‘belief’, and ‘agnosticism’, are highly problematic and controversial. Students of belief have as much of a stake in this as students of unbelief. Religious terms are notoriously difficult to define in any fixed way: there is nothing ‘essentially religious’ or irreligious, and as Campbell has argued, ‘the notable lack of success in defining the latter term is hardly a good omen for success in defining the former’.49 Beyond these core difficulties, atheism is often modified and subdivided: minor and major, positive and negative, strong and weak, militant and fundamentalist, and so on.50 Lively discussions on atheism in the social sciences, particularly by Lois Lee and Stephen Bullivant, have demonstrated the problems with using existing, contemporary terms unreflexively, even with context qualifications (e.g. ‘I am now talking about atheism in X sense’). In particular, these scholars warn against insisting on terms that are ‘imprecise or overly narrow and which are confused and combined with one another without consistency’.51 Applied to Classics, the criticisms of Lee and Bullivant are unavoidably destructive. Scholars routinely deploy controversial and opaque terms to modify atheism in the Classics, where they are inconsistently and often unreflexively used in a way that excuses atheism as something else (typically ‘agnosticism’); by the expectation they will represent intellectual theories of ‘positive’ or ‘militant’ disbelief; or by the assumption that ritual participation is proof of belief, even where unbelief is implied.52 If the sort of approach taken to atheism in ancient Greece were applied to belief then the overwhelming majority, if not all, of our evidence on belief would evaporate. We can safely ignore these contemporary modifiers applied to atheism. There are many forms of atheism and reasons to be an atheist other than a rational summing up of the available evidence, including irreligious socialisation or disillusionment due to scandal or a problem of injustice.53 Some of these roughly correspond to forms of atheism in the ancient world, but other types of atheism in ancient Greece are unique in form, as we should expect given the unique nature of Greek religion. Atheism is a ‘semantically parasitic category’, the form of which is shaped by its corresponding theism and the society in which it is embedded54:

8

Introduction atheism defines itself in terms of that which it is denying. From this it follows that if definitions and understandings of God change and vary, so too our definitions and understandings of atheism will change and vary. This further means that there will be as many varieties of atheism as there are varieties of theism.

This is partly why this book is focused on the 8th to 4th centuries BC: the radical changes in Greek religion under Alexander, especially the belief in god-kings and royal patronage of the arts, equally radically altered the nature and expressions of atheism.55 That period requires its own dedicated work. Terms like ‘atheism’ can be etic, from the perspective of the observer, and they can be emic, from the perspective of the subject, but a strong historical definition has elements of both.56 It is for this reason agnosticism must be included in a discussion of atheism, rather than as a third category as it is usually presented, alongside secure faith and atheism as positive disbelief, ‘the belief that there is no god of any kind’ in the classic terms of John Hick (1963: 4). This understanding of atheism is far too narrow, it others atheism as an extreme philosophy, and it is not helpful or representative of the Greek conception.57 The philosophical distinction between agnosticism and atheism is built on a primarily social distinction developed by Thomas Henry Huxley in the late 19th century.58 There is no evidence that the ancient Greeks thought of agnosticism and atheism as distinct and incompatible positions regarding belief in gods. In fact, treating atheism as positive disbelief and agnosticism as a third category in the study of the Greek world has mostly resulted in confusion. For instance, the controversial phrase used in the accusation against Socrates, ou nomizei theous (variously translated as does not believe in, does not accept, does not worship, etc. the gods), has puzzled scholars partly because it does not distinguish between agnostic and atheistic positions.59 It is clear that Socrates did not see it this way: Socrates and Meletus exchanged arguments over a range of other things that are perceived as part of the accusation, in the works of Plato and Xenophon. Instead, the men discussed Socrates’ unbelief in gods in general and specifically of the gods of the Athenian state; his failure to worship appropriately; his persuasion of others into impious belief and behaviour; his connections with natural philosophy and other suspicious, sceptical ideas; his unique and objectionable claims to direct knowledge of and contact with his divine sign; his deceptiveness and other perceived moral and civic failings; and his position as a foreigner to appropriate behaviour and beliefs in the community.60 These seem to suggest a very broad scope of material and issues was understood as relevant to atheism in the ancient world. It seems almost inevitable for an investigation of forms of atheism in the Greek world to focus on the word atheos, as the root of the modern term atheism, as have the most recent substantial discussions of ancient atheism like those of Whitmarsh and Winiarczyk.61 In its earliest uses in Homer,

Introduction

9

Pindar, Sophocles, and Aeschylus atheos means something like ‘godless’, ‘impious’, or ‘god-forsaken’.62 So Eurymachus in the Odyssey (18.353) explains that ‘not without the gods (atheei) did the great Odysseus come to the palace’: his aim is to pre-empt criticisms of Odysseus’ impending mass murder of guest-friends as unjust and godless. People who have taken such ‘godless’ actions might be called atheos, as in Sophocles (Trach. 1035–6), in which Heracles invokes Athene to ‘heal the pain caused by your cursed mother (matēr atheos)’. The atheos mother is, of course, Hera, who Heracles blames for his fate due to her unjust resentment of and actions against him as the son of Zeus’ infidelity with Alcmene. The chorus use atheos in a similar way in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (661), when they exclaim to Oedipus that if they are working against Oedipus then ‘godless (atheos), friendless, may I meet my end, if I take this purpose’. Here the chorus members would be atheos if they took unjust actions against their friend and king. Finally, in Pindar (Pyth. 4.159–62) we find reference to ‘godless weapons’ (atheōn beleōn) of Io who had conspired to have her step-son Phryxsus murdered, and in Aeschylus (Eum. 538–9) ‘godless boots’ (atheō podi) used to trample the altar of Justice. As we can see, atheos in the earliest literature refers to several related things: actions performed without the support or oversight of the gods, that are often perceived as unjust; people who are separated from, at odds with, or opposed, or cursed by the gods due to these actions; and items with which people perform these kinds of evil or unjust actions. I discuss this understanding of atheos, which is predominantly related to justice and morality, at length in Chapter 3. The term atheos captures one way that the Greeks thought about atheism, but it does not cover the full set of phenomena that fall under different categories of unbelief in the Greek world: their thinking on unbelief was no more limited to references to a single term than their thinking on belief was.63 Instead of trying to reconcile the Greek term atheos with the modern atheist, as is the usual practice, this represents instead an attempt to understand the ancient conceptual landscape of atheism and reconcile it with the modern concept.64 Themes related to morality, justice, and oath-breaking are connected to atheism in a much deeper and broader way once we move beyond a discussion of atheos and look at a fuller picture of discourses about atheism in ancient Greece. Plato, in his Statesman, condemns those ‘impelled to atheotēs and to vaunting pride and injustice by the drive of an evil nature’ (308e). Atheists here are people who have lost connection with divine law and justice, which has led them into immoral behaviour such as the breaking of societal pacts on the basis of justice, concord, and so on. The classic examples of this are in two dramatic fragments, in Sisyphus by Critias (discussed at length in later chapters) and Bellerophon by Euripides65: Does then anyone say there are gods in heaven? There are not, there are not (ouk eisin, ouk eis), if a man is willing not to give foolish credence to the ancient story. Consider for yourselves, don’t form an opinion on the basis

10

Introduction of my words! I say that tyranny kills very many men and deprives them of possessions, and that tyrants break oaths in sacking cities; and in doing this they prosper more than those who day by day quietly practise piety. I know too of small cities honouring the gods which are subject to greater, more impious ones because they are dominated by more numerous arms. Eur. Bell. F286 (trans. Collard and Cropp 2008)

It is impossible to know the full plot of Bellerophon, but later fragments of the play show the cynical morality espoused by Bellerophon: Men’s bloody feuds and battles should be settled by underhand means. The path of truth is a feeble one, and War is a friend to lies. Euripides Bellerophon F289 (trans. Collard and Cropp 2008) The loss of divine grounding risked the loss of any subscription to the structures of morality and justice. Fears of loss of subscription to divine and human law as part of a loss of belief in just gods due to suffering were justified: this is precisely where we find rejection of religious practice and belief in ancient Greece. It is this form of atheism that Thucydides describes when he details the plague in Athens, in which dead bodies were left unburied, people stopped making offerings at sanctuaries; and men stopped caring about the fear of gods or law, behaving as if they did not exist. In the first place doctors, who treated it in ignorance, had no effect (being themselves the ones who died in proportion to having the most contact with it), nor did any other human agency, and their supplications at sanctuaries and recourse to prophecies and the like were all of no avail. In the end they abandoned these, vanquished by the disaster[…] [52] The sanctuaries in which they had found shelter were filled with corpses, since they had died there on the spot; people, seeing nothing they could do as the disaster overwhelmed them, developed indifference toward sacred and profane alike. All the funeral customs they had previously observed were thrown into confusion, and they gave burial as each found the means. Many of them, in the absence of relatives because of the number who had already died, turned to shameless burial methods; some put a corpse of their own on the pyres of others and set fire to them before those who had built them could, while others put the body they were carrying on top of another that was being burned and went away. [53] In other matters as well, the plague was the starting point for greater lawlessness in the city. Everyone was ready to be bolder about activities they had previously enjoyed only in secret[…] Neither fear of the gods nor law of man was a deterrent, since it was judged all the same whether they were pious or not because of seeing everyone dying with no difference, and since no one anticipated that he would live till trial and pay

Introduction

11

the penalty for his crimes, but that the much greater penalty which had already been pronounced was hanging over them, and it was reasonable to get some satisfaction from life before that descended. Thucydides History 2.47.3–53.4 (trans. Lattimore 1998) This type of practical atheism, rejecting the ritual foundations of Greek religion and systems of justice and morality built on belief, was, predictably, rare. There was very little incentive for the Greek to disengage from religious practice regardless of belief, and given the embeddedness of Greek religion, this would have been an impossible and pointless endeavour. But where they did abandon or reject belief and worship of just gods, they were driven by outrage, anger, and despair. The fear of loss of support for traditional morality and divine law explains the concern for appropriate education and socialisation, as the teaching of subversive philosophies could lead to the rejection of traditional conceptions of the gods, along with the moral and justice systems that relied on them. The Stranger in Plato’s Laws expresses this clearly when he talks of how the young men of Athens have lost their way: Athenian:

Cleinias:

Start with the gods. Their existence, they say, is not a question of nature, but of art, of certain conventions; and these conventions are different in different places, depending on the consensus among a particular group of people at the point where they were making rules for themselves. What is good in nature is one thing, what is good by convention something quite different. As for what is just, it does not exist at all, they say, in nature; people are forever arguing about it and changing their definition of it. And whatever change they make, at the moment when they make it, that is then the definition in force at any particular moment, brought into being by art and convention, and owing nothing to nature. All these views, my friends, are prevalent among the young; they get them from intellectuals, be they ordinary people or poets, who say that the height of justice is whatever anyone can win for himself by force. This is the origin of the impieties which afflict our young people, who seem to think there are no gods of the kind the law would have us believe in; this is followed by civil unrest, as their clever guides drag them towards the life which is ‘correct according to nature and which consists in living truly as the master of others rather than as their slave under the law. That’s a powerful piece of argument, my friend! And how ruinous for young people, whether in public life, in their cities, or in their private lives, at home! Plato Laws 10.889e–890a (trans. Griffith 2016)

12

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This idea that corruption of justice and morality was driven specifically by atheistic teaching was a substantial force behind the prosecution of Socrates. According to the Socrates of Plato’s Apology, the accusation of atheism directed at him was informed by comic portrayals of him and other teachers in the fifth century.66 The Socrates of the Clouds is an atheist in several senses that a teacher of fifth century ‘new thought’ was commonly seen to be: Strepsiades: Socrates: Strepsiades: Socrates:

Strepsiades:

Mother Earth, what a voice! How holy and august and marvellous! That’s because they are the only true goddesses; all the rest are rubbish. Come now, by Earth, doesn’t Olympian Zeus count as a god with you people? What do you mean, Zeus? (poios Zeus) Do stop drivelling. (ou mē lērēseis) Zeus doesn’t even exist! (oud’ esti Zeus) […] (Socrates explains how storms, lightning, and thunder, traditionally attributed to Zeus, are really caused by the Clouds and Whirlwind) […] Whirl? That’s a new one on me, that Zeus is gone and Whirl now rules in his place. Aristophanes Clouds 363–6, 383 (trans. Henderson 1998, amended)

And later in the play: Pheidippides: Strepsiades: Pheidippides:

Listen to him, “Zeus of the Fathers”! How antiquated! Do you think there’s a Zeus? (Zeus gar tis estin?) I do. There isn’t, no, because Whirl is king, having kicked out Zeus. (Dinos Basileuei ton Di exelēlakōs) Aristophanes Clouds 1468–73

The Clouds are replacement, usurping gods: these gods are a comic exaggeration played on for comic effect, as is Socrates’ worship of them. It is possible to read Socrates’ statement of disbelief and usurpation here as separate statements in the fashion of ‘luxuriant multiplicity’ (see Chapter 4), but there is no sense that they are parallel explanations: they are repeatedly presented as part of the same package of atheism.67 Atheism as usurpation represented lack of care for the appropriate gods, as with the Cyclops in the Odyssey: ‘the Cyclopes care nothing for Zeus with his aegis, nor for the rest of the blessed gods, since we are much stronger than they are’.68 Socrates has his head in the clouds: he is absurd, wrong, and strange, but most of all he is obsessed with his own divine creations. Aristophanes portrays his comic atheist Euripides similarly: he prays to ‘Air’, a reference to his known associations with natural philosophy, and

Introduction

13

to the more obviously ridiculous ‘twisting of the tongue, Intelligence, and sensitive Nostrils’.69 These depictions are clever parodies, exaggerating a real concern that naturalistic and humanistic investigation would usurp traditional conceptions of the gods and morality. The modes of thought adopted by many philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries, in humanistic and materialist or naturalistic investigation, were commonly associated with philosophical atheism. It is connection with this kind of thought that also lay beneath the charge of atheism laid against Socrates, as he says in Plato’s Apology: You see, for many years now many people have been bringing before you accusations against me saying nothing that was true, and who I’m more afraid of than Anytus and his cronies, though those are formidable enough; but the former, my friends, are more to be feared who took you under their wing when you were boys and gained your confidence and made accusations against me, none of which was any more true: “there is someone called Socrates, a wise fellow, who as a thinker has investigated all things above and below the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger”. These people, fellow Athenians, who spread this reputation around are my formidable accusers: for those who listen to them think that those who make such inquiries don’t even acknowledge the gods. Plato Apology 18b, 18d (trans. Emlyn-Jones and Preddy 2017, amended) And again: So, as if they were making the charge, I must read out their affidavit: ‘Socrates is guilty and wastes his time searching what’s below the ground and in the heavens, and makes the weaker argument the stronger one and teaches others these same things’. Plato Apology 19b-c Many figures who operated within these intellectual traditions, like Diagoras, were held by contemporaries and later tradition to have been atheists.70 Anaxagoras, referenced explicitly in the Apology (26d), was famous for declaring that the sun was a flaming ball of metal and the planets were rocks which rotated around one another.71 Xenophanes, for observations about human thought and knowledge of the gods, such as that ‘horses would draw pictures of gods like horses’.72 The kind of relativism advanced by Protagoras, that he could not work out whether the gods existed or their form, crossed the boundaries of unacceptable cynical hedging about the gods.73 Though hedging about the nature or identity of the gods was a standard, and pious, component of Greek religious practices, it could be highly inappropriate and impious. Take the prayer that Hecuba offers to Zeus in Euripides’ Trojan Women:

14

Introduction

Hecuba:

Menelaus:

You that support the earth and have your seat upon it, whoever you may be, so hard for human conjecture to find out, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature (anagkē) or the mind of mortal men (nous brotōn), I address you in prayer! For proceeding on a silent path you direct all mortal affairs toward justice! What is this?! What a strange new prayer you offer to the gods! Euripides Trojan Women 884–8 (trans. Kovacs 1999)

Hecuba’s bizarre and impious prayer is matched by her bizarre and impious intentions, in trying to persuade Menelaus to kill his wife Helen. Beyond the natural philosophers and sophists, allegorical interpretations of the gods, beginning with Theagenes of Rhegium in around 525 BC and popular by the fifth century, though designed to reconcile accusations of immorality levelled against the Homeric gods and the new scientific thought with traditional religion, were perceived as having innovated religion into atheism.74 The aversion to religious innovations is revealed in the accusation against Socrates, where it is equated to atheism: ‘Socrates is guilty of failing to believe in the gods of the state and introducing new gods’.75 In the Laws, atheists are those who do not believe in the ‘correct’ gods, a highly contested domain, and they should be persuaded before being formally punished: nobody who believes that the gods exist, as the laws require, has ever intentionally performed an impious action or breathed a word contrary to law. No, people do these things in one of three frames of mind: either lacking the belief I mentioned; or second, believing that there are gods, but that they care nothing for human beings; or third, that they are easily won over by inducements in the form of sacrifice and prayer. Plato Laws 10.885b (trans Griffith 2016) The author of the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease observed something similar of magic-users: He who by purifications and magic can take away such an affection can also by similar means bring it on, so that by this argument the action of godhead is disproved. By these sayings and devices they claim superior knowledge, and deceive men by prescribing for them purifications and cleansings, most of their talk turning on the intervention of gods and spirits. Yet in my opinion their discussions show, not piety, as they think, but impiety rather, implying that the gods do not exist, and what they call piety and the divine is, as I shall prove, impious and unholy[…] I am sure that they are impious, and cannot believe that the gods exist or have any strength, and that they would not refrain from the most extreme actions. [Hippocrates] On the Sacred Disease 3.10–21, 4.9–10 (trans. Jones 1923)

Introduction

15

For pseudo-Hippocrates, as for Plato’s Stranger, believing in gods who could be controlled, placing themselves above the gods, or inappropriately gatekeeping communication with them, was a cynical form of self-empowerment drawn on atheism.76 The jurors in Socrates’ trial perceived Socrates’ belief in his Divine Sign, with whom he personally communicated, as this kind of gatekeeping, as Xenophon states.77 As with much of Socrates’ argument in the Apology, it is a defence, but not an especially persuasive one: it would have been as likely to confirm the accusation to jurors as refute it. Indeed, when he tries to defend himself by claiming that Meletus’ accusation is incoherent because lack of belief in any gods and innovation of new gods is incoherent, the jurors jeer.78 Rejection of the state gods was a denial of the city’s values, morality, culture, identity, and politics, and atheism. Greeks in general understood and accepted the idea of new gods and religions, but this did not extend either to worshipping those instead of one’s own gods or failing to worship state gods.79 It is often argued that the Greeks were relativistic with regard to religious practice, in that they believed that different cultures worshipped roughly the same gods in different ways appropriate to their culture.80 For instance, Herodotus assumes gods are universal, integrating foreign gods into his own where possible, and finding it remarkable that foreign peoples do not81: Apart from Urania, the only god whose existence the Arabians acknowledge is Dionysus; his cropped locks, they say, provide them with the inspiration for the way in which they wear their own hair short: that is, cut in a circle, with the temples shaved. Dionysus is called Orotalt by the Arabians, and Urania is Alilat. Herodotus Histories 3.8.3 (trans. Holland 2014) Consequently, cultures or individuals that did not recognise gods who had manifested to them were considered intentionally blind: These same Thracians, whenever there is thunder and lightning, fire arrows up into the sky, and shake their fists at Zeus, in the belief that there is no god save their own (oudena allon theon nomizontes einai ei mē ton spheteron). Herodotus Histories 4.94.4 Herodotus’s observation here is on the peculiarity, and irrationality, of atheism in the face of what he perceives to be obvious evidence of deities.82 Likewise his description of the Massagetae, who, he explains, only believe in the Sun, to whom they sacrifice horses, which they justify as giving the ‘fastest of animals to the fastest of the gods’.83 Herodotus’ explanation is of a strange phenomenon: a foolish practice by foreign peoples that might have disastrous results for them.84

16

Introduction

That was not to say that all cultures were expected to worship the same gods in the same way. Different peoples appropriately worshipped different gods with different names and attributes, using different cultic practices. Communities were expected to worship the gods appropriate to their communities and not others, as with the famous Scythians, Anacharsis, and Scyles.85 In secret Anacharsis established rites to the Mother of the Gods at Cyzicus, but was reported to the king, who killed Anacharsis. Scyles, the Scythian king, lived as a Greek, but when he attempted to become a Bacchic initiate his house was struck by a thunderbolt and he was discovered by the Scythians and killed. On this François Hartog remarked: ‘[a]s in the case of Anacharsis, Scyles’s piety occasions his death, for what is piety for the Greeks is the height of impiety for the Scythians’.86 This sense of appropriate gods for different communities reflected a more common practice: in fifth-century Athens permission was required to import new gods, and doing so improperly was a serious crime.87 Importing new gods was possible, but the appropriate permissions had to be obtained, the new gods welcomed by the old, and the city had to consent to this major cultural, political, and religious event.88 To identify with foreign gods was perhaps to identify with foreign communities and values: unnatural, treasonous, and disturbing behaviour, that represented part of a package of atheism. This is just a snapshot of the contours and boundaries of the landscape of ancient atheism. It represents a series of lenses and themes through which the Greeks viewed atheism, that overlapped and combined in various ways. The key arenas for thinking about atheism in the Greek world centred around morality, especially in relation to justice; customs, in particular as informed by appropriate education and socialisation; Greekness and otherness; and the exchanges, appropriate or otherwise, of theology and philosophy. These broadly inform the choices of topic in the book. The form of Greek atheism certainly reflected that of Greek religion at the time, but atheism and atheistic ideas were far from ‘unthinkable’ in ancient Greece. In fact, not only were these kinds of ideas discussed by the philosophers like Antiphon, Protagoras, and Democritus, but they were presented on the dramatic stage by tragic and comic playwrights like Euripides and Aristophanes; debated in the law courts; and as far as it is possible to know, they were the common talk of the agora, where Socrates taught and citizens mingled.89 While material from across Greece is used wherever possible, it is difficult to avoid focus on the Athenians, not least because of the association between Athens and various relevant intellectual movements, the far greater pool of Athenocentric surviving source material, and the records of phenomena like trials for asebeia, or impiety, at Athens. It seems inevitable that the understanding of atheism deployed here will be criticised as too broad. The association of the sophists and natural philosophers and their thought with atheism has been denounced as ‘wrong’ and critiqued by various scholars of ancient atheism, yet that this association was drawn by ancient Greeks is not seriously disputed anywhere in scholarship.90

Introduction

17

This justification holds more generally: given that these ancient discourses, philosophies, and individuals were so strongly associated with atheism by the ancients themselves, artificially restricting them from the study of ancient atheism would require a very special justification (which it has not yet received). Hopefully a sufficiently persuasive case has been made for the understanding and scope of atheism advocated for here. The salient points are, first, that the narrowing of definitions represents an artificial restriction built on a deeply prejudicial and othering tradition that atheism is an ‘extreme’ and unsophisticated position. Secondly, that the current narrow definitions have been so artificially restrictive that it has effectively arrested the discussion of ancient atheism in scholarship, and if it is accepted (as it should be) that atheism is as natural to humans as religion, it must follow that the definition is dysfunctional. A broad understanding can be shaped to the Greeks’ own thinking about atheism, capturing a far greater and more coherent, authentic grouping of material, that offers a far more fruitful discussion. This can be condensed into the following definition91: Atheism is the various forms of unbelief in the right gods and/or the failure to worship them in appropriate ways. Notes 1 Bremmer 2007: 1. 2 Bremmer 2007: 11 and 1982: 51–52. See also Rubel 2014: 32 describes it as ‘unthinkable’ before the fifth century. 3 Woodruff 2011: 92. 4 Most 2003: 304. 5 Harrison 2000: 22. 6 Rubel and Vickers: 32. 7 Pearson 1909: 184. Endorsed by Guthrie 1971: 235. 8 Febvre 1982: 336. Wootton also argued that Febvre was arguing for an ‘epistemological break’ and did posit unbelief: see Wootton 1988: 703. 9 Harrison 2000: esp. 22–23; Harrison cites Beard, North, and Price 1998: 42–43 who argue Roman ‘religion and its associated rituals were embedded in all institutions and activities’, but not cognitively rooted to the extent they make unbelief impossible. Bremmer 1982, 2007, arguing Greek religion was cognitively embedded, and atheism impossible. Larson 2016: 4 has argued scholars have paid excessive attention to this embeddedness. 10 Whitmarsh 2016 has offered the main challenge in Classics. 11 Hunter 1985. 12 Reynolds 1991: 22. 13 Reynolds 1991: 24, 35–36. 14 On the power of the church: Wootton 1985, 1988, 1992. 15 On precursors: 1988: 723–30. 16 Arnold 2005. 17 New Atheists: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, late journalist Christopher Hitchens, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and neuroscientist Sam Harris. See Harrison 2015b: 170 on the revival of studies on Greek belief. Recent works on atheism: see also Whitmarsh 2014, Bremmer 2007, Giordano-Zecharya 2005, O’Sullivan 2012, and particularly Sedley 2013a.

18

Introduction

18 Gibbon 1836 [1995 ed.]: 1:22. 19 Brelsford 2005: 176: ‘actions or behaviors do not derive from and are not readily governed by beliefs’. See also Rossano 2012: 81–83 on ‘Ritually faking belief’. 20 On these see Burnet 1924: 5, Dover 1972: 33, Finley 1969: 64, and Needham 1972: 191. 21 For the modern movement: Price 1984: 10–11, 1998: 3, and Beard, North, and Price 1998: 43; Burkert 1985: 8, Gould 1985: 7, Sourvinou-Inwood 2000: 44, and Bruit-Zaidman and Schmitt-Pantel 1992: 27. Versnel 2011: 545–59 lists and critiques these perspectives. Barton and Boyarin 2016: 1 similarly outline a methodology based on refusing to use or think with religion, to locate the ancient phenomena in their own terms. 22 nomizein as ‘to believe’ is highly controversial: see Giordano-Zacharya 2005, and reply in Versnel 2011: 539–59; pisteuein can be used, but means closer to ‘trust’, e.g. Hdt 1.24, or Aesch. Pers. 800: ‘trust in the divine oracles’, and is not consistently used to refer to any distinct concept of belief. The intelligibility of religion: Gould, J. 1985: 1–2, Kearns 1995: 512. 23 ‘Negative catechism’: Garland 1994: ix. See Harrison 2015b on the evolution of the negative catechism. Kindt 2012: 30–32 responds to/nuances the negatives. See pg. 96 no.109 on doctrine. 24 Rejecting religious practice: Bremmer 2007: 1. The classic ritualistic study of Greek atheism is in Price 1999: 126–42, who advances this view. 25 PR was outlined in Sourvinou-Inwood 1990, 2000. 26 Sourvinou-Inwood 1990. 27 Woolf 1997 criticised PR’s marginalisation of belief; Bendlin 2006 and Kindt 2012 its marginalisation of decentralised religious practice. 28 Kindt 2012: 12–35, Versnel 1990, 2011; Gould, J. 1985; and Veyne 1998 have stressed the flexibility of religion beyond the polis. Burkert 1995: 203: ‘Polis religion is a characteristic and representative part of Greek religion, but only part of it. There is religion without the polis, even if there is no polis without religion’. 29 E.g. Kindt 2012, who does not mention atheism at all, but discusses asebeia in 116–20 as allied to magic in that they both represent deviancy from stateacceptable practice. Atheism’s relationship with superstition and magic is discussed at length in the discussion on alterity in Chapter 6. 30 Versnel 1993: 124–31, 2011: 539–59, and Harrison 2000: 1–30, 2007: 383–4, 2015a: 24–27: beliefs are not only subservient to ritual; Naiden 2012, on the critical role of belief in ritual; and Feeney 1998: 12–46, Most 2003: 303–4, Yunis 1988: 39. Parker 2011: 15–16 summarises: ‘surely even a ritual is performed in the belief that there is some purpose in doing so’, influenced by Frazer, e.g. 1890: 62–65. Similarly Jim 2014: 59: ‘ritual performance – or indeed the whole fabric of ancient Greek religion – presupposes the beliefs that the Greek gods existed’. Larson 2016: 4–6. 31 Ritual implies belief: see Naiden 2012; ritual without belief doesn’t make sense: Larson 2016: 12. 32 Cf. Raaflaub 2004: 44, who is ‘reluctant to assume a high level of consciousness of a given value in a society that does not have a corresponding word to express it’. See Skinner 2002: 159–60, arguing that word and concept are not equivalent, and Kindt 2012: 30: ‘the very fact that Greek culture had no word to say credo (“I believe”) … does not mean that the category of belief itself – in the sense of certain shared assumptions about the nature of the divine – was absent from ancient Greek religion’. 33 Ambasciano and Pachis 2017: 12; cf. Bendlin 2000. 34 Just as Wiebe 1979 argued belief ought to be indispensable even before the second ritual turn. The naturalness of religion: Boyer 1994, McCauley 2011, or Wolpert 1992.

Introduction 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44

45

46

47

48 49

19

See esp. Veyne 1988, and Versnel 2011. Rhodes 1994: 168. Harrison 2007b: 133. Rüpke 2013: 3–40 argues for the difference between individual and polis-based religiosity, as does Rubel 2011, 2013; and Woolf 2013: 136–63, on the importance of choice and difference to polytheism. See also Kindt 2012: 36–54 on personal religion and modes of thinking versus Polis Religion. Furley 2006: 415–6. Evans-Pritchard 1965: 7. Ayer 1936 [ 1971 ed.]: 16–19, and 84–103. See Palmer and Steadman 2004 that ritual performance cannot be used as an indicator of belief. Cf. Boyer 2001: 1–2, Needham 1972: 1. Price 1984: 5. See also Kindt 2012: 36–37 on the impossibility of accessing personal beliefs. ‘Exceptional individuals’: Bremmer 2007: 1. Shorter articles are often just lists of atheists or discussions of individual unbelief: Bremmer 2007; O’Sullivan 1997, 2012; Wallace 1994; Van der Horst 2006: 242–9; Cooper 1995; Osborne 1997; Sutton 1981; Lefkowitz 1987, 1989; and many works on Socrates like Connor 1991, Whitmarsh 2016 discusses groups and individuals called atheists. Sedley 2013b traces heroic rationalists. See also Winiarczyk 1984 and 1992 gives an index of those viewed by the ancients as atheists. Henrichs 1976, who accepts Prodicus was an atheist. GMT was justified by Carlyle 1840. It was common with polymaths like Hegel 1914: 30, Kierkegaard 1941, and Nietzsche [ 1997]: 111: ‘the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars’. Criticism is not new, e.g. Spencer 1896: 34. See also William James’ 1880 lecture ‘Great Men and their Environment’. The tendency partly comes from our sources, like Herodotus and Thucydides, as well as the later historians Diodorus and Plutarch, who focus on great men; see Sarah Brown Ferrario 2014. See Whitmarsh 2016: 7 on survival processes. Lucretius’ famous discourse, De Rerum Natura, provides a salutary lesson on this process of survival. Greenblatt 2011 evocatively described how this radical text was nearly lost, and only just survived the Middle Ages thanks to the rediscovery of a lone manuscript in the 15th century. Kearns 2010: 141 observed that punishable ‘godless’ types are more commonly portrayed. ‘Historians’ neglect of women has been a function of their ideas about historical significance. Their categories and periodization have been masculine by definition, for they have defined significance primarily by power, influence, and visible activity in the world of political and economic affairs … ’ Gordon et al. 1976: 75. Burton 1992: 26 observes that ‘feminists recognize that history is not simply what happened in the past but, more pointedly, the kinds of knowledge about the past that we are made aware of’. Wootton 1988: 724: ‘The search for precursors is, I believe, of particular importance in the history of unbelief, but it needs, as Febvre recognized, to be conducted not just as a search for unbelievers but also as a search for ways of thinking on which unbelief will later depend’. Lee, L. 2012, 2015: 22, Campbell 1971: 17–45, Pasquale 2007: 760. Asad 2003: 25–26: ‘there is nothing essentially religious, nor any universal essence that defines “sacred language” or “sacred experience.”’ Problematic to fix a definition: Lemert 1999: 247–8. See also Weber 1963: 1. Campbell 1971: 17 argues ‘Irreligion itself must be identified, delineated and defined and its various forms described … Since irreligion is defined primarily by reference to religion, the notable lack of success in defining the latter term is hardly a good omen for success

20

50 51 52

53

54

55

56 57

58

Introduction in defining the former’. Until very recently Campbell’s plea for a new sociology of irreligion had been ignored e.g. Bullivant and Lee 2012: 19. Minor and major: Smith, G. 1989: 7–8. Negative and positive: Flew 1967: 14, 1984; still used by Michael Martin 1990. Lee, L. 2015: 22 and Bullivant 2013: 13 on avoiding narrow definitions. E.g. Bremmer 2007: 1 on ‘soft atheism’ (above); Parker 1996: 211: Greeks stayed clear of ‘militant atheism’; Drachmann 1922: 146: ‘positive atheism’; Versnel 2011: 292: ‘isolated cases of ostentatious atheism’. O’Sullivan 2012: 174, also n.36 derides New Atheism and ‘its most zealous preachers’ as ‘populist, fundamentalist atheism’. This intellectual baggage leads O’Sullivan to minimise the importance and atheism of the fragment e.g. 2012: 184: ‘not atheistic but philosophically rich’. Bremmer 2007: 12–13: ‘Protagoras was an agnostic rather than an atheist’; Carabine 1995: 13 labels it ‘outspoken agnosticism’; see likewise O’Sullivan 2012: 172, Mansfeld 1993: 183. Versnel 2011: 558 sensibly discards the division between agnostic and atheistic. Distinction between concept of and motivation for atheism: Cliteur 2009: 10–11. Reed 2002 left the Catholic priesthood for emotional reasons. Barker 1992 insists his ‘deconversion’ to atheism was due to an addiction to reason, but also describes how the corruption of his fellow preachers turned him away from the church. On irreligious socialisation, e.g. China, the Soviet Union, or even the UK, where estimates show the religious ‘nones’ seem to have stabilised at 48.6%. On the latest estimates of religious nones in Britain see NatCen BSA: 2017. Quotation: Hyman 2007: 28–29. Fitzgerald 2007: 54. On the co-dependence of theism and atheism see Asad 2003: 25–26, Fitzgerald 2007: 54, Lee, L. 2015: 25. and McCutcheon 2007: 173–99. See also Bullivant 2013: 13, Le Poidevin 1996: xvii: ‘Any discussion of atheism, then, is necessarily a discussion of theism’. Whitmarsh 2016 and 2021: 93–97 offers a commentary on atheists in this period. It has sometimes been assumed that civic religion broke down into atheism in the Hellenistic period, but this is not true: civic cults were disrupted but continued where possible, and there is no evidence in a widespread loss of belief; see Larson 2016: 12ff. Bullivant 2013: 12–13 argues for the appropriateness of subject-specific modifications to definitions. Unbelief is one of the major definitions in most general and philosophical dictionaries, e.g. the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ‘either the lack of belief that there exists a god, or the belief that there exists none’. Oxford Dictionaries have it as ‘Disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods’; Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God. Also, Disregard of duty to God, godlessness (practical atheism)’. Lee 2012: ‘non-religion’ is a binary against religion. ‘Non-religion’ is not synonymous with atheism, as it requires that both that ritual non-participation is atheism, and that one could exist outside of religion, neither of which are true for the Greeks. See also Eller 2010: 1–18. On agnostic atheism: Martin 2007: 2. Support in the social sciences: Lee 2012, 2015; Eller 2010: 1; Philosophers: Smith 1989: 7; atheism as unbelief (including disbelief) is the definition in the Oxford Handbook of Atheism; definition in Bullivant 2013: 11–21, and Cambridge Companion to Atheism; definition in Martin 2007: 1–10. Cf. also Cliteur 2009: 1–2. This is contrary to Winiarczyk 2016: 62–63, who argues (but does not substantiate) that including agnosticism in a definition of atheism ‘seem[s] too broad’. Huxley first used agnosticism in 1869. Agnosticism was never distinct from atheism, e.g. Huxley 1884: ‘It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe’. Social identification was at the core of Huxley’s redefinition: see Pleins 2013: 93.

Introduction

59 60

61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74

75 76 77

21

Huxley 1889: 750 records that Rev. Dr. Wace, Principal of King’s College, remarked of him: ‘He may prefer to call himself an agnostic; but his real name is an older one – he is an infidel’. The differing social acceptance of atheism and agnosticism is discussed in Putnam and Campbell 2010: 16, and again at 104. On the lack of distinction between agnosticism and atheism in ancient Greece see Kearns 2010: 141–2. Accusations against Socrates: Pl. Ap. 24b–c. On the ritualist position on the accusation see Giordano-Zecharya 2005; cf. Versnel’s 2011 fourth appendix: 539–59. See also Harrison 2015a: 23, and Parker 2011: 36. Navigating different forms of atheism: Pl. Ap. 26c; lack of belief in state gods and belief in new gods: Pl. Ap. 24b-c; unbelief: Pl. Ap. 27a–28a; Irreligion and nonreligion: Xen. Mem. 1.1.2–5, 1.1.5; ritual participation: Xen. Ap. 11–12; natural philosophy and rhetorician: Pl. Ap. 18b-c; scepticism and questioning: Pl. Ap. 23cd; defence of divine sign as comparison with prophets: Xen. Ap. 12; the jurors shout at Socrates and object, practicing thorubos, when he mentions his divine sign: Pl. Ap. 20e–21b; as a deceiver: Pl. Ap. 17a-b; belief in divine justice: 30d; oathbreaking as disbelief: Pl. Ap. 35d; defence of participation in state: 28d-e; E.g. Whitmarsh 2021: 84. Whitmarsh 2016: 116–7 gives a good brief overview of this material from this perspective. Winiarczyk 2016: 61–115 also offers a recent discussion of the range of atheos, with particular philological sensitivity. God-forsaken: Woodbury 1965: 208 and ‘impious’: Whitmarsh 2021: 84. Similar observations in Whitmarsh 2021: 96. For instance, most recently, Whitmarsh 2022: 86–87 represents an attempt to reconcile the terms atheotes and atheist. The problem of divine injustice is a common idea in Euripides. On the natural injustice of pious men subject to disaster: Scyr. F684; the unpredictability of fortune leads to lapses in faith: Hipp. 1102–10; and reassuring oneself that the gods will maintain justice, punishing the evil and rewarding the good: Alc. 604–05, Ion 1621–22. See Riedweg 1990: 40–41. Plato’s Socrates repeatedly observes that his accusation is informed by depictions in Comedy: Pl. Ap. 18a–20c. On ‘luxuriant multiplicity’; see Chapter 4. Hom. Od. 9.272–7. Described as ‘atheistic’ in Whitmarsh 2022: 88. Ar. Frogs 889–93. Natural Philosophy associations: the Eur. Vita 10–14 has Euripides attending lectures of Anaxagoras, Prodicus, and Protagoras, and Teleclides F39–40K says Socrates helped him write his tragedy, as in DL 2.18. Ar. Birds 1073–5: the accusation and reward for killing Diagoras. Lys. 6.17 on word vs deed. Athenagoras, Plea 4: he chopped up a statue of Heracles for firewood; Melanthios FGrHist 326 F3, Krateros FGrHist 342 F16: divulged the mysteries. See Winiarczyk 2016, 1979, and 1980 for various considerations of the historical tradition of Diagoras, and the argument that he was not an atheist. DL 2.3.8–12. Xenophanes DK21B15. Scholium on Plato’s Republic 600c (F3). Theagenes: Scholium (Porphyry) on Venetus B, Hom. Il. 20.67. Tatian To the Greeks, 21: ‘[Metrodorus] spoke very stupidly when he turned everything into an allegory. For he says that Hera, Athena and Zeus … are hypostases of nature and arrangements of elements’. See also Phld. On Piety, 1.518–41. Janko 2006: 52 argues they aimed to reconcile religion and philosophy. From Xen. Mem. 1.1.1. Similarly Favorinus ap. DL 2.40; cf. also Philodem. de Piet. 1696–7, Pl. Ap. 24b-c. Martin, D. 2004: 40–46. Xen. Ap. 14.

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78 Pl. Ap. 27b 79 E.g. Xen. An. 7.8.1–6, in which Eucleides the seer chastises Xenophon on his failure to appropriately sacrifice to Zeus Melichios. See Garland 1992 on Greeks and foreign gods. 80 Relativity: esp. Rudhardt 2002 and Harrison 2000: 208–22. 81 For Harrison 2000: 214 complicating examples are ‘lapses’, where the universal principle is ‘momentarily forgotten’. See also 1.216: Scythian digression; 2.50 esp. the origin of the names of the gods in Egypt and the Pelasgians. Harrison 2000: 219, Rudhardt 2002: 179–80. 82 Herodotus struggling to deal with disbelief: Harrison 2000: 218–9; see also Hartog 1978: 38–39. 83 Hdt 1.216.4. 84 Foolish to ignore omens: Mikalson 2003: 43. Caused disaster: Flower 2008: 119–22. 85 Hdt. 4.76–80. 86 Hartog 1988: 67. 87 On importing gods: Garland 1992, also Parker 1996: 152–98, 2011: appendix 2. Importing gods improperly was a crime: e.g. Socrates, from Xen. Mem. 1.1.1; Plato Ap. 24b, Euthphr. 3b. See Naiden 2012: 218–9. One implication the accusation against Socrates was that he had not gone through the proper processes to import a god; Cartledge 2009: 87–88. 88 Pan, Asclepius, and the non-Greek Bendis, as well as others, were imported to Athens in the fifth century. 89 Pl. Ap. 26d: Anaxagoras’ books were cheaply sold in the agora. Socrates taught in the agora: Pl. Ap. 17c; the stoa Basileus: Pl. Tht. 210d; Eleutherios: Theag. 121a; and in general ‘where the young men were’ esp. in Laches 180c, but also Lysis 204a. 90 Winiarczyk 2016: 63 recently claimed that it is ‘wrong’ to ‘equate materialism with atheism or call Ionian philosophers of nature atheists’. 91 A broadly similar understanding is advocated by Sedley 2013b: 139–40.

2

Foundations Learning (un)belief in the Greek religious environment

Robert Garland once observed that ‘[w]e know more about children in relation to Greek religion in general and Athenian religion in particular than we do about any other aspect of their lives’.1 There are detailed studies on the participation of children in rites of passage, training at the philosophical academies, household religion, and various other aspects of the religious lives of children in ancient Greece. In the Greek world, it was generally recognised that even if children were born with natural affinities to virtue or values, children needed to be appropriately educated and socialised to have the correct moral and civic attitudes and behaviours, which included religious practices and beliefs: they were not born believing in gods.2 However the organisation of teaching and learning differed across Greece, the aim was always broadly the same: teaching children appropriate moral, religious, and political behaviour in order to create ‘good citizens’.3 Plato’s Athenian explains this in the broadest of senses in the Laws, as part of a discussion about appropriate education and socialisation: ATHENIAN:

Education, I maintain, is […] a proper upbringing where pleasure and pain are concerned, so that, from the very beginning to the very end, they hate what they should hate and love what they should love. Plato Laws 2.653a–b (trans. Griffith 2016)

This was a live topic in the ancient world, just as it is today. In the late fifth and fourth centuries, the education of the citizen male was a preoccupation of the Athenian philosophers, as part of a debate over teaching strategies and a desire for teaching to have a moral dimension and outcome for learners. In generating a secure religious environment, a great deal of ritual activity was turned towards the production of religious knowledge, learning, and socialisation on behalf of the Greek youth. As Burkert remarked: ‘[t]he formation of the rising generation appears almost the principle function of religion, where ritual concentrates on the introduction of adolescents into the world of adults’.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-2

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But religious education, and education in general, was not ‘prepolitical’, part of a formal process that ends with citizenship: it was a part of life that started at birth and continued to death.5 Wet nurses told stories of the gods to children, singers on street corners recited Homer and other myths about the gods, dramatic performances revealed the gods and explored theological issues, religious festivals demonstrated appropriate ritual behaviours and enacted myths, in sympotic discussions theology often took centre stage, and supernatural figures were depicted everywhere from table pottery to civic buildings.6 The religious ‘education’ Greek children received was largely not of any formal type: even the more structured forms of education, paideia, were more ‘socialisation’ than ‘education’.7 This sort of participatory socialisation in action is key, because beliefs are not primarily formed from a conscious rational process, for which a more formal education would be crucial, but from reflections, or rationalisations, of intuitions.8 Plato’s Stranger valued this, and feared its rejection9: they refuse to believe the stories they’ve been hearing since their earliest childhood, offered them with their mothers’ or their nurses’ milk in songs (whether playful or serious) which were sung as enchantments, as it were; or songs they will have heard in the prayers that accompany sacrifice; they will have seen the spectacles accompanying them which the young so enjoy seeing and hearing performed by those conducting the sacrifice. They saw their own parents’ absolute seriousness, on their own and their children’s behalf, as they addressed prayers and supplications to gods whose existence was not a matter of doubt; as the sun or moon rose, or moved towards their setting, they heard and saw the prostrations and genuflections of all the Greeks and barbarians, in all manner of adversity, and in prosperity. Did they believe there were no gods? No, they believed there absolutely were gods … Plato Laws 10.887d (trans. Griffith 2016)10 Aristotle (Pol. 8.1338b) observed the importance of this kind of socialisation: ‘education by habit must come before education by reason’.11 The immediate family was the most important locus for early life learning about religion, though it has been commonly undervalued and can be difficult to demarcate.12 A child’s early family life was saturated with religion, not only in the rituals in which they participated but also those performed on their behalf.13 Children were the subject of rituals to Eileithyia or Genetyllis, safeguarding the health of the mother and child, at the moment of birth; five days after birth the Amphidromai took place, marking the inclusion of the newborn into the family under Hestia with ritual gifts (opteria); the dekata after ten days, and so on.14 They were placed under the protection of childrearing (kourotrophic) deities like Ge, subject to magical rituals; and fitted with amulets, charms, and pendants that they wore until the age of three or four.15 A lot of these practices in the household (oikos) are commonly framed

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as ‘magical’, in which women more typically served as authorities.16 Children also participated in ordinary familial rituals like weddings, sacrifices, and mourning rituals; and served as adjuncts in many other rituals.17 Isaeus, the orator, in his speech On the Estate of Ciron, records the normal activities of a father dealing with his grandsons: As was natural since we were the sons of his own daughter, he never made any sacrifice without us, but whether he was performing a small or large sacrifice, we always there joining in it with him. And not only were we invited to these ceremonies but he always took us into the country for the Dionysia; we attended public spectacles with him and sat next to him, and we went to his house for all the festivals. When he sacrificed to Zeus Ctesius, a sacrifice that he took especially seriously and to which he did not admit slaves or free men from outside the family, but performed all the ceremonies personally, we shared in this, laid our hands on the victims with his, placed our offerings with his, and assisted him in the other rites; and he prayed that Zeus grant us health and wealth, as was natural for him being our grandfather. Isaeus 8.15–16 (trans. Edwards 2007) Although idealistic, the passage demonstrates the range and importance of religious activity that was part of a normal family routine, and how it served to legitimate family relationships. Participation in inappropriate rituals could be equally delegitimating, as in Demosthenes: Grown to manhood, you used to read aloud from books for your mother as she conducted initiation rites, and you colluded with her in other ways. By night you clothed the initiates in fawn skins, plied them with wine, purified them, and scrubbed them down with clay and bran. You raised them up after purification and bade them utter, “Affliction removed, condition improved,” proud of yourself because no one ever shrieked so loud. Demosthenes 18.259 (trans. Yunis 2005) Demosthenes is mocking Aeschines’ poor upbringing, by claiming that he helped his parents in all sorts of inappropriate ways, with familial rites unfit for a respectable young man. Children in Athens also participated in a range of rituals outside of the familial structure, mediated by the polis. Plato’s Stranger, in the Laws (7.794a), recommended that children between the ages of three and six should gather periodically at village sanctuaries, for an unspecified purpose that was probably an induction into the local religious lore.18 The Stranger is concerned to ensure that children meet a minimum standard of knowledge about the gods, to function in society, prevent them from blaspheming, and show them how to speak with appropriate piety when sacrificing and praying.19

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This ideal was not far from reality: Greek children served a range of roles in sanctuaries, festivals, or in rituals. Children served as temple servants, like the priest of Zeus at Aigion, a young boy; the priestess of Artemis at Patrai and Aigeira, a maiden (parthenos); or ‘hearth-child’ (pais aph’hestias), an intermediary between the initiates and the divine, maintained at public expense at Eleusis for the Mysteries.20 Girls carrying baskets containing ritual objects (kanephoroi) feature in religious processions from very early periods, as in a seventh–sixth century Middle Corinthian bottle in the British Museum.21 Parthenoi (maidens) from a variety of backgrounds took part in the Panathenaea: 31 are depicted on the Parthenon frieze carrying wine containers and incense burners for purification; and they also participated in women-only festivals like the Haloa, Skira, Stenia, and Thesmophoria.22 Two girls belonging to the genos Praxiergidai served annually as loutrides, whose duty it was to wash the ancient olive wood image of Athena at the Plynteria and Kallynteria rituals.23 At the Pyanopsia festival, children with living parents were paides amphithaleis, cutting branches for the wreaths of athletic victors, and girls carried the suppliant’s branch in the cult of Apollo to the Delphinion on the sixth day of Mounychion.24 Young Spartans were also required to attend and participate in state festivals like the Gymnopaidiai, Karneia, or the Hyakinthia, all of which required prior preparation and learning (like learning musical instruments and horse-riding), some of which was handled by public education with other aspects expected to be learned in private.25 And of course youths participated in their age category at the Olympics, as part of the festival to Zeus.26 By the Classical period, boys, including slaves, are depicted assisting in rituals in a variety of roles, such as assisting the priest at an altar for a sacrifice, taking the role of splanchnoptai (roasting entrails on a spit), leading the animals towards the altar, or extispicy (divination with a liver); with slave children in assistant roles.27 Over 40% of surviving Attic votive reliefs include child figures, most of whom are engaged in making offerings.28 Although children, particularly young boys, were useful in these contexts for their innocence and ritual purity, this formative experience was useful for the socialisation of the young.29 The system of learning through ritual roles and production to reinforce stories and education in other contexts was probably as successful in embedding religious learning in the young as Plato’s Stranger envisioned. The key way in which ‘religion provided the main avenue for children into the life of the polis’ was through the many rites of passage undertaken, which served as exciting and memorable religious markers of age, status, and experience.30 Rites of passage ensured the transmission and memorability of theology and mythology: they were ‘imagistic’ rituals, the second ‘mode of religiosity’, highly memorable, exciting but infrequent moments in a child’s life.31 The combination of these with ‘doctrinal’ modes, unexciting but highly routinised ritual actions, will have ensured a powerful ingrained religious education embedded in civic, familial, and social roles by early adulthood.

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These rites of passage introduced the child to the divine in its different manifestations and roles, and inducted children into the roles they had to fulfil as adults dealing with the gods within polis structures.32 Around the end of their first year, a boy was introduced to his phratry, and his legal guardian was required to swear he was a legitimate son of an Athenian woman.33 When he turned 15, he was registered as a phrater, a formal member, and sacrifices were performed on his behalf, his hair was ritually cut, and the young men probably then performed the oinisteria, bringing an offering of wine to Herakles.34 Children are shown in the various states of play on the second day of the Anthesteria, called the Choes, and occasionally in more direct ritual contexts: boys of around three were crowned with a wreath and given a small pitcher of wine to participate in the ritual, for the first time introduced to one of the state’s major deities alongside his year group.35 A child’s participation in the Choes was important: the age of children seems to have been reckoned in the amount of Choes in which they had participated.36 These rites of passage marked the child’s development into adulthood, with the responsibilities of an adult echoed in competitive group athletics and protective civic rituals.37 At the Oschophoria, the Ephebes, an elite band of five hundred youths, competed in a race carrying bunches of grapes on branches; after Lycurgus (around 338 BC), initiates were required to tour Athens’ sanctuaries to begin their training.38 Ephebes also led the victim to the altar and lifted the animal to have its throat cut and also took part in a rite involving a statue of Athena, purifying the Palladion in sea water.39 They participated in other ritual competitions too, of recitation of works in festivals.40 As many as 100,000 sixth-century lead figures have been found at the shrine of Artemis Orthia, of which hoplite types have been linked to rites of passage.41 Through these rites of passage, young men practised their military, civic, religious roles. At Sparta, the polis mediated almost all of the religious rites of young people and initiatory ceremonies were similarly crucial for developing and strengthening social bonding between young men.42 An example of one of these rituals is the notorious ‘Cheese Race’; these contests did occur in the Classical period, though most of the evidence is late.43 In this race young boys competed to steal cheese from the altar of Artemis Orthia, and they were whipped while doing so; splattering the altar with blood as their due to Artemis.44 The Cheese Race was praised for teaching strategy, endurance and pain, and moral lessons about fame and suffering, though its religious connotations are not developed by Xenophon, Plutarch, or Pausanias.45 The religious focal point for the rites of passage of Greek girls was at home.46 Girls made dedications of toys, locks of hair, belts, and other possessions associated with childhood to specific deities at important developmental points: on attaining puberty, on marrying, and when giving birth.47 Artemis was typically the favoured deity of girls in Greek cities, but Athena, Hera, Hippolytus, and others were also the objects of devotion.48

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Outside Athens, there were more public rites for girls. At Sparta, figurines show women involved in running races that served as a rite of passage, and choral dancing.49 Young women at Spartan festivals danced and sang in the nude, again, as part of a process of rites-of-passage in their ritual nudity and athleticism, paralleled at other sites in Greece.50 These rites and festivals all had religious meaning and explanatory mythology attached to them, which the girls learned as part of their participation: the Heraia, for instance, was reputedly a thanksgiving rite instituted by Hippodameia in gratefulness for her marriage to Pelops (the marriage link underlined its role as a rite-of-passage).51 Aristophanes’ Lysistrata includes a frequently cited list of the religious duties and roles that some elite girls could perform: As soon as I turned seven I was a Sacred Bearer (arrephoros); then when I was ten I was a Grinder (aletris) for the Foundress (archgetis); and shedding my saffron robe I was a Bear (arktos) at the Brauronia; and once, when I was a fair girl (pais), I carried the Basket (kanephoros), wearing a necklace of dried figs. Aristophanes Lysistrata 641–47 (trans. Henderson 2000) In Athens, the most famous rite of passage that elite girls might undertake was ‘acting the bear’ (arkteuein) for the Arkteia, consecrating young girls to Artemis, as depicted on various vessels from the archaic period.52 Arktoi performed ritual dances, processions, and sacrifices which, in many cases, were performed naked. Of the other rituals mentioned in Aristophanes, the arrhephoroi, bearers of the sacred objects, were two or four seven-year-old girls chosen by the archōn basileus (the senior religious official in Athens) to bear the warp for working Athena’s sacred peplos during the Chalkeia festival, and ended with a nocturnal ceremony where they carried mysterious objects in a basket to the shrine of Aphrodite north of the Acropolis.53 The aletrides were from one of the noble families and performed some form of menial task, using querns, related to sacrificial cakes; but this role is obscure.54 Lastly, the Kanephoroi were bearers of the baskets containing the sacrificial knife, barley, and fillet, who must have served at the Panathenaea.55 A key institution for the religious education of boys and girls was the khoros, which was used to refer to children’s education in general in some poleis and denoted the central political space in Sparta.56 By the fifth century, choral education was seen as a part of a traditional education, alongside gymnastic training, as it is caricatured in Aristophanes’ Clouds.57 For Plato’s Stranger, the purpose of this education was in religious education and character formation: of nobility and manliness in boys; and good order, temperance, and chastity in girls; to which contributed the music, lyrics, dance, ritual aspects, and the recited and memorised mythological content of the material.58 In his Laws, Plato’s Stranger considered the choral system the best for educating the young in religion: ‘all the three choruses must enchant

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the souls of the children, while still young and tender, by rehearsing all the noble things which we have already recounted’.59 The choral environment in Athens was agonistic: at the City Dionysia, ten choruses of fifty boys representing the ten Attic tribes competed at the dithyrambic choruses, and likewise at the Thargelia, Hephaisteia, Prometheia, and the Koureotis, boys were divided into different divisions along tribal lines.60 These divisions were significant, bonding the children to their city and tribes through a ritual process.61 Choruses performed at festivals and were organised in a way that emphasised moral lessons, shaming cowards and rewarding the brave, alongside musical and athletic contests that helped to develop an agonistic spirit in young people.62 Through long training and rehearsal and practise of songs, which entailed learning the myths that were their subject matter, children drew moral and religious lessons.63 From choral dances to pyrrhic, armed, dances, parthenoi and women of marriageable age participated in a variety of performances.64 Choruses were very important in Spartan education too, as they were elsewhere in Greece, where they marked the transition into adulthood.65 In Sparta, girls were ordered into choral age groups like the boys, with a focus on preparation for marriage, which took place between 18 and 20, and was the key religious and ritual rite of passage in a Spartan woman’s life.66 Performances, as in the Greek choral song, are a ‘chief medium’ for the interaction of myth and ritual, transcending time concerns and allowing the communication of mythic narratives and ritual performance.67 Alcman’s Partheneion was performed by young girls as part of a pre-harvest ceremony to Artemis, presenting themselves to the goddess.68 The first part of this is a couple of myths, of Castor and Polydeuces’ conflict with their cousins the sons of Hippocoon, and the second is a ritual performance. In this myth, the Hippocoontids attempted either to obtain (inappropriate) brides or to abduct them, and the Tyndarids killed them in response. The strength and dangers of female sexuality, and the dominant role of the man in marriage, for instance, were developed in the Hippocoontid myth in Alcman’s Partheneion.69 The poem also engages in a broader theological discourse about whether divine punishment exists (discussed in Chapter 4), and offers a metaphysical position: fate cannot be averted and evil brings divine destruction70: Having devised evil deeds, they suffered in a way that cannot be forgotten. There is such a thing as retribution from the gods. Blessed is he who, with a sound disposition, weaves through the time of day without punishment that makes him weep. Alcman Partheneion 35–40 (trans. Nagy 2020) Girls were practising their myths and in the process learning how to operate in society, learning appropriate values and behaviour, and engaging with and producing their own theological ideas.

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Religion was a part of the more formal aspects of education for elite children in Athens, but students did not ‘study’ religion.71 Teaching started almost immediately for wealthy boys, who were taught by their nurse and father about right and wrong and piety and impiety: they began ‘formal’ education at around seven.72 There were traditionally two categories of formalised Athenian education, physical and mental: the second of these – made up of poetry, music, maths, and dialectic –, was split into two, leaving gymnastikē, mousikē, and grammata by the late fifth century.73 Of the didaskoloi, or teachers, the kitharistēs, teachers of music, and paidotribēs, teachers of gymnastics, were the most important in religious education and the most valued in general: their role was in development of civic character, which included appropriate moral, religious, and political behaviour.74 The grammatistēs was the least important in direct religious instruction, but under them Greek elite boys spent a great deal of time reading, reciting, singing, performing, and even producing epitomies and versions of stories about the gods, from the epic poems. Anything to hand of decent style could be reused in education, but most available written material with any significant content (i.e. not basic nonsense-words designed for copying) would have included stories or worship of the gods.75 It is not difficult to imagine the grammatistēs instructing his boys to copy from publicly available texts, many of which (the vast majority, before the epigraphic habit of the fifth century) were cult and temple documents, either publicly displayed or stored in and around the city, particularly in central, sacred spaces.76 Undoubtedly, Homer and the poets took pride of place.77 First Homer’s works and other epic poems were memorised and then those of the melic or lyric poets, considered fundamental in moral instruction.78 The method was rote, copying from texts like the Iliad onto ostraca, pot sherds, or wooden or wax tablets; indeed, all of the vase depictions that remain which show boys learning or reading are of epic texts or concerning mythology.79 Spartan youths also learned grammata through Homer and the poets, absorbing key moral lessons and the divinities of their world.80 As a result, it was not unknown for ordinary citizens anywhere in Greece to know every verse of Homer, though the ability to recite at will the Odyssey or Iliad like Niceratus in Xenophon’s Symposium was at least noteworthy: ‘My father was anxious to see me develop into a good man (anēr agathos)’, said Niceratus, ‘so he made me to memorize all of Homer; and so even now I can repeat the whole Iliad and the Odyssey by heart’. ‘But have you failed to observe’, questioned Antisthenes, ‘that the rhapsodes, too, all know these poems?’ ‘How could I’, he replied, ‘when I listen to their recitations nearly every day?’ Xenophon Symposium 3.5–6 (trans. Henderson 2013) Niceratus is teased for his devotion in learning Homer through study and memorising the texts, but also through listening to rhapsodes every day.81

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This was not just Athenian practice. Homer was the ‘educator of Greece’: Homeric works were central to Greek education, and an adult without extensive knowledge of these poems in the fifth century would have been very unusual.82 Even Spartans, whose formal education system has been called ‘a mainly secular educational cycle with important religious elements’, learned grammata through Homer and the poets; religion was omnipresent in Spartan education as it was elsewhere.83 Elite Athenian children were supervised by a paidagōgos, a slave supervisor, whose role was to protect the child and ensure they were good mannered and acted as a confidant. Paidagōgoi were commonly foreign and so might have imparted some knowledge to Athenian children of foreign religions.84 The admiring description of Persian paidagōgoi by Plato’s Socrates in Alcibiades (1.122b), which is concerned with the education of the elite Athenian, suggests that it might have been the role of the paidagōgos to impart religious wisdom. In the dialogue, Plato’s Socrates describes the Persian habit of appointing the wisest Persian to teach the king’s son about Zoroastrian religion, set against an unflattering description of their Greek counterparts, suggesting that he perceived the Greek paidagōgoi as inadequately assisting in religious education.85 Spartan formal education, as far as it is discernible from the remaining evidence, was also organised around the creation of good citizens: individuals who subjugated themselves to the state and served an austere, courageous, community-oriented life.86 This included inculcating the famously strict Spartan approach to religion, perhaps most famously resulting in their loss at Thermopylae and their arrival at Marathon too late to fight in the battle, the first due to their ongoing participation in the festival of Apollo Karneios, and the second because of the full moon.87 In the agōgē, the elite male education system entered into around age seven (the usual age of entrance to education in Greece), desirable values were encouraged through the worship and association of different deities with the agōgē.88 The Dioscuri, for instance, embodied values of courage, obedience, and self-sacrifice, while Artemis Orthia, as guardian of the young, was particularly important to the Spartan ephebic (and female) education, and encouraged the young to seek protection from appropriate divine figures.89 A key figure in the Spartan childrearing system was the paidonomos, who supervised the young and had wide-reaching powers and teaching responsibilities that included basic reading and writing through classic literature such as Tyrtaeus, which has been described as ‘religious propaganda’.90 Levels of formal education varied among those who were not elite males. Most Greek women received no formal religious education and while education varied over place and time, and some women learned to read or write at home, women were less likely to be literate than their male counterparts.91 Women outside Athens were commemorated for their poetry, most famously Sappho, but also Telesilla, a handful of Boeotian women in the fifth century, and Spartan women like Kleitagora.92 This involved engaging with traditional

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poetry in which many religious stories and rites were recorded. There were also female Pythagoreans according to Iamblichos, so some women at least were publicly engaged with contemporary philosophy and theology.93 Similarly, non-elite children were either taught a basic standard of literacy or none.94 This might seem a major hindrance to religious education, but it is not clear that it was. Ancient Greece was at all times primarily an oral culture and the teaching of literacy by the grammatistēs through traditional texts, considered the least important component of formal elite male education, was only a supplementary means of learning traditional stories and myths.95 Most non-elite education relied on parents, who inducted children into religious rites and passed on religious knowledge, and this was supplemented with some broader access to low-fee elementary education, with many apprenticed into a trade.96 It has been persuasively argued that child workers were involved in the production of ritual items like pottery, or those with symbolic iconographical and mythical subjects, from the early Iron Age onwards.97 Mythological subjects transmitted through Homer and the poets were a part of ordinary Greek life as much as formal education: even citizens who could not afford formal instruction were exposed to singers reciting Homer, pots and buildings depicting Homeric scenes, dramatic adaptions of epic, and of course, conversations about mythology. The Greek environment was saturated with religion that reinforced earlier learning. Both rote-learning and ritual participation were crucial to religious learning in Greece.98 This is the first of the ‘two modes of religiosity’ that help retain information about the gods, according to cognitive scientist Harvey Whitehouse: ‘doctrinal’ learning, or highly routinised and formulaic but unexciting ritual action.99 Greek children were introduced to ideas about the gods through copying, but it was through constant exposure in ritual action that they were retained. Books served principally as didactic or mnemonic aids to oral traditions for the Greeks but were no substitute for the live skills of discourse in a primarily oral environment quite mistrustful of literature.100 So religious learning was omnipresent, lifelong, and powerful, but this learning engaged Greeks in a religious environment, it did not teach them a single, accepted set of doctrinal beliefs. The mythological and poetic traditions that were the core of Greek education and socialisation were part of a live and varied discourse about the gods that involved speculation on their nature, form, goodness, and even existence. Greek children were not taught a single, doctrinal account that would have resulted in a consistent and unified set of beliefs: they were engaging with different stories and conceptions of the gods all of the time. This not only left plenty of space for sceptical accounts, but for questioning from the children, which these traditional stories were designed to answer. The most effective, pious poetic expressions used in rituals, like Alcman’s Partheneion quoted above, were responses to questions and doubts about the gods. As such, this discourse embedded within it varieties of beliefs and unbeliefs. It was this

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uncontrolled nature of the mythical tradition that bothered Plato, and his Socrates critiques it in the Republic: ‘Shall we be perfectly content, then, to let our children listen to any old stories, made up by any old storytellers? Shall we let them open their minds to beliefs which are the opposite, for the most part, of those we think they should hold when they grow up?’ ‘No. We shall certainly not allow that’. ‘For a start, then, it seems, we must supervise our storytellers. When they tell a good story, we must decide in favour of it; and when they tell a bad one, we must decide against it. We shall persuade nurses and mothers to tell children the approved stories, and tell them that shaping children’s minds with stories is far more important than trying to shape their bodies with their hands. We must reject most of the stories they tell at the moment’. ‘Which ones?’ […] ‘The ones Hesiod and Homer both used to tell us – and the other poets. They made up untrue stories, which they used to tell people – and still do tell them’. Plato Republic 2.377c–e (trans. Griffith 2003) Plato recognised that the organic and varied nature of the poetic traditions taught in schools risked children learning wrong things about the gods. However, the selectivity and control that Plato wanted to exert over education was at odds with practice in most Greek states, certainly Athens, though perhaps less so in traditions like Sparta where more control seems to have been exerted over the exposure of citizens to traditional poetry.101 But even in Sparta, it was impossible to separate ‘pious’ religion from sceptical traditions: instead, the Spartans appear to have neutered impiety and sacrilege by controlling and ritualising it to provide a release valve. The Cheese Race is a good example of this: it had subversive and sacrilegious elements, particularly in the use of violence in sacred areas; but it was sanctioned and overseen by religious figures like the priestess of Orthia, as a form of ritualised inversion.102 Nowhere in Greece offered a doctrinal religious education advocated by Plato: the lack of control over mythological subjects that Plato’s Socrates bemoans left Athenian children with a pool of varied knowledge of religion and theology, a range of conceptions of the gods and criticisms of them, and engaged on a range of subjects, when they moved into the next stage of transition into citizenship. Their learning up to this point had been as much in religion as into religion and as such their beliefs could be developed in a range of directions. The formal schooling of Athenian children ended at around age 15 and they became full citizens at the age of 21. Young men in this period after formal schooling but before full citizenship, called meirakia, took place in informal learning through sunousia, or ‘association’, based on the earliest

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forms of elite education: in the Iliad, for instance, Patroclus learned under Achilles and Achilles under Phoenix; and in the Odyssey, Mentor served as a ‘mentor’ for Telemachus.103 This is best described in the Theognidean corpus104: do not seek the company of base men, but always cling to the noble. Drink and dine with them, sit with them, and be pleasing to those whose power is great. For from the noble you will learn noble things, but if you mingle with the base, you will lose even the sense you have. Knowing this, associate (symmisgēs) with the noble, and one day you will say that I give good advice to my friends. Theognis To Cyrnus, 26–38 (trans. Gerber 1999) Through association with older, skilled men, usually a family member or mentor – an association which continued beyond adolescence – young men learned good character and wisdom, passing down values and learning in what remained a predominantly oral culture, and developing trust and power bonds between the younger and older men.105 For instance, in the Apology (20d, 26d) Plato’s Socrates described his own process of learning through a combination of speaking with wise men, seers, poets, craftsmen, and teachers, as well as the influence of reading Anaxagoras.106 Sunousia was emphasised as necessary for a good education but equally as a process through which appropriate religious belief and behaviour could be subverted.107 Although in principle meirakia could find sunousia with prominent men around the city, the informal nature of this process and sudden lack of supervision meant that in practice this was an awkward age with little to do.108 Indeed, the formal ephebeia was the eventual response to the perceived need for more oversight for and control over young men of this age, but the ephebeia was only implemented in the late fourth century.109 Halfway through the fifth century a group of intellectuals began to monetise sunousia, creating a professionalised, more formalised route for education in this period.110 This was not really a ‘revolution’ as it has sometimes been cast: these new intellectuals offered a professionalised form of sunousia, but did not prevent or exclude traditional, non-professionalised sunousia.111 It did represent several changes from the traditional system, however. First, the new higher education focussed on developing intellectual qualities and learning technē through discourse, more than helping to develop hereditary values, as in traditional sunousia.112 Building on a prominent Pan-Hellenic, particularly Ionian, tradition of criticism, there was a growing interest in enquiries into the natural world in Athens in the fifth century, with the likes of Prodicus, Gorgias, Protagoras, and Antiphon, who funded their inquiries by teaching.113 However, intellectuals within this collection of movements shared a reputation for challenging religion and were commonly perceived as teaching atheism, impiety, and relativism.114 They were often cast as rejecting

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traditional religious learning, but this is not fair. Different intellectuals developed expertise on a variety of subjects, building on literature, mythologies, and ideas that young people had engaged with in their earlier years, but emphasising different areas and aspects and developing critical discourse on them with deeper engagement.115 If anything, this made these intellectuals even more threatening: they were perceived as having captured educational mechanisms traditionally designed to inculcate appropriate civic values, including beliefs towards the gods, divine law, and so on; and turned them into the teaching of radical irreligious ideas and moral inversion.116 In practice, however, this all made it very difficult to figure out what was wrong with what these intellectuals were doing: the result can be seen in Meletus’ mixed-up argument with Socrates, who argues his teachings fit within traditional religious learning.117 The more coherent critiques of sophists were focused on payment for teaching, which did matter. While the main customers of the sophists were wealthy meirakia, professionalisation meant that anyone who had the means could now pay for it, which was particularly appealing to those with little inherited status but enough money to afford lectures.118 This created a democratising effect, as Rihll observed119: Dissemination of scientific and philosophical ideas was not a marginal or low profile activity in classical Athens. Ordinary Athenians in their thousands were exposed to philosophical ideas in the agora, gymnasia, and theatre, amongst other places. There were formal lectures and informal gatherings, which could take place in public or in private, and which could be spontaneous or arranged. Depending upon the needs and desires of the teacher, and the status of teacher and student as citizen or metic, a ‘student’ might come and go freely, or have to pay for attendance on or attention from the teacher … While many sophists charged high rates for their lectures, not all did, and some charged different amounts for different courses.120 For instance, though students at Plato’s Academy paid living costs, they paid no fees, so there were occasionally poor students who kept their place through support from the wealthy, or earned it through night work or private tuition.121 Doubtless part of the attraction for less aristocratic students was in associating with wealthier, better-bred, and already more politically notorious peers. Indeed, almost everyone with business in Athens was exposed to these teachers, whose audience varied from paying students to the interested bystander listening to free lectures in the agora, where new intellectual ideas were disseminated alongside those of historians and poets, or technai, like doctors, or painters.122 The lack of dogma and official religious authority in Greek religion meant that anyone could establish themselves as an authority on religious issues and transmit sets of beliefs to adolescents.123

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Among aristocratic families the new intellectuals’ increasing prominence gradually came to be viewed with alarm. Aristophanes’ Clouds gives form to this anxiety: my education bred the men who fought at Marathon, whereas you teach the men of today to spend their lives muffled in cloaks; and so I choke with rage when they’re supposed to be dancing at the Panathenaea and one of them’s holding his shield in front of his haunch with no regard for Tritogeneia! Accordingly, my boy, boldly opt for me, the Better Argument, and you will learn how to hate the agora and steer clear of bath houses … No, you’ll be hale and glistening and pass your days in gymnasia, not in the agora chattering about the thorny subjects currently in vogue, or being dragged into court about some trifling, obstinatious, disputatious, ruinatious case. Aristophanes Clouds 987–93, 1002–5 (trans. Henderson 1998)124 The anxieties about the corrupting influence of wider, non-aristocratic ‘new wealth’ are embodied in Cleon, who is presented as a stupid populist deficient in morality and ‘above all in education’: giving members of lower classes access to education and therefore the corridors of power, was not viewed as desirable.125 The sophists – many of whom taught at the agora – were perceived as peddling pointless criticism, dialectic, rhetoric, and other socially dangerous arts, and having created an alternative social and educational network among the young men, at odds with traditional sunousia, and circumventing ties to the clan, father, family, and city.126 The influence of the sophists seemed to spawn a sort of ‘youth movement’ in criticism, scepticism, and atheism in the late fifth century – a kind of ‘atheist underground’, as Sedley has it – as Plato’s Stranger argues in his Laws127: Stranger:

Cleinias:

All these views, my friends, are prevalent among the young; they get them from intellectuals, be they ordinary people or poets, who say that the height of justice is whatever anyone can win for himself by force. This is the origin of the impieties which afflict our young people, who seem to think there are no gods of the kind the law would have us believe in; this is followed by civil unrest, as their clever guides drag them towards the life which is ‘correct according to nature’ – and which consists in living truly as the master of others rather than as their slave under the law. That’s a powerful piece of argument, my friend! And how ruinous for young people, whether in public life, in their cities, or in their private lives, at home! Plato Laws 10.890a–b (trans. Griffith 2016)

The Stranger viewed the ideas pushed by these new intellectuals and teachers as dangerous in themselves, but the key danger, he identifies, is that they

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teach them to the young men: this echoes the accusation against Socrates.128 Book Ten of the Laws is almost entirely dedicated to attacking this group of atheist young men and censuring the influence of their teachers.129 Some of the danger posed by this trend may have been imagined by the older generations, nostalgic of their strict, conservative upbringing, but this movement of young men certainly existed.130 The influence of this group of young men can be seen across Athenian society, particularly from the 430s. The distinctively sophistic idea that ‘might is right’ is a running theme of dangerous foreign policy in Thucydides after Pericles’ death, most famously expounded by the Athenian ambassador in the Melian dialogue.131 Alcibiades represents the best example of one of these young men: his interest in utility of argument over the truth; effective, charismatic, and subversive speechmaking; lack of bond to his city or his friends; and respect only for new intellectuals.132 It was these same young men educated in the 430s and 20s who were accused of the mutilation of the Herms and parodies of Eleusinian Mysteries, and lay partly behind the oligarchic clashes with the democracy in the 410s and beyond, as Forrest observed.133 Indeed Plato dedicated substantial parts of both the Republic and the Laws, in the mid fourth century, to remarking scathingly on the young men running around Athens refuting everything and claiming that the gods did not exist.134 Plato’s passion on this, and his advocacy of very harsh treatments for these teachers, is drawn from his desire to separate himself and Socrates from these teachers and therefore responsibility for their students.135 In the eyes of the public, and even some of their own associates, there was no easy distinction between Plato, Socrates, and the new professional teachers, though Plato dedicates a great deal of energy to enforcing one.136 In Plato’s Laches, set in 425 BC, two men are making an arrangement based on sussitia, sharing meals together and association, alongside the generals Laches and Nicias.137 Laches remarks that it is surprising they want to associate with them instead of Socrates, who had a reputation in aristocratic circles for teaching children excellence.138 Plato is even more explicit about Socrates’ role in sunousia in the Theages, where Demodocus requests Socrates take his son as a pupil, but the philosopher claims the young learn simply through exposure to him, not formal instruction.139 Although he is concerned with the business of education and people learn from him, Socrates claims he simply encouraged their innate positive attributes and discouraged their negative ones.140 Plato’s Socrates pins his defence in the Apology on this distinction between professional teaching and learning by association, in order to distinguish himself from the sophists who taught specific disciplines.141 For Plato, the sophists are paid teachers who corrupted education, while Socrates represented traditional sunousia in instilling excellence by association. By 399 BC Socrates’ reputation for teaching was a source of blame, culminating with his trial in 399 BC for corrupting the young in religious matters142:

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Scholars have often argued that that the charge was concocted to evade an amnesty that prohibited political trials of those involved in the short-lived 404/3 oligarchy in Athens.144 The charge certainly concerns Socrates’ part in educating Athenian youth (which was not a crime), some of whom who were members or supporters of the Thirty Tyrants, such as Critias and Plato’s uncle Charmides.145 But the Tyrants and Socrates were not on friendly terms or political allies, and Socrates was equally known for educating Alcibiades, supported by the democratic factions, whose actions were as damaging to Athens as those of the Tyrants146: his accuser argued, having become associates of Socrates, Critias and Alcibiades did a great deal of harm to the state. For Critias, of all involved in the oligarchy, bore the palm for greed and violence, while Alcibiades exceeded all in licentiousness and arrogance under the democracy. Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.12–13 (trans. Henderson 2013) If the religious accusation were a pretext, Socrates would surely not have defended himself on religious grounds, as he does, and in thinking of ‘other accusations’ from Aristophanes and other leading men he would have surely focussed on the political. Nor would Plato have spent a great deal of energy over the decades dealing with the charges ex facie, and exonerating Socrates of them, as he did. It seems much more plausible that the idea of the religious prosecution as a pretext for a political one is a later invention of Polycrates in his treatise on Socrates, as Brickhouse and Smith have argued, that has been fashionable among scholars who have systematically minimised the importance of belief and unbelief in Greek society.147 Indeed, even where the religious motive has been recognised in the accusation it has commonly been argued that the focus was on ritual participation and not belief, even though this position was thoroughly refuted more than a quarter of a century ago.148 In fact, Xenophon argues Socrates persuasively established his orthopraxy rather than his beliefs, but he still lost the case.149 It is clear that nomizein included belief in the context of Socrates’ trial, and that Socrates’ belief was a key component in the accusation.150 Finally, some scholars have argued that Socrates clearly believed in the gods, so cannot have been prosecuted for atheism. However, the charges of impiety against Socrates already had ‘prima facie plausibility’, given his representation in the Clouds and his own professed beliefs and teachings.151 In the Memorabilia, for instance, Xenophon’s Socrates argues that the gods did not care about the size of the offering but only the piety of the giver, which stood in stark contrast to traditional values.152 Likewise, the debate between Socrates and Euthyphro portrayed in the Euthyphro shows Socrates

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undermining a popular form of piety and holiness.153 Fundamentally, Socrates shared with the sophists the belief that the world could be understood with reason and argument, rather than an appeal to divine causation and mystery that was core to Greek piety, as explored in Chapter 5.154 Perhaps most importantly, the gods that Socrates believed in, detailed earlier and in his defence speech, were so significantly different from those of the average Athenian that they would have been unrecognisable to the jurors, as Vlastos observes155: What would be left of [Hera] and of the other Olympians if they were required to observe the stringent norms of Socratic virtue which require every moral agent, human or divine, to act only to cause good to others, never evil, regardless of provocation? Required to meet these austere standards, the city’s gods would have become unrecognizable. Their ethical transformation would be tantamount to the destruction of the old gods, the creation of new ones – which is precisely what Socrates takes to be the sum and substance of the accusation at his trial.156 So the accusation itself furnishes sufficient grounds to justify the trial against Socrates, if we account for the backdrop to the trial in the changes to religious teaching, as explored above, and we accept that impiety was considered a legitimate reason to pursue a case, as it clearly was in Athens at the time.157 Meletus argued that Socrates’ offence was essentially corruption of sunousia, through which he had corrupted the beliefs of the Athenian youth, and this is the accusation to which the Socrates of Plato and Xenophon respond in the respective defence speeches.158 Plato’s Socrates understood that Meletus’ accusation hinged on his role in sunousia in the Apology, and believed the charge rested on his educational role, because ‘the Athenians do not care if a man is clever, as long as he does not teach his clever ideas (sophias)’.159 Socrates readily accepted his role in educating these men in the Apology and his defence that none of them felt that he had taught them wrong things is entirely unpersuasive.160 The problem with Socrates’ teaching for Meletus and his peers was not his oligarchic political leanings, but that he corrupted the religious and moral characters of the leading statesmen of his age.161 As such Socrates does not so much understand himself as a proxy embodying political allies of the Tyrants, as a proxy embodying other teachers of impiety, like Anaxagoras.162 The prosecution of Socrates was the culmination of longstanding anxieties in Athens about the effectiveness of religious socialisation and education, in a religious environment that allowed for a range of (un)beliefs. The formidable religious socialisation in ancient Greece resulted in a strength of religious knowledge and action, but not a doctrinal belief. Greek children were not educated into religion, they were educated about them, in a mythical and theological tradition grounded as much in doubt and scepticism as it was piety, and inducted into a range of ritual behaviours predicated on religious

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variety. Religious socialisation was a lifelong process and the environment of Athens was saturated with religion, but Greeks did a variety of things with these religious raw materials: lectures, sympotic discussions, marketplace conversations, and ritual performance could as easily be deployed to question the existence of the gods as worship them. This made it very difficult for anyone to know where the lines of acceptable beliefs were, and this was commonly litigated, both figuratively and literally. The Athenian intellectual culture that arose during the fifth century built on this process of socialisation more than it challenged it. New intellectuals, like Socrates and Protagoras, taught the Athenian youth critical attitudes towards gods and religion. But these attitudes were not novel: there had always been a strong critical and sceptical tradition in Greek society. For the Athenians, the sophists had educated their children in the wrong attitudes to citizenship, morality, and the gods, but they did not particularly understand why, how, or how to prevent this in the future. Notes 1 Garland 2013: 207. 2 Children needed education into right belief: Pindar O 2.86–8, 9.100–4, N 3.40–42; Thgn. 31–38; see also Pl. Cra. 384b, discussed in Joyal et al. 2009: 6, 6–7. Pl. Prot. is a discussion of whether people are born good or need to be taught: a fashionable topic of discussion, e.g. Arist NE 1103a–b; see Martin 2004: 67–72, and EngbergPedersen 1983. Gagarin and Woodruff 1995: 181–4: on teaching aretē. Barrow 1976: 39. See also Beaumont 2012: 152 on children as ‘wild, untamed beings’ who needed appropriate training and 15–42 generally. Taught goodness vs natural evil/goodness: Eur. Hec. 592–602. Arist. NE 1179b.20, Democ. DK68B242 on the debate on naturalness of vs teaching virtue; see De Romilly 2002: 44–49, M. Johnson 2020: 218, Mulhern 2004: 327–8, and Ober 2001: 175–207, esp. 188–94 on philosophers as alternative teaching authorities. Pl. Meno 93c–94e1: Athenians (and Socrates) believed they should teach virtue to children (with reservations from Socrates); also Crit. 50d–51d1, Ap. 24d10–e2; and Pl. Prot. 319e1–320b5, Men. 70a, Laws 2.653a–b; Kraut 1987: 245–96, particularly 288. Van Berkel Wolfsdorf 2020, Ackerman 1987: 87, 90–91, argues the Athenians, and philosophers like Protagoras, placed more value on underlying norms and dispositions. 3 ‘Gentlemanly conduct’, kaloskagathos, see Jaeger 1973: 13. Importance for the kaloskagathos of the package of behaviours which included morality, see Atherton 1998: 229–32. Xenophontic idea of the symposium as key to educating appropriately behaving kaloikagathoi: Hobden 2004. Training for civic life: Barrow 1976: 31, De Romilly 2002: 30, Robb 1994: 184. 4 Burkert 1985: 260 and Golden 1990: 41. 5 ‘Prepolitical and formal’: in Arendt 1958. Essays in Yun Lee Too 2001 argue for less formal, long-term education. See also Patterson 2013: 379. 6 Waterfield 2005: 128 argued for the significance of drama in education. Daily recitations of rhapsodes: Xen. Symp. 3.6; Beck 1964: 118, Thomas 1995: 106–7. See Patterson 2013: 379: religious festivals as education. On the educational nature of symposia, see Bremmer 1995: 35, Muir 2003: 506 and esp. Hobden 2004: 134–6. On wet nurses and myths: Parkin 2013: 56; Joyal et al. 2009: 66–67, Bremmer 1995: 34. Morgan 2011: 453–4: ‘the gods are community deities; they exist in all of the spaces of the community and are honored by both house and city’.

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7 Socialisation: Joyal et al. 2019: 83, Murray and Wilson 2004: 4, Beaumont 2012: 152, Bremmer 1995: 33. 8 Cognitive science of religion on education see Brelsford 2005: 174–91, an excellent survey from the perspective of a religious educator. Boyer 2001: 305–6 argues beliefs are attempts to justify intuitions, the result of ‘implicit’, hidden mental processes. Participatory socialisation: Bremmer 1995: 38. 9 Bremmer 1995: 33. Ducat 2006: 277 gives an excellent description of Spartan religious education vs socialisation. 10 See also Eur. F484N2, and Pl. Rep. 2.377. 11 See also Poetics 1179b23–26, 1095b3–6; and Pl. Menex. 246a5–249c8. Curzer 2017: 123. 12 Preeminence of family in religious education: Bremmer 1995: 30–31, Faraone 2008: 211, Ingalls 2000: 1, Morgan 2011. 13 Garland 2013: 207 on early life rituals. 14 Eileithyia and Genetyllis: Garland 2013: 208, Dillon 2002: 230–1, Parker 2006: 432–3. the ritual opteria (gifts); Amphidromia see Hamilton 1984, Golden 1990: 23, Neils 2003: 144, and Pomeroy 1997: 68–69. 15 Kourotrophic deities: e.g. Hes. Theog. 346–8: the progeny of Tethys included kourai; Calame 2010, Parker 2006: 426–39, Pedrucci 2020. Belief that deities ensured survival of child: Garland 2013: 210. Amulets etc.: see figures and discussions in Beaumont 2012: 62, Garland 2013: 210, Neils 2003: 143–4. Cults of these deities were common, as protective deities in a society with high infant mortality; see Parkin 2013: 41, 48, 50; Saller 2007: 87–112; Coale and Demeny 1983. 16 Faraone 2008: 218. 17 Mourning rituals: e.g. Thebes Museum BE 469; Garland 2013: 220; Oakley 2003: 163–94; Neils 2003: 139, 157–8. 18 Garland 2013: 219. 19 Laws 7.821c–d, discussed in Garland 2013: 219. 20 Priestess at Patrai and Aigeira: Paus. 7.19.1, 7.26.5; Zeus: Paus. 7.24.4. Pais aph’hestias: Porph. Abst. 4.5; Garland 2013: 218, Dillon 2021: 326. Pre-pubescent children frequently feature in lists of priests at sanctuaries, especially in rural areas: Neils 2003: 158. 21 BM 1865.7–20.20; discussed in Oakley 2013: 155. 22 Women-only festivals: Ar. Thesm. 1150; Dillon, M. 2000: 470, 475–6, Garland 2013: 217–8. Parthenoi may not have just been the wealthiest girls: Lykourgos in the 330 s paid for adornment for 100 girls to participate in the panathenaia Plut. Mor. 852 C; see Dillon 2021: 330. 23 Loutrides: IG I3 7; Xen. Hell. 1.4.12; Plut. Alk. 34.1; Hsch. and Phot. s.v. loutrides; Dillon, M. 2002: 132–6, Garland 1992: 100–2, 2013: 217. 24 Paides amphithaleis: Poll. Onomast. 3.25, ThesCRA 6.46; Garland 2013: 218. Girls carrying the suppliant’s branch: Plut. Thes. 18.1–2; Beaumont 2012: 160, 165. 25 Ephebes at the Gymnopaidiai: Paus. 3.11.9; Karneia: Hesych. s.v. Hyakinthia: Polyc. ad Athen. 4.139d–f; Ducat 2006: 249, 262–77. 26 Dillon 2021: 339–40. 27 Splanchnoptai: e.g. of a boy leading the animal to the altar: Neils and Oakley 2003: 158, fig. 22; Oakley 2013: 165. Extispicy: e.g. depiction of a boy holding an organ next to a warrior on an Attic red-figure amphora from 480BC in Würzburg; Oakley 2013: 155–6, fig. 156. Slave children as assistants: Isae. 8.16; Dillon 2021: 336, Beaumont 2012: 160. 28 Lawton 2007: 42, based on Edelmann’s 1999 corpus. 29 Beaumont 2012: 156.

42 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

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Foundations Golden 1990: 41. Whitehouse 2000, 2002, and 2004 on these modes of religiosity. Garland 2013: 211. On the oath: Isae. 8.19, Dem. 57.4; [Dem.] 59.60; on the festival: Parker 2006: 458–61. On the Oinisteria: Athen. Deipn. 11.494; Garland 2013: 213. Anthesteria: Philostr. Her. 12.2.720, IG II2 1368.127–36; Parker 2006: 297–301, ThesCRA VI.4145; Garland 2013: 212, Neils 2003: 146. Choes: Oakley 2013: 166, Neils 2003: 145–9, e.g. cats.95–97. In Ar. Thesm. 746–7 Mnesilochus asks the age of a child by saying ‘Three Choes? Or four?’; Neils 2003: 146. Ham 1999: 201. Oschophoria: Plut. Thes. 23.2–3; Pind. F6c; Tours: [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42.2–5; Garland 2013: 213–14. Ephebes leading victim and cutting its throat: Eur, Hel. 1562; Bremmer 1995: 32. Purifying the palladion: Burkert 1970: 356–68, Garland 2013: 217. Recitation: Pl. Tim. 21b, Beck 1975: 38. Discussion of figurines in Kennell 1995: 136–7. Kennell 1995: 137. Cheese race and ritual contests: Stele of Arexippos (fourth century); Xenophon Lac. Pol. 2.9, Paus. 3.16.10–11; Ducat 2006: 249, Joyal et al. 2009: 19–20. Plut. Sp. Con. 2.9; Mor. 239c–d; Paus. 8.23.1. Dillon 2021: 333. Suffering, fame, strategy: Xen. Lac. Pol. 2.9; Pl. Laws 1.633b; Ducat 2006: 250–1. Rituals: Bremmer 1995: 33; rites: Garland 2013: 211, 214, 223. Spartan women shaved their heads: Plut. Lyc. 15.5. Garland 2013: 214, Neils 2003: 152–3. Favoured deities: Garland 2013: 214. Sixth century bronze figurines of girls running: Inv. 3305, from Sparta; and Inv. 3072, from Delphi; National Museum Carapanos 24, from Dodona; BM 208, from Albania. Alcm. Parth. 1.39, 3.8–9, refers to a ritual race associated with the cult of Helen; Paus. 3.13.7 describes a similar race, and it is alluded to by Ar. Lys. 1307–15; Paus. 5.16.2 describes the run in the Heraian games. Millender 1999: 367, and particularly Scanlon 1988: 185–202 for detailed discussion of the ritual components of competitions; Neils 2003: 154 for summary. Spartan festivals: Plut. Lyc. 14.4–6, Mor. 227e. Other sites: Sanctuary of Artemis at Braurion: see Millender 1999: 368–9, and Scanlon 1988: 189–200. Heraia: Paus. 5.16.2–3, whose alternate explanation is that it was introduced after the early sixth century Elean treaty. Scanlon 1988: 816. Arktoi on krateriskoi vases found at the sanctuary of Artemis like at Braurion: e.g. Neils 2003: 151–2, fig. 11; Oakley 2013: 155, 165, see Garland 2013: 207, 215–16, Neils 2003: 151. Arrhephoroi: Paus. 1.27.3; Garland 2013: 216. Hesy. s.v. aletrides; schol. ad. Lys. 643. Garland 2013: 217. Kanephoroi: [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 18.2, Thuc. 6.56.1, cf. Ar. Peace 948. Oakley 2013: 155, Garland 2013: 217. Chorus focus on education: Pl. Laws 2.654a–b; also Athen. 14.623e–33e, Philolaus of Tarentum F44b6 and 11 Diels and F37b4, 6, 7; Anderson, W. 1966: 1–110, Calame 1997: 221–44, Ingalls 2000: 1–2, 18, Wilson 2000. Meaning of ‘khoros’: Pollux 9.41–42; Paus. 3.11.9; Wilson 2000: 2. Ar. Cl. 961–83. See also Pl. Laws 2.654a–b, 2.672e; Ingalls 2000: 2. Pl. Laws 2.655d, 7.802e. Ingalls 2000: 2–3. Singing and education: Dillon 2021: 327–8. Plato as the Athenian Stranger: Halverson 1997: 74–101. Pl. Laws, 2.664b.

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60 Agonistic environment: Garland 2013: 219. City Dionysia and Thargelia: IG II2 1138.6, 11; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56.3; Antiph. 6.11. Hephaisteia and Prometheia: IG II2 1138.11, Koureotis: Pl. Tim. 21b. 61 Garland 2013: 219. 62 Choruses at festivals: Plut. Lyc. 21.1–2; moral lessons: Xen. Lac. Pol. 9.5; agonistic spirit in music and athletics: Xen. Lac. Pol. 4.2; Ingalls 2000: 3. Girls’ physical competitions and ritual dances: Plut. Lyc 14.2–3; Ingalls 2000: 3. 63 Calame 1997: 231; Ingalls 2000: 4–5. 64 Ritual performances discussed in Beaumont 2012: 168–9. 65 Importance of Spartan choruses: Athen. 14.623f–633a. Transitional rituals: Ingalls 2000: 1, Calame 1997: 10–15, 258–63. Choral education: Alcm. Parth. 52, Pind. F112. Scanlon 1988: 187. 66 Marriage was key religious festival: Plut. Lys. 30.7, Cleom. 1, Lyc. 15.4; Dillon 2021: 340, Ingalls 2000: 1. The marriage rite and ritual capture in Plut. Lyc. 15.4–7 are contentious; see Cartledge 1981: 94–95, and 101–2. 67 Kowalzig 2007: 68. 68 For a discussion of Alcman’s Partheneion see Ingalls 2000: 6–11. 69 Moral lessons in the Partheneion: Ingalls 2000: 6–9, Kennell 1995: 137–8, Stehle 1997: 31–32. 70 Ingalls 2000: 8. 71 Bremmer 1995: 38. 72 See Pl. Prot. 325c5–d; de Romilly 2002: 197, Joyal et al. 2009: 45, 2019: 89. 73 Binary division: Pl. Rep. 2.376e, Laws 6.764c–e, 7.795d–e, Isoc. 15.180–1, Arist. NE 1180a25, Pol. 8.1337b23; and Ar. Kn. 1235–9 toys with this, showing the contrast between proper and improper education; Morgan 1999: 49. Plato dates the ternary division to the 430 s in Prot. 312a–b; other forth century writers take it for granted, e.g. Xen. Lac. Pol. 2.1, Arist. Pol. 8.1337b23–46; Morgan 1999: 50–51. Different forms of education overlapped as Arist. Pol. 8.1337b observes. On the formal division see De Romilly 2002: 30–33. 74 Paidotribēs and kitharistēs built character and body: Arist. Pol. 8.1339a; Barrow 1976: 42–45, 56. High value of them is revealed by the focus on them on vase paintings, e.g. in Beck 1975: 14. Cheiron the Centaur, the ideal schoolmaster, is not depicted teaching letters: Maxims of Cheiron, from Hesiod; schol. on Pindar P 6.19 quotes it; see Beck 1975: 9–23. Morality in education: Pl. Laws 2.653b, 659d, esp. bk7, e.g. 7.788a, Aelius Theon Prog: xix–xx; Ar. Kn. 182–93; Joyal et al. 2009: 36 on Solon’s laws; Bloomer 2013: 457, Patterson 2013: 367. Kagan 1991: 4, Csapo 2004: 241 (esp. on music) on the practical and ethical nature of Athenian education. 75 Morgan 1999: 47. 76 Morgan 1999: 54, Thomas 1991: 31. The Athenian ‘epigraphic habit’: Davies 2003: 327–40. 77 E.g. Xenophanes DK21B10: ‘from the beginning all have learned according to Homer’. Tor 2020: 28, Joyal et al. 2019: 89. This should not be taken too far e.g. Homer as a ‘bible for the young’ in De Romilly 2002: 32. 78 Poetry in moral instruction: Pl. Prot. 325e–26c; Barrow 1976: 40, Beck 1964: 117, Kagan 1991: 21, Muir 2003: 506, Murray 1996: 19, Robb 1994: 184–6. Useful content: Ar. Frogs, 1030–5, as in Ducat 2006: 277. 79 E.g. Douris ‘school cup’, Berlin F2285, inscribed with ‘Muse sing to me … I begin to sing of wide-flowing Scamander’, probably a line from Stesichorus, as in Beazley 1948: 337. Pot depictions in Immerwahr 1964: 17–48, esp. 18–19 on the Douris cup; Beck 1975: 16, Robb 1994: 186. The depiction in Walter Barreis 63 is not of epic poetry, but it is ‘a mythological aid’, as in Immerwahr 1973: 143. Discussion of copying religious myths in Joyal et al. 2019: 84.

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80 Ducat 2006: 227. 81 Xen. Symp. 3.6–7. Beck 1964: 118, De Romilly 2002: 32. 82 Homer as educator of Greece: Pl. Rep. 10.606e; also Xen. Symp 4.6; Barrow 1976: 22, Muir 2003: 506. Whitmarsh 2016: 29 describes the idea a Greek would not know Homer as ‘unimaginable’. Since Jaeger’s Paideia the educational, literary, moral, and religious role of Homer and the poets has been uncontested. See Havelock 1963, the poets as a ‘tribal encyclopaedia’, and Thomas 1995: 104–23, Gold hill 1991: 116–27, Janko 2006: 52–54, Morgan 2007: 303, and Raaflaub 2000: 23–59. 83 Cartledge 1987: 25. Kennell 1995: 135–7 argues secularity is more a feature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. 84 Hdt. 8.75.1, 480BC, is the earliest record of the paidagōgos in literature: Themistocles’ son’s foreign paidagōgos features; Persian in Plut. Them. 12.3; either a Cretan or a non-Greek in Ath. 1.20. 85 Pl. Alc. 1.121e–22a. 86 Production of good, pious citizens: Tyrtaeus F12.10–28 West, Plut. Lyc. 24, Xen. Lac. Pol. 2.1–4.6, and Arist. Pol. 8.1337a21–32; Barrow 1976: 23–24, Joyal et al. 2009: 15–18. Spartan education suffers, like all discussions of Sparta, from ‘le mirage’, Ollier 1933. Problems with sources on Sparta: Kennell 1995: 14–27. Conversely, Xenophon’s value and consistency with other sources: Griffith 2001: 49–50. 87 Karneia: Hdt 7.206; Full moon: Hdt 6.120, Ar. Ach. 83–84. 88 Agōgē as the centre of the Spartan ideal: Kennell 1995: 5. The age of entry at seven: Plut. Lyc. 16.4; Kennell 1995: 32, 117. Spartan males did not become full citizens until 30: Xen. Lac. Pol. 1.6, 4.7, Plut. Lyc. 14.1, 15.1–10, 24.1, 25.1; Kennell 1995: 118. 89 Dioscuri: Sanders 1992: 205–10; Pindar N 10.52–54 calls the Dioscuri Sparta’s stewards, and they featured on coins, reliefs, statuary and trophies, altars and sacrifices, in Paus. 3.14.7–9, 3.13.6, 3.20.2, and subject of Spartan origin stories: Xen. Hell. 6.3.5–6, Pl. Laws 7.796b, and Thgn. 1087. 90 ‘Religious propaganda’: Barron, Easterling, and Knox 1985: 90. Paidonomos: Xen. Lac. Pol. 2.2, Plut. Lyc. 17.2. Kennell 1995: 120–1. 91 E.g. Xen. Oik. 7.3–6, the most influential, problematic, source on Athenian women’s education, where Ischomachus claims his wife was only taught to weave and cook; Pomeroy 1994: 58–67. Women were less literate: Cole 1981: 219. No evidence of formal instruction of girls: Cole 1981: 225. Late evidence: e.g. a Hellenistic statuette of a woman and girl reading: Cole 1981: 226, n.43. Hdt 4.78 has Skyles’ Greek mother teaching him reading Greek, mentioned because it was unusual. Connection between reduced literacy for women and political exclusion: Harvey 1966: 621. 92 Athens NM 1260 depicts Sappho reading. Cole 1981: 223–4, n.26, Pomeroy 1977: 55–56. Musical training of women: Pl. Laws 7.806a. Kleitagora: Ar. Lys. 1237, Wasps 1245–7. Spartan public education for women: Xen. Lac. Pol. 1.3–4 and Pl. Laws 7.806a have them avoiding clothes-making and stress physical training, implied in Ar. Lys. 82; Cartledge 1981: 91, n.40, Millender 1999: 358. Baking: Heraclides Lembus 373.13. On literacy: Boring 1979: 15, Cartledge 1981: 93, Cole 1981: 228. The education of Spartan girls is contentious: the idea they had extra education is part of the myth of Spartan female ‘licence’, the creation of Athenian men; Arist. Pol. 2.1269a29–1271b19; Plut. Lyc. and Lys, Hdt 5.51.2–3, 7.239.4, on Gorgo; 4.146, on the escape of the Spartans by trading clothes with their wives; 6.52.2–7; Millender 1999; Cartledge 1981, stresses the negative elements of the life of a Spartan woman. 93 Female Pythagoreans: Iamblichus Vita Pyth. 267, Cartledge 1981: 90–93.

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94 Basical literacy of Athenians: Ar. Kn. 188–9; Morgan 1999: 46–61, Barrow 1976: 47–48. 95 Grammatistēs: Barrow 1976: 36, 40, Beavis 2000: 412, Beck 1975: 9–13, Muir 2003: 506, Robb 1994: 184–5. Oral society: Thomas 1991: 15. 96 Affordability of elementary education: Pritchard 2015: 121. Apprenticeships: Robb 1994: 201, Griffith 2001: 29, Burford 1972: 82–91. Predominance of private/home teaching: Cole 1981: 226. The only hint of a more public form of schooling in the fifth century is from outside Athens: in Hdt 6.27, a Chian school collapsed and killed 119 students; it was probably a larger private institution. Also Paus 6.9.6–7, an Olympic boxer caused the collapse of a school on Astypalaia; and Aesch. Ag. Tim. 9–12, Solonian regulations for school opening and closing times. See Joyal et al. 2019: 85. 97 Langdon 2013: 174–89. 98 Thomas 1991: 123–31. 99 Memorability: Boyer 1994, McCauley 1999: 286, Wolpert 1992. Modes of religiosity: Whitehouse 2000, 2002, and 2004. 100 Mistrust: Pl. Phdr. 276a–d, 278a–b; see Robb 1994: 99–120, Thomas 1991: 21–33. 101 Murray 1996: 15 describes Plato’s ‘uncompromising hostility’ as ‘very odd’. Plato’s alignment with Spartan society, including in Republic: Futter 2012. Inspiration of Sparta in the Laws: Powell 1994, Morrow 1960. 102 Subversive choice of cheese: Ducat 2006: 253, Kennell 1995: 128. 103 Phoenix: Hom. Il. 9.162–70, 430–526. Mentor: Hom. Od. 2.224–30, 253–67. Earliest forms: Barrow 1976: 36. Joyal et al. 2009: 2, Robb 1994: 197. Informal: Glucker 2020: 95. 104 On authorship and date of the Theognidean corpus, and the argument it is unified by theme rather than author see esp. Figueira and Nagy 1985, response in Hubbard 2007, arguing that the sphrēgis elegy cannot be reconciled with an authorless tradition. 105 Meirakia: Robb 1994: 201. Orality: Havelock 1986: 4–5, Robb 1994: 198. On sunousia: Robb 1994: 198–200. Learned virtues: Pl. Meno 91a–b, Arist. NE 1103b22; Avramenko and Promisel 2018: 852. Sunousia with men around the city: Xen. Symp. 8. Barrow 1976: 18. Oral and literate education in Aristophanes: Woodbury 1976: 349–57. 106 Morgan 1999: 48. 107 Plato’s Socrates in Pl. Tht. 151b–c talks about association without using the term. 108 Robb 1993: 87. 109 On the creation of the ephebeia in 335BC see De Marcellus 1994, esp. 48–49. 110 Sophists filling the gap: Robb 1993: 87. 111 Called a ‘revolution’: Robb 1994: 201; ‘great novelty’ in De Romilly 2002: 30. Never replaced sunousia: Barrow 1976: 52–53. Sunousia could refer to a broad, non-technical range of phenomena, as Plato does: Glucker 2020: 95. 112 Sophists caused changes in education: De Romilly 2002: 4. New form of HE: De Romilly 2002: 30. 113 Rising spirit of enquiry: Barrow 1976: 51–52. 114 The sophistic caricature of Socrates as immoral and impious in Ar. Cl. is a good demonstration of attitudes towards the sophists, who suffered from the ‘taint of irreligion’: Waterfield 2005: 133; see also 134–5. Reputation for challenging religion: e.g. driving out singing poetry after dinner: Ar. Cl. 1354–8. Prot. DK80A3 was a famous example. Radical sophistic challenges to religion and the gods: De Romilly 2002: 85, 94–95, 103–11; Thomas 1995: 119. 115 Different subjects taught by sophists: Guthrie 1971: 30–31, 38–40; De Romilly 2002: 8–9.

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116 The Spartan King praises simple common sense and wisdom in Thuc. 3.37.3; De Romilly 2002: 39. 117 Difficulty distinguishing new teaching: De Romilly 2002: 33. 118 Joyal et al. 2009: 59, 2019: 90. 119 Rihll 2003: 189. 120 Prodicus had a 50 and a one drachma course: Pl. Cra. 384b. Rihll 2003: 176. 121 Wealthy supporters: DL 4.38; night work: e.g. the Stoic Cleanthes in DL 7.168; private tuition: Athen. Deipn. 11.509c–e. 122 Rihll 2003: 174–7. 123 Whitehouse 2002: 147. In Hdt 7.140–4, the ‘wooden wall’ episode, the Athenian demos acted with greater authority as interpreters of the oracles than individuals. Authority is key to transmission: e.g. Sørensen 2005: 475. Mystery ideas: Sperber 1985: 84–85. Most research is on authority in transmission of texts, e.g. Atran 2004: 91. 124 See also Kn. 985–96; Ford 2001: 107. 125 Biles 2016: 117. 126 Robb 1994: 205; see also Havelock 1986: 21: undermining traditional ties was the reason for Socrates’ indictment. Anxieties about sophists teaching pointless theory vs traditional active learning: Ar. Cl. 1002–19; De Romilly 2002: 38–39. 127 Mikalson 1998: 292–3, 242–9 posited a ‘youth movement’ in Athenian religion in Hellenistic Athens. Garland 2013: 214. On the ‘atheist underground’: Sedley 2013a: 329–48, who is wrong to claim they mark the origin of atheism in the West. 128 Pl. Laws 10.884a: ‘outrageous acts of the young’; 10.888a: ‘My child, you are still young’; 10.888b–c: ‘no man who adopted this opinion in his youth’. Collins 2008: 140–1. 129 Collins 2008: 140–1. 130 Perception of a concerted attack from New Learning: Woodruff 2011: 91. 131 Thuc. 5.105; also 1.39. 132 Speechmaking: Thuc. 6.16–18; Pl. Symp. 218a on Alcibiades’ love of Socrates’ wisdom. 133 Forrest 1975: 42–43. Empowered: Pl. Laws 10.884a; teaching: 10.886a–e, Robb 1994: 205. Davidson 2006: 37. 134 Pl. Laws 10.885c–888c. Intellectual children: Pl. Rep. 6.498a; refuting behaviour: Rep. 7.539b; Rihll 2003: 181. 135 As Marchiandi 2020 argued, even the location of Plato’s school in the Academy was designed to separate him from the sophists: having previously taught in a gymnasium (DL 3.7.10), the new location geographically grounded the school in traditional civic ideology and paideia, unlike the market teaching of sophists. 136 Socrates’ associates on him and sophists: Pl. Symp. 215b–d, on his captivating speech; Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 19. Woodruff 2011: 91 says ‘this association is one of the few things we know about him with historical certainty’. 137 Pl. Lach. 179a–c. 138 Pl. Lach. 180c–e. 139 [Pl.] Theages 130a. See Guthrie 1971: 80–81. 140 Throughout Meno and Theaetetus; e.g. Pl. Tht. 149a–51a: comparison with his mother, as both were midwives; her of bodies and him minds. In Xen. Ap. 20–21 Xenophon’s Socrates says he is a teacher and considered education the greatest good. He was a teacher in Clouds and his final indictment assumes a teaching role. Nails 2014, on teaching vs learning. Scott 2000: 13–23 on Socrates’ denial of his role as a teacher not as a denial of being an educator. Kahn 1996: 89–91 argues Socrates was a ‘seeker’ of intrinsic aretē rather than teacher. Kraut 1987: 294 highlights the contradiction between his denial of being a teacher and his

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141 142 143 144 145

146

147 148

149

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focus on virtue, yet denial of the possibility that virtue can be taught, e.g. Pl. Prot. 319e–320b, and his aim to improve the city by educating them. Mintz 2014: 735–47 argues Plato’s Socrates’ claim he was not a teacher is based on his desire to separate from other teachers. Zoller 2010, esp. 97 emphasises Socrates’ rejection of both conventional and sophistic methods of teaching, arguing Socrates aspired nonetheless to a form of self-help. Leibowitz 2010: 151–2 notices that ‘he does not quite deny that some learn from him’. On Socrates’ fascination with the young see Guthrie 1971: 78 and Zoller 2010: 82–83. Pl. Ap. 33a–b. Plato’s Socrates hangs the defence on this distinction: Mintz 2014: 743–4. Robb 1994: 201. Similar to Favorinus ap. DL 2.40; see also Pl. Ap. 24b–c. cf. also Philodem. de Piet. 1696–7. Todd 1993: 308: ‘It is tempting to assert that Athenian religious trials were all about politics: a surprisingly high proportion of known impiety trials reveal, on examination, a surprisingly strong political agenda’. Wallace 1994, 2004a: 231. Socrates was executed for educating Critias: Aeschin. 1.173. Charmides: Xen. Mem. 3.7.1, Symp. 4.32, DL 2.29; on their association. See Dover 1988 [1976]: 155–7, Stone 1988, Burnyeat 1988, O’Sullivan 1997, Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 19–21. But degree of influence on Alcibiades and Critias is controversial: see Scott 2000: 19–20, Rhodes 2011: 42–43. Used for politics: O’Sullivan 1997: 147; politics partially responsible: Vlastos 1983. No evidence … : Nails 2006: 7; Slings 1994: 92 on the political implications. Socrates taught Alcibiades: Xen. Mem. 1.2.24–48, and Isoc. 11.5, who records but refutes the tradition. Alcibiades’ political views are complicated: he had base support in democratic factions, as in Thuc. 6.29 and elsewhere; but Plut. Alc. 25, Thuc. 8.14 on Alcibiades’ role in oligarchic revolution in Athens, but the thirty legislated against him: Xen. Mem. 1.2.31, and also family association as proxenoi with Spartan oligarchs in 5.43, and fears he wanted tyranny in 6.15–6; Wallace 2004a: 230, Dover 1976: 155. On the democratic defenders of Socrates see Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 170–3, and Kraut 1987: 194–244, arguing Socrates was pro-Democracy. Waterfield 2012: 291–96 is more neutral, but argues he was neither oligarch nor democrat. Bussanich and Smith 2013: 315 observe that ‘there is no evidence that he [Socrates] was an oligarch or interested in political revolution’. Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7. Finley 1977: 65 argues on the basis of Plato Letters, 7.325b, mentioning the prosecution by ‘men in power/authority’, but no specific political machinations or scheme; see Connor 1991: 50. On belief: see Versnel 1990: 125. E.g. Allen 1980: 17–18: ‘Athenian religion was not a matter of creed and dogma, but of ritual observance, of dromena, things done, rather than legomena, things said … Impiety, in short, normally lay for definite kinds of acts’. Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 30–31 detail the arguments on Socrates’ accusations based on ritual conformity and their refutations. This is substantially based on the problematic 20th century philosopher A. E. Taylor 1951, who argued Socrates was a forward-thinking monotheist with ‘a profound concern for the unseen moral order and a religious faith not common in the society around him in God and the immortal soul’ (94). He argued the offence was only ‘technically’ (110) against state religion, but really a political manoeuvre, and ‘nothing to do with the “supernatural sign” of Socrates’ (114). See Versnel 1990: 126. Plut. Mor. De. Gen. 580b–c also views the charge as one of atheism: he had ‘no use for the divine (hupereōra ta theia)’. Xen. Mem. 1.1.2–5, 1.1.5; evidence of belief: Burnet 1924: Pl. Ap. 24c1, Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 31, McPherran 2005: 14. Plato’s Socrates uses and

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151 152 153 154 155

156 157

158

159 160 161

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Foundations recommends divination; e.g. his ‘orders’ to pursue his mission in Ap. 33c; see also Crit. 43c–4b, or Phd. 60e–la. Cohen 1989: 214. That belief was key has been denied by a variety of figures, from Todd 1993: 311: ‘we may note that Sokrates is charged not with what he thinks but with what he teaches’, to Giordano-Zecharya 2005. On the debate: Versnel 2011: 539–59. Plausibility: Connor 1991: 50, Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 19, Janko 2006: 48. Xen. Mem. 1.3.3, cf. Pl. Euthphr. e.g. 14d–15a. Connor 1991: 53. Connor 1991: 53. Joyal 2019: 90. Scholars have sometimes dismissed Socrates’ beliefs: Cohen de Lara 2007 considers the idea Socrates was on a divine mission a ‘misconception’: instead, ‘the Apology portrays Socrates as providing a reasoned – not religiously inspired – response to the divine …’ See also Brickhouse and Smith 2005, Partridge 2008. Vlastos 1991: 166. See also Samaras 2007: 3: ‘he evades the issue which is probably uppermost in the minds of the jury: even if he believes in gods, does he believe in their gods?’ See further the introduction. As Saxonhouse 2005: 100–12 argues. Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 1, Bussanich and Smith 2013: 302, Connor 1991: 49–56, for discussion. On the ‘religious interpretation’, taking the accusation against Socrates as sufficient to explain the trial, see Brickhouse and Smith 2002, Burnyeat 1997, Cartledge 2009, Connor 1991, Emelyanov 2021, and McPherran 2005. Xen. Ap. 10, 19–20, and Pl. Ap. 23d. Strauss 1972: 129–33 shows how Xenophon combines the charges. The charges are typically divided: Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 30 understand them as three distinct points: first, atheism of state deities, secondly, introducing new divinities, and finally, corrupting the youth. Nails 2006: 11 observes: ‘Athenian law forbade impiety, and that is the single law Socrates is charged with breaking – in two ways (not believing …, introducing …), with one result: corruption of the young’. Bussanich and Smith 2013: 319–27 and Burnyeat 1997: 227 support the idea of a single combined charge of religious (and other) corruption. Pl. Euthphr. 3c7–d2. Sunousia: Pl. Ap. 19e–20a; Robb 1994: 204. No one was concerned with beliefs: 2c–d. Nails 2006: 9–10, Hansen 1995: 26. Pl. Ap. 33c–34b; See also Pl. Men. 91e, where Plato’s Socrates comments that no one noticed Protagoras was corrupting the young for the 40 years he taught. Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 194–7, argue the jurors and Socrates understood that the reference to alleged corrupted ‘students’ referred to those who learned from him across the political spectrum. ‘His philosophical life had the effect of undermining traditional beliefs in the god’: Bussanich and Smith 2013: 319. Lombardini 2014: 23 discusses Socrates’ trial as for moral corruption. Pl. Ap. 26d.

3

Morality Atheist ethics and immorality in the Greek imagination

In late fifth century Athens, anxieties had coalesced around the educational corruption of younger citizens into atheism and immorality.1 However, the idea that atheism is morally corrupting, which can be traced across the history of Western and Christian thought, was not necessarily authentic to the ancient Greeks.2 E. R. Dodds, in his epochal Greeks and the Irrational, argued that morality and religion were not necessarily connected in Greece, but there were attempts to draw this kind of connection in archaic thought in order to combat inadequate theological explanation of suffering3: [It is a] characteristic feature of archaic religious thought – the tendency to transform the supernatural in general, and Zeus in particular, into an agent of justice. I need hardly say that religion and morals were not initially interdependent, in Greece or elsewhere; they had separate roots. I suppose that, broadly speaking, religion grows out of man’s relationship to his total environment, morals out of his relation to his fellow-men. But sooner or later in most cultures there comes a time of suffering when most people refuse to be content with Achilles’ view, the view that ’God’s in his Heaven, all’s wrong with the world’. Man projects into the cosmos his own nascent demand for social justice; and when from the outer spaces the magnified echo of his own voice returns to him, promising punishment for the guilty, he draws from it courage and reassurance. The tenuous connection between (im)morality and (a)theism is drawn from foundational aspects of Greek theology. It is undoubtedly true that, as Lloyd-Jones insisted, the gods, and Apollo and Zeus in particular, could act as moral agents in the earliest and (by the Classical period) traditional conceptions of the gods in Greece, but they did not consistently do so.4 Alcaeus (F142 West), for instance, describes Apollo’s role at Delphi ‘as a prophet of justice’: he frequently plays the role of moral teacher at Delphi, as in the tale of Glaucus in Herodotus, in which the Spartan is punished by the god for immoral behaviour.5 As Davies puts it, Apollo had ‘taken shape in the collective imagination of at least some Greeks as the patron, or direct author, of laws and of a moral order’.6 In one of the more frequently cited DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-3

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passages on the justice of Zeus, Hesiod describes how he enforces for his daughter Justice: Zeus’ eye, which sees all things and knows all things, perceives this too, if he so wishes, and he is well aware just what kind of justice this is which the city has within it. Hesiod Works and Days 256–85 (trans. Most 2018) In this passage Zeus is commonly understood as acting as an agent of justice,7 but his enforcement of justice is justified on a personal level: Justice is a daughter who has been offended and Zeus is her father acting in her defence. In fact, ‘if he so wishes’ (ai k’ethelēs) implies that Zeus’ dispensation of justice is not consistent but relies on his personal inclinations.8 This is common for depictions of the justice of the gods: their interventions on issues of justice are multifactorial: they may love justice and punishing injustice, but they are motivated by self-interest and interpersonal reasons.9 This ambiguous presentation of the gods as acting as self-interested agents of justice is still relevant centuries later: in Sophocles’ Ajax, Athena herself confirms that ‘the gods love sensible men (sōphronas) and hate the bad (tous kakous)’.10 She predicates this on the advice that Odysseus should learn from Ajax’s example: ‘never yourself utter an arrogant word against the gods, nor assume conceit because you outweigh another in strength or in profusion of great wealth’.11 The gods’ hatred of the bad sees off the accusation of injustice, but it is deployed to emphasise that Ajax’s punishment less about justice than hubris: personally offending the gods. Similarly, in Euripides’ Hippolytus Artemis appears in judgement over the characters’ justice, to ‘clearly reveal the righteous mind’ of Hippolytus (ekdeixai phrena … dikaian).12 The gods may be serving in their capacity of agents of justice, but Artemis is motivated by the desire to defend and advocate on behalf of her own worshipper. Not only are they unreliable agents of justice; the gods only inconsistently abide by the moral standards that mortals would. The gods were sometimes held to the same moral standards as men: they were expected to obey rules of friendship, cooperation, reciprocity, and exchange, and possibly to enact justice; and they sometimes took pity on humans.13 But they had their own modes of behaviour, characteristically jealous of their own superiority, brutal in their vengeance, and fundamentally self-interested.14 Nor were the gods consistently compassionate or moral: they played games with men and frequently caused them considerable suffering.15 The popular Greek conception of the gods as amoral reflected the world as Greeks experienced it: unforgiving, unfair, and populated by creatures with mixed motives.16 The idea of wholly good and just gods, which are often read as Platonic innovation through Socrates and followed by Aristotle, were a reaction to these earlier portrayals that they argued insufficiently portrayed the moral agency of the gods, but instead of looking to correct the gods most Greeks appear to have placed their trust in personal and civic morality.17

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There were widely held moral principles in the Greek world, but these were not doctrinal, divinely-revealed and backed, ethical or moral codes.18 There are references to divine law in the unwritten and unshakable rules of the gods, which was sometimes seen as cultural standards common to humans and sometimes as laws prescribed by the gods.19 Some Greeks identified the distance that this created between mortal and immortal morality, as in Theognis: ‘are there no divine guidelines for mortal men, no path to follow that will appease the gods?’20 The works of Homer and Hesiod were sometimes used as examples or common reference points for views about many things including the gods and morality, and they were used in education, but they were not doctrines or dogmas, especially not in morality, nor was there an authoritative priesthood to guide in their interpretation.21 Greeks made moral choices based on common wisdom and precedent, but these moral standards could conflict with each other, as they do in Plato’s Euthyphro, between the idea that killing of any kind incurs pollution and the claim that blood is thicker than water.22 Euthyphro appeals to the former because he believes that it is more in line with divine law, but most Athenians would probably have chosen the latter, as Dillon has argued.23 This is not a choice between divine justice or human morality: it demonstrates the competing moral claims that the individual could choose from. Usually context served to resolve these moral conflicts, but ultimately, there was no fixed authority about morality. While oracles could serve as moral guides, it was obviously impractical for Greeks to consult an oracle every time they had a moral decision to make.24 Oracles at Dodona and Delphi did not offer general pronouncements about morality or a general set of rules; they gave specific responses to precise questions.25 Some poleis had local officials in charge of monitoring and advising individuals on various religious actions, such as the exegetai in Athens, a board of two of the eupatridai clan who probably made joint responses, one elected by the people and in charge of queries about correct performance of sacrifice and ancestral rites, and one appointed by the Delphic oracle who was in charge of queries about purification.26 But these were focussed on correct performance of ritual or piety more than morality.27 In some texts there is a clear distinction between piety, what is hosios and eusebēs; and morality, what is dikaios, righteous actions approved by men.28 For instance, Bacchylides, in his Ode for Hieron, sings of Croesus’ fall and recommends to Hiero: ‘Do hosia and cheer your heart; for this is the greatest of benefits’.29 As Adkins points out, this does not mean that it is most beneficial to do what is right, but to do what is pious: Croesus is saved from the Pyre by his pious deeds to Apollo, not by moral righteousness.30 However, there was not necessarily a hard distinction in ancient Greece between correct behaviour towards the gods and moral actions. As Rudhardt has emphasised, what is hosion can govern basic social behaviour that bears on morality: oaths, murder, the behaviour of children to their parents or adults to one another, respect for other people’s

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lives, hospitality, and justice.31 Morality and piety can be treated as separate but related, associated virtues, as they are in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, in which Eteocles observes that Oecles is ‘moderate, just, good, and pious’ (sōphrōn dikaios agathos eusebēs).32 The view put forward in Aeschylus sits reasonably well with the impression Demosthenes gives, in his Against Meidias (and elsewhere), a speech that ends with a comment that conviction is demanded by both piety (hosian) and justice (dikaian).33 ‘The two realms are juxtaposed’, as Gunther Martin observes, but they are both types of justice.34 A similar but much more developed perspective is revealed in Plato’s Euthyphro, where Socrates and Euthyphro systematically attempt to make sense of the differences between moral and pious behaviour. Though Socrates and his companion agree that it is just to be pious, Euthyphro does not think that pious action is always just.35 Nonetheless, Socrates and Euthyphro both agree that being hosios is part of ‘what is right’: the two parts of being dikaios are piety and holiness to the gods and human justice.36 The dialogue betrays, as Bryant observes, ‘that while religion and morality are not wholly separate in this period, the link between them is tenuous’.37 Thucydides’ Melian dialogue is one of the most illustrative examples in the fifth century of the conflict between these two different modes of understanding morality and piety. The Athenians and Melians are debating the justice of the Athenian invasion of Melos: Ath:

Ath:

‘So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have. Our aims and our actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with the principles which govern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can … ’ ‘Now, when it is a question of standing in divine favour, we do not expect to be denied our share of it. For nothing in what we assert or in what we are going to do is a departure from men’s concept of god and attitude toward themselves. According to our understanding, divinity, it would seem, and mankind, as has always been obvious, are under an innate compulsion to rule wherever empowered’. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 5.105 (trans. Lattimore 1998)

The Melians claim to be doing the dikaios thing – what is ‘right’, ‘just’, or ‘customary’ – and as a result, they argue that they are backed up by the gods: they equate their understanding of justice and the will of the gods.38 The Athenians (and Thucydides) counter this with a realist, hard-headed, and coldly rational response, arguing they are supported by the gods because it is a natural rule for the stronger to rule the weaker, as they do.39 It has been argued that the Athenian argument is thus radical in its dismissal of

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traditional conceptions of the divine role in justice: the Athenian argument deploys a different understanding of morality, as separate from piety, but it is not clear that this was especially radical.40 However, the Athenian response is, as Connor observes, striking because of ‘its unsentimental clarity in the analysis of power’41: the pragmatic Athenians advocate for a conception of morality and the gods that enables their amoral imperialism. Perhaps the more radical aspect of this is civic: for the Athenians, appropriate state action is expedient, not moral.42 Yet, later in Thucydides, in contrast to the proud and cold Athenians of the Melian dialogue, the Athenians appear to switch modes and appeal to the justice of the gods.43 After the destruction of the navy in Syracuse, Nicias reassures the army that they will survive, since they are pious and humble men so the gods will not punish them anymore, and the gods have forgiven them for earlier transgressions.44 The disaster at Sicily that led to the meek Athenian response later in the war was, Connor observes, clearly foreshadowed by the Melian dialogue.45 The Athenian response about the law of the stronger strongly resembles, in its language and content, the words of Xerxes before the invasion of Greece in Herodotus, and in parallel the Melian dialogue directly precedes the Sicilian expedition in Thucydides.46 As Macleod argued, this may not a change in thought but a change in circumstance: they still believe in the strength of their piety regardless of the morality of their actions.47 But after 415BC the Athenians are no longer the dominating power, and so they have to appeal to a different conception of the gods, and their attitude to justice; the same understanding that they had earlier firmly rebutted when the Melians articulated it.48 Scholars have disagreed about whether there is a significant change in the way that the connection between piety and morality was viewed over time. Dover argued that there was a clear distinction in early Greece between what the gods desired and what was morally best according to humans, but that piety and morality became increasingly equivalent in the fourth century.49 In his view, one of the key implications of the eventual convergence of morality and piety was that ‘virtue, not the performance of sacrifices, is the way to win the gods’ favour’, as the desires of the gods came to be understood as, broadly, justice, and moral behaviour.50 The evidence does not unproblematically support this. Xenophon, in the fourth century Memorabilia (by which time Dover believed morality and piety had largely fused), described Socrates’ piety and his beneficence as different virtues.51 By the turn of the third century, Menander wrote that ‘anyone who believes that he secures the god’s favour by sacrifice … is in error. For a man must be useful by not seducing virgins or committing adultery or killing for money’.52 But Menander was attacking the belief that piety and morality were different, which he must have felt was still common enough to be worthy of addressing at the time. Indeed, this image of progress towards belief in the pious as the moral has since been significantly complicated by scholars since. Andrej and

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Ivana Petrovic, for instance, have argued that there was a moral dimension to Greek belief from the earliest periods53: the notion of inner purity is often interlocked with notions of honesty, loyalty, faithfulness, selflessness, and assertion of the principles of justice, righteousness, and of sexual decorum. Inner impurity, on the other hand, is regularly associated not just with wrong intentions and transgressive thoughts in the ritual context, but also, and relatedly, with disregard of and disrespect for moral values—inner impurity is intertwined with dishonesty, perjury, unfaithfulness, scheming and plotting, selfishness, self-serving intentions subordinating and undermining the interests of the group or community, and inappropriate sexual impulses. In their view a relationship between inner purity and morality is revealed from the earliest Greeks texts and continues beyond the Classical period. In fact, rather than a linear progression towards convergence of religious and moral dimensions, there are multiple competing moral theories throughout Greek history, some of which involve a fusion of morality and piety, while others do not. It seems clear, however, that moral theories that centred piety grew in popularity, at least in intellectual circles, in the fifth and fourth centuries. We may reasonably wonder if the connection with events during the Peloponnesian war drawn by Thucydides represented a genuine driver of change in thought on morality and piety in Athens by the end of the fifth century. The increasingly common belief in a strong connection between piety and morality corresponded with a growing belief in the immorality of atheism and impiety. By the end of the fifth century atheism was commonly listed as part of a set of values that are harmful to the state or the individual, such as immorality, injustice, and lawlessness.54 In Euripides’ Bacchae, the chorus exclaim: ‘let justice manifest, sword in-hand, and slit the throat of the atheist, this lawless, unjust (ton atheon anomon adikon), earthborn son of Echion’.55 In Andromache, the chorus proclaim that the murder of Andromache and her child would be ‘godless, lawless, and loveless’ (atheos anomos acharis).56 And in Helen: ‘you were proclaimed throughout Hellas: betrayer, faithless, lawless, godless’ (prodotis apistos adikos atheos).57 In the rhetorical work composed by the Sicilian Gorgias, The Defence of Palamedes, a fictional defence of the ancient hero Palamedes, the rhetorician warns that the fictional jury will be committing ‘terrible, ungodly, unjust, unlawful things’ (deinon atheon adikon anomon ergon) if they find Palamedes guilty.58 In Plato the connection between terms like atheos, apistos (faithless), and asebēs (impious), with anomos (customless/lawless) and adikos (unjust) is drawn out into a clearer theory and geography of atheist immorality, especially throughout book ten of the Laws. In the Theaetetus Plato’s Socrates argues that men can choose either to live by divine morality, or an atheistic way of life, which was necessarily immoral: ‘two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed,

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and the godless, which is most wretched’.59 Because morality was living with god, atheism was immorality. Indeed, the connection between atheism and immorality was not just a rhetorical or dramatic trope, or a philosophical speculation: immorality came to be loosely understood as a consequence of atheism in the fifth century.60 In Thucydides’ depictions of the plague, for instance, the historian records how the Athenians saw that men were being killed indiscriminately by the plague so they abandoned sacrifice, worship, and appropriate moral and civic behaviours.61 According to Thucydides they consequently stopped caring about ‘all law, sacred and profane’ (hierōn kai hosiōn): in Thucydides’ view, their despair leads to atheism, and corresponds with stasis, including the breakdown of the body politic and all sense of morality.62 The corrupting influence of atheism, in a religious, political, and moral sense, is confirmed at the trial of Socrates. This moral connotation is made explicit in the accusation, as Socrates records it in Plato’s Apology (27a): ‘Socrates is a wrongdoer because he does not believe in the gods’ (adikei Sōkratēs theous ou nomizōn). Plato’s Socrates evidently does not deny that an atheist would be immoral; instead he argues that, conversely, since his accusers agree that he believes in some gods, he must not be an atheist and therefore not a degenerate either (ouk eimi to parapan atheos oude tautē adikō).63 Socrates’ conception of the gods certainly ‘demands a radical questioning of the community’s values and its religion’.64 As observed in the previous chapter, the Athenians must have noticed (as Thucydides did) that Socrates’ students, like Alcibiades, had demonstrated a lack of commitment to their community and its values, morality, and religion, in spite or perhaps because of Socrates’ efforts.65 The link between Socrates’ atheism and his immorality that Plato depicted at the trial was informed by the comic depiction of Socrates in Aristophanes two decades earlier. In the Clouds, Aristophanes depicts Socrates teaching disbelief in the traditional gods and subversion of ordinary moral behaviours such as payment of debts and rejection of oaths.66 Aristophanes’ Socrates teaches how to argue for anything and how Strepsiades can escape the debts that his son Pheidippides has caused him, and he encourages Pheidippides to abuse the old customs of morality like the expectation of affection and respect of children to parents.67 The result is that Pheidippides, although able to help his father, is not inclined to obey him at all: he is entirely selfish, individualistic, materialistic, immoral, and impious, having accepted the teachings of Socrates, including the nonexistence of the gods.68 Although the play ends with Strepsiades burning Socrates for his offences against the gods, it is both the impiety and the immorality of his son that makes the protagonist realise the madness of Socrates.69 As Parker observes, the problem with the Aristophanic Socrates’ atheism is not70: [t]hat it angered the gods, as is often stressed in modern accounts, [which] is not stated in the play. What is stressed instead is how, allied with rhetoric, it subverts social morality.

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The connection between atheism and immorality was also drawn in Aristophanes’ depiction of Euripides.71 Just like his Socrates, the atheism of Aristophanes’ Euripides involves disbelief in the traditional gods and encouraging others to do the same (in Women at the Thesmophoria 450–1), and belief in new parodic ‘personal gods’ (as in the Frogs 889–93): ‘Air’, ‘twisting of the tongue, Intelligence, and sensitive Nostrils’; comic exaggerations of Euripides’ obsessions. The atheist Euripides of the comic stage is immoral, justifying breaking oaths, portraying immoral subjects on stage like incest and whores, and failing to set an appropriate moral standard.72 The comic playwright Aristophanes naturally takes this to the extreme in his Frogs, where he has his incarnation of Aeschylus argue that Euripides has almost single-handedly caused the moral decline of the entire population: Of what crimes is he not guilty? Didn’t he show pimps, women giving birth in temples, sleeping with their brothers, claiming that life is not life? And then our state is filled with these bureaucrats and oafish democratic apes always cheating the people, and there’s no one able to carry the torch anymore because of lack of training. Aristophanes Frogs 1078–88 (trans. Henderson 1998, amended) Impiety is only one part of this passage, in rejecting the instruments of ritual (torches) and giving birth in temples.73 Here Aristophanes takes what must have been a common complaint, of the role of the stage in moral corruption, and reduces it ad absurdum: Euripides’ atheism led him to teach Athens to behave immorally, in striking parallel with attitudes towards Socrates only six years before his trial. In all of these examples it is worth considering the rhetorical impact of developing attacks on the morality of atheism. For Aristophanes it creates an amusing caricature, in Euripides it identifies a convincing antagonist, in Thucydides it emphasises the severity of the disaster, and in Socrates’ trial it swayed the jury against him. Nonetheless, it is clear that reputed atheism was not always associated with immorality in practice. For instance, Diagoras of Melos, exiled from Athens for atheism in the late fifth century, is not accused of immoral behaviour beyond impiety itself in any of the records of his accusation.74 An even more stark case is Anaxagoras, who is not only never accused of immorality, but had a reputation for beneficence, civic duty, and selfless moral behaviour. Diogenes Laertius says of Anaxagoras that ‘he was outstanding in nobility and wealth, and also in generosity’: he gave away his inheritance to his relatives, and separately, when offered any gift from the rulers of Lampsucus, he asked for an annual holiday for the children on the anniversary of his death.75 Plutarch in his Pericles says that Anaxagoras bestowed ‘dignity and intelligence’ on Pericles more than any other adviser, and ‘elevated and gave purpose to his character’.76 Likewise, Protagoras also retained a good reputation in spite of being driven from Athens in the late fifth century on suspicion of teaching atheistic natural philosophy. Plato’s Socrates explicitly

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remarks on this in the Meno (91e): ‘I believe he died about seventy years old, forty of which he spent in the practice of his art; and he retains undiminished to this day the high reputation he has enjoyed all that time’.77 Protagoras was also widely credited in the ancient world with the creation of the constitution of the Athenian colony of Thurii in around 443BC, alongside other wellrespected and wise figures like the historian Herodotus and Hippodamus of Miletus, the city planner.78 So a reputation for immorality was certainly not inevitable for those with a reputation for atheism. A major reason for this must be because, as demonstrated above, morality was not divinely-revealed, dogmatic, or inextricable from religious belief in the Greek world; moral systems were primarily based on commonly agreed human standards. The best example of practiced and human-centred morality – and ‘evidence for popular morality’ – is in the Athenian courts, where morality had been explored and decided for centuries, and was presided over by the gods, as Demosthenes observes79: But the laws desire and seek what is just, good, and beneficial. When that is found, it is established as a common order, equal and similar for all, and this is a law. All men should obey it for many reasons, but above all because every law is an invention and gift of the gods, a decision of wise men, a corrective for faults committed willingly or unwillingly, and a common agreement of the city in obedience to which all men should live in the city. Demosthenes 25.16 (trans. Harris 2018) Sets of moral standards were developed by building on legal precedents and known wisdom in the courts and by judging the benefits of each decision individually, but were given their legitimacy by the gods, as Edward Harris has argued80: ‘1) the will of the gods, 2) human reason, 3) moral improvement, and 4) the agreement of the community … A law in the fullest sense of the word was not only passed by the Assembly, which granted the approval of the community, but also sanctioned by the gods.’ These moral systems were humanistic in practice and participants accepted their divine legitimacy not through expressions of belief by participants, but by their participation in an environment that rested on a religious foundation. Speakers passed statues of the gods when entering the court, trials opened with prayers and sacrifices, they made oaths under the gods, and wrong decisions came with the threat of religious consequences (like pollution); it was in this context that moral standards were being explored.81 As we have seen, they frequently dealt with subjects like piety and impiety (the subject of Demosthenes’ Meidias discussed earlier), in which case, the expectations and desires of the gods were naturally taken

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into account on moral decision making.82 Human justice was conceived of as an aspect of justice as a whole, which included divine justice, as we will see in the next chapter. This environment was not just background noise, but the actual mechanisms for making moral decisions in court were based on human (and not divine) agency. The ad hoc humanistic approach to morality that was taken in the Athenian lawcourts was dominated by consideration of the expediency and justice of a measure, at least by the fourth century.83 This was an alignment of political and moral choices, which produced ‘outstanding results’, as Ober has argued.84 There were frequent appeals to the consequences of behaviour or of the decision of a jury for all citizens. Lycurgus, for instance, argues that Leocrates must be punished because if the Athenian ancestors had they acted as he did, the city would have been ruined.85 More than deciding in accordance with the fixed laws or sets of moral rules, jurors were expected to decide consistently: different moral behaviour and qualities could work for different individuals, as long as these moral standards complemented the rest of society.86 The outcome was complex webs of moral standards, knitting together different gnomai into new standards suitable for the individual circumstances. In Demosthenes’ Against Meidias, for instance, Demosthenes argues that mercy should only be given by a jury to good citizens.87 To justify this he appeals to a piece of common wisdom, that it is possible to make claims on a friend’s money by loaning responsibly to them: if someone is generous and kind to others then he deserves to be able to claim the same in return. Meidias does not deserve this leniency, Demosthenes argues, because of his previous harmful actions.88 A new moral standard is built on the basis of a different piece of common wisdom: that only good men deserve judicial leniency. There is a similar process in Demosthenes’ Against Aristocrates. Euthycles (for whom Demosthenes composed the speech) is attempting to demonstrate that Charidemus does not deserve the graphē paranomōn that declared his person inviolable.89 To achieve this he argues that there are circumstances in which the killing of a person is moral. This he bases on a series of legal precedents, including that if someone kills another in athletic contest then they are not to be found guilty or punished, because intentions are key to criminal punishment. The mechanisms of morality in the public domain were an accumulative process of human wisdom deployed ad hoc in decision-making, which was underwritten by the theory that the development of specific skills and moral values was necessary to make communal living possible. The most famous worked out humanistic moral theory of this type is advocated for by Plato’s Protagoras, who argued that individuals ought to obey moral requirements because they are necessary for the continued survival of a political community, which was in turn necessary for individual survival.90 For Plato’s Protagoras, man needs more than just the individual skills to get food, shelter, clothing, and even fire (the demiourgikē technē): he also has to be able

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to survive against wild animals, for which he needs to live communally (requiring the politikē technē, or morality, including virtue, justice, and respect).91 The survival of a community for Protagoras thus required that citizens agreed and observed a minimum standard of justice and law, which was sufficient to meet the moral requirements of a society.92 This was not esoteric or aberrant thinking: the idea that men had developed their own moral laws to restrain them from barbaric behaviour featured in a range of traditional and ancient literature, such as Hesiod.93 Protagoras’ model justified morality in human terms: for Protagoras, ‘man is the measure of all things’.94 The humanistic moral system of Plato’s Protagoras is quite typical of ‘sophistic’ investigations of morality, which ‘looked to humans for the solutions to their problems’.95 Plato’s Protagoras does include the gods in his moral system: he claims that the first human communities were unsuccessful because men lacked the skills (politikē technē), later given to them by Zeus. The gods are a part of the mythical background or landscape of Protagoras’ thought, but they are not necessary for the ongoing functioning, enforcement, or effectiveness of his moral system. While fears about atheists were mostly based on the threat they might pose to the city, the motivation for behaving morally in theories like Protagoras’ was grounded in individual and communal benefit. The best and most moral cities benefitted each citizen most and the city further incentivised morality by offering rewards of special status and recognition in the community.96 There were many problems identified with moral systems that relied on shared community values rather than divine enforcement and guarantee. The fifth-century Athenian philosopher Antiphon argued that the politikē technē and pressures on communal survival described by Protagoras did not either reveal the content of morality or establish that moral behaviour benefitted the individual.97 Instead, Antiphon argued that morality does not always contribute to the wellbeing of an individual, and as a result, he says, it was not always rational for the individual to obey moral codes. This also opened communities up to abuse by the political executive: since whatever the city decides is considered in effect what is actually just, cities could sanction considerable cruelty against the individual, who would have no grounds for protest.98 To resolve this, Antiphon distinguished between human laws and customs (nomoi), the penalty for transgressing which you could avoid as long as you were not noticed; and natural laws (phusis), which applied whether anyone saw or not.99 Nomoi restricted a person’s ability to pursue selfinterest, so the actions of nomos-abiding agents are not good because they involve more suffering than is necessary.100 Antiphon theorised that it is never true self-interest to obey nomoi that conflict with phusis, but only to obey those nomoi when witnesses were present.101 For Antiphon, a morality based on human nomoi and justice alone is unrealistic, unworkable, and insufficient incentive to moral action in the long term; and so the inclusion of divine or cosmic law is necessary to justify moral behaviour.

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Antiphon’s conception of morality is strongly reminiscent of the most notorious of atheistic texts, the Sisyphus fragment. This fragment records an imagined speech by Sisyphus in a late fifth-century (c. 415 BC) tragic or satyr play, usually argued to have been written by the oligarch Critias102: 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, even if in secret they should do or say or think anything. So he thereupon introduced religion, 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; for they have thought. Speaking these words he introduced the sweetest of teachings, concealing the truth with a lying speech. He 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: from the vault above, where he saw that there were flashes of lightning and fearsome claps of thunder, and the starry gleam of heaven, the fine craftsmanship of Time, the wise artisan, whence comes a star’s gleaming lump and whence the liquid rain travels to earth. Such were the fears he set up around humans, by which he both located the deity well with his speech, in an appropriate place and extinguished lawlessness with his laws. Thus I think did someone persuade mortals to believe that there is a race of deities. Critias Sisyphus F25, in Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. 9.54 (trans. Whitmarsh 2014) As with many of the key texts in the history of Greek atheism, such as book ten of Plato’s Laws, the Sisyphus fragment has been marginalised in scholarship, enabled by the fragmentary nature of the play and driven by a ‘discomfort’ with the idea of atheism in the ancient world.103 A common argument is that the views in the fragment were not intended to be a serious portrayal of atheistic philosophy, but a caricature designed to be disproven by the ending of the play in which Sisyphus is proven wrong about the nonexistence of the gods and punished, as a demonstration of the stupidity of atheists.104 It is true that the views of characters on-stage should not be taken to represent the views of the audience or playwright and that it must

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be significant that the character who voices these atheistic views is Sisyphus, whose hubris gained him punishment in the afterlife in traditional Greek mythology.105 But the ending of the play does not survive: though Sisyphus’ life ended this way in Greek myth, there is little to suggest that the play did, and the final outcome of a play or a myth does not determine the interpretation of every dramatic element anyway; nor do we know how sympathetically Sisyphus was presented in the play.106 If the ending of the play was intended to disprove and dismiss the views in the fragment, it certainly did not work: this is the only part of the play that survived and whether or not modern scholars take it seriously, it is clear that it was taken as a notable expression of atheism in the ancient world.107 Using drama as a safe space for intellectual exploration, the Sisyphus fragment brings together traditional themes, particularly from Hesiod (commonly understood as the ‘wise and clever man’), and sets of wellknown philosophical ideas, and develops them to a persuasive and critical conclusion.108 The speaker works from the assumption that some people imagined that the gods did have a role in punishment for wrongdoing. But for him, the gods were invented to motivate moral behaviour, as part of a package that included the shame of behaving badly in front of other men and fear of behaving badly in front of the gods.109 Seen in light of its context as explored above, it is clear that this speech represents an impressively coherent, cogent, highly informed, and persuasive atheistic moral theory based on a range of different traditions.110 It is not simply an expression of atheism, but a double-edged destructive critique of religious morality, maintaining the utility of religion in morality while demolishing religious belief as a lie, without any obvious replacement in its place: it is ‘aggressively hostile to morality’.111 The ‘inner good’ was a key innovation in filling the vacuum left in humanistic morality that Antiphon and the fictional Sisyphus identified.112 This was developed by the late fifth and early fourth century philosopher and scientist Democritus, who, like Protagoras, argued that obeying nomoi was beneficial to the individual because nomoi are necessary for a harmonious community.113 But he added that acting morally nourished the inner good, and improved character, so moral requirements should always be obeyed because they always benefit the individual.114 This gave unobserved people self-interested, rational, reasons for acting morally: He who uses encouragement and verbal persuasion to instil virtue will prove to be more effective than he who uses the threat of law and force. For one who is kept from injustice by law will probably do wrong in secret, while one who is led to his duty by persuasion will probably not act wrongly either in secret or in public. Accordingly, one who acts rightly by understanding and knowledge becomes at once courageous and upright in his judgements. Democritus DK68 B271 (trans. Graham 2010)

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Democritus’ theory depends on euthymia (cheerfulness or pleasure), achieved through a harmonious and temperate life: excesses created imbalances and pleasure came from expelling jealousy, envy, and spite; and avoiding focussing on single pleasures.115 Democritus argued that the gods had initially given mortals these good things and men had made them bad through excess.116 Much like Protagoras, for Democritus the gods are included as part of the mythological backdrop: the mechanics of his moral theory did not require them. The same sort of problem of justifying moral behaviour without the gods was captured in Plato’s dialogues too, where we find a similar solution to the one offered by Democritus.117 In the Republic, Glaucon and Socrates agree on a social contract to justify moral behaviour, in which each party agrees to compromises in what they really want (i.e. to be able to commit injustice) and do not want (to suffer injustice).118 However, again, it followed that if anyone could commit injustice without being caught then they would. Like Democritus, Plato’s Socrates provides justification for moral behaviour in perception of the soul, which here has a ‘divine quality’ to it.119 Good behaviour is informed by the soul and a good soul is informed by the divine. In a sense it is a neater justification than Democritus’, because it clearly justifies common norms, by divine connection, and reconciles self-interest with moral concern for others. However, the two theories are compatible, as Plato has Phaedrus argue in the Symposium: he argues that the only way to live a satisfying life is by being in love, which makes bad acts shameful and incentivises good civic behaviour.120 Much like Democritus, Plato’s Phaedrus argues that the virtue is better than vice for the possessor and also that bad but successful men are less happy than good but poor men. The ‘divine quality’ of the soul is an innate predisposition to goodness but removed by one degree. As such, as in the works of many of Plato’s philosophical contemporaries in the fifth and fourth centuries, the gods are an instrumental but disposable part of primarily humanistic mechanisms for justifying moral behaviour. Towards the end of his life Socrates became obsessed with Athenian imperial culture and the making of good citizens.121 Plato inherited these concerns: the Athenian’s task in the Laws is persuading the founding generation of Magnesia to be governed by good, immutable laws sanctioned by the traditional gods and based on cosmic order.122 There is a recognition here that citizens and readers need to be persuaded of the goodness, and validity, of a sustainable divinely-sanctioned moral order that integrated reason.123 It is no coincidence that the tenth book of the Laws, in which the Athenian particularly confronts the need to persuade citizens of this, is where he considers in depth the dangers of atheism. The anxieties about the morality of the gods revealed in Plato’s works were the culmination of various historical and theological trends, the most prominent of which was, perhaps paradoxically, a loss of faith in traditional approaches to morality in Greece, with morally ambiguous gods, insufficiently worked out moral theories, and

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aristocratic familial values, underwritten by comparisons with non-Greeks. These were not adequate for the morally challenging landscape of the fifth century, marked by increased democratic participation, innovations in philosophy and natural science, cultural and theological exchange with abroad, and new modes of inter-polis conflict incurring ever greater cruelty and suffering.124 This shift in interpersonal and interstate relations in the fifth century drove innovations in moral theories of various kinds, including those that rehabilitated the gods as moral agents and complex moral systems without the need for them. The proponents of new humanistic moral systems rarely chose to exile the gods from moral and ethical systems entirely, but they nonetheless attracted increasing attention and concern. Prodicus, for instance, does not appear to have wanted to overturn traditional ethics, but it is clear that his ideas were viewed with suspicion.125 It is easy to imagine Protagoras’ epistemological critiques as problematising the universal validity of ethical norms and like many of these theories they put ‘pressure’ both on the notion of the gods’ existence and their role in morality.126 The Sisyphus fragment perhaps exerts the most ‘pressure’ of all: it is a combination of these theories and the anxieties about them, while recognising the stakes involved given the utility of religion and belief in morality.127 In the face of the great suffering of the fifth century in Greece, at least in part due to the actions of unscrupulous and sophistic political leaders in Athens, whose shifting allegiances and private acts of immorality and irreligion were of increasing public concern, it is hardly surprising that many increasingly felt a threat from atheism in moral deviancy. Notes 1 See Chapter 2. Lombardini 2014: 23 discusses Socrates’ trial as for moral corruption. 2 On the history of atheism as morally corrupt: Cicero On Moral Ends 2.80–1, 96, 99 explained virtuous Epicureans as better than their philosophy. Psalm 14 is the classic example [NIV]: ‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”. They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good’; ‘the sin of unbelief is greater than any sin that occurs in the perversion of morals’. St Augustine On Baptism, against the Donatists, iv, 20, was unsure if a wicked Catholic was preferable to a moral atheist, but resolved that other sins naturally followed from atheism. Aquinas ST 2.2 Q.10, A.3 Whether unbelief is the greatest of sin? argued ‘the sin of unbelief is greater than any sin that occurs in the perversion of morals’. Although Martin Luther in Commentary on Galations, from Dillenberger 1962: 139 argued reason offered knowledge of morality in the impious, but sin weakened our powers of reason and lack of belief in the law failed to ‘bridle the wicked’, and the impious lacked grounding in doctrinal moral law. John Calvin in Institutes 2.8.1 argued moral law is ‘written in our hearts’, as Paul said in Romans 2.14 but only understandable through study of revealed doctrine. John Locke in his 1689 Letter concerning toleration 71, 52 wrote that ‘promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no effect on an atheist’, so the state should not tolerate them. Edmund Burke 2003:

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Morality 77 wrote that religion is ‘the basis of civil society, and the source of all good’. Even later atheists accepted this connection, such as J. P. Sartre 1946, who claimed there could be no objective standards for morality without god, a claim echoed by Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov by F. Dostoevsky 4.11.4, or 2003: 753. Richard Bentley 1724 argued ‘no atheist as such can be a true friend, an affectionate relation, or a loyal subject’. A. E. Taylor 1947: 158–9 wrote that ‘science divorced from wisdom and the fear of God’ was to blame for both world wars and modern war in general. Paul Tillich 1963: e.g. 13 argues scientific moralities do not offer philosophical justification for behaving morally. For different aspects of discussion of the connection of atheism and immorality in Western Christian thought see Martin 1990: 4–23, Schneewind 1998: 26–33, Zuckerman 2013: 497–510. See also Meyer 2008: 120, Smith 1989: 275 and Anderson 2007: 215–30, and the modern surveys in Gervais et al. 2011: 1189–1206 on immorality as the key criticism of atheists. Dodds 1951: 31–2. Lloyd-Jones 1971: 1. Glaucus: Hdt 6.86. Glaucus’ foreigners were portrayed as sensible and show special respect to Apollo; cf. Datis returning the looted statue of Apollo 6.118. This may be connected with his association with justice in Herodotus, as he shows himself just with Croesus at 1.86–7.2, as Mikalson 2003: 48–9 observes. Davies 1997: 47. As in Petrovic and Petrovic 2016: 265–6, for instance. Hes. WD 268. Inconsistently ethical gods: Den Boer 1979: 13. Soph. Ajax 132–3. Soph. Ajax 127–30. Eur. Hipp. 1298–9. Obey rules: e.g. in comic guise, in Ar. Peace 363–425; Justice: Eur. F151, Ar. Cl. 902–19, Dem. 25.11; Dover 1994: 78–9, 255, Pearson 1962: 17. Lloyd-Jones 1971: 3–4. Some claim the gods have compassion: Eur. El. 1327–30, Lys. 2.40, Thuc. 7.77.4, Men. Epitr. 855, 873–5. Playing games, as in Eur. Hipp. esp. 47–50, 1420–22. See Democritus B175, Eur. IT 380–91; Isoc. 11.38–40; Dover 1994: 80. The unpleasantness of the human experience in Greek thought, e.g.: Hom. Il. 24.525–6, Hes. WD 90–110, Semon. F1.20–22, Bacch. 5.159–62. Unjust gods: e.g. Strife in Hes. WD 25–6, or Apollo in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 530–50. In Xenophanes’ view, e.g. in B11–12, anthropomorphic views of the gods are not just groundless but ethically harmful, especially in civic contexts, anticipating Plato’s criticisms of the poets in Rep. 2/3, as Tor 2020 has argued. In Plato’s Tim. 29d7–30c1, for instance, the craftsman god is essentially good. For Aristotle, the beings in the universe can be ranked, and that at the top, the Unmoved Mover, is the most good and has goodness without needing to obtain it unlike lesser beings; Aristotle De Caelo 11.12, Parts of Animals 1.5, Nic. Eth. 1141a; Dover 1994: 17, Dillon, J. 2004: 157, Nussbaum 2001: 373–4; and on the theories of Plato, Aristotle etc, see Irwin, T. 2007 e.g. 63–4 on Plato. Vlastos 2000: 63 argued Socrates’ innovation was partly because of his moral role. Vlastos 1991: 166 again, argues the austere ethical conception of the gods by Socrates and Plato would have led to abandoning the vast majority of earlier depictions of the gods. Moral god a Platonic invention: Bordt 2006: 118–20. In spite of radically different approaches, the idea that there was no doctrine or priesthood in Greece is now a nearly ubiquitous feature of books on religion. Gould 1985: 7 and Harrison 2007a: 383 recognise the lack of doctrine as proof of the ‘fundamentally improvisatory’ nature of Greek religion, and argue that there

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was no inherent need for literary texts; similarly Bremmer 1999: 1–2, 7–8. Others have stressed the importance of the polis structure in replacement for doctrine: Sourvinou-Inwood 1990: 17–19, Kindt 2012: 30. Others, like Bruit-Zaidman and Schmitt-Pantel 1992: 27, Finley 1984: 4, and Price 1984: 10, 1999: 3 argue that the lack of doctrine is part of the absence of belief and primacy of ritual. Homer and Hesiod were inspired, not revealed: see Dillon, J. 2004: 155–6, Parker 2006: 105. Unwritten laws: Pl. Laws 838a–b, Arist. Pol. 1287b, Soph. Ant. 450–7., Xen. Mem. 4.4.19–21, cf. Eur. Suppl. 433–7 on written versus unwritten laws; divine origins for laws: homicide: Ant. 1.3, Areopagus: Dem. 23.70. Bryant 1996: 174, Dover 1994: 22, 255, Den Boer 1979: 193, Thomas 1991: 32. Against the tradition championed by Dodds that morality and religion were largely separate until the later periods, Den Boer 1979: esp. 15–21 argued that the ‘idea of law from a divine revelation’ was part of Greek thought from the earliest periods, but his argument is unconvincing, largely because he conflates morality and purity, and impiety and immorality; see also Gill 1980: 374–418. Horn 2020: 91 argues that unwritten laws are divine. Thgn. 373–82. The educative properties of Homer and Hesiod see the previous chapter, and Hdt 2.53; Bremmer 1999: 7, Burkert 1985: 120, Harrison 2007a: 383. They have been sometimes used as an equivalent to doctrine, to ‘fill a gap’: Gould 1994: 104–5, Price 1999: 67. Pl. Euthphr. 8a–9e, esp. 9a. Most Athenians would have picked ‘blood is thicker than water’: Dillon 2004: 160. Glaucon at Hdt 6.86 is a significant moral dilemma, but it is also a once-in-alifetime decision. On the nature of oracular pronouncements see the next chapter. On the exegetai and Eupatridai see Oliver 1950, and more briefly Pocock 1962: 219. Answers were on ritual not morality: Dillon 2004: 155–6. Hosios and dikaios: Ant. 1.25, Lys. 8.3. Dover 1994: 248. Bacc. 83. Adkins 1972: 82–3. Thuc. 3.84. Rudhardt 1958: 31. Aesch. Seven 610. Dem. 21.227 and see 19.311 where jurors are encouraged to cast their votes for ‘divine and human justice’, and again in Against Leptines, esp. 20.126–7, where he ‘maintains a distinction between human and divine justice, introducing a hierarchy with the divine sphere following a stricter idea of what is just: nothing that is not in accordance with human justice can be just with the gods’. Martin, G. 2009: 246. Martin 2009: 30. Pl. Euthphr. 12a. Pearson 1962: 32: ‘There is no suggestion, either in Plato or elsewhere, that there was a tendency among Athenians to explain justice in terms of piety, to fall back on a religious explanation of ethics’. Rudhardt 1958: 32. Annas 2006: 37–8. Bryant 1996: 38. Thuc. 5.104. Athenians and Thuc dismiss the naïve view: Connor 1984: 151, Meiggs 1972: 388. On the law that the stronger dominated the weaker see also their earlier appeal to this during the Spartan Conference before the war, in Thuc. 1.76; cf. Thuc. 4.61.5, Pl. Gorg. 483c–e; Connor 1984: 151. Hornblower 2010: 244, on 5.105.2

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Morality has argued that the Athenians were not saying that ‘might is right’, but that ‘might’ superseded ‘right’. The gods, therefore, support might over morality. As Hornblower ibid observed, this is similar but not exactly the same as the sort of argument Callicles makes in Pl. Gorg. 483c9–d6 in that – see Low 2007: 161–3 – Callicles develops a new sense of justice and morality, rather than eschewing it, claiming that it was ‘natural justice’ for the weaker to rule the stronger. Callicles’ argument solves the problem of the gods condoning injustice, but only by changing the idea of justice. Hornblower 2010: 242, on Thuc. 5.104. Hornblower highlights that both uses of ‘divine fortune’. 5.104, 112 are by the Melians. Connor 1984: 157. Behaviour dictated by expediency is appropriate: in judging the acceptance of the idea that expediency was a rule of the day in Athens, and was not perceived as impious, ‘it is only necessary’, Adkins 1960: 234 argues, ‘to consider Athens’ (fifth-century) foreign policy’. See more recently Low 2007: 163. Nicias in Thuc. 7.77. Thuc. 7.77.2–3. Connor 1984: 156. Hdt 7.8. Macleod 1983: 144–5. Parker 1997 explores the frequent claims, on very different bases, that Athens was favoured by the gods. In the conception of Den Boer: ‘Demonically incalculable is the character of the god, whose law is not the law of man, the god of universal life and wisdom. His way of acting is supra-ethical and arbitrary’. Den Boer 1979: 14; Adkins 1972. Dover 1994: 250–5. Dover 1994: 253–4. Xen. Mem 4.8.11. Menander F683. See also Isoc. 2.20, Xen. Ages. 11.2, with similar sentiments in the fourth century. Petrovic and Petrovic 2016: 265. Whitmarsh 2016: 116. Eur. Bacch. 995, repeated at 1015. Eur. Androm. 491. Eur. Helen 1148. Gorg. Pal. DK82B11A.36. Pl. Tht. 176e–77a. Lefkowitz 1989: 71 argued that ‘in antiquity, being atheistic or impious (the terms are not synonymous) signified an inability to distinguish right from wrong’. She gives some additional examples. Thuc. 2.47.3–53.4. Mitchell-Boyask 2008: 42 on the moral consequences; Padel 1992: 53 on stasis. Pl. Ap. 26c–d. Burnyeat 1997: 234–6. Alcibiades: Thuc. 6.53, Xen. Hell. 1.4.14–20, and the later Plut. Alc. 19.5, DS 13.5.1–4. Ar. Cl. 221–62, 363–83. Oath-breaking was a sign of impiety and immorality, as in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, especially the last book, where it is used to trace Persian moral decline; see Torrance 2013: 320. Refusing to take an oath was perceived as an indicator of impiety, as it is in the lengthy rhetorical argument on oaths in court in Aristotle Rh. 1376b20–4. See also Lyc. Leoc. 76: Leocrates has perjured himself impiously if he swore the ephebic oath, and if he did not swear it he has been avoiding his duty. Dem. 21.120: it is impiety to say a man is a

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murderer and then swear you never said that; Andoc. 1.30–3: the jurors swear to obey piety and impiety and not put an innocent man to death; likewise Ant. 5.88. On oath-breaking see Plescia 1970. However, untrustworthiness with oaths was expected and ‘side-stepping’ was common: see Bayliss 2014: 243–79. On impiety: e.g. Ar. Cl. 221–74, 360–436. Escaping debts and moral relativism: Ar. Cl. 1321–44. Relativistic caricatures were extremely common in the ancient world: Gagarin 2002: 31–3; the substance of the Platonic and Aristotelian criticisms of Protagoras were based on criticisms of relativity: Sherman 1989: 190–200; on the commonality, diversity, and nature of the dialogue about (non-moral) relativism post-Protagoras, in Plato, Aristotle and Democritus, see Lee 2005. Ar. Cl. 1311–20 on Pheidippides, and specifically his disbelief: 1467–75. Ending: Ar. Cl. 1445–1510. Parker 1996: 205. Euripides was also believed, later in antiquity, to have been charged with impiety, but this is unlikely: Aristotle Rh. 1416a; other factors: Ar. Thesm. 445–53. Satyrus Life of Euripides POxy 1176, vol. 9, pg.153, 15–21, F3, col 10; 4, Aetius Plac. Phil. 1.7.2; Eus. PE 14.16.1. Oaths: Ar. Thesm. 275–6, Frogs 102, 1471; using his line from Eur. Hipp. 612. Incest: Ar. Frogs 850, whores: Frogs 1043. Moral standard: ‘a poet should conceal wickedness, not bring it forward and teach it. For little boys have a teacher who advises them, and grown-ups have poets’. Ar. Frogs 1053–5. On types of impiety see Chapter 6. Ar. Birds 1072–8, Lys. 6.17. On the date of Diagoras’ expulsion see Romer 1996: 394–401. DL 2.6–15. Plut. Per. 4.4. Pl. Men. 91e. Kagan 154–69, De Romilly 1992: 21. Harris, E. 2006: 290, Wallace 2005: 357–71. Harris 2006: 51. Boegehold 1995: 39 makes the argument about sacrifices at trials: ‘It would be consistent with the seriousness of the undertaking for dikasts to swear their oath at the beginning of the trial, and for there to be an altar and a sacrifice, but no such sacramental or ceremonial functions are attested’. Rabinowitz 2008: 66, for instance, assumes the role of sacrifices before trials, but does not discuss evidence. See Morgan 2011: 453–4 on gods as omnipresent community deities. See also, for instance, Lysias ap. Athenaeus 12.76, F195 Carey, in which Lysias argued Cinesias was impious and the laws should help deal with him to satisfy justice just as his friends had died from divine justice. Arguing on expediency as much as justice: e.g. Dem. 20.1; cf. also Thuc. 3.56.7. Ober 2008: 6. Lyc Leoc. 59–60; cf also the appeal to consequences in Dem. 25.20. Dover 1994: 219. Decide consistently: Dem. 20.135, 23.143. Dover 1994: 219. Complementary rather than the same virtues: Morgan 2015: 494. Dem. 21.184–6. Dover 1994: 218–9. Dem. 21.186. Dem. 23.55–6. If Protagoras’ views are based on Plato’s Protagoras and Theatetus. It is not important here whether this accurately represents Protagoras’s own views: Plato’s was a discussion of the ethical consequences of these kinds of views, as argued in Van Berkel 2020: 82–6. For an excellent discussion of Plato’s Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras, focused particularly on techne, see Nussbaum 2001: 89–117.

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91 Pl. Prot. 321C–2C. Moral aretē (virtue), dikē (justice), and aidōs (respect); later expanded to dikaiosyne, or justice, sophrosyne, or moderation, sound-judgement and temperance, honesty and trustworthiness, skill, even-temperedness, courage, wisdom, and hosion or eusebia, or piety. See Pl. Prot. 322B–E; Symp. 194E–7E; and Xen. Ages. 3, 4, 5, 6.1–8; see also the narrower conception of Pindar, Isth. 2.35–45; Adkins 1972: 76, Dover 1994: 66, Nill 1985: 2, 4–7. On aidōs: Cairns 1993, particularly 1–5, and on the history of the link between aidōs and dikē, 152–3. 92 All citizens are just: Pl. Prot. 323a2–3, 324d7–325a5, 326e8–327a2; men are differently just: Pl. Prot. 323c, 326e–7c, 329e, 349d. Protagoras believed that morality was fulfilled by law: Nill 1985: 8–9, 14, 23. 93 Natural barbaric behaviour: particularly Dem. 25.15, 20, but see also Hesiod WD 276–80, Antiphon F44A, Eur. Supp. 201–4, Or. 1554–5, Isoc. 3.5–6, Xen. An. 5.7.32, Cyr. 5.2.17, Hiero 7.3, Oik. 13.9; Bryant 1996: 174–5, Dover 1994: 74–5, 89. 94 Pl. Tht. 152a, and compare also with Socrates’ reference in Pl. Cra. 386a. Nill 1985: 27, Meyer 2008: 117. See Van Berkel 2020, especially 85 on the discussion of the fragment in Plato. 95 Gagarin 2002: 33. 96 Pl. Prt. 327b; Nill 1985: 38–9. 97 Antiphon’s ideas on justice are mostly from the lengthy fragment Ant. F44a–c, in Pendrick 2002: 159–91, or DK87B44; Nill 1985: 2. He does not positively approve of breaking nomoi, but he implies approval: Gagarin 2002: 74. 98 For a discussion of Antiphon’s criticism that cities could sanction cruelty see Nill 1985: 24–5, 27, 32–3. Pl. Tht. 167c4–d1 recognises this same problem with these kinds of humanistic theories; on Plato’s discussion see Van Berkel 2020: 84. 99 Distinction between phusis and nomos: Ant. F44a.2.20–5.35; Nill 1985: 54. Nomoi only punished when observed, but phusis always punished: Ant. 44a.1.10–35; Nill 1985: 54. Gagarin 2002: 73–4 has argued that Antiphon here is talking about morality, or at least behavioural norms. 100 Restricted ability to pursue self-interest: Ant. F44a 5.4–13. Nill 1985: 65. This was a sort of extension on a traditional norm of Greek morality – that it was moral to help one’s friends and hurt one’s enemies; see Gagarin 2002: 75–6. 101 Self-interest not to follow nomoi when unnoticed: Pl. Rep. 359c–60c. Nomoi conflict with self-interest: Ant. 44a 4.22–4, 32–53. See Sisyphus F., Democ. DK68B181, and Xen. Mem. 4.4.21. Nomoi conflict with phusis because they place restrictions on what you can and can’t do, this restricting your ability to pursue self-interest; phusis as human nature: Ant. F44a 2.30–4.22, 4.32–5.24; Nill 1985: 56–62, Pendrick 2002: 65. 102 Critias (the tyrant), or Euripides(?) F25 (from ‘Sisyphus’). Preserved best in Sext. Emp. Adv. Phys. 1.54. Whitmarsh’s 2014 article is the best modern scholarly discussion of this fragment, O’Sullivan 2012 is also an interesting (if overly apologetic) discussion on how the fragment can be read as going beyond atheism into a more productive view of religion; and Kahn 1997 continues to be an important reading. 103 ‘Discomfort’: Whitmarsh 2014: 114, arguing that scholars have attempted to prove that it is bad Greek, undermined its authorship, and that the character and ultimate demise of the speaker shows the views were not condoned. O’Sullivan 2012: 184 downplays more radical antireligious interpretations of the fragment as ‘facile’. On its atheism see Bremmer 2007: 17–18, Kearns 2010: 149, Parker 1996: 212; and the idea it is ‘dangerous’, Burkert 1985: 314–5.

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104 For instance, Guthrie 1971: 243 argued that Sisyphus in the play was a ‘notorious sinner who no doubt received his well-known punishment by the end of the play’. M. Davies 1989: 30 observes the ‘growing awareness that a satyr play is an unlikely location for serious views about the true origins of religious belief’. Kahn 1997: 250, based on Dihle 1977, argues that putting the views into the mouth of ‘arch-trickster’ Sisyphus is ‘not exactly to provide a personal endorsement’. Similarly Hesk 2000: 181–4 considers at length that Sisyphus’ deceptive character in the play undermines the validity and authenticity of the theory, as did Scodel 1980: 128–37 with irony established through intertextuality. 105 Sutton 1981: 33–8 argues that the identity of the speaker as Sisyphus as ‘a cunning rogue, if not a downright criminal’, is key in interpreting the fragment: for her, Sisyphus ‘is holding these new-fangled ideas up to scorn and ridicule’. 106 Whitmarsh 2014: 112–3, Wright 2016: 56–8, Sutton 1981: 36–7. 107 In Pyrrh. 3.218 Sextus observes that there was a raging controversy around religion and theology, with the majority declaring gods exist but some who denied it including Diagoras, Theodorus, and Critias. See also Adv. Phys. 1.54. 108 Whitmarsh 2014: 118–20 argues that the ‘wise and clever man’ may be Hesiod. Conservative influence: Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 1; radical: Parker 1996: 212, Whitmarsh 2014: 113. Presocratic ideas: Kahn 1997. For older scholarship see Sutton 1981: 36–7. On the freedom from constraints on atheism in drama, see Kahn 1997: 261–2. 109 On shame of behaving badly in front of men and gods see Aeschin. 1.50, 1.67. 110 Gottesman 2020: 247 describes it as ‘one of the earliest and most cogent statements of atheism’. O’Sullivan 2012: 182–4 discusses the fragment’s wide engagement and recognises that readers have failed to ‘do justice’ to the ‘subtlety of the ideas’ in the fragment; though this is in misplaced criticism of those who see the fragment as offering a materialist or ‘cynical’ philosophy. 111 Kahn 1997: 262. 112 The same idea of an inner good whereby behaving morally benefits the psyche is found in Plato’s Meno and Protagoras, as well as Pl. Rep. 2–4, where he argues that the foundation of happiness is ‘psychic’ justice; cf. Pl. Phdr. 245b. See Guthrie 1971: 166–8. 113 Necessary for harmony and recognition of gap in earlier theories: Democ. DK68B245; Nill 1985. 114 Man’s inner good: Democ. DK68B181, B51; see also Democ. B45: ‘The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than he who is wronged’; B174, B118; B103: ‘he who loves no one is loved by no one’. See also Dem. 45.14, Isoc. 15.221 on the poor decisions of the greedy selfish man; Dover 1994: 223–4, Nill 1985: 2, 75–6, 83–4. 115 Excesses cause imbalances: Democ. DK68A135, and various others in Graham 2010: 583–93; Nill 1985: 77. 116 Gods bestowed good: Democ. DK68B173, B175; Nill 1985: 79–80. 117 See Pl. Rep. 2.357a–61d, 2.362d–67e. Nill 1985: 41. Thrasymachus and Callicles both argue in Rep. 1.338c–e, 1.358c–d that the laws of nature dictate that it is just for the stronger to overcome the weaker; see also Gorg. 483c–d; Bryant 1996: 175, Nill 1985: 1. 118 Social contract: Pl. Rep. 2.359a–2.360d. 119 Pl. Rep. 7.518e. McCabe 2006: 75, 97–8. 120 Self-interest as compatible with morality: Pl. Symp. 177d–180b. See also the appeal to mental and physical health in Rep. 4.445a–b; Irwin 2007: 111–13. 121 Wolfsdorf 2017: 40–5.

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Balot 2020: 71–4. Annas 2017: 122. Liatsi 2020: 11. Bett 2020: 201. Van Berkel 2020: 76. This pressure is often excused because ‘explaining how people came to believe in gods is not necessarily tantamount to saying there are no gods’, Bett 2020: 207. 127 On ‘pressure’ in the Sisyphus fragment, see Tor 2020: 24.

4

Theology Discourses of (a)theology and the evolution of Greek belief

By the fifth century, Athens was the centre of a vibrant theological discourse stretching from complex, advanced theodicies, through frustrated despair about the opaque communications of the gods, and into pondering their very existence. Plato and Aristotle would later pin many of these latter arguments on the ‘Sophists’, famous for their epistemological critiques and often-abrasive or morally problematic teachings, including scepticism about the form and existence of the gods.1 But the ‘Sophists’ were building on, and engaging with, a long history of critical thought, not just from the materialist presocratics, also commonly known to contemporaries as sophists, but right back to Homer and Hesiod. Consequently, it is possible to construct a history of atheistic ideas through discourses of exchange in theology2 and theodicy, as Hunter and Wootton have for Early Modern Europe. These discourses, centred around theories on the nature of religion or the gods and theodicy, attempt to explain how the gods can exist and be just in spite of the existence of natural injustice. These discussions were highly influential, especially in Athens: their influence can be found in various oral, performed, and written discourses; historical works, drama, and literature; and even the epigraphic record. Scholars have often argued that engagement with these kinds of ideas was limited to small groups of ‘radical’ individuals like Euripides, who discussed or platformed sceptical ideas, and acted as ‘spokesm[e]n of the new thought’, as Guthrie once claimed.3 While it is increasingly being recognised that there was a much broader and wider engagement in a contemporary intellectual environment,4 too much focus is placed on debating which side of the discourse the author or text represented, as with one of the more famous examples in Protagoras:5 Protagoras, a follower of Democritus, got the reputation of being an atheist. For he is said to have started his treatise On the Gods with this introduction: ‘Concerning the gods, I cannot ascertain whether they exist or whether they do not, or what form they have; for there are many obstacles to knowing including the obscurity of the question and the brevity of human life’. Protagoras DK80B4 (trans. Graham 2010) DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-4

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A great deal of debate has been dedicated to the extent to which this passage represents atheism or not but this largely fruitless focus has mostly served to flatten a passage that is fundamentally discursive.6 The limits of knowledge to the gods’ existence required by Protagoras’ anthropological approach represented a systematising of sceptical theological relativism, but also built on and contributed to a wider theological discussion, sparking a range of reactions in philosophical theology.7 For instance, in Herodotus’ striking comment about the gods (2.53.1)8: ‘whence each of the gods came to be, or whether all had always been, and how they appeared in form, they did not know until yesterday or the day before, so to speak’. Without understanding these ideas as discursive, it is not easy to explain why they were spread, recorded, and survived, in Greek civic societies in which religion was embedded. They seem in opposition to the dominant theological and religious beliefs at the time, they do not serve an obvious moral function, they are not always presented as parodic and designed to be dismissed and laughed at, and they are not the sorts of ideas that satisfy the usual criteria of survivability on their own terms. The survival of ideas in a competing marketplace usually depends on how ‘intuitive’ ideas are: intuitive ideas match normal assumptions about classes of objects (e.g. that humans walk on the ground and cannot fly), while ‘counterintuitive’ ideas invalidate those assumptions. Ideas that are most likely to thrive lie in a goldilocks zone of moderate, modest, or minimal counterintuitiveness, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued: ‘if an idea is not counterintuitive then it is not evocative (it is boring, so not worth remembering), but if it is too counterintuitive then it is too difficult to remember and perhaps believe’.9 The success of religious beliefs and stories is governed by this principle: they are usually at most ‘modestly counterintuitive’ ideas.10 For instance, the mythical contest for Athens, one of the most popular and famous myths in ancient Athens, mimics a human athletic contest, which is not ‘counterintuitive’ at all for the most part. However, Poseidon and Athene each exercise a specific power that is beyond normal capabilities of human-like beings: of creating ex nihilo a salt-water spring and a fully grown olive tree. These represent a single point of ‘counterintuitiveness’ for each god: that makes it an evocative story without being overly complex and difficult to remember.11 The scientific and philosophical experiments of the sophists and the presocratics often did not meet these survival criteria: they frequently involve maximally counterintuitive concepts that involve too many points of counterintuitiveness to remember easily or be believable.12 To most Greeks, as to Meletus in Plato’s Apology (26d), the idea of the sun as a stone was maximally counterintuitive: it is not a static object, but moves across the sky; it is clearly animated, and serves a clear causal function connected with the seasons, and so on. To imagine it as a stone defied all of these normal, casual, intuitive expectations. In isolation, these ideas might not survive, but they survive as part of a reactive discourse: they are often embedded in dialogues, such as the Apology,

Theology 73 in which they are used as soundboard or a pool of potential conceptions of the gods. They offer indispensable context for the development of theologies, which were often developed through varied and in some sense competing stories in Greece.13 Socrates observes as much about his own intellectual contributions in Plato’s Apology, where he claims that he acts as a ‘gadfly’, rousing or stirring up the horse that represents the state; or a ‘spur’, energising and training the horse at the behest of the god.14 Socrates’ arguments might appear (or even be) impious, but they made the discourse better, stronger, and more refined: though this could be read as a kind of dialectics, Socrates’ ideas were educationally useful not just by prompting stronger reactions in defence of the gods but by strengthening the discourse as a whole. Regardless of doctrine or priesthoods to enforce it, there was a broader body of beliefs to which one could subscribe, engage, and doubt.15 The dynamism of Greek religion, and lack of doctrinal thinking, meant that Greek religious ideas could be adapted in response to scepticism, just as scepticism could adapt to religious ideas. This thesis is not entirely novel: Michael Hunter observed (quoting Fotherby’s Atheomastix) a similar phenomenon with respect to Early Modern England:16 Quite apart from the actual existence of ‘atheism’, the spectre of it undoubtedly allowed authors to rehearse arguments on matters ‘most needefull to be beleeued; yet least laboured in by Diuines’. By visualising unbelievers who ‘must be refuted by the principles of nature onely, for all other arguments they scorne’, writers were given an excuse to expound the principles of natural theology. Hunter argued that questioning the existence and nature of the gods was not only significant to the development of theology in the abstract, but useful to believers: it allowed for a form of righteous confirmation of their worldview only obtainable through adversity and refutation of criticism. Whether or not the proponents of these critical ideas intended it, they survived and thrived because they performed an indispensable role in society, in priming and strengthening theology. The enduring relevance and survival of sceptical ideas was fuelled by their interaction with these religious ideas, driving the modification, adaption, and strengthening of these religious ideas in response. In this view, atheism was not only loosely ‘thinkable’ in the ancient world: criticism of the form, nature, and existence of the gods was central to the evolution, survival, and enduring relevance of Greek religion. It would be possible to focus on any number of problems to establish and explore a discourse of theistic and atheistic ideas, but it makes most sense to focus on the central challenge of Greek theology: the justice of the gods. The idea of divine justice never sat comfortably in Greek culture: the earliest literature does not present the gods as unproblematically just and embeds critiques of divine justice alongside plausible responses to them. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are both ‘theologically challenging’, as Allan has

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argued, ‘since each shows the simple model of divine justice to be in various ways both problematic and naïve’: they are more alike in their treatment of divine justice than they are different, contrary to more traditional readings like that of Lloyd-Jones.17 The gods’ concern with justice in the Iliad is haphazard and driven by personal feuds or the varied motivations of individual deities who are only inconsistent agents of justice. A good example of this is Poseidon’s attempt to gain Apollo’s support against the Trojans, arguing for punishing the Trojan descendants of Laomedon for his crimes in robbing them of their reward for building the Trojan walls and herding their cattle.18 Though as Allan rightly argues that this demonstrates divine concern with justice, it is driven and justified by Poseidon’s personal grudge.19 There is no sense here that Apollo or Poseidon are concerned to uphold some impersonal, cosmic rulebook of justice. The gods of the Odyssey similarly dispense justice at arm’s length, inconsistently, indirectly, and when it suits their agenda. Odysseus’ loyal farm-hand Eumaeus remarks about the unpunished suitors: ‘the blessed gods do not love cruel deeds, but they honour justice and the righteous deeds of men’.20 Eumaeus makes no comment on the gods’ actions: the gods may love justice and hate cruelty, but there is no sense that they need to, or will, intervene to police it either. When the suitors do eventually come to justice, it is at the hands of Odysseus and his allies (including Athene), which is seen as confirmation ex post facto of the justice of the gods (e.g. by Laertes at 24.351); but there is still no sense in which the gods would necessarily have brought the dispensation of justice themselves. All of this suggests that dispensation of justice is left largely to humans. Hesiod shared with Homer a conception of the gods as dispensing justice depending on their own individual agendas, but more than anywhere in Homer he despaired at the palpable suffering of mankind and the power of the gods.21 Zeus accepted the suffering of innocent mortals as part of the cosmic order and pursued aims that resulted in it, as in his Works and Days:22 But countless other miseries roam among mankind; for the earth is full of evils, and the sea is full; and some sicknesses come upon men by day, and others by night, of their own accord, bearing evils to mortals in silence, since the counselor Zeus took their voice away. Thus it is not possible in any way to evade the mind of Zeus. Hesiod Works and Days 100–105 (trans. Most 2018) The humans of Hesiod are wretched creatures, oppressed by incomprehensible natural evils that are sanctioned by the gods: they live their lives in toil because Zeus has hidden the ‘means of life’ as a result of his dispute with Prometheus.23 Zeus ruled through force: his concern was to punish the guilty and unjust, not the consistent application of formal principles; and he did not care to reward or even avoid harming the just or innocent, which caused profound suffering and justified despair.24 Semonides, in the seventh century,

Theology 75 represented a similar view, of a Zeus applying his personal concern for punishing injustice through force: ‘Loud-thundering Zeus controls the outcome, lad, in everything, and makes it how he wants’.25 For these poets, suffering in the world either comes from the gods, it is condoned by them, or they do not care about it. This conception of the gods was at once an issue and a defence for the problem of divine (in)justice in Greek religion: while the idea of differently motivated gods reconciled the existence of the gods with natural injustice, it made it more difficult to maintain that the gods themselves were just.26 For this reason, the inconsistent and individualised divine concern for morality of Homer and Hesiod is regularly criticised by later philosophers, like Plato.27 The notion of divine justice as dependent on the competing interests and conceptions of the gods is famously mocked by Plato’s Socrates in the Euthyphro: there’s nothing surprising if in doing what you’re now doing, punishing your father, it’s loved by Zeus [who tied up his father, Cronus, for eating his own children], but antagonistic to Cronus and Uranus [Zeus’s grandfather, whom Cronus castrated]; loved by Hephaestus, but not by Hera; and again if any other gods are in dispute over this, the same applies to them too. Plato Euthyphro 8b (trans. Emlyn-Jones and Preddy 2017) Euthyphro’s belief that the injustice of failing to prosecute his father would result in divine punishment by the fifth century represented a clearly oldfashioned and rather literal view of divine justice based on Homer and Hesiod, and Socrates critiques it as such.28 Euthyphro’s position was not a kind of ‘banal religiosity’ set up to fail by Plato (or Socrates), as is sometimes argued, but a serious and plausible position for a fifth century Greek to hold, represented also in the Derveni Papyrus, for instance.29 Even after particular beliefs had fallen out of intellectual fashion, the theological environment had evolved beyond them, or criticisms had rendered them vulnerable or implausible, older conceptions of the gods continued in circulation and could be reclaimed, reused, and updated as these views were. As the anthropologist John Skorupski observed:30 The traditional thinker’s intellectual toolbox, when he comes into contact with alternative ideas, runs to accumulation, becoming crowded with a collection of methods and ideas which might come in useful. The scientist’s is relatively sparser, with wholesale discarding of outworn equipment at regular intervals … If an old response to a criticism became relevant again, Skorupski realised, it could easily be revived, remaining in the toolbox of potential solutions even if it were not being actively referenced. Dover once eloquently observed something similar of the Greek world: ‘[o]nce ideas and

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attitudes are expressed, no matter in what context, they do not die; they are fed into the consciousness of society, and they can grow in the dark’.31 Likewise, when a new criticism developed, it might replace older ones, or it might coexist with them, but older theodicies could always be revived in the face of new criticism. By the Archaic period, the general uneasiness about divine justice had crystallised into so-called ‘Archaic pessimism’: a sense of the ephemeral nature of man, the ‘ambivalence of hope’, and a belief in the proximity of misfortune, without expectation of divine justice, which became a prominent feature of poetry in the archaic period.32 Archaic pessimism is perhaps best demonstrated by Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver Solon in the sixth century, in his Hymn to the Muses: Zeus oversees every outcome, and suddenly, just as the clouds are quickly scattered by a spring wind which stirs up the bottom of the swelling and undraining(?) sea, ravages the lovely fields over the wheat-bearing land, reaches the gods’ high seat in heaven, and again brings a clear sky to view; the strong sun shines in beauty over the fertile land and no longer can even a single cloud be seen – such is the vengeance of Zeus […] Often agony results from a slight pain and no one can provide relief by giving soothing drugs, whereas another, in the throes of a terrible and grievous disease, he quickly restores to health with the touch of his hands. Fate brings good and ill to mortals and the gifts of the immortal gods are inescapable. In all actions there is risk and no one knows, when something starts, how it is going to turn out. The man who tries to act rightly falls unawares into great and harsh calamity, while to the one who acts badly the god gives success in all things, an escape from his folly. Solon F13 (trans. D. Gerber 1999) Archaic pessimism as represented by Solon reflects acceptance of the fragility of human fortune and the apparent injustice of outcomes of which the gods are explicitly the cause.33 Probably influenced by fragments of Solon’s poetry, Herodotus tells a story in which Solon expresses similar sentiments, arguing to Croesus that Tellus and then Cleobis and Biton are the most fortunate because they died happy and honoured, while equivalent (but alive) men like Croesus have time to fall from grace before they die: an observation that proves prescient, as Croesus is shortly defeated by Cyrus and dethroned.34 Harrison has argued that such Solonian wisdom in Herodotus is a reflection of common thought in the Archaic period: ‘observations such as that “no man is happy until he is dead”, that divine jealousy disturbs human affairs, human fortune is inevitably mixed, or that “death is better than life” are myriad, especially in archaic poetry or tragedy, though they find their reflections also in preSocratic philosophy’.35 This sort of pessimism was part of a shared body of repeated ideas exchanged across archaic elegy, such as in the Theognidea:36

Theology 77 Dear Zeus, I’m quite surprised at you. You’re king of all, the honour and power is yours alone; you understand the heart and mind of each man, and yours, Lord, is the highest majesty. So how can you, son of Cronos, bring yourself to treat alike wrongdoers and the law-abiding man, whether we are disposed to sensible restraint or err towards unrighteousness, injustice, and crime? Are there no divine guidelines for mortal men, no path to follow that will appease the gods? Theognis 373–82 (trans. West 1999b). The poet must appeal to Zeus directly for dikē: as elsewhere in the Theognidea, Zeus is the basis for retributive justice, and he must wait for this to be enforced.37 He does not offer a solution: though there are answers to the problem of divine injustice elsewhere in the Theognidea (such as ancestral fault in Thgn. 197–208), here the question is despairingly left open. This is classic archaic pessimism: the gods are powerful and capable, but they allow or even cause injustices to occur in the mortal realm, which is outrageous to the poet. Though Lloyd-Jones was entirely correct in his observation that Greeks ‘would not have thought it reasonable to expect Zeus to have their own interests at heart in preference to his own’, he is wrong to suggest that the Greeks did not rail against the injustices (or lack of care for cosmic justice) perpetrated on them by the gods.38 The idea of the primary dispensation of divine justice through the sporadic lightning bolts and plagues of angry gods was enduring but never sufficiently persuasive as an explanation of the administration of divine justice in the Greek world. It continued to fuel a sceptical tradition parodied even by the parody Socrates in Aristophanes’ Clouds: Strepsiades:

Socrates:

But now explain this: where does the lightning bolt come from, blazing with fire, that incinerates us on contact and badly burns the survivors? It’s quite obvious that Zeus hurls it against perjurers. How’s that, you moron, you Croniant,39 you mooncalf! If he really strikes perjurers, then why hasn’t he burned up Simon or Cleonymus or Theorus, since they’re paramount perjurers? On the other hand, he strikes his own temple, and Sunium headland of Athens, and the great oaks. What’s his point? An oak tree certainly doesn’t perjure itself! Aristophanes Clouds 394–403 (trans. Henderson 1998, amended)

Aristophanes’ Socrates argues in the Clouds that the gods do not exist because ‘Simon the Sophist’, Cleonymus, and Theorus were not punished by

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the gods for their impious behaviour and oath-breaking, which is traditionally associated with divine vengeance, and because of the pointlessness of Zeus attacking oak trees which were sacred to him.40 That Aristophanes makes the problem of divine injustice a central component of Socrates’ package of atheism shows that he recognised that his audience would find it a most believable motivation for disbelief. Although Aristophanes clearly intended to provoke serious thought in his audience, part of the parody of Socrates here is in his primitive strawman of Greek theology, exposing and laughing at contemporary philosophical pretensions, and there are obvious replies to Socrates’ argument that are not given because of the stupidity of the protagonist Strepsiades.41 Embedded within despairing archaic pessimism was a recognition of inherent instability of fortune; that people suffered misfortune and fortune in mixed proportions during their life, and each could come at any time.42 This obvious truism was elevated to gnomic wisdom, found in the works of Homer, Theognis, Bacchylides, Simonides, Pindar, and many others, allowing them to explain the apparent failure of the gods to protect the fortunes of the just and punish the unjust, without blaming specific gods.43 These gnomai could be put to completely different uses over time, which could range from despairing outrage at the gods to eager theodicies.44 Archilochus, the mid-seventh-century Greek lyric poet, demonstrates this clearly, in a way typical of his no-nonsense attitude:45 It all depends upon the gods. Often enough, when men are prostrate on the ground with woe, they set them up again; and often enough, when men are standing proud and all seems bright, they tip them over on their backs, and then they’re in a plight – a man goes wandering, short of bread, out of his mind with fright. Archilochus F130 (trans. West 1999b) Fortune was inherently fickle: the fortunes of men were made and broken easily and quickly, and Archilochus was resigned to powerlessness at the hands of the gods.46 This might appear to be a kind of hopeless cynicism which would be surprising for a poet strongly associated with local cultic traditions, who composed poetry for one of the more significant cults of Demeter and traditionally associated with the introduction of the cult of Dionysus.47 In fact, this sort of view is both a criticism of earlier conceptions of the gods and a potential solution to the problem, and it echoes the proem of Hesiod’s Works and Days and a range of other works.48 Reversals of fortune draw on Homeric concepts of tlemosyne, endurance, and offered a way of explaining and understanding the universe, including natural injustice, while sustaining the existence and participation of the gods in human affairs; they were ‘a way of making sense of experience’.49 Positing the fickleness of fate and the possibility of reversals of fortune involved limiting the power of the gods and disconnected them by degrees from the enforcement of justice.

Theology 79 Reversals of fortune were used to relieve the gods of fault for divine injustice with appeal to cosmic principles, but the gods could not be entirely written out of responsibility and were still commonly blamed for them. Reversals are one of the key narrative features of Herodotus’ Histories: an archaic theodicy that fits his subject matter and, in some ways, his often observed ‘archaic style’.50 The sixth-century Samian tyrant Polycrates is told by Amasis to throw away his most prized possession, a ring, to protect himself from the phthonos, or envy, of the gods, but the ring is returned to him: a sign that his fate cannot be averted, eventually culminating in his assassination.51 Reversals feature especially in Herodotus’ Croesus logoi, with Solon’s tales of reversals and Croesus’ eventual fall from power, after which Croesus blames the ‘God of Delphi’ for his fate:52 ‘When I launched the invasion, however, it was with the full encouragement of the god of the Greeks – so the ultimate blame, I suppose, should lie with him. For would I otherwise ever have been so foolish as to choose war over peace? In peacetime it is sons who bury their fathers – but in times of war, it is fathers who bury their sons. Somewhere in the heavens there is someone smiling at what has happened’. […] [T]he Pythia, it is said, had a ready retort. ‘Not even a god can evade what fate has preordained. Five generations ago, an ancestor of Croesus, a man who at the time was a guard sworn to the personal protection of the Heraclids, succumbed to the seductions of a woman’s treachery, killed his master and stole his throne, an honour to which he had no claim – and now it is Croesus who has paid the debt on that crime. The truth is that Apollo was keen to see Sardis suffer her downfall in the time of Croesus’ sons, rather than during the reign of Croesus himself – but the Fates would not be gainsaid. Nevertheless, what little they would allow, the god did secure on Croesus’ behalf. The fall of Sardis was delayed by three whole years – and so you should be sure to inform Croesus that he has had three years more of freedom than was originally his lot. Secondly – did the god not come to his rescue when he was on the verge of being burned to ashes?’ Herodotus Histories 1.87, 1.91 (trans. Holland 2014) Herodotus spins a variety of explanations into his narrative: Croesus paid for the sins of his ancestor as a consequence of Fate and was not punished by Apollo who had tried to reward Croesus for his piety and justice but is bound by Fate.53 But it is presented as reasonable for Croesus to blame the gods and Apollo’s self-defence involves emphasising his own relative powerlessness rather than any real claim that the result is just or fair. Often, instead of blaming a specific named god, Herodotus turns to ‘necessity’, to ‘reversals of fortune’, or to phthonos, but he also uses vague mentions of divinity – to theion, the divine, daimoniē tis hormē, ‘some divine impulse’, or ho theos, ‘the god’.54 This vagueness in blaming gods for misfortune is quite similar to the process observed by Evans-Pritchard, in

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which the Azande were careful to understand specific misfortune as explained by the supernatural, but not misfortune in general.55 Herodotus is much happier to identify specific gods who were responsible for fortunate events. For instance, the Greeks dedicated the plunder of the Persian wars to specific gods: Delphic Apollo, Olympian Zeus, and Isthmian Poseidon, in recognition of their aid in giving the Greeks victory.56 This kind of reluctance to name the gods as responsible for misfortune was common in Greek religious practice.57 Tragic poets sometimes had their characters blame individual gods, but there was still a reluctance to attribute misfortune to the gods. Where divine forces were named as responsible for misfortune in the Persians, they were typically those who had roles or associations in justice, cosmic order, or misfortune; particularly daimones, sometimes called a lower order of spirits but often less specifically to divine forces.58 This is common in Greek prose: in instances of positive association specific gods are named, or where the specific identity of the god is unclear ‘tis theos’ (some god) is referenced, typically as the source of visions and oracles and changes in fate more generally, and in instances of negative association (e.g. misfortune, injustice, or suffering), they refer to ‘daimōn’, as part of a distancing strategy.59 At one point in the Persae, the chorus bemoans the ‘grievous deity’, referring to the source of the cruel disaster that has occurred, yet just a few lines later prayers are addressed not to the daimōn but the gods: Chorus: Queen:

O grievous deity (dusponēte daimōn), you have leapt and stamped on the entire Persian race too heavily! Oi, what misery the destruction of the army brings me! O nocturnal vision, appearing to me in dreams, how very truly you revealed to me our tribulations! But you, friends, judged them to be of too little account. However, since your words ordained it, I want nevertheless first to make prayers to the gods. Then I shall come, after fetching gifts for Earth and the dead, a libation from my palace. Aeschylus Persians 515–24 (trans. Hall 1997)

It is possible that two distinct entities are being referred to here: the gods and daimones, though Aeschylus does not make this explicit. More generally, the passage reflects a custom of attributing good things to the gods explicitly, while giving an air of vagueness as to the specific supernatural source of bad things.60 This deferred but did not solve the problem of divine injustice, and, in fact, elsewhere in the Persians (294) troubles are still ‘god given’.61 But attributing good things to gods is not to attribute them a necessary formal role in dispensing justice: in Plato, for instance, the gods are worthy of worship and good, but they have little ethical role or responsibility; this is the domain of the Forms.62 Especially with the increasing association of goodness and divine beings under Plato, it became more common to also excuse

Theology 81 evil in spirits, a defence best represented by an anonymous character in a fragment of an unnamed play by Menander, the most famous author of New Comedy in the fourth century, who was then followed by the later Stoic writers:63 To every man is assigned at birth a good spirit (agathos daimōn); a guide to virtue, through the mysteries of life. We should not believe that the spirit is evil and can harm our lives; he is good, and there is no evil in him. Every god must be good. Menander F714 Sandbach (trans. Luck 2006, amended) The unwillingness of Menander’s character to accept any evil divine agents was perhaps an inevitable evolution: as more superhuman agents were introduced to explain misfortune, their importance was elevated and they were excused of causing misfortune.64 A later comment attached to this fragment of Menander by Julian of Halicarnassus captures one potential explanation: that bad people blame the gods for their own mismanagement of their lives; misfortune is really human responsibility.65 There were many forms of theodicies that shifted the responsibility for justice onto humans. In what has been called the ‘first attempt at a theodicy’, at the opening of the Odyssey Zeus argues that humans have responsibility for justice, and must be just to avoid destruction; injustice occurs where humans abrogated that responsibility:66 It’s astonishing how ready mortals are to blame the gods. It is from us, they say, that evils come, but they themselves, by their own reckless stupidity, have sufferings beyond their fated share. Homer Odyssey 1.32–4 (trans. Gagné 2013) The relationship between the gods and moira, fate, is as Eidinow labels it ‘vexing’.67 The strength of Zeus’ argument is any blame directed at the gods could, in any individual scenario, be defused by deflecting the blame to the victim (or their enemies), which served to evade the problem of divine injustice.68 This represents an evolution of a similar passage in the Iliad 16.384–90: As underneath the hurricane all the black earth is burdened on an autumn day, when Zeus sends down the most violent waters in deep rage against mortals after they stir him to anger because in violent assembly they pass decrees that are crooked, and drive righteousness from among them and care nothing for what the gods think. Homer Iliad 16.384–90 (trans. Lattimore 2011) Both of these passages involve a component of direct divine justice, but they also placed partial responsibility for justice and injustice in the hands of

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humans, which remained a popular answer to the problem of divine injustice for centuries.69 In Homer and Hesiod, humans suffer as a result of a combination of ‘their fated share’, divine punishment, and human injustices. Solon evolves this view, with justice elevated to a layer of divine necessity rather than the will of Zeus, and humans ultimately responsible for injustice and justice:70 As from a cloud comes the force of snow and hail; and from a flash of lightning, thunder; from powerful men comes a city’s destruction, and through ignorance the masses fall enslaved to a tyrant. If they raise a man too high, it’s not easy to restrain him afterwards. Solon F9.1–4 (trans. Gerber 1999, amended) When human justice is corrupted, this leads to indiscriminate punishment for the entire city.71 Solon’s conception of cause here may seem naturalistic, as Vlastos has argued, but as we have seen, Solon considered the cause of these unpredictable natural disasters to be divine, which he contrasts with preventable causes of human injustice.72 The precise mechanisms for humancaused injustices were conspicuously vague, as in Theognis: Everything here has gone to the dogs and to ruin, Cyrnus, and we can’t hold any of the blessed immortal gods responsible. It’s the violence of men, their base gains and insolence that have cast us from prosperity into misery. Theognis 833–836 (trans. Gerber/West 1999b) Theognis does not offer any insight into how humans have thwarted the divine desire for justice. He simply asserts the responsibility is human, in implied response to blaming the gods for injustice: a reflection of generalised discontent with human society and the inability of humans to sustain just societies.73 Theognis also does not explain why the gods are prepared to allow this injustice, despite their ability to do so: as Versnel has argued, the capability and power of the gods is not questioned in Theognis.74 The idea that humans, and not gods, were responsible for injustice survived well into the fifth century, as the philosopher Democritus argued: The gods have given all good things to men both in times of old and now. But things that are bad, harmful, and unprofitable, these the gods have not conferred on men in times of old or now, but men bring them on themselves through blindness of mind and ignorance. Democritus DK68B175 (trans. Graham 2010) Democritus placed a clear and explicit distinction between the good things, which were from the gods, and the bad, which were due to humans. He does not offer any explanation of natural disasters, or other natural injustices, which were theologically problematic even for Homer, instead blaming this

Theology 83 on the limits in the human ability to know; a critique that he very extensively develops elsewhere (unknowability is considered in Chapter 5).75 The idea that humans themselves were responsible for injustice had evolved between the sixth and fourth centuries; dispensing divine justice became understood as the responsibility of the polis, in particular through the law courts. The process of proactive engagement with the dispensation of justice can be traced back to Solon at least: through his attempt to establish a stabler law and constitution as Athenian archōn, Solon practised establishing control over a causality of justice, working on specific solutions to concrete problems, and tracing the boundaries between established human culpability and divine dikē.76 As such he departed from other pessimistic poets, such as Theognis, for whom there was no independent basis for the application of divine justice like Solon’s law code.77 The Eumenides has often been seen as a transitional point in an evolution from divine to human justice.78 It is, in fact, part of this older tradition: the central point of the play was the reconciliation of divine and human conceptions of justice through a ‘divine and mortal partnership’ in which the execution of divine justice took place through the system of state justice that reinforced civic relationships in defiance of clever rhetorical arguments.79 However, bringing the dispensation of divine justice into the human realm risked relegating the gods to irrelevant, instrumental, or abstract figures in the system of justice. The consequences of this theodicy are starkly portrayed in the Sisyphus fragment, an imagined speech by the mythical figure Sisyphus from a late fifth-century tragic or satyr play (the context and background of which is considered more fully in the previous chapter). Contrary to insistence that it is ‘not a theological tract’ and it was intellectually ‘marginal’ to contemporary philosophical discourse in Athens, this is a theologically rich fragment that represents complex engagement with discourses on divine justice.80 Here the core component of the execution of justice is built on a human nature that is not essentially bad, combined with human laws designed to create a system of justice.81 Imagined divine involvement is relegated to filling the gaps beyond human reach:82 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, even if in secret they should do or say or think anything. Critias Sisyphus F25, in Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. 9.54 (trans. Whitmarsh 2014) The shift of responsibility for divine justice into the human domain was such a serious theological problem, much debated in Athens, that here it is

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existential, with Sisyphus arguing that belief in the gods was invented by humans to control lawlessness.83 Hence he introduced the Divine; the idea that there is a deity flourishing with immortal life, hearing in his mind, seeing, thinking, and attending to these things and having a divine nature […] Such were the fears he set up around humans, by which he both established the deity well with his speech, in an appropriate place, and extinguished lawlessness with his laws. Thus I think did someone persuade mortals to believe that there is a race of deities. Critias Sisyphus F25 (trans. Whitmarsh 2014, amended) The fragment responds to Hesiodic theodicies, with its references to unjust animal nature, promethean role in establishing the arts, and the role of the gods in deterrence from injustice: indeed the ‘human’ who invented the gods may even be Hesiod, the poet who first positioned the gods as instrumental to human justice.84 It is also in dialogue with a range of philosophical explorations of the origins of religious belief out of justice and law in Prodicus, Democritus, Plato (especially his ‘noble lie’), and others.85 Another difficult consequence of perceiving human justice as enforcement of divine justice is that it could be tested, and, since human justice is not reliably just, this could also be used to argue that the gods did not exist. This was the idea that Euripides put in the mouth of one of his characters, most likely Bellerophon, from a fragment of his play of the same name:86 Does then anyone say there are gods in heaven? There are not, there are not (ouk eisin, ouk eis), if a man is willing not to give foolish credence to the ancient story. Consider for yourselves, don’t form an opinion on the basis of my words! I say that tyranny kills very many men and deprives them of possessions, and that tyrants break oaths in sacking cities; and in doing this they prosper more than those who day by day quietly practise piety. I know too of small cities honouring the gods which are subject to greater, more impious ones because they are dominated by more numerous arms. Euripides Bellerophon F286 (trans. Collard and Cropp 2008) In a sophisticated, concise argument that builds on and subverts contemporary critiques of traditional stories about the gods as in Plato’s Republic (2.377–8e), just as the character clearly built on notions of reversal of fortune, Bellerophon pits conventional conceptions of human expectations and criteria for justice against the belief that gods are just and concludes that since injustice is apparent there can be no gods.87 As Walter Burkert once observed, the testing of divine efficacy is a route to atheism:88 … only an atheist will demand statistical proof that pious action is successful; to test this by experiment was a risk no one could bear. Thus it

Theology 85 was found unthinkable to try to overcome any major crisis without religion, and a successful outcome was readily accepted as the good gifts of the gods that confirm the value of piety. But any theodicy that rests on the application of human justice lends itself to testing, even if this was impious, especially for those in the Platonic tradition of good gods, or who considered responsibility for injustice to be human.89 By the late fifth century, then, the effective enforcement of civic justice had become a theological necessity, with existential stakes, and a tool for the demonstration of belief in the gods and their system of justice. In a Lysian fragment of Against Cinesias, the orator argues that Cinesias, a well-known poet ridiculed for atheism by Aristophanes, is the ‘most impious, lawless person alive’.90 Although his friends all died by divine justice as a result of their impiety, the orator argued, Cinesias had been forced to live with the misery of his life and destruction of his legacy: this is used to emphasise the power and continued responsibility of the community to make Cinesias’s life unpleasant.91 A similar case was made against Andocides in 400 or 399BC. An orator in the tradition of Lysias argued that while it might surprise the jurors that the impious atheist Andocides travelled safely on the sea (a dangerous domain in which survival relied on the goodwill of the gods), the gods were, in fact, still in the process of bringing retributive justice upon him via human justice:92 Andocides has made it clear to the Greeks that he does not believe in the gods (theous ou nomizei). He became involved in ship owning and traveled by sea – not because he was afraid of what he had done but because he was shameless. But god brought him back, so that he could come to the scene of his crimes and pay the penalty at my instigation. I predict that he will indeed pay the penalty, and that would in no way surprise me. God does not punish instantaneously; that sort of justice is characteristic of humans. I find evidence for this in many places: I see others who have committed impiety and have paid the penalty much later, and their children paying the penalty for the crimes of their ancestors. In the meantime god sends much fear and danger to the criminals, so that many of them are keen to die prematurely and be rid of their sufferings. In the end, god imposes an end on their life, after ruining it in this way. Lysias 6.19–20 (trans. Todd 2000) The gods were engaged in several layers of applied justice here: tormenting Andocides during his life, then punishing him with death (at an unknown point), and finally tormenting and punishing his ancestors. This idea of justice that is delayed to a later point also features in Against Cinesias, where the orator observes that it might be expected Cinesias’ punishment would be reserved for his children.93 Lysias was drawing on a much older tradition of delayed justice. This idea appears in Solon, for instance:

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Theology But one man pays the penalty at once, another later, and if they themselves escape the penalty and the pursuing destiny of the gods does not overtake them, it assuredly comes at another time; the innocent pay the penalty, either their children or a later progeny. Solon F13 (trans. Gerber 1999)

Solon gives two separate explanations for how justice is actually dispensed: that justice can be delayed until a later time in the lifetime of the wrongdoer, or until later generations. Consequently, Solon argues, men only think that injustice is occurring because of their limited knowledge of the way the world works, but in fact the gods do punish injustice in a variety of ways, even though they might not be immediately apparent. Tragedy allowed for particularly good exposition of the principle of delayed justice through dramatic irony, as the audience were aware of divine machinations that the characters were not. So, for instance, in both Aeschylus (Eumenides) and Euripides (Orestes), Orestes, who killed his mother (an injustice, despite its obvious justification), is not immediately brought to justice. Instead, Orestes suffers over the long term: the audience know that Orestes is tormented by madness, guilt, and the Erinyes. Similarly, in Trachiniae, Hyllus the son of Heracles blames the gods for the injustice of Heracles’ suffering because he is not aware (unlike the audience) that Heracles would be deified on his death.94 The dispensation of justice is delayed and invisible to the characters in each case. These represent fundamentally different and much more effective types of theodicy than the others. Unlike explanations that involve the appraisal of various aspects of the gods’ responsibility for injustice, they involve sustaining that the problem does not exist at all, and so strictly step outside of the realm of ‘theology’. The main formulation of the idea of delayed justice was in ancestral fault (progonikon hamartēma), collective social guilt, or responsibility for violent actions of the past, which was probably the most effective solution to the problem of divine justice.95 It is referenced in a huge variety of contexts and genres in the Greek world, from epic and tragic to legal, historical, or rhetorical contexts, and across time: an idea powerfully present in Homer that retained its relevance until long after the end of the Classical period.96 Ancestral fault was more than just a literary topos referenced in occasional texts and cultural artefacts. The Mysteries of Eleusis, the second of Demeter’s gifts to mankind, offered the hope of a better afterlife so that, by using the rites as a kind of cure, the initiated would be purified.97 (Beyond this, it is generally held that there was very little belief in reward or punishment in the afterlife in Greece until after the fifth century.)98 Burkert traced this process to the need for freedom from an ‘ancient cause of wrath’, which generated the need to purify the initiated from this- and other-worldly misfortune.99 So the need to escape ancestral fault was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Ancestral fault principally served as a buffer against the natural injustice of the human experience (a ‘problem of evil’), as a catch-all explanation in

Theology 87 response to potential accusations of injustice, and how this could cohere with powerful, guiding, and just gods.100 It offered a clever explanation for why good people were seemingly afflicted with unfortunate circumstances, and why bad people were allowed to do bad things with no apparent retribution; indeed, misfortune for one person could even be perceived as an omen for another person, or part of their punishment.101 The potential explanatory possibilities of ancestral fault were endless, which is part of why the idea of ancestral fault has been so powerful, pervasive, and long-lived. Hidden and delayed justice allowed Greeks to explain radically different types of events across time, even after-the-fact. Identification after the fact was crucial because it allowed Greeks to explain an apparently unjust event, apply various explanations to identify the cause of the event, and reinterpret the apparently unjust event as part of a cosmic system of coherent divine justice. In this way the notion of delayed justice was self-proving: those who survived confirmed their own piety and the justice of the gods in rewarding it, whereas the death of an impious person could always be interpreted as divine punishment.102 Delayed justice could also predict into the future; for instance, Herodotus says in commenting on the Athenian abuse of the Persian ambassadors from Darius:103 Just what disagreeable consequences were suffered by the Athenians for this treatment of the king’s messengers, I am unable to say; perhaps it was the destruction of their city and the countryside around it – though I do not myself believe this happened as a direct result of their crime. Herodotus Histories 7.133 (trans. De Selincourt 2003) Extended explanations across time, place, and person allowed the assumption or claim of divine justice for a pious or impious act even when the punishment or reward was not apparent to the observer. It became a nonspecific predictive system, taking advantage of survivorship bias. When Walter Burkert observed, as quoted above, that ‘only an atheist will demand statistical proof that pious action is successful’, he must have had in mind the anecdote told of Diagoras, the famous atheist from Melos, whose reply to a bystander astonished at the votive offerings in Samothrace was that ‘there would have been far more, if those who were not saved had set up offerings’.104 Regarding their relative fortune and misfortune, those who survived catastrophic or potentially dangerous situations were inevitably much more vocal than those who did not. To a greater degree this made systems of delayed justice unfalsifiable, with multiple possible explanations for how justice could be, or was being, achieved. Delayed fortune is an example of a ‘block to falsifiability’,105 an idea originally proposed by nineteenth-century anthropologist E. B. Tylor to explain the persistence of magical practices, and since developed by fellow anthropologist Evans-Pritchard through the entire span of magical beliefs, and finally to all generalising systems of thought.106 Tylor proposed blocks to

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falsifiability in order to explain what he considered a central question of belief: why do ‘honest but unscientific people’ go on ‘practising occult science in good faith’.107 Tylor gives many examples of blocks to falsifiability, including the indefiniteness, in time, place (and other details) of predictions; the recognition of successes versus the lack of impact of failures, usually ascribed to improper procedure during the rite or some other human failing; the self-fulfilling power of prophecies; and the combination of magical practices with techniques that do predictably bring about the appropriate results.108 In a similar vein, Evans-Pritchard offered 22 reasons why the Azande failed to comprehend the falsity of their beliefs.109 As Skorupski has argued, each of these 22 reasons ‘describes a way in which facts and theories lose their potential for coming into direct opposition’.110 In studies of Greek religion, ‘blocks to falsifiability’ have also been known as ‘let-out clauses’, and these have been particularly analysed for their ability to protect ideas against testing theology.111 In his ‘Greek States and Greek Oracles’ Robert Parker examined how divination and oracular pronouncements had evolved to include a variety of ‘let-out clauses’ and built-in explanations, to offer authoritative and accurate advice to believers and to protect the oracles from potential criticism.112 Greeks could be suspicious and sceptical of oracles, as Herodotus’ story of Croesus’ testing of the oracles of Delphi and Amphiaraus reveals.113 But as Thucydides astutely and candidly observes following his description of the plague in Athens, oracles could never really be disproved: The Athenians were afflicted by all the weight of suffering, with people dying inside and the land plundered outside. During the misfortunes, as was natural, they also remembered the following verse, the old men claiming that long ago it was recited: ‘A Dorian war will come, and with it plague’. Now there was the contention among people that those of old did not use the word ‘plague’ [loimos] in the verse but ‘famine’, [limos] but under the circumstances, the opinion naturally prevailed that plague was mentioned; men shaped their memories in accordance with what they experienced. And yet, I suppose, if another Dorian war breaks out after this one, and it happens there is famine, they will probably recite accordingly. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 2.54 (trans. Lattimore 1998) Oracles could not ever be entirely disproven, not just because the divine message was ‘negotiable’ or they maintained the ability to re-evaluate in hindsight.114 People were ‘temperamentally disposed’ to believe them: oracles could manage the expectations of consultants in various ways, like setting basic limits to the suitable forms of question and answer, as seems to be the case for many of the oracles recorded in literature.115 But as is clear from the remaining tablets at Dodona, at least, most of the questions asked there were basic and answered simply with a yes or no, or one of two choices.116 Priestesses were

Theology 89 likely politically informed and skilled at psychological techniques, allowing them to predict the answer that the asker wanted: on the whole oracles probably offered relatively reliable advice.117 Not limiting oracles to specifics like time, place, or single applications, combined with the use of hindsight, created a powerful set of blocks to falsifiability. Negative results from obeying even these simple oracular answers could be explained as the consequence of a bad question, the asker wanting to know too much, the lesser of two potential evils, angry or mischievous gods, that the right result had not come about yet, or even that the oracle had been corrupted.118 The offering of multiple, consecutive theodicies to explain an apparent example of injustice is what John Gould has called ‘luxuriant multiplicity’, often expressed through gnomai, or a ‘summing up of human experience’.119 Luxuriant multiplicity was reactive: it was especially useful when faced with situations of apparent injustice or challenge, or fractious theological difficulties; in the case of the Lysian orators, from the difficulty in sustaining that impious men could live with apparent lack of punishment. In a sense, the use of luxuriant multiplicity reflects situations in which there is no single, cohesive, and decisive answer. As Gould observed:120 [W]e are not dealing with the sort of unified and structured set of ideas that we are entitled to call a theory, but rather with a set of metaphors of very different implications, […] the different explanatory generalizations, each containing a truth, which though each pretending to give a general explanation, when juxtaposed in one context, may provide contrasting and even mutually exclusive ‘solutions’. These sets of solutions did not provide a single coherent answer, or a set of cohesive beliefs, but offered an assortment of different causal explanations, or solutions, any combination of which might be applied simultaneously as solutions to a potential theological problem or answers to a situation.121 The believer had a collection of these unfalsifiable let-out clauses from which (s)he could select, combine, or interpret at will. As Versnel demonstrated, different ‘let-out clauses’ might even conflict:122 [When] confronted with unaccountable, in particular catastrophic events, (many) Greeks of the archaic period seem to have shared one general feeling more than any other: that there is not one universal and monolithic principle of causation, or if there is, that no single definition would suffice in a world of great complexity. Many texts, from Homer down to the Classical period, serenely juxtapose two pictures of divine causation which – in our eyes – are incompatible: the one of seemingly amoral, arbitrary meddling, the other of moral and just intervention. In the texts which I have in mind, the two visions are not differentiated in terms of sharp boundaries, nor reconciled in an intellectually satisfying coherent system. It is my view that this picture of multiple causality must

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These conflicts were understood as particular nuggets of wisdom that might apply to specific situations to varying degrees, backed up by the underlying idea that the divine world and order was ultimately unknowable (explored in the next chapter). In 1996 Robert Parker issued a call to arms for scholars of Greek atheism, arguing that we need to distinguish between attacks from within and without in Greek religion:123 We need to ask what in all this was truly threatening or ‘impious’; what constituted an attack from without rather than from within the traditional religious framework, that loose and accommodating structure within which certain forms of doubt, criticism, and revision were, in fact, traditional. These distinctions have been enduring: more recent discussions have categorised the kinds of critiques discussed here and in the next chapter as ‘internal modifications’ that were part of an ‘essentially theological enterprise’.124 Hopefully this chapter has demonstrated why successful analyses of belief and unbelief along these lines have not been forthcoming: the distinction is, broadly, artificial and restrictive, flattening a much broader discourse into religious or theological tinkering. In fact, Parker’s description a year later of Greek religion as ‘a jostling mass of competing beliefs and values and interpretations and uncertainties’ serves equally well to describe this set of discourses.125 The most pious Greeks could sample or espouse some starkly sceptical ideas, whether as underlying earnest despair, context to their theological innovations, potential explanations for phenomena, part of a developed and protected theology, or a record or discussion of common ideas. Many of the ideas traced here that undermined the justice or existence of the gods were documented or espoused by individuals who appear to have believed in relatively well-defined deities. These were both ‘radical’ and ‘traditional’ discourses, upending alternative conceptions of the gods, or returning to older ones: a radicalism enabled by the fundamental flexibility of non-dogmatic religion. Keen criticism, not uncommonly atheistic in nature, was built on the same ideas and theories about the gods and part of the same discourses as the sharpest theological innovations. As a result, these ideas contribute to a pool that provides an invaluable record of philosophies of atheism, whether or not they are atheistic in themselves. This allowed for, in Skorupski’s words, a ‘received core of beliefs coexisting with localised scepticism on the one hand and idiosyncratic speculative elaborations of a metaphysical or cosmological kind on the other’.126 So, both sides of a critical exchange – articulation of and response to criticism – could even take place in the mind (or work) of a

Theology 91 single individual. The process of evolution in Greek theology, in discourse with sceptical and atheistic philosophies readily espoused throughout the centuries, was the enduring strength of Greek religion: its flexibility. As Carabine has argued, ‘it would be a mistake to suppose that from the time of Xenophanes on there was a heightening of critical powers concerning the nature of the gods’.127 From the earliest records, the Greek theological world was fundamentally improvisatory, active, open, and robust, as a consequence of a healthy sceptical tradition that allowed for the deployment of shared ideas and discourses in service of arguments that could support a range of philosophies including atheistic ones.128 In this chapter I have attempted to trace atheism through discourses of theology and theodicy: this is how the Greeks ‘coped with their gods’.129 Divine justice was a problem for Greek belief in the gods from the earliest texts and continued to be the subject of active theological innovation throughout the heyday of Greek polytheism. Without a rich tradition of criticism that could be sampled and responded to, most of the best theodicies and keenest defences of Greek theology would not have been possible. As such, Greek theology is not only indispensable to understanding Greek atheology and vice versa, it is part of the same conversation and environment. Any discussion of atheism that includes only the most overt (often abrasive or comic) portrayals, like that in Bellerophon or Clouds, can only be a very partial picture and too often leads scholars to treat these as exceptional or extreme examples of isolated atheism, or dismiss them as incompatible with a religious environment in which they were, in fact, invaluable, indispensable, and embedded. Notes 1 On Plato’s presentation of the sophists, see de Romilly 2002: 1–29, Waterfield 2005: 130–2, and for a more recent, nuanced view of Plato’s presentation of the sophists, see Cohen 2015, esp 15–37. 2 For an exploration of the appropriateness of theology in Greece, see Eidinow et al. 2016. 3 Guthrie 1977: 56. 4 Broader engagement: Allan 2000: 145. Jaeger 1946: 301–4 on Protagoras’ ‘humanistic’ theology, and also 321 on broader influences of the sophists. Also Sedley 2013a. 5 See also scholium on Plato’s Republic 600c (A3). 6 Discussed at length in Chapter 5. 7 Barnes 1982: 354 argues the passage adjured theology. As Balaban 1999: 279–80 argues, Protagoras’ philosophy is a systematising of relativism. 8 On Protagoras’ influence on Herodotus: Scullion 2006: 201, Burkert 1985: 131. How and Wells 1912 on 2.53 remark that chapter showcases ‘the ideas of an educated Greek in the fifth century’. 9 Boyer 2001. 10 Religion as minimally counterintuitive: Boyer 2001, Boyer and Ramble 2001, and cf. Sperber 1985: 85. More recently Porubanova-Norquist et al. 2013 in the other

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

Theology contexts; and Upal’s 2010 work differentiating between context-based and noncontext (content)-based minimal-counterintuitiveness. Apoll. Bibl. 3.14; Hdt 8.55; Ov. Met. 6.70–102; shorter allusions in Paus. 1.26.5–6; Xen. Mem. 3.5.10; Pl. Menex. 237c; Isoc. (Panath.) 12.193; Eur. Ion 1433–6, Tro. 799–803. McCauley 2011: 8–9, 105–17. Theology through stories: Kindt 2016: 13–14. Competing stories/theologies: Parker 1997: 145. Plato, Ap. 30e–31a. Marshall 2017: 163–74. Price 1999: 126 argued that scepticism was not based in responses to religious ideas because these religious ideas were not coherent. See Harrison 2007b: 133–4 for a response, arguing that lack of doctrine does not mean lack of coherence. Hunter 1985: 146. Allan 2006: 2. Allan argued the conception of amoral divine in the Iliad vs moral divine in the Odyssey is flawed. Literature like Homer and Hesiod is not created ex nihilo: they (and us with them) enter the scene at a time when theology and theodicy were already advanced. Lloyd-Jones 2002: 28ff. Poseidon reminds Apollo of their shared animosity to the Trojans: Hom. Il. 21.442–62. Story of building the wall: Hom. Il. 20.144–8. On this passage as generational punishment see Lloyd-Jones 2002: 2. Allan 2006: 6. Hom. Od. 14.83–4. Despair: Allan 2006: 27. Arguing Homer and Hesiod present the gods as punishing wrongdoing in life: Svavarsson 2020: 596, Lloyd 2018: 77. As Allan 2006: 27 argues: ‘The very structure of the Theogony expresses Zeus’ supremacy: the Muses sing the history of the cosmos culminating in the ascendancy of Zeus’. See also Thalmann 1984: 81–2. Hes. WD 42–7; cf. also 287–92, where he comments that the gods have placed aretē at the end of a long hard road; as Beall 2006: 168–70 argues, this is a persuasive technique, in which hubris is only less desirable because it is more of a burden on humans than dikē. Nelson 1998: 79–81. Penglase 1997: 201–2, on Hesiod’s theology as primarily stressing the power, authority, and supremacy of Zeus. On Zeus’ role as guarantor for justice, see Hes. WD 9, 225–47, 252–5, 267–9, 256–60; Strauss Clay 2016: 22–3. Semonides F1, trans. West. Versnel 2011: 151–5. Especially in the Cratylus. Havelock 1963: 221. See Allen 2013: 9–12 and Geach 2005: 24 on the Homeric and Hesiodic literalism of Euthyphro. ‘Banal religiosity’, in Edwards 2000: 213; the article is a useful defence of the complexity and depth of Euthyphro’s views; see also Geach 2005, which is more damning of Socrates’ arguments than Euthyphro’s ‘earnest belief’ (24), as is McPherran 2005, who argues that Euthyphro is ‘morally and theologically progressive’ (1). On the Derveni papyrus see Betegh 2004, Vassallo 2019. See also Kahn 1997 that the Derveni papyrus may have been authored by Euthyphro and represents at least the same ‘religious and intellectual milieu’. See Betegh 2004: 64 on authorship theories. Skorupski 1976: 199. Dover 1988 [1976]: 157. Cairns xi–xli and Versnel 2011: 155 on archaic pessimism. Eidinow 2011: 81–2.

Theology 93 34 Hdt 1.30–2. See Osborne 2009: 204 on the influence of Solon’s poetic fragments on this passage. 35 Harrison 2000: 40–1; full references for all of these are available in Harrison’s fns. 17–20, and vary from Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar through Aeschylus and Sophocles, to Xenophanes. 36 See also 743–6: ‘Again, how is it fair, lord of the deathless gods, that someone who keeps out of wrongfulness, guilty of no transgression and no perjury, a righteous man, suffers unrighteously?’ Eidinow 2011: 82–6. 37 Figueira and Nagy 1985: 68–74, Van Wees 2000: 59. 38 Lloyd-Jones 1971: 33. 39 Celebrant of a festival of Cronos, Zeus’ father; i.e. someone who is archaic or oldfashioned. 40 Shortly before this, in Ar. Cl. 367, Socrates argues the gods do not exist. See Dover 1968 on 396 and Sommerstein 1982 on 397 for reference to divine vengeance and oath-breaking; cf. Hesiod WD 281–9. 41 See Fisher 1988 on Aristophanes’ thought provoking approach (26–8), and his aim as exposing and mocking philosophical pretensions (23–6); that Aristophanes in the Clouds did not present the issue so seriously as to burn Socrates at the end of the play, as has been argued; see Davies 1990. Dover 1968 on 403 offers some natural replies to the problem Socrates poses. 42 Humans get mixed fortune: Theognis 167–8, 441–6, 1013–6, Bacchyl. F25, F54, Andoc. 2.5–6, Solon F14, Mimnermus F2, Simonides F526. 43 Reversals: ‘There is no evil which men cannot expect; and within a brief time god turns everything upside down’. Simonides F527, Theoph. Ad Autol. 2.37, trans. D. Campbell. See also Hom. Il. 24.527–51, Thgn. 155–8, 159–60, also, to a lesser extent, 1013–6, Bacchylides fr. 24, Isoc. 7.4, Pind. Isth. 5.52; Versnel 2011: 153–60. 44 Collins 2004, Gagné 2013: 251. 45 For a discussion of the frank tone of Archilochus and how it differs from his predecessors, as emphasised particularly by Jaeger, Snell, and Frankel, see Seidensticker 1978: 10–2. 46 Kirkwood 1974: 34–9. 47 Brown 1997: 45–7. 48 Fowler 1987: 23. Kahn 1973: 738, n.1 argues this fragment depends on Thg 121ff. 49 Eidinow 2016a: 232; see in general 222–32. On Homeric endurance see Kirkwood 1974: 36. 50 E.g. discussion of Herodotus’ archaic style in Johnson 1994: 251–4. 51 Polycrates: Hdt 3.39–43, 120–5. See Harrison 2000: 33–63 on reversals of fortune. 52 Croesus logoi: Hdt 1.30–89, esp. Herodotus’ judgement at 1.34.1. See also esp. the Xerxes dream narrative, 7.12–18, discussed in Eidinow 2011: 99. 53 How and Well 1912 on 1.91 observe the significance of this as an old fashioned component of Hdt’s theology. 54 To theion: Hdt. 1.32.1, 3.40.2; daimoniē tis hormē: 7.18.3; ho theos: 1.32.9, 7.10e, 7.18.3 (tou theou), 7.46.4; Mikalson 2003: 151–2. Mikalson 1983: 66 excludes references to ‘the gods’ as exceptions to the norm, but does not justify this. 55 Evans-Pritchard in Collins 2008: 12. 56 Greeks dedicated a large gold tripod with snake-stand at Delphi, a statue of Zeus at Olympia and of Poseidon at the Isthmus, in Hdt 9.81.1; and the Poenician warships captured at Salamis, in Hdt 8.121. Mikalson 2005: 16. 57 This is one of the best explanations for Thucydides largely ignoring the gods, which is often read as ‘scandalous’, e.g. in Hornblower 1992: 170. In Thucydides theologically driven principles like reversals of fortune still apply, but because the History is such a consistently bleak work, with humans still largely miserable,

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60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72 73

Theology suffering, creatures (see Hornblower 2009: 64–5), it was perhaps easier to avoid mentioning them than risk blaming them. A similar line of argument is followed by Pownall about Xenophon’s muted divine presence in the Hellenica; discussed in Pownall 1998: 251–77. Indeed, Xenophon might have taken his lead from Thucydides in this, given the connection between the two works. For a discussion of justice and civic religion, and the attempt to explain suffering as human anomie with the implied backdrop of divine punishment in Thucydides, see Nielson 1996: 397–407. The lower orders of spirits: Hesiod WD 109–93. Luck 2006: 228. ‘theos tis’ can also be used when talking about human suffering and reversals, e.g. Aesch. Pers. 294, Hall 1996 on 158; Mikalson 2003: 131. In Herodotus it is Greek behaviour for Croesus to attribute evil to a daimōn (1.87.4); Mikalson 2003: 163. An interesting case is in Pers. 346: Hall 1996 argues the daimōn destroying the Persian fleet referred to in 345 was meant to be understood as Zeus, but the Persians use nonspecific daimōn to refer to a deity destructive to them, and switch to theoi in 346 to refer to divine protection of Athens. Eidinow 2011: 45 argues that daimones were commonly but inconsistently given negative associations (esp. in Homer). As Hall 1996 observes on 158, ‘the Persians in this play speak with remarkable frequency of an indefinite and unnamed dainn with malevolent intent towards them refer to unnamed daimōn’. It was common to reference nonspecific bad daimones, e.g. Mikalson 1983: 19, 59–60. Hall 1996: 121, on 158. See Carabine 1995: 19 and McPherran 2013: 201–3. Eidinow 2011: 44–5 on ambiguous definition of daimōn; Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 378 on Ep. 1091ff. See Gomme and Sandbach 2003 [1973]: 718 on F714: men are responsible either due to their wickedness or foolishness. Jul. Hal., Job 126 R.21–126 V.4 in Usener 1900: 334. The fragment includes F714 Sandbach [F550–1 Kock], in Clem. Al. Strom. 5.14.130, partially recorded in Plut. De Tranq. Anim. 474B6. Nestle 1975 [1941]: 24: ‘älteste Versuch einer Theodizee’. Cf. Jaeger 1974: 86: ‘Diese Theodizee schwebt uber dem ganzen Gedicht’, rendered less precisely by the English edition as ‘The entire poem is filled with the same purpose – to justify the ways of God to man’, 1946: 54. See Versnel 2011: 156–7. Justice to avoid destruction: Strauss Clay 2016: 21–2. Eidinow 2011: 32. For a discussion of fate as ‘moira’, see Eidinow 2011: 30–41. Eidinow 2011: 32–3. Ashforth 2005: 96 from Eidinow 2007: 191: ‘I have yet to encounter anyone who accepts that his own poverty is inherently meaningless, that it represents nothing more significant than his own personal misery … to questions about the inequitable distribution of good and bad fortunes, other answers are readily available’. Suppositions informed by the witchcraft paradigm offer one of the most emotionally satisfying: ‘We are being held back and are suffering because of other people’s malice’. Note that the problem of injustice, as Burnyeat 1997: 233–4 calls the sort of question posed in the Euthyphro, is different from the problem of evil: the former is about justice and the latter goodness. Lewis 2006: 55, Blaise 2006: 116 argues that this view is opposed to Hesiod, rather than an evolution of the kind of position represented by Hesiod. Lewis 2006: 53. Naturalistic, as argued by Vlastos 1995: 33–4. The contrast of divine natural disasters and preventable human injustice is explored in J. Lewis 2006: 47. Lane Fox 2000: 35–51.

Theology 95 74 Versnel 2011: 157. Eidinow 2011: 90 argues that this is to emphasise the depth of bad human behaviour. 75 See Kirk et al. 2002: 409–13, especially their frgs 548–50 and discussion. See also Leszl 2007: 72–3 as contentedness depending on human insight in Democritus. 76 J. Lewis 2006: 74–95, who discusses the similar argument in Vlastos 1995: 46. On the ad hoc, specific, and purposive nature of Solonian laws, see Hölkeskamp 2005. On stability see Eidinow 2011: 81–2. On the debate over the nature of dikē in Solon, as natural order or political tendencies, see Almeida 2003. 77 Figueira and Nagy 1985: 70–1. 78 E.g. in Zakin 2009: 178. 79 ‘Divine and mortal partnership’: Tzanetou 2012: 54; see 61–3. Aesch. Eum. 526–755; Gewirtz 1988: 1044–5, Lloyd-Jones 1971: 93–4. A similar message can be found in Soph. Ant, esp. 1347. Civic relationships in defiance of rhetoric: Johnstone 2011: 169. 80 ‘Not a theological tract’: Barnes 1982: 357. ‘Marginal’: de Romilly 1992: 108. Guthrie 1971: 298–304 recognised Critias was skilled and educated in philosophy, but considered the fragment illustrative of a narrative of corruption. More recently Wright 2016: 50–8 has discussed its ‘extraordinary’, ‘unusual theological content’. 81 See Balla 2018: 92 that the fragment does not assume pre-political humans could not instinctively distinguish between good and bad. 82 See Whitmarsh 2014, Kahn 1997 on the fragment. 83 ‘People were tending to wonder whether the gods really existed, given that, as dispensers of justice, they made no impact upon human life’, De Romilly 1992: 110. See Yunis 1988 and Hesk 2000: 182 on discussions of justice, divine power, and the gods. 84 Konradova 2018: 13–14. 85 Democritus in PHerc 1428 frs 16 and 19 as discussed in Henrichs 1975: 96–115, esp. 103 and Wright 2016: 59. Pl. Rep. 2.359 and the noble lie in 3.414b–c. Cf. also Laws 941b. On the noble lie in Plato as a political duty and a mechanism to assure assent in the pursuit of a harmonious rule, just as in Critias, see Schofield 2007; the noble lie is a plausible construction in Ferrari 1989: 112–3. Morrow 1960: 127 draws the comparison between Rep. 3.414 and the Critias fragment. 86 The problem of divine injustice is a common idea in Euripides. On the natural injustice of pious men subject to disaster: Scyr. F684; the unpredictability of fortune leads to lapses in faith: Hipp. 1102–10; and reassuring oneself that the gods will maintain justice, punishing the evil and rewarding the good: Alc. 604–05, Ion 1621–22. See Riedweg 1990: 40–1. 87 On the critiques of poetic stories of the gods in the Republic, see Ferrari 1989: 110–2; Gulley 1977: 161–6 as false fictions; Urmson 1982: 131, as blasphemous and inappropriate rather than simply inaccurate. On reversals of fortune, see Bellerophon F299–304 Aegus-Meleager. 88 Burkert 1985: 268. 89 This is one of the reasons Xenophon rewrote the Croesus story in Cyropaedia 7.2.22–4: to stress the blame lay with Croesus, because he did not check the meaning of the oracle and his testing of the oracle was impious. Cf. Hdt 1.91.4; Ellis 2016: 75–85. 90 Cinesias in Ar. Eccl. 325–32, describing how he urinated on a shrine of Hecate, defiling it; Birds 1380–90, seeking admission to the new community; Lys. 912–7 encouraging his wife to break her oath and promising to take the risks. See Todd 2000: 356–9. 91 Lysias ap. Athenaeus 12.76, F195 Carey.

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92 Lysias 6.19–20, see also 31–2. This speech was long rejected as a spurious work by a ‘disappointed religious extremist’, as Todd 2000: 63 puts it, because it ‘eschews both historical narrative and legal argument’ in favour of focus on civic dangers of impiety. It is increasingly considered genuine; either Lysian or an assistant. 93 Lysias ap. Athenaeus 12.76, F195 Carey; Lys. 6.19–20. 94 Soph. Trach. 1264–78. Lefkowitz 1989: 78–9 95 Gagné 2013. 96 On ancestral fault see Aeschin. 3.110–12, Aesch. Ag. 1497–1504, Seven 720–91, Supp. 434–7; Eur. Hipp. 1370–80, Iph. Taur. 178–202, Ph. 865–95; Hom. Il., 4.155–65; Hdt.: Croesus in books 1, e.g. 1.8–13, and Glaucus in 6.85–6, esp. 86d, are the best examples; Hes. WD 281–85, Pl. Laws 9.854a–c, Solon F13, Hymn to the Muses, from Stob. 3.9.23: 25–32, Soph. Ant throughout but see esp. 853–7, OC 960–1013, El. 1417–21, Thgn. 197–208. Gantz 1982 argued that there were no indisputable attestations in tragedy, for instance, and West 1999a does the same for Sophocles as well as Aeschylus, but Gagné 2013: 14 has persuasively argued for the prominence of the idea in tragedy. Some have argued that it only appears in later texts, but Gagné 2013: 177 has again convincingly demonstrated it in Homer. See also Parker 1983: 202. 97 Pl. Rep 364e–5a, Ar. Frogs 448–59, and see also Hdt 2.81 on the precision of Orphic burial rituals; Burkert 1987: 5, 21–5. 98 Svavarsson 2020: 593. 99 Pl. Phdr. 244d–e. Burkert 1987: 24. 100 Parker 1983: 202 identified this aspect of the belief as an idea that ‘protects the belief in justice against crude empirical refutation’. 101 E.g. the prediction of the wrecking of Athenian ships in punishment for the lawlessness of the Athenian leaders in Hdt. 8.96–7. 102 A later, but evocative, example is Dicaearchus, notoriously irreverent admiral of Philip V, who set up and sacrificed on altars of Impiety and Transgression, and was killed by being ‘racked and scourged’, in Polyb. 18.54, who comments he met a just end according to men and gods. On the ‘sense of relief’ that accompanied such punishments, see Meijer 1981: 216–63. 103 The other explanation for the description of the city that Herodotus implies here was probably the burning of the temple at Sardis in 5.102, as in How and Wells. 104 DL 6.59. In the same vein Mikalson 2005: 190 observed ‘many a sailor who had prayed to Poseidon for safety no doubt perished at sea’. 105 ‘Blocks to falsifiability’: E. B. Tylor; see Skorupski 1976 and Evans-Pritchard 1965. 106 A discussion of the history of ‘blocks to falsifiability’ can be found in Skorupski 1976: xiii. 107 Tylor 1891: 134–5. 108 Skorupski 1976: 5 on Tylor. 109 Evans-Pritchard 1976: 201–4. 110 Skorupski 1976: 5. 111 Let-out clauses: Harrison 2007a: 380, Parker 1985. 112 Parker 1985. 113 Hdt. 1.46.3–49. 114 Parker 1999: 14–15. ‘Negotiable’: Furley 2006: 419. 115 Parker 1999: 14–15, Lane Fox 1986: 214: ‘Their service could only survive and retain credit at this practical level by setting limits to the suitable forms of a question and answer. The gods were prepared to consider a choice between alternatives, but if mortals asked for too much, they risked provoking a god’s displeasure … The god then could not be refuted. If he advised action and the

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116 117 118

119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

result was disastrous, questioners were left to reflect that the alternative would have been much worse’. On question subjects see Eidinow’s 2007: 125–8 analysis of tablet records at Dodona; and on most questions as a binary choice rather than open-ended, Eidinow 2007: 132–4, as well as Parker 1985: 301–2. Psychological techniques: Malkin 1987, in Eidinow 2007: 33. On explaining negative results, see Lane Fox 1986: 214, and Eidinow 2007: 133–4. There are a number of lessons against finding out too much and giving the gods too much involvement in your life, e.g. in Hdt 4.155, Battus visiting the oracle for help with a stammer and getting told to found a colony; and solutions to that, e.g. limiting scale of questions in Eidinow 2007: 134. Harrison 2000: 140 on the lack of time limit for prophecy. Corruption: e.g. Cleomenes bribing the Pythian Oracle to condemn Demaratus: Hdt 6.66; Cleisthenes corrupting the Pythian Oracle to tell Sparta to free the Peisistratids: Hdt 5.63, 90; Pleistonax and his brother bribe the Delphic Oracle to free them from Spartan exile: Thuc. 5.16.2–3; Eidinow 2007: 35. Ambiguity in sources: Eidinow 2007: 34–5; Bowden 2005: 22–4. ‘summing up’: Gould, J. 1989: 79. See Versnel 2011: 198–200 on luxuriant multiplicity, and Harrison 1997: 112–16 on this in Herodotus. Gould borrowed the term from anthropology: see Lewis, I. 1985: 72–7. Gould 1989: 79. See also Collins 2008: 47 for examples. See Harrison 2000: 102–21, particularly 105–6: ‘[The] moral explanation of human suffering is not the only form of divine explanation adopted by Herodotus – other “amoral” explanations for misfortunes, that they are omens or that the divinity is capricious, are also available’. Versnel 2011: 162. Parker 1996: 210, my emphasis. Tor 2017: 47, 346. Parker 1997: 148. Skorupski 1976: 8. Carabine 1995: 17. Fundamentally improvisatory: Gould 2001: 210. See Versnel 2011.

5

Unknowability The piety of agnosticism in Greek philosophy and practice

The complexity and variety of the Greek gods is widely recognised today: it was a rare point of agreement between the two pioneering scholars of Greek religion, Jean-Pierre Vernant, emphasising the inseparability of the individual gods; and Walter Burkert, who established the variability of characteristics depending on time and place.1 Gods could be generalised, like ‘Zeus’, but they were also localised and specialised: ‘the Zeus of Olympia’ or ‘Zeus of Guests’. In some contexts, the Greeks clearly distinguished between local and shared gods, while in others, they were treated as unified: this has puzzled scholars.2 ‘Is there such a thing as Zeus, or are there just a huge host of Zeuses?’3 This flexibility in divine identity has often been viewed as a central ‘problem’ for scholars of Greek religion, in a way that most Greeks clearly did not conceive of it. There is no answer to this ‘problem’ because the mysterious and flexible nature of divine identity in ancient Greece is not a problem at all: ‘ambiguity was inherent in Greek religious thinking and practice’.4 A ‘central category of Greek religion’ at the core of the relationship between Greeks and their gods and embedded in the basic building blocks of Greek thought and language about the divine was the belief that there can be no certain knowledge about the gods: this is known as the ‘principle of uncertainty’ or unknowability.5 Unknowability is not a new idea, but it is still often inadequately understood. In his Elements of Theology, Eric Dodds observed that agnōstos and cognate terms regarding unknown gods can refer to six different types of belief that all come under the broader notion of unknowability and agnosticism: (i) gods who are unknown because they are foreign or nameless; (ii) gods who are essentially unknowable to humans due to the limits of human knowledge; (iii) gods unknown to people who have not (yet) had that knowledge revealed to them; (iv) gods who are essentially unknowable to humans due to the essence of the god, but partially knowable from other sources; (v) gods unknowable in the positive but knowable in an apophatic, or negative, sense; and (vi) gods who are completely unknowable but accessible in some sense by a mystical union that does not involve imparting knowledge.6 Dodds argued that the second was the ‘ordinary position of the Greek sceptic’, while the final four were each ways of ‘escaping from the DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-5

Unknowability 99 sceptical position while maintaining and even heightening the belief in divine transcendence’.7 Dodds did not develop this to its natural, general conclusion: unknowability, or agnosticism, did not function as a distinct third answer to the question of whether one believes in gods, but it could (and frequently did) inform these beliefs. This way of viewing unknowability and agnosticism is not novel and it has incredible explanatory value in the ancient world, but it is controversial.8 Viewing unknowability in this way is a radical perspective shift for scholars who have been reluctant to admit that atheism exists in the ancient world. It decisively rules out the routine dismissals of ancient atheism as of ‘agnostic rather than an atheist’ nature: this is a way of making the uncertain certain, by treating uncertainty as a certain belief and answer, instead of accepting that uncertainty can be built into all kind of beliefs and unbeliefs.9 Discomfort with the idea of unknowability can partly be explained, as Scott has argued, by the conflict between historical methodologies and built-in unknowns, mysteries, and uncertainties in the evidence.10 Historians typically perceive lack of knowledge as a series of unknowns, some of which historians would like to know more about (and others they would not), in areas less or more (though very rarely fully) explored.11 The unknowable is treated as a function of methodology and the survival of the evidence, not as a feature of it. Scott uses the example of the Delphic oracle: scholars have posited various theories to explain why and how a priestess would generate prophecies, including the idea of vapours rising from a chasm, political intrigues, and more contemporary psychological explanations.12 Scholarship has struggled to move on from these theories, but to a Greek the mystery around the causality of the prophecies of the priestesses would have been normal and this uncertainty is embedded in the evidence in a way that confounds explanation. The Greek conception of their gods depended on the vagueness of divine identity; the ‘darkness and unknowability of the cosmos and the divine’.13 The Greek word for a god (theos) is not a name (unlike the modern ‘God’) but a predicate noun, highlighting a quality of something; a description of a vague category, capturing a sense of divinity.14 Though the precise semantic range of theos is difficult to secure because no ancient source offered any systematic semantic analysis of it, its usage is broad and flexible, as Kearns argues, referring to ‘a particular god, some god unknown or unspecified, or a more impersonal concept of deity’, connoting ‘power, deathlessness and unpredictability’.15 Though there were more or less appropriate applications of theos (for instance, to refer to Zeus), there were no institutional controls over appropriate usage of theos and no clear boundaries of definition, which made it hard to exclude particular beings.16 There is no genre or type of literature in which references to the anonymous abstract collective of gods does not appear, with theos conveying a sort of vague sense of ‘godkind’, and expressions of unknowability feature even in the earliest literature.17 At first glance at least, unknowability might appear incompatible with the anthropomorphic, named, present gods of Homer, confidently described as

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exaggerated humans who are petty and unjust but powerful, longer-lived, and beautiful.18 But as Kearns has observed, the divine was ‘inexplicable and extreme, whether the extremity manifests itself as “the other” or as “like humans but more so” – both versions are embedded in Greek, as perhaps in most, religious thought’.19 Humans in the Homeric works still assume a fundamental uncertainty about the gods. Homer as the narrator may be able to identify the gods, but the characters in his works find it much more difficult. In Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, Odysseus addresses the unknown river at the edge of the land of the Phaeacians as a suppliant, ‘listen, sire, whoever you are’; just as Telemachus had earlier addressed Athene, ‘listen to me, you God that came to me yesterday’.20 The gods might roam the battlefield, fighting invisibly on behalf of one side or another, or disguise themselves to observe the behaviour of humans or to interact with them in various ways.21 But from the perspective of the characters in the Homeric tradition the gods were still mostly hidden and their location was marked by ‘ambiguity and interstitiality’, associated with ‘remote’, ‘dangerous and marginal landscapes’, like rivers and the sea.22 Even when the gods appeared to speak directly to humans, as occurs several times in the Odyssey, they are described as ‘difficult to recognise’.23 ‘Gods’, for the unknown composer of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ‘are hard for mortals to see’: divine appearances in Homeric texts are ‘essentially ambiguous’ and ‘markedly vague’.24 This uncertainty uneasily coexists and to some extent drives the need to establish and fix some kind of communication with the gods through specific action. In Homer, ritual sacrifice involves detailed and carefully constructed elements with a fixed order, as a way of attempting to create certainty in communication with gods who may have been misidentified, may be angry due to a mysterious or forgotten transgression, or even may not be listening.25 Sarah Hitch has argued that this causes a tension with the authorial voice, that focusses on the actions of the sacrifice and performance rather than the divine reception and outcome, but this focus on the fixed also reflects the same uncertainty expressed by the human characters about the effectiveness of ritual causality.26 This tension between unknowability and the need for detail in communication is particularly apparent in Euripides’ works, where it is revealed in the differential of knowledge between the characters and the audience rather than the author.27 In Hippolytus the nurse has an intuition that divine forces are involved, but the identity of the divine agent to blame for Phaedra’s illness is a mystery: the nurse says that it could be Pan or Hecate, the Korybantes or the Mountain Mother, or Dictynna.28 Though the characters in the Hippolytus are uncertain, the audience of the Hippolytus know that Phaedra is ill because Aphrodite made her love Hippolytus, to punish Hippolytus’ irreverence towards her.29 As in Homer, the gods appeared clearly and frequently on the dramatic stage, despite the uncertainty of the characters: this acted as a mirror to the real world, suggesting a hidden reality despite the uncertainty of the participants.30

Unknowability 101 Curse tablets are reminiscent of the nurse’s list of potential deities in Euripides’ Hippolytus, as in this early fourth-century binding curse tablet found in Attica: If anyone put a binding spell on me, be it man or woman, slave or free, alien or citizen, from my household or from outside it, be it out of envy toward my work or my actions, if anyone put a binding spell on me before Hermes, be it Hermes Eriounios or Hermes Restrainer or Hermes Trickster, or before some other power, I bind in return all my enemies. Ogden 2002: 211, n.16931 The person cursing here only has an inkling that some Hermes might have overseen a curse against them but does not know their precise identity or name and so focuses on divine activity (in epithets). Consultations of the oracles at Delphi and Dodona show ordinary Greeks struggling to determine and name which god was angry with them, or to whom they should sacrifice or pray.32 These oracular shrines were focal points for human-divine communication, where people went to try to access divine knowledge and exert some control over events.33 Since a name is only ‘shorthand’ for ‘portfolios or packages of attributed imagined powers’, it felt safer to identify broad divine activities that related to the observable world.34 It was necessary for people to name individual gods during rituals, but this process of naming was pragmatic and did not diminish belief in unknowability. ‘One of the most salient features of interaction with the divine is uncertainty’, as one recent commentator observed, but the Greek pursuing this ritual as part of a reciprocal exchange must assume that a relationship does exist.35 After all, aside from power, a relationship with the gods allowed Greeks some access to beings who did have knowledge of reality.36 As Simon Pulleyn observed, despite misgivings about identifying gods in theory, ‘knowledge of the name is an essential prerequisite to any form of communication’.37 Something akin to this is argued by Plato’s Socrates in the Cratylus, during a discussion of the naturalness of names: 38 The first and finest line of investigation, which as intelligent people we must acknowledge, is this, that we admit that we know nothing about the gods themselves or about the names they call themselves – although it is clear that they call themselves by true ones. The second best line on the correctness of names is to say, as is customary in our prayers, that we hope the gods are pleased by the names we give them, since we know no others. I think this is an excellent custom … Plato Cratylus 400d–401a (trans. Reeve 1997) Plato’s Socrates pragmatically distinguishes between what the gods are really called (which humans cannot know) and the customary best guess: he believes that the gods are unknowable to humans, but he recognises that a minimum

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amount of knowledge is necessary to contact them. Greek ritual was predicated on this uncertainty in identification of divine agents or their motives.39 This is what Emily Kearns called the ‘paradox at the heart of Greek religion’: that in some ways the Greeks ‘believed that they knew little about the gods, in other contexts they acted as though they knew a lot’.40 Greeks were forced to behave with a certain degree of certainty for the purposes of ritual, even if this did not reflect their own certainty or made them uncomfortable. This ‘epistemological uncertainty’ is characteristic of religious interactions:41 the prevailing sense of the unknowability of the gods meant that there were no securely positive expectations of the intentions or behaviors of the divine. Instead, mistrust – both of the gods, but also of other members of one’s community and their relation to the gods – was a crucial dynamic, shaping social forms, including ritual actions. Beyond their apparent tangible usefulness, offerings to the gods became a kind of ‘safe anchor’ and a reassurance in dealing with uncertainty and anxieties and the ‘ultimate unknowability’ of divine operations.42 Ritual represented the conflict in convergence of two divergent necessities that shaped Greek representations of and relationships with the gods: maintaining an ‘insurmountable ontological gap’ and making the gods tangible and communicable with.43 The result was a fundamental ambivalence in the way Greeks conceived of and behaved towards their gods.44 For instance, in daily life just as in Homer, highly detailed documents like sanctuary decrees detailed the precise steps for ritual: these show the importance of unknowability by striving for certainty wherever it can be found.45 Driving all of this was an anxiety about the risks and stakes of getting it wrong and failing to communicate properly with the gods: ineffectiveness or even impiety.46 Greeks were not so much discomforted by the idea of uncertainty as the consequences of wrong actions taken in an uncertain world. Wrong knowledge of the gods was dangerous and impious, but so was (pretending) too much knowledge of them. After all, Apollo was called Loxias, the crooked speaker of oracles; oracular priestesses were expected to imperfectly impart advice, and the prophētai to translate signs from the gods, but not to maintain direct contact with them.47 The impossibility, or impiety, of direct contact with the gods is partly why the Athenians would have been concerned about Socrates’ divine sign.48 An individual in direct contact with a divine voice that gave clear, personal advice did not fit the mechanics of traditional Greek religion, especially because it directly contradicted the principle of unknowability. This broke, as Vernant put it, the ‘inevitable tension’ of communication with the gods:49 to establish real contact with the world beyond, to actualise it, to make it present, and thereby to participate intimately in the divine; yet by the same

Unknowability 103 move, it (the divine idol) must also emphasise what is inaccessible and mysterious in divinity, its alien quality, its otherness. Indeed, Plato has his Socrates recognise that he may be the only person to ever experience this.50 Even worse, though Socrates claimed direct contact, the source of this contact remained entirely mysterious: Socrates’ sign is radically knowable in one (very impious) way, and yet dangerously unknowable in another.51 It is clear that the object of kaina daimonia (new gods) in Meletus’ accusation is Socrates’ daimonion, and most Athenians would have instantly understood the issues with Socrates’ sign, just as Euthyphro did.52 Meletus did not need to develop a special argument for the divine sign as a religious innovation: Socrates himself made this clear at the trial. Just as claiming too much knowledge of the gods was impiety, observations of unknowability could be pious humility. This should not be surprising: as philosopher George Smith has argued, unknowability (which he considers under agnosticism) is a central part of pious expression in most religions: ‘the universal element linking together the various concepts of god … the central tenet of theism’.53 For instance, Tertullian, the third-century AD Christian author, observed of God: [t]hat which is infinite is known only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond all our conceptions – our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in His transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown. Tertullian Apology 17 (trans. Thelwall 2018) For Tertullian, unknowability is proof of the magnificence of God, just as it would be for Augustine.54 The most pious expressions have often been accompanied by ecstatic incomprehensibility and paradoxes, as in the famous Nag Hammadi Thunder text, a second- or third-century AD text full of paradox, riddles, and incomprehensible, ecstatic utterances, like ‘I am a mute who does not speak, and great is my multitude of words’.55 In a similar way the most pious expressions in the Greek world could be the most incomprehensible. The enigmatic Orphic gold tablets, deposited in graves from the fifth century onward, combine formulaic analogical stories and instructions for the afterlife with nonsense words. These tablets were part of Dionysiac mystery cult, the central rites of which were impossible to communicate, as Aristotle observed: ‘the initiate into the mysteries was moulded and not taught’; this unknowable meaning was conveyed in the tablets themselves.56 Tablet 27, for instance, contains specific passwords for the afterlife, but the final word ΓΑΠΕΔΟΝ, is a nonsense word that is written upside down.57 Johnston has described this tablet as ‘a sort of crib-sheet for the soul’s most final of exams’.58 The tablet attempts to tap in to the

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transcendent power and piety of the unknowable while somehow making the divine accessible and tangible. On the other hand, while unknowability could be a sign of humble piety, it depended on the context: unknowability could be embedded within irreverent, impious, and atheistic contexts. Compare the brilliantly convoluted and conventionally pious addresses like the chant of the chorus of Argive elders in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: ‘Zeus, whoever Zeus may be, if this name is pleasing to him, by this name I address him. I can compare with him, measuring all things against him, none but Zeus’.59 The context betrays its piety: the chorus are portrayed as traditionally religious in the play, their prayer is a humble expression of the majesty of the divine, and they are invoking the importance of referencing names correctly rather than questioning the broader features or existence of the gods.60 Comparing this passage in Aeschylus with Hecuba’s prayer from Euripides’ Trojan Women shows a common recognition of the inscrutability and unknowability of divine forces, which could be expressed in pious or irreverent terms. On hearing that Menelaus will condemn Helen to death when they return to Sparta, the foreign queen, now reduced to slavery, says: ‘whoever you are, you are hard to know, Zeus, whether the Necessity of Nature or the Mind of Mortals, I pray to you’.61 Hecuba may be hedging her bets about whichever gods she is able to reach, or she may be expressing a shocking impiety and irreverence by twisting an ordinarily pious expression into an irreverent one in front of one of her captors, Menelaus, in order to prompt exactly the sort of appalled reaction that he gives. The difference is mediated by the context of the speaker and the expression, and the precise formulation. In part, the interpretation of Hecuba’s prayer as an impious inversion of traditional unknowability rests on Menelaus’ reply to her prayer, ‘What does this mean? A newfangled prayer you offer to the gods!’ also marks it as impious. But the audience must also have been informed by Hecuba’s foreignness and the scepticism that Hecuba expresses elsewhere, especially of divine justice, which is not unfounded given that as Lee observed, the play contains a distinct lack of justice.62 Hecuba’s character’s lines are also referential to natural philosophy, which was, by this time, a recognisable dog-whistle for impiety and atheism to the audience. She questions whether Zeus is called ‘Necessity’ (anagkē) or ‘Mind of Mortals’ (nous brotōn), both references to the theories of natural philosophers, but the latter modified to imply that the gods might also be only the inventions of humans.63 In most cases, whether unknowability represented piety or otherwise substantially depended on the use of the specific expression. Unknowability was key to the protection of Greek theology from scepticism: it was the ultimate ‘let-out clause’, in the sense discussed in the previous chapter, offering the most powerful answer to nearly any sceptical inquiry about the

Unknowability 105 nature, existence, or justice of the gods.64 It may, at first, appear to be a concession to scepticism, as David Sedley has it:65 Usually, however, the assertion of doubt is nothing more than a disarmingly frank acknowledgment by a committed system-builder that his conclusions are necessarily hazardous and unproven, a self-imposed counterweight to excessive didactism and dogmatism, a modern sacrifice at the altar of intellectual honesty. There is no suggestion that any of these pre-Hellenistic philosophers derived much comfort from his admission of ignorance or thought of it as anything more than a regrettable expedient. Indeed, it is hard to see what comfort it could afford anybody who was not prepared to renounce a rather fundamental human trait, the desire for knowledge. The recognition of uncertainty should not be seen as a philosophical failure, but instead as a way of coping with the gods. Half a century ago Jean Rudhardt had already astutely observed that when talking and thinking about the divine ‘the Greeks perceive both its nearness and its distance’.66 Rudhardt believed that unknowability was illustrative of the complexity and not the failure of Greek theological thought. Thomas Harrison has more recently developed this line of thought about unknowability as a healthy feature of Greek religion: for him, unknowability ‘complements rather than [represents] qualifications to a traditional model of Greek religion’.67 Unknowability was a useful idea, not a recognition of the weakness of religious belief (as Nietzsche would later parody it).68 Unknowability was so embedded in Greek religious thought because it had a function: this was the aspect of unknowability as ‘explanation’, through which it served to protect conceptions of the divine.69 Perhaps the fullest and most rewarding account of the explanatory value of Greek religion has been offered by John Gould, also building on the work of Rudhardt.70 Gould emphasised that all religious systems are internally rational and self-justifying, arguing that religious explanation is part of a symbolic language for dealing with the natural chaos of the world. So, he argued, the need for rational explanation of the universe and the nature of the gods drove the ‘fundamentally improvisatory’ nature of Greek religion.71 This improvisatory nature rested on a basic recognition of unknowability. Determining supernatural causality in the Greek world, Gould argued, could never be definitive; the signs are always fundamentally ambiguous, the divinity is always inferred, not revealed, and the motivation for any given divine action is at an even more remote distance from any certain explanation.72 When faced with criticism or scepticism, unknowability allowed for various responses of the type perhaps most elegantly articulated by the Christian theologian Augustine: So what are we to say, brothers, about God? For if you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it,

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you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you think you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you. So he isn’t this, if this is what you have understood; but if he is this, then you haven’t understood it. Augustine, Sermon 52.16 (trans. Hill 1991) It was insistence on the ineffability of God that allowed Augustine in his second sermon to develop apparently contradictory theology like the doctrine of the Trinity: that God is One God inseparable yet also separable as the Son, Father, and Spirit.73 A baseline insistence on unknowability protected Augustus’ theological principles before he developed them, allowing doctrines that would have been otherwise unsustainable. Unknowability was likewise central to Greek religion as a protective idea, as Thomas Harrison has argued74 ‘unknowability’ in fact serves as a necessary complement to traditional conceptions: it was precisely because of the fall-back position that the best way to approach and the best way to envisage the gods were matters inaccessible to men that traditional attributes and forms of worship could continue unchallenged. Unknowability was the foundation of the ‘luxuriant multiplicity’ that is characteristic of Greek religion, as discussed in the last chapter. The unknowability of the gods and uncertainty over the motives and the hidden causality of the world did not only enable but demanded a flexible and open attitude, which naturally involved appealing to all available theological conceptions or explanatory principles to explain different events or problems, with very little discomfort at the presentation of potentially mutually exclusive explanations.75 Unknowability also had a range of other useful, protective functions in Greek belief and practice. Contingent denials, in which people leverage support from the gods in exchange for recognition of their existence and role through ‘if … then’ expressions, show how unknowability could be used to affirm the justice or existence of the gods. For instance, furious at the injustice of having been hit by Antinous, Odysseus exclaims that if (ei) there are any gods for beggars then they will ensure that Antinous will die.76 This is a bargain with the gods that by performing an action on Odysseus’ behalf the gods confirm their existence to him and their interest in justice and reciprocal action. Antinous is, of course, the first of the suitors to die in the Odyssey, and so Odysseus proclaims ‘By Father Zeus, you gods are still there on high Olympus if those Suitors have really paid the price for their outrageous insolence!’77 These contingent denials rely on unknowability to performatively prove the gods’ existence, as part of a broader set of narratives in which the gods fulfil these sorts of deals.78 Of course, rituals, appeals, prayers, and contingent denials could be unsuccessful, but unknowability protected from this having any serious

Unknowability 107 consequences in undermining the characteristics, justice, or existence of the gods. There were countless ways that Greeks felt any form of propitiation could fail, as Naiden has argued, and getting the wrong god was one of the most important.79 Xenophon related one such case in the Anabasis, in which the general discovers from a seer that the bad luck he was having managing his affairs is because he was sacrificing only to Zeus Basileus and not Zeus Melichios.80 A similar concern can be found in Herodotus, at Lade, when the Ionians were faced with Dionysius’ grim training exercises; they wail proverbially ‘which god did we offend that we are suffering this?’81 The examples from oracles explored above assume that misfortune will be the result of the incorrect choice of god: ‘to whom of the gods (and heroes) must I pray and/or sacrifice in order that I fare better?’ is the standard formula.82 The priestess’ answer aside, if the asker of this question did not fare well then unknow ability would allow them to attribute this misfortune to having made the incorrect choice of god, some incorrect or inappropriate ritual behaviour, some mysterious grudge, or another reason. The idea that misidentifying gods could be impious or make a prayer ineffective helped Greeks cope with perceived inaction from the gods or ineffectiveness of prayer: belief in uncertainty prevented the unmanageable expectation that the gods would be consistently rational, predictable, constant, and just in exchange.83 The attribution of malevolent agency to nonspecific ‘gods’, or ‘the divine, was useful in avoiding blaming a specific deity, and thus risking incurring their wrath, while still identifying or at least implying explanation of the agency behind a certain negative action.84 This is best illustrated by Croesus in the passage of Herodotus about his downfall.85 Famously pious Croesus loses faith in the support of the gods and blames Apollo (who he calls ‘god of Delphi’) for his misfortune, as it was due to his oracle that Croesus went to war with Cyrus. Croesus is corrected and rebuked by Apollo, via the oracle, for blaming him, even though it was Apollo who had delayed his misfortune. It is incorrect and inappropriate to blame the gods, even when it seems like they are to blame, because it is not possible to understand entirely their machinations. Making the motivations of the gods indeterminate and indeterminable protected also their justice and morality: this was an important theodicy in the ancient world. In the Antigone, Creon claims that ‘a god’ has leapt on his head.86 Tecmessa, Trojan captive of Ajax in Sophocles’ Ajax, remarks of her change of status into slavery that ‘such, I suppose, was the gods’ will’.87 In Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus conjectures that his past actions were the will of the gods, ‘who perhaps had long felt anger against my family’.88 In Euripides’ Phoenician Women Oedipus says that he cannot believe his actions were his own, performed without the intervention of ‘some one of the gods’.89 Later in the play, Oedipus observes that each person must submit to their fate, enduring the necessities that come from ‘the gods’.90 This unwillingness to blame individual gods for bad things is not only the case in the imagined worlds of tragedy, but also apparent in the way that Greeks dealt with real

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events. Demosthenes attributed the outcome of Chaeronea – the decisive battle in 338BC in which the Greek city states were defeated by Macedonian Philip II – in part, to ‘the god(s)’.91 In Xenophon’s Hellenica the power balance as a result of Mantinea in 362BC – a key battle between the Spartan and Theban forces in which the Thebans won a tactical victory but lost their dominant general Epaminondas, and had to sue for peace, thereby losing the opportunity to form a hegemony – is attributed to ‘the god’.92 In such instances, consistent across a variety of historical and mythological worlds, the god or gods who intervened are not specified, nor how they intervened, or whether it was simply fate, which helps to muddy any potential impiety involved in imagining divine injustice further. Unknowability also allowed for theological flexibility and resilience in dealing with other cultures who had different gods and systems of religion. The Greek world had contact with a range of other groups who believed in gods that looked and seemed different. This is perhaps best illustrated in Herodotus, who spent so much time on ethnographic discussion, but it is not limited to that author.93 Harrison has argued that Herodotus’ answer to foreign gods is to consider the gods as universal, though recognised in different ways by different groups: which gods were worshipped, how they were worshipped, and the local characteristics of these gods (significant differences, one might think).94 The gods are hidden behind the doors of an advent calendar, different cultures having opened different doors.95 According to this view, Herodotus does not appear to believe in foreign gods as separate entities at all: instead he believes in a unified world-belief with different cultic manifestations.96 Herodotus does indicate a belief in universal gods at several key points in the Histories: with the Arabians in Hdt 3.8 and the Massagetae in 1.216. Herodotus speculates that gods who may have different names but similar epithets, which represent areas of activity (as mentioned above), refer to the same gods, and discusses this explicitly at 2.50:97 almost all the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt. That they derived from barbarians was evident enough, I found on investigation – and that they mostly arrived from Egypt seems to me obvious. Excepting Poseidon and the Dioscuri, whose names I have already mentioned, and Hera, Hestia and Themis, the Graces and the Nereids, there is not one name of a god that has not been known in the land of Egypt since the very dawn of time. Here, I am merely echoing what the Egyptians themselves say. Those gods whose names they do not recognize must, it seems to me, have been given their names by the Pelasgians. The one exception is Poseidon, a god whom the Greeks learned about from the Libyans. The proof of this is that the Libyans are the only people to have used Poseidon’s name right from the very beginning, and to have honoured the god without break. One thing the Egyptians do not practise at all is the cult of heroes. I shall have more to add to my account of all the various

Unknowability 109 customs adopted by the Greeks from the Egyptians. However, it was not from the Egyptians that they learned to make statues of Hermes with an erect penis, but from the Pelasgians. The Athenians were the first to adopt the practice, and all the other Greeks adopted it from them. Herodotus Histories 2.50–1 (trans. Holland 2014) But the universalising principle is frequently subverted by Herodotus, as foreign gods are sometimes identified as entirely unique deities, even when cross-attribution with Greek equivalents appears obvious.98 Additionally, as Harrison has recognised, while foreign gods are often imagined as the same gods as those of the Greeks, ‘a clear line is drawn at worshipping foreign gods’ in Herodotus: foreigners who worship Greek gods suffer misfortune.99 Acceptable interaction with foreign gods seems to have been restricted to using their oracles, and respecting them and their boundaries.100 For Harrison, disruptions to the messy picture of a relativism based on universal divinity and localised differences in custom are only ‘qualified’; it is a lapse, where this universal principle is ‘momentarily forgotten’.101 Herodotus’ ability to switch between an idea of universal gods and localised gods is not simply a failure of consistency or a universal principle being subverted, but comfort with deploying different competing conceptions of the divine that allow him to emphasise, as he does with particular effect with Croesus at 1.91, mortal ignorance in the face of supernatural knowledge.102 Herodotus selects the approach that best helps him solve the theological or practical problem he is confronted with at different points in his history. Herodotus’ gods are simultaneously both universal and local, and they may represent the same or different gods to ones familiar to him: he is intensely relaxed about this idea, while anxious to avoid concrete identifications or discussions as a result. It is Herodotus’ underlying recognition of unknowability that allows him to do this. Herodotus’ individual views were complex enough, but there is no reason to believe they were an unusual way of dealing with theological issues of this type. In philosophical theology unknowability could serve as a foundational defence of the gods, but it could also be developed in a way that put pressure on their existence. By the fifth century a ‘critical stream of thought’ in Greek philosophy led some philosophers to challenge the potential knowledge of mankind about everything (including the divine) based on the relativity of conception or unreliability of human sources of knowledge.103 Unknowability was a prominent train of thought from the earliest experimentations in Parmenides, with the establishment of the category of nonbeing, or transcendent being, a being who cannot be known or thought about, which would eventually result in Plotinus’ claim that god was beyond being and unknowable.104 The real breakthrough in relativity, applying the principle of uncertainty to the nature of the gods, came with Xenophanes, building on older traditions of unknowability and informing

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later ones.105 Xenophanes famously said of the gods that ‘horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies (of their gods) in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses’.106 Xenophanes rejected the ancient authorities on the gods, like Homer, and emphasised the limitations of human knowledge about divine things.107 Xenophanes argued that the gods were perceived differently by different individuals: they were difficult to conceptualise, and the limits of the human capacity precluded true knowledge of them. As Tor has argued, Xenophanes’ statements were not directly refuting of the existence of the gods, but they were certainly poised to ‘put pressure’ on common ideas about the gods including their existence, just as unknowability when used as a theodicy was used to prop up beliefs in and about the gods.108 Heraclitus, the fifth-century Ephesian philosopher, and later contemporary of Xenophanes, was also insistent about the unreliability of the senses and the equal (lack of) knowledge of men, arguing that the gods were unknowable.109 Like Xenophanes, Heraclitus criticised not just Homer and Hesiod, but also earlier philosophers and other supposed authorities on the gods, claiming the equal basis of all men in wisdom (i.e. that they were equally unwise).110 It has long been argued that Heraclitus insisted on unknowability in defence of his conception of the divine, famously remarking that ‘the lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals’: true knowledge of the gods was impossible, even when apparently receiving insight from them.111 Fränkel had already identified in 1938 that the idea of unknowability and the limits of metaphysical perception was built into Heraclitus’ conception of the relative power and imperfection of men compared to gods.112 For Empedocles there were fundamental limits on mortal understanding and each person only possessed partial knowledge, no matter their certainty of their own worldview: ‘each believing only that which he happened to confront, as they are driven everywhere, [every one] claims to have found the whole. Thus these things are neither beheld by men’.113 In the fourth century Democritus and others would continue to argue for these limits to human sensory knowledge, Sextus Empiricus records: ‘in reality we do not understand what the nature of each thing is [or] is not’; and his pupil Metrodorus famously claimed that ‘none of us knows anything, not even whether we know anything or not’.114 Protagoras developed the pressure generated by some earlier philosophical articulations of unknowability into a more overt form that undermined the existence (and not just form or behaviour) of the gods.115 In the opening to his About the Gods, which is the only fragment of this work that survives, he says: Concerning the gods, I cannot ascertain whether they exist or whether they do not, or what form they have; for there are many obstacles to knowing, including the obscurity of the question and the brevity of human life. Protagoras DK80B4 (trans. Graham 2010).116

Unknowability 111 Like Xenophanes, Protagoras avoided an explicit knowledge statement, but he similarly deployed unknowability to ‘put pressure’ on the existence of the gods.117 Not only were the features and form of the gods unknowable, but their very existence might also be as well. The agnostic atheism of Protagoras’ opening comment was perceived by some as radically impious, a concern that was not alleviated by whatever it was that Protagoras later elucidated in his now-lost work. Protagoras’ comment is remarkable and may have led to accusations of impiety because he explicitly reflected on the existence of the gods and not simply their features or nature.118 A strikingly similar comment by Herodotus can be fruitfully compared with Protagoras’: ‘whence each of the gods came to be, or whether all of them always existed, and what sort of form they take, they did not know until yesterday or the day before, so to speak’.119 While Protagoras says he does not know about the existence of the gods, Herodotus says he does, despite the Greeks not having always known. Herodotus neuters the proposition at the core of Protagoras’ argument, effectively writing out unknowability about the existence of the gods and repurposing it as fairly straightforward and pious unknowability. The problem with Protagoras’ comment is not his expression of uncertainty, but that his ‘anthropological approach to theology’ leads to an inappropriate depth of inquiry.120 Under Protagoras, unknowability is no longer just an epistemological issue but an ontological one, but the ease with which Herodotus turns it back into a question of knowledge demonstrates that these cannot be separated from each other. Avoiding the impiety of investigating too much into the divine is an important aspect of Herodotus’ approach to religion. Herodotus offers two statements in Book Two that demonstrate his reluctance to deal with ‘divine things’. First, he explains that he will not relate information on Egyptian belief and theology, beyond ‘the mere names of their deities, because I believe that all men are equally knowledgeable about them’, a comment strongly reminiscent of the philosophical observations of Heraclitus and the philosophers. Secondly, he explains that ‘a discussion of divine things is a subject I particularly wish to avoid – any slight mention I have already made of such matters was forced upon me by the needs of my story’.121 By these statements, Herodotus seems to mean that he will not discuss theology, though he will discuss rituals for anthropological reasons. He does not discuss the Mysteries of Osiris, or those at Eleusis; he refuses to relate the reason why the Egyptians sacrifice swine at their festival, or to give the name of a person subject to the highest status of embalming; just as he refuses to mention the name of a dead man later in the text.122 Herodotus does not discuss theology because he believes it is impious, instead insisting that the gods are not knowable. A number of scholars have wrongly dismissed Herodotus’ own explanation of his avoidance: the desire to avoid impiety.123 Mikalson and Lateiner both suggested that the cause of Herodotus’ self-enforced silence is one of investigative plausibility.

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There is definitely some truth to this: beliefs are not easily investigated or translatable between cultures; rituals are much simpler to investigate and describe, so Herodotus is able to record them.124 The difficulty in investigating beliefs is also an expression of unknowability entirely in line with Herodotus’ explanation: his desire to avoid impiety.125 But most importantly, as Harrison has argued, Herodotus does not believe that investigation into the divine is worthless; he just believes that certain knowledge is impossible, and claiming too much knowledge is impious.126 This is not a strange or philosophically incurious position: a similar position is taken in the Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease (2.1-46), where the magoi, purifiers, priests, and ‘quacks’ are impious because they claim piety and superior knowledge, and by Plato’s Socrates in the Cratylus: let’s begin our investigation by first announcing to the gods that we will not be investigating them – since we do not regard ourselves as worthy to conduct such an investigation – but rather human beings, and the beliefs they had in giving the gods their names. After all, there’s no offense in doing that. Plato Cratylus 401a (trans. Reeve 1997) The silence of Plato’s Socrates about the gods is due to their mysterious nature, but his unwillingness to speculate also reflects the intrusion of practical concerns: philosophy is not insulated from the potential impiety of expressing too much knowledge of the gods.127 Unknowability is useful, in a religious or theological sense, only in so far as it protects the proposition of god’s existence: it becomes dangerous when it is deployed to question the existence of the divine itself. Plato’s works show the influence of Heraclitus, but also Parmenides, Protagoras, and Xenophanes, in arguing that because sensible things are always changing (as Heraclitus had argued), and his Forms cannot change, they must not be sensible and are therefore fundamentally unknowable:128 Plato doesn’t provide an exact description of the nature of things, and is entirely silent on the higher realms, because human reason is not equipped to comprehend these:129 to find the maker and father of this universe is hard enough, and even if I succeeded, to declare him to everyone is impossible. Plato Timaeus 28 C (trans. Zeyl 2000) It is common now to separate the transcendent Christian God from the Greek pantheon, often inappropriately caricatured as ‘much more powerful than humans and did not have to die, but in most other respects were like us’.130 But Christian apophatic theology, that god is ineffable, unnameable, and unknowable, was built on the speculative theology of ancient Greece:131

Unknowability 113 God may be unknown because he is foreign or nameless, or because of the limitations of the human mind. He may also be regarded as unknown to those who have not enjoyed a special revelation or initiation. He may be unknown in essence, but partially known through his works; unknown in his positive character, but definable through negations, or finally, accessible only through the unio mystica. This could as easily be a description of unknowability by an ancient Greek: it reflects an idea of the divine world in Platonism, Heraclitus, and Protagoras, and earlier Greek philosophy; in literature, like Herodotus or Homer; and dramatic performances, such as Euripides; as well as the products of ritual such as the Orphic tablets or curse tablets. Unknowability was at the heart of Greek religion and irreligion, and an indispensable component of Greek beliefs and discussions on the divine. Without this perspective it might seem as if the opening up of philosophical discussions of unknowability in the fifth century, in particular about the injustice and immorality of the gods, led to a widespread doubt about the gods and a decline in belief.132 But as we have observed, unknowability was not a weakness but an incredible strength of Greek religion and theology. It was the most powerful defence of the idea of the gods and gave a language and a context for expression of doubt about them, whether theological, pious, religious, or otherwise. Doubts about the nature or existence of the gods had always been a part of Greek thought and were common to the imagined and real landscape of the Greek world. On the one hand, the acceptable and broad discourse on unknowability was ‘liberating’ for ‘a scientific mentality’, in which the gods played little or no role in the cosmos or worldview, as Harrison has argued, driving relatively free ‘atheological’ innovation.133 But the value of unknowability lay in its theological utility, which meant that there was a constant pull towards repurposing these ideas to support theological and religious worldviews. ‘It would be a mistake’, as Carabine argues, ‘to suppose that from the time of Xenophanes on there was a heightening of critical powers concerning the nature of the gods’, which is often cast as a conflict between the ‘Homeric gods of the majority’ and the ‘conception of the gods by those who rebelled against them’.134 Equally, it would be wrongheaded to expect ‘an atheism with no illusions’, as Rubel puts it, to be expressed in a shared and re-purposive context that made safe the expression of all kinds of doubts about the gods, nor would it ever have.135 Unknowability breaks down the imagined clear distinction between belief and unbelief, in discourse, behaviour, ideas, culture, ritual behaviour, and expression. While some argue against using agnosticism to mean anything but the sense invented by T. H. Huxley in the late nineteenth century, as a ‘third category’ of belief,136 this is rarely justified, it defines atheism out of existence without confronting the evidence, and completely flattens the thriving critical milieu and the vibrant, varied, and deeply felt beliefs about unknowability that lay at the heart of Greek religious (un)beliefs and practice.

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Notes 1 Complexity of divine: Vernant 1991, particularly 277–8 on inseparability of gods; Burkert 1985: esp. 119, on variability of time and place. Versnel 2011: 30 discusses these. 2 See e.g. Xen. An. 7.8.1–6, with Xenophon’s problems caused by neglect of Zeus Melichios even though he was a regular worshipper of Zeus Basileus; cf. the assertion of Xenophon’s Socrates in Sym. 8.9 that, ‘Zeus, though he has many epithets, is nonetheless believed to be the same god’, trans. Parker. See Parker 2003, 2006: 11–17, and 2011: 65–79, for his most recent and best treatment; and Versnel 2011: 60–87. 3 See Parker 2003: 182. 4 Finley 1985: xix. 5 Quote is Sourvinou-Inwood 2000: 20. On the critical role of unknowability see also Harrison 2000: 191–208. Uncertainty built into core terminology: Alvar 1985: 236–7. 6 Dodds and Proclus 1971: 311–2. Various others have examined the same problem. van der Horst 1988: 19–42 deploys three categories of ‘unknown gods’, included in Dodds; see Henrichs 1994: 31. 7 Dodds and Proclus 1971: 312. 8 J. J. C. Smart, late Australian philosopher, in his 2013 article in the SEP, represents the mainstream view that there are three potential positions towards belief in a deity: atheism, agnosticism, and belief. He recognises there are problems with this view and his solution is to dilute the boundaries between these categories. Smith 1989: 8 instead argues for two categories, of atheism and belief, each of which can include agnosticism; on agnostic atheism, see Martin 2007: 2. In a similar way Lee 2012 argues ‘non-religion’ is a binary against religion, though ‘non-religion’ is not unbelief: this would imply atheism is ritual non-participation; see also Eller 2010: 1–18. Agnosticism has commonly been argued to be a modern phenomenon, e.g. in Lightman 1987, as its modern usage was invented in 1869 by Huxley, who in 1884 described it as: ‘a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe’. 9 Protagoras has suffered most from this: e.g. Bremmer 2007: 13 calls Protagoras an ‘agnostic rather than an atheist’; likewise O’Sullivan 2012: 172, and Meijer 1981: 220, who mentions his ‘agnostic theories’. Barnes 1982: 354 argues that the passage ‘is not atheistical: […] it indicates aporia or agnosticism’. Tor 2017: 47 describes Protagoras’ ‘theological attitude’ as an ‘agnosticism’ of ‘internal modifications’. Whitmarsh grapples with similar problems but does not resolve them, e.g. ‘this cannot be a simple statement of agnosticism’, 2016: 88, and calls Protagoras an atheist; and Flower 2009: 11 says ‘it was perhaps not so much the atheism of Prodicus as the agnosticism of Protagoras’ that drove the mystery parodies and mutilations of the Herms. 10 Scott 2020: 52–64. 11 Scott 2020: 52–4. 12 Scott 2020: 56–64. 13 Sourvinou-Inwood 2003: 408. 14 Price 1984: 79. 15 Carneades in Cic. De Nat. Deo. 3.43–52 is an extended discussion of the nature and meaning of god, distinguishing between other figures like satyrs and Olympians. See also Pl. Ap. 27b–28a: Plato’s Socrates discusses the children of the gods, and the spirits and heroes, and concludes they are all ‘divine stuff’. Kearns 1995: 512–3; see also Alvar 1985 on theos and unknowability. 16 No institutional controls or boundaries of definition: Price 1984: 80–1.

Unknowability 115 17 References abound to ‘godkind’: see Francois 1957; Parker 2011: 65; Parker 2006: 11–17; Mikalson 1983: 66–8; 1991: 22–5. 18 Gods look like larger humans: Versnel 1987: 43–4. 19 Kearns 1995: 512. 20 Listen sire: Hom. Od. 5.445–9; god that came yesterday: Hom. Od. 2.262. 21 Fighting on behalf of one side or an individual, as they do in the Iliad, e.g. 5.297–351, the battle of Diomedes and Aphrodite, fighting on behalf of the Trojans; gods fighting on the behalf of humans is a continued feature of the Greek tradition: e.g. Hdt 8.38–9: defence of Delphi in 480BC from the Persians by Phylakos and Autonoos; Diod. Sic. 15.53.4: by Heracles at Leuctra in 371BC; Diony. Hal. 6.13: in the Roman tradition, with the appearance of the Dioscures at the battle of Lacus Regillus in 494BC ( Versnel 1987). The masking of gods in haze in Hom. Od. 16.161, or unmasking at 5.127–33 ( Versnel 1987: 44). Healing a sick man: POxy 1381, Versnel 1987: 47–8. Lloyd 2018: 40 argues revelation by gods is always uncertain. 22 Petridou 2016: 195–7. 23 Gods difficult to recognise: e.g. Athena appears to Odysseus, Hom. Od. 13.220–9, 311–29. 24 Hard to see: hDem 110. Ambiguous and vague: Versnel 1987: 42–55. 25 E.g. in Hom. Il. 1.65–7 Achilles blames plague on Apollo’s anger over sacrifices or failure to keep vows and Il. 23.159 shows concern that the gods will be too preoccupied to listen to prayers. Hitch 2009: 67–8, 132. 26 Hitch 2009: 67–8. In 140 she describes the ‘constant questioning’ of efficacy of sacrifice by gods and men in the Iliad. 27 As Lefkowitz 1989: 80 has argued, the Medea, Bacchae, Hippolytus, Andromache, Helen, and Alcestis of Euripides all touch on unknowability. 28 Eur. Hipp. 141–69. See also Eur. Tro. 884–6: ‘Hecuba: whoever you are, most difficult to know, Zeus, whether necessity of nature or the mind of men, I address you in prayer’. See Gould 1985: 10–11 and Lefkowitz 1989: 72. 29 Eur. Hipp. 1–58. 30 The absence of the gods comes across far more crisply in Sophocles than Euripides, the reputed atheist: e.g. Soph. Trach. 1264–74; Lefkowitz 1989: 73–4, 78–9. Gods more present but ambiguous: Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981: 9. 31 Curse tablet: discussed in Jordan 1999: 115–24. 32 Consultations that codify unknowability in literature include Xen. An. 3.1.5–8: Xenophon asks Delphi to whom he should sacrifice to have a prosperous journey; Plut. Arist. 11.3, from 479BC: the Delphic oracle informs Aristides that the Athenians and Greeks must pray to Zeus, Hera of Kithairon, and other deities, to beat the Persians; Dem. 21.51–2: a list of gods to pray to for individual things like good health and fortune, based on oracles from Delphi and Dodona. See Versnel 2011: 46–7 on these. The Dodonan tablets, catalogued in Eidinow 2007: 72–138, record real-life responses that avoid the narrative elaboration, as argued by Parker 2016: 70–1. Some ask which gods to worship, e.g. Eidinow 2007: 89 n.1: ‘Hermon (asks) by aligning himself with which of the gods will there be from Kretaia offspring for him, in addition to those he has now?’, see also pg.112, n.1. Asking which god to pray to was common for a range of consultation subjects. On having children: 89–93, n.6, 7, 15; on recovering from illness: pg.104–7, n.1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10; on property: pg.108–10 n.1; on attaining prosperity or aims: pg.110, n.1, 6; pg.121, n.3. Eidinow 2007: 77 n.9; pg.90–1, n.4, 5, 6; pg.96–99, n.6, 8, 13, 14 (etc.), make requests of ‘the god’. Others are more specific in address. 33 Kindt 2020: 271. 34 Davies 1997: 44. 35 Jim 2014: 65–6; assumption of the relationship: Yunis 1988: 53.

116 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62

Unknowability Eidinow 2007: 12. Pulleyn 1997: 97; on ritual as communication: Hitch 2009: 94. Pl. Cra. 400d–401a; see also 384a–b, 387d, 388b, 389c, 397b. Versnel 2011: 51. Larson 2016: 85–9. Kearns 2006: 311. Eidinow 2022: 2. Epistemological Uncertainty: Stowers 2011: 39; cf. Burkert 1996: 6 on the ‘knowledge barrier’; Larson 2016: 13. ‘Safe anchor’ and ‘ultimate unknowability’: Sourvinou‐Inwood 1997: 173; Jim 2014: 88. Reassurance: Eidinow 2022: 21–3; see Hobson et al. 2018; Jacoby 2020, on psychological research on ritual performance in response to anxiety and ‘affiliative deficit’. Boivin 2009: 268, 284; Eidinow 2022: 21; Kindt 2012: 45; 2020: 271. Graf 2001a: 229; Kindt 2012: 45. Specificity in rituals: Alvar 1985: 236. E.g. Hes. WD 724–6 talks about ‘libations to Zeus’: libations were commonly specific. Where oaths make specific mention of the gods, rather than assuming their power, they tend to be specific, e.g. the Acharnian ephebic oath RO 88: calls a list of named gods as witnesses, who are a mix of local heroes and familiar gods. See Sommerstein and Bayliss 2012 for more examples. Mikalson 1983: 68 observed that deities could be named in certain types of cult acts. Need to communicate to a deity driving specificity: Griffiths 1975: 119; Pulleyn 1994: 18, 22; 1997: 96–115, esp. 97; Versnel 2011: 53–4. Ensuring the propitiation was received: Pulleyn 1994: 17; Versnel 2011: 43. Loxias: Strabo C250, Ogden 1997: 46. Divinely inspired figures are only conduits: Parker 2011: 66. Prophētai translate mysterious signs: Pl. Tim. 72a–b, Luck 2006: 285–6. See Slings 1994: 97 on the concern of the Athenians being Socrates’ divine sign as direct contact. Vernant 1991: 153. Pl. Rep. 6.496c. Partridge 2008: 285. Partridge 2008: 285 observed the fundamentally mysterious identity of the Sign. Pl. Euthphr. 3b5–6. Smith 1989: 8–13, 38–9, 41. Augustine, Sermon II [LII Ben.], sect. 16; see below. The Thunder: Perfect Mind, trans. G. MacRae. See Miller 1986: 487 and Pulleyn 1994: 23 on the power and ‘violently reverent’ incomprehensibility in Thunder. Aristotle F15 (Ross); see Graf 2007: 140–1 for more context on the unknowability of the experience and the tablets themselves. E.g. fourth-century tablet from Graf and Johnston 2007: 38, n.27. Greeks speaking in tongues see Luck 2006: 298. Johnston 2007: 94, 132–3. Aesch. Ag. 160–6. Cf. ‘Gaia and Themis, one form with many names …’ in Aesch. PB 209–10. Harrison 2000: 258 argues for the power of the name, as does Versnel 2011: 50–1. See also Lloyd-Jones 1971: 85 and Zajcev 1996: 203–12 who believe the passage suggests appropriate pious humility, and Raeburn and Thomas 2011: 85, who stress the ‘common and traditional’ nature of this contemplation of what name to use during a prayer. Eur. Troj. 885–7. Eur. Troj. 469, 1240. Barlow 1986: 209, on 884. On justice: Lee 1976: xvii, referencing Conacher 1967.

Unknowability 117 63 E.g. Heinimann 1945: 130–1 connected this line with Empedocles DK31B134; Lee 1976: 223, on 884–8 observes the ‘influence of contemporary speculation’ combined with the ‘conventional’ structure of the prayer. 64 On these see the previous chapter. 65 Sedley 1983: 10–11. 66 Rudhardt 2002 [1992]: 182. 67 Harrison 2000: 191. 68 E.g. Nietzsche, Gay Science V.2.20: ‘“Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that’s indecent” – a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties’. 69 Eidinow 2007: esp. 10–25. 70 Gould 1985. Rudhardt, in his 1958 dissertation, e.g. pg.44, ‘le flottement perpétual de la notion de dieu’. He had worked this into a broader concept in his 1992 article on foreign religions. 71 Gould 1985: 8–14, and expanded in 1994: 94. Gould 1985: 6–7. 72 Gould 1994: 94. 73 Augustine, Sermon II [LII Ben.], sect. 2. 74 Harrison 2007a: 380. 75 Tor 2017: 34–5, 46–7. 76 Hom. Od. 17.464–78. 77 Antinous: Hom. Od. 21.97–101, 22.1–22. Proclamation: 24.351–4. 78 On the protective nature of ‘if … then’ clauses, see Hitch 2009: 128. Importance of performative nature of unknowability: Fraenkel 1950: 160; Pulleyn 1994: 17. 79 Larson 2016: 224; Naiden 2012: 131–82. 80 Xen. An. 7.8.1–6. 81 Hdt. 6.12.3. From Versnel 2011: 43. 82 SEG 15.395. 83 Yunis 1988: 56; Versnel 2011: 43–4. 84 Likewise the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease esp. 5, as argued by Martin 2004: 41–3, where the author avoids attributing specific diseases to the agency of specific gods, but insists on the ultimate divinity of diseases as a whole, as a consequence of the divine makeup of the natural world. 85 Hdt 1.87, 90. 86 Soph. Ant. 1273. 87 Soph. Aj. 487–90. 88 Soph. OC 964–5. 89 Actions not his own: Eur. Ph. 1612–4. The chorus state that a murderous one of gods was responsible for the Sphinx, Eur. Ph. 1031–2. Jocasta complains about the situation she finds herself in, having given birth to Oedipus and then married him, and blames ‘some god’, theon tis; Eur. Ph. 379–81, see also 1579 ‘the god who brings this to pass’ – for bringing about the destruction of Oedipus’ family, just as the fulfilment of Oedipus’ curse through the death of his sons Eteocles and Polyneices was fulfilled likewise through the actions or will of ‘a god’ or ‘the gods’: 69–70, 1426 ( Mikalson 1991: 22–5). 90 Eur. Ph. 1763, 382. 91 Dem. 18.192–4. 92 Xen. Hell. 7.5.26. 93 Other examples include Eur. Hel. 1307 and Pausanias 8.37.9 ( Pulleyn 1994: 23). 94 Harrison emphasises that the ‘identification of gods takes place … in spite of what seem extraordinary obstacles’ ( Harrison 2000: 213). Harrison assumes belief

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99

100

101 102 103 104

Unknowability beneath Herodotus’ portrayal. Herodotus’ gods are universal, and cultures only differ by worship: Harrison 2000: 212; Parker 1996: 159; Rudhardt 2002: 175–80. Analogy from Harrison 2000: 212. See also Rudhardt 2002: 178. Unified belief with different cultic practices: Gould 1994: 103; Harrison 2000: 209; Rudhardt 2002: 172, 180. Universal gods: e.g. Zeus is known as Ammon: Hdt 2.42, 1.182, 4.181; Zeus as Bel-Marduk: 1.181, 3.158, Zeus as the Persian god: 1.131; Demeter is known as Isis: Hdt 2.123, 2.156; Alilat the Arabian goddess, Mylitta the Assyrian goddess and Hator the Egyptian goddess are all Aphrodite: 1.131, 4.59, 1.105, 2.41; Mendes is Pan: 2.46.4, and Melqart the Tyrian is Herakles: Hdt 2.44. On referring to the same gods: Zeus Purifier, Protector of the Hearth, and Protector of Friends, with different epithets, but explicitly emphasising they are the same god: Hdt 2.53, 1.44; cf. Hom. Il. 15.187–93, Hes. Theog. 112–38 ( Asheri et al. 2007: 107; Versnel 2011: 73, 77, 105). Subversion by Herodotus: Harrison 2000: 213; cf. Linforth 1928: 13. Direct equations between gods are also made at Hdt 1.131.3, 1.216.4, 2.29.7, 3.8.3, 4.59.2, and 5.7, for instance. The universalising principle is subverted when, for instance, the Apis is described as god of the Egyptians, despite Cambyses’ injury at 3.64.3, i.e. his involvement in Persian affairs; see also 1.172.2: the Caunians remove ‘foreign cults’ and worship only ancestral deities. 5.102 and 9.119.1: Cybebe and Pleistorus are described as local gods, even though Cybebe had an established identification with Demeter, the Great Mother, and Aphrodite: see Charon of Lampsacus FrGH 262 F5; Edwards 1993; Harrison 2000: 216; Robertson 1996: 304. Hdt 1.131: Persians originally sacrificed to the sun, moon, earth, fire, water, and winds, but later adopted worship of a number of more recognisable deities; Rudhardt 2002: 176. 1.87.3, and 1.90.2: Apollo is god of the Greeks for Croesus even though he honours him himself; 5.49.3 (Aristagoras), 9.90.2 (Hegesistratus), 5.92–3 (Socles): appeals by foreigners using Greek gods or common gods as witnesses to entreat Greeks; 4.108.2: non-Greeks (Budini) worship Greek gods. These are complicating statements that reinforce the idea of ‘Greek’ and ‘Foreign’ gods, even when foreigners worship Greek gods, etc., as in Burkert 1990: 24–5; Harrison 2000: 215. Harrison 2000: 217–8. Hdt 4.79.2: The Scythian king Scyles, who is killed; 7.43.2: Xerxes’ worship of the Trojan Athena and heroes of Troy which resulted in a ‘panic attack’; and 4.76.3–5: Anacharsis the Scythian and his death as a result of the vow to create a festival of the mother of the gods ( Rudhardt 2002: 185). Respect: Hdt 6.97. Datis does not intend to harm Delphi and is shocked they thought he would, instead leaving 300 talents of frankincense on the altar. 6.118: Datis returns the golden statue of Apollo from Delium to Delos with instructions for them to return it. Oracles: 1.157–8: Mazares consults a Greek oracle at Branchidae. 1.13: Gyges’ offerings at Delphi. 1.51: Croesus’ offerings at Delphi, etc. Harrison 2000: 214. Eidinow 2007: 10–11. ‘Critical stream of thought’: Carabine 1995: 13–14. Greek philosophy complicates the attributes of the gods: Sedley 1983: 16. Parmenides DK28B1.27–32, B2, B8. Burns 2014: 22; Carabine 1995: 16. Lloyd 2018: 43 argues Parmenides ‘radically undermined’ appearances of the

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105 106 107 108 109 110

111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

gods, ‘in a move that goes far beyond raising a doubt or two about this or that phenomenon’. Carabine 1995: 16. Xenophanes DK21B15. Xenophanes DK21B11. Tor 2020: 24. See also Lloyd 2018: 78, Xenophanes’ ideas ‘undermined’ the idea of the gods. The unreliability of the senses and means of gaining knowledge: esp. Heraclitus DK22B107, also B7, B17, B19, B22, B34–5, B55, B101a. Criticism of the poets, on people/authorities knowing nothing: DK22B1–2, B28a, B40: ‘Learning many things does not teach understanding. Else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, as well as Xenophanes and Hecataeus’, B42, B57, B81, B104, B129, schol. Eur. Her. 131. On the equal wisdom of men: B116, B108, B113. Johnstone 2020: 42, 46. Heracl. DK22B93 see also B78. Burkert 1985: 309 wrote that Heraclitus ‘combines radical criticism with the claim for a deeper piety’. Osborne 1997: 40 concludes Heraclitus does not ridicule religious practices. Adomenas 1999 argued that Heraclitus was not a reformer but an interpreter. Fränkel 1974 [1938]: 214–20. Johnstone 2020: 49–51. Empedocles F3, Sextus, Math., 7.123–4. Democritus DK68B10; see also B6–9, B117, B125. Metrodorus: DK70B1, Euseb. PE 14.19.9; Sedley 1983: 14. See Tor 2017: 47 on Protagoras’ development in DK80B4 of unknowability into ‘agnosticism’. See also DK80A3. ‘Put pressure’ as in Tor 2020: 24 on Xenophanes. As De Romilly 2002: 105–6 argues. Hdt 2.53.1; cf. Prot. DK80B4; on the comparison between the fragment of Protagoras and Herodotus see Burkert 1985: 131; Scullion 2006: 201. De Romilly 1992: 221 observed the ‘convergences in their thought’. Schiappa 1991: 55. Hdt 2.3.2, 65.2; see Burkert 1985: 131; 1990: 24–9; Scullion 2006: 200 for discussion of Herodotus’ avoidance of discussing divine things. Osiris and Eleusis: 2.171.1–2. Egyptian swine: 2.47.2. Embalming: 2.86.2. Dead man: 2.170.1. Scholars dismissed Herodotus’ desire to avoid impiety: e.g. Lateiner 1989: 65; Scullion 2006: 200. When Herodotus declines to provide more information on the Samothracian mysteries, his own religiosity is implied. Gould is correct to assume that Herodotus was himself an initiate of the Samothracian mysteries: Hdt 2.51; Gould 1994: 92. Mikalson 2002: 198; Lateiner 1989: 64–7; on investigative plausibility see also Gould 1994: 94; Harrison 2000: 191. Cf. Socrates’ reluctance to talk about the gods in Pl. Cra. 407d–e. Pulleyn 1994: 24 argued that Herodotus is concerned to avoid divulging mysteries. Harrison 2000: 182–90. Carabine 1995: 27. Arist. Metaph. 987a 32–b 7, 1078b 9–1079a 4, 1086a; Irwin 1977: 1. Carabine 1995: 26. On the quote and inappropriate distinction between the transcendent Christian God and human-like Greek gods see Davis 2017: 569. Carabine 1995: 10, 1.

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132 Belief in decline: Nilsson 1940: 112, 94, 115; 1948: 66–70; 1952 [1964]: 260–2. On references to the nonspecific ‘gods’ as a symptom of decline specifically, see Nilsson 1948: 116. See response in Mikalson 1983: 110–12. 133 Harrison 2007b: 139. 134 Carabine 1995: 17. 135 ‘atheism with no illusions’: Rubel 2014: 21. 136 Winiarczyk 2016: 63, for instance, argues without justification that ‘[d]efinitions of atheism that include agnosticism, epistemological scepticism or even pantheism or deism seem too broad’.

6

Othering Mediating the legitimacy of (a)theism and the creation of Greek identity

L’étrange is perhaps the most important driver in the formation of ancient Greek identity: the strange and uncanny; the other. Just as the Greeks ‘invented the barbarian’ in order to define their ‘Greekness’ without needing to articulate explicitly or codify what it was to be Greek, they also ‘invented’ the magician and witch, the oracle-monger, the superstitious, and the atheist to explore and reinforce their religious and communal identity.1 This generation of oppositional religious categories allowed Greeks to cultivate and mediate a sense of normative religion, and recognise and practise a coherent set of beliefs and rituals, without a guiding doctrine.2 As Whitmarsh observes, ‘[t]he history of atheism cannot be just that of those who profess not to believe in gods; it must also account for those social forces … that construct it as the other, the inverse of true belief’.3 This is ressentiment, for Nietzsche, the denunciation of the other through which a sense of self is formed4: Any form of ressentiment, for real or imagined reasons (see Aberle on ‘relative deprivation’), may trigger a language of alienating displacement of which the accusation of magic is just one possibility in any given culture’s rich vocabulary of alterity. In the Greek imagination the main forms of religious othering were magic, superstition, and atheism: each of these occupied their own space as well as a shared category of religious malpractice and deviancy, as a ‘relational category rather than a substantial one’, as Edmonds has argued, in opposition to subjectively defined normative religion.5 Of all of these, the most discussion by far has been given to magic. ‘The scholarly literature’, anthropologists M. and R. Wax observed, ‘contains two principal approaches to the definition and study of magic: an intellectual and a moral’.6 By this they refer to (the legacy of) 19th-century, Christian-influenced anthropological discussions of forms of belief and practice like ‘magic’, ‘the occult’, or ‘superstition’, motivated by the desire to distinguish religion, perceived as intrinsically positive, from all forms of notreligion (including atheism), perceived as equally negative.7 In the tradition of 19th-century anthropology, magic is Urdummheit (primordial stupidity) and DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-6

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is intellectually inferior to scientific and intellectual thought, unlike religion which is a stepping stone to rationality.8 This was the perspective of James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, who argued that magic differed from religion as magic involved threats and coercion against the gods, while religion was humble prayer. Coperhaver (2015) has explored in depth the indebtedness of Frazer to ideas normative religion and primitive magic and atheism in the enlightenment and renaissance: he was, after all, a classical linguist. Like many, Frazer was indebted to Jacob Burckhardt, who viewed the process of building any kind of theory or science around magic as pointless and potentially dangerous, criticising earlier renaissance scholars like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola9: In astral superstition he finds a root of all ungodliness and immorality. If the astrologer believes in anything at all, it must be the planets that he worships as his gods, … nothing promotes evil more than when heaven itself seems to be its author, thus causing belief in eternal salvation and damnation to wither away. Building on the classical tradition and attempting to reconcile admiration for ancient philosophy with – as they perceived it – the bloody, dark, and primitive Greek ritual traditions, many renaissance scholars grappled with ancient magic and belief. One of the most important, but neglected, renaissance scholars in the English tradition is Tudor Sir John Cheke, tutor to Edward the Prince of Wales from 1544 to 1553, and a close friend of King Henry VIII, as well as the first Regius Professor of Greek at St John’s College Cambridge from 1540 to 1551, where he played a crucial role in rehabilitating Greek studies.10 Cheke is especially important in his impact on the development of modern conceptions of magic, atheism, and religion, and particularly the perception of a division between religion and magic eventually popularised by James Frazer. As the central figure of a famous group of Protestant Humanists, including Thomas Smith, Thomas Wilson, William Cecil, and Roger Ascham, Cheke helped shape the (controversial) religious reforms of the age.11 In 1545–6 Cheke presented to Henry VIII a translation of Plutarch’s On Superstition, Plutarch’s discussion of the role and nature of superstition and atheism in society, with an attached preface in Latin in which the term ‘atheism’ is first recorded in English.12 The preface is unusually long and was the most directly and coherently political of his commentaries: in it, Cheke argued for continued religious reform by offering the king a definition of what constituted right and wrong forms of worship.13 Cheke divided religious deviancy into two forms. The first were those who undermine knowledge of God’s will: the ignorant, heretical, and arrogant, who ‘mistake the thickest darkness for brightest day-light: and these men think nothing is or can be better than their own conceptions and tenets. Such are they, who spend all their age in Plato’s Cave’.14 Atheists and the

Othering 123 superstitious are of the second category: those who undermine correct action towards God.15 Atheists, like the superstitious, ‘apprehend not how to fear in such a manner as they ought’: atheists do not fear the gods, while the superstitious fear them too much (or inappropriately).16 This idea of a category of religious deviancy, revived from Plutarch, characterised by primitive thinking, stupidity, and extreme behaviour and manifesting as atheism, magic, or superstition, informed Frazer and beyond. There was no agreed and common definition of magic, superstition, or atheism in the ancient world, but they were nonetheless identifiable. Identification was a polythetic approach: many different combinations of cues could be make it identifiable to most people through an intuitive and subjective process of perception, dependent on normativity.17 This draws on Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances: all members of the family draw from a set of characteristics, but all look different, no one has all of them, and there may be no single feature that all share, with some characteristics that a clearer indication than others.18 how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet. (But this never bothered you before when you used the word ‘game’.) ‘But then the use of the word is unregulated – the ‘game’ we play with it is unregulated’. – It is not everywhere bounded by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one may throw the ball in tennis, or how hard, yet tennis is a game for all that, and has rules too […] We don’t know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary a for a special purpose. Does it take this to make the concept usable? Not at all! Except perhaps for that special purpose. Wittgenstein Principle Investigations §68–9 (trans. Anscombe, Hacker, & Schulte 2009) Boundaries between practices and beliefs considered religious, atheistic, magical, and superstitious were only drawn explicitly and discussed when there was a specific reason to draw these: most of the time, Greeks followed their intuition. In this shared category of otherness, magic, superstition, and atheism were commonly associated with one another, and with various other aspects of alterity. By the Classical period magic was already strongly associated with foreigners (especially Egyptians and Persians), as a source of great alien magical wisdom.19 Female users of magic are far more common than males in Greek literature, which involved a further inversion of traditional power dynamics.20 The practice of magic was full of inversions too. Rather than the highly symbolic, precious, and sacred items of traditional religion, magical items were often mundane: anything from bits of wood to the most common herbs and plants.21 In particular the ‘goēs’ (sorcerer), and to some

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extent ‘magos’ (Persian magician), had strong negative connotations of fraudulence and a mercenary attitude.22 Magic also gradually became associated with undesirable or immoral behaviour, like incest and other social taboos.23 So, a network of associations was built up that could be attached to any identifiable collection of non-normative practices or beliefs, and reinforced the idea that they were deviant. Modern studies of magic have struggled to move substantially beyond Frazer’s distinction between religion and magic as that between ‘humble prayer’ and ‘coercion’.24 However, scholars have shifted this distinction (of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religious activity) into one within magic itself. Magic has often been divided into two camps: ‘black’ or ‘white’, ‘cthothian’ or ‘olympian’, ‘unofficial’ or ‘official’. The impression we get of magic from Greek sources and the analytical distinctions that were influenced by them, in the work of scholars like Frazer, is not necessarily reflected in real phenomena. Greek practitioners of magic not only made curses or spells (epodai) but also prayers (euchai); both aimed to persuade (peithein) the gods, as Plato’s Stranger observed.25 As Graf has argued, coercion is the last resort of the Greek magician, and not the rule, as is codified in the (albeit chronologically much later) Greek Magical Papyri.26 Similarly, internal divisions such as ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic are ultimately indebted to a view which defines by other and have not worked well in application. Magic could be used for healing and helping or destroying and killing: the intent differed, but the practices were similar.27 Curse tablets and lead, clay, or wax figurines were melted or pierced with needles used ‘contagious’ magic (the destruction of part of the intended victim’s body with the aim of impacting the whole) to restrain or control their victim.28 But there were no clear ‘black magic’ practices, and (sometimes the same) people could use a variety of techniques for different purposes. Curse tablets, for instance, refer to both binding spells and prayers for justice, and some texts have elements of both of these.29 These were agonistic tools: rarely used to harm seriously, but instead to solve a variety of interpersonal issues, from love to business rivalry.30 They were not either ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Likewise, drugs could be used for positive or negative effects or purposes.31 Another common designation for magic is as ‘unofficial religious activity’; a designation that relies on the idea of religious belief and activity as mediated and sanctioned primarily by the polis.32 The Polis Religion model has proven problematic, both in its reliance on there having been a coherent and cohesive set of official religious beliefs and activities as sanctioned by the polis and in its consequent marginalisation of ‘unofficial’ practices and beliefs that is not borne out in the evidence.33 For instance, conceiving of Greek religion from the perspective of Polis Religion, we would expect the state to police beliefs and activities like magic. But the legal actions in Athens, for instance, were against asebeia, impiety, and did not expressly include magic, and while there were laws against specific activities and one could still be punished for committing a crime using magic (e.g. murder via pharmaka), there was no

Othering 125 general ban against ‘magic’.34 ‘Probably the’ clearest example of a prosecuted magic-user that comes from Athens, is Theoris, who was prosecuted in Athens some time before 338 BC for selling incantations (epoidai) and drugs (pharmaka), and was executed alongside her whole family.35 Scholars have variously argued that Theoris was charged with homicide by poison, or planning to commit it, or perhaps for impiety in a broader sense.36 Either way, this trial does not reveal a clear distinction between legitimate and illegitimate practice or belief. Julia Kindt is probably right to suggest that Theoris’ trial represents an attempt to ‘to draw the line between religion and magic, between acceptable and unacceptable religious practices and religious power with the help of the law courts’.37 As Phillips observes, the ‘desire to know the future or levitate or heal was not necessarily criminal; but who tried it, in what ways, for what reasons, and at what times could make it so’.38 The only suggestion that this may have differed outside Athens is in Plato’s Meno, when Meno argues that Athens was less inclined than other poleis to prosecute magic users; but as Socrates argues, this is a rhetorical device.39 There is very little evidence of any inclination to systematically control or regulate magic through the polis anywhere in the Greek world (in the Classical period at least). Moreover, many ‘official’ rituals shared elements of para-theistic supernatural magical beliefs with ‘unofficial’ ones. At Eleusis, for instance, the story of the fire ritual through which the king’s son (Demophon or Triptolemos) had been made immortal was a central component of the mythos of the secret Mysteries, and initiates also engaged in magical practices like purifications and an oath of secrecy.40 Likewise, as Betz has argued, the Orphic tablets, which offer an invaluable panorama of information on initiates of cults like the Mysteries, include symbols (sumbola), formula (sunthēmata), and quotations which, as Betz observes, ‘cannot be understood without the assumptions of magic’.41 While magic involved ‘inversions’ of authority and sacred objects, so did ‘official’ religious practices, like the ‘Cheese Race’ discussed in Chapter 2.42 Conditional curses were popular and respectable, and used for everything from gravestones to official contexts; for instance, the Athenian assembly was introduced with a curse on wrongdoers, or those who had been bribed to speak.43 Likewise, many practices and beliefs not mediated by the polis were common and served parallel functions to ‘official’ types. In the Greek world, ‘shamans’ performed similar functions to oracles – the ‘official’ form of contact with the gods in Greek religion.44 The Greek shaman detached his soul from his body so that he could speak with the gods in their own language, make predictions, and gain insight from obscure dreams, as well as harnessing powers over the natural world, and performing initiations at various (Orphic) events.45 Pythagoras, for instance, supposedly had significant powers of prediction, and was able to control the weather and manipulate the human soul.46 Common seers and diviners may have been mocked by Aristophanes, medical writers, and philosophers, but they were also

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praised in city inscriptions. Thucydides mentions them frequently as part of the normal operation of the city, and it is clear that they were an important and routine part of daily civic life.47 Leaders and other non-specialists might also have been expected to have various skills of divination, and there were city oracle interpreters and personal seers for politicians in high office.48 In the Anabasis, for instance, Xenophon consults a seer frequently, but he is also able to perform this function himself.49 The gods most associated with magical practices were Hermes, Hecate, Ge, and Persephone: chthonian gods who are called on as witnesses of binding oaths or curse tablets and their powers are harnessed for spells as early as the fifth century.50 Hermes and Hecate feature most commonly in the curse tablets where they are frequently called katokhos and katokhe to denote their roles in binding and possession.51 As Scullion observed in his seminal article on Olympian and chthonian gods, the sharp distinction between the chthonian and Olympian gods has been taken for granted.52 The main clear link between different supposedly chthonian manifestations of gods is that they are all associated with the earth, as is the literal meaning of the term: other divisions between chthonian and Olympian gods ‘tend to collapse when faced with the evidence of actual cult’.53 The chthonic guises of the gods often invoked in the context of magic are not ‘evil’.54 Magical appeals to the gods are based in the inherent multiplicity not of the aspects but of interests of the gods.55 The gods, mostly but not always chthonian, could participate in even the most ‘macabre’ of magical practices, like curses, or exorcisms, apparently without issue. For instance, curse tablets were deposited in sacred wells, sanctuaries of popular gods (particularly chthonic deities), or graves, with no apparent contamination of impiety or sacrilege.56 The gods could also be invoked in supressing other supernatural agents. Pausanias (the second century AD travel writer) and Plutarch tell a story about how Pausanias (the fifth century BC Spartan general) was haunted by an innocent girl he killed (Cleonice), and he haunted the Spartans for starving him to death in a temple.57 The way to get rid of the ghosts of Cleonice and Pausanias was by propitiating both Pausanias and Cleonice and the gods.58 The mechanisms of ordinary religion were also used to consult on the use of magical practices: for instance, oracles were consulted on whether to use evocators.59 And when Aeschylus, in a fragment of his early fifth century Soul-Raisers (most likely part of a trilogy followed by Penelope, Bone-Gatherers, and a satyr drama Circe) constructs an elaborate necromantic ceremony, the gods are invoked in order to call upon the dead60: Come now, guest-friend, take up your position on the sacred grassed enclosure of the fearful lake. Slash the gullet of the neck, and let the blood of this sacrificial victim flow into the murky depths of the reeds as a drink for the lifeless. Call upon primeval Earth and chthonic Hermes, escort of the dead, and ask chthonic Zeus to send up the swarm of night-wanderers

Othering 127 from the mouths of the river, from which this melancholy off-flow water, unfit for washing hands, is sent up by Stygian springs. Aeschylus Psychagogoi F273a TrGF (trans. Ogden 2002: 26) Here the gods are an ordinary part of the mechanisms for necromancy. So the gods were conceived of as part of the mechanics of a variety of different beliefs and practices: sometimes unnamed, as ‘the divine’, and sometimes named. ‘Cthothian’ and ‘olympian’, ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘humble prayer’ and ‘coercion’: none of these divisions really work because they rest on an opposition between religion and magic, which were not distinct traditions and drew on a shared pool of beliefs about the way the cosmos and the divine work. All supernatural beliefs operated in a world of faceless but powerful entities, from gods to the souls of the dead.61 The most important and common assumption about the divine sphere was that it was unknowable but powerful (as explored in the previous chapter).62 Magical practices were part of the interplay between the principle that certain knowledge of the gods was impossible, and the desire to gain insight of this hidden knowledge, and gain some control over the gods or the world, despite the danger in doing so.63 Curses relied on the exploitation of divine forces in order to achieve a particular result, but the mechanisms and often nature of these forces was mysterious.64 Belief in ghosts and necromancy assumed a mysterious otherworldly presence, and an afterlife sometimes with the usual divine figures like Hades and Persephone and even mysterious ritual behaviour with fundamentally familiar elements like sacrifice.65 Xenophon’s Socrates astutely summarises: ‘in short, what the gods have granted us to do by help of learning, we must learn; what is hidden from mortals we should try to find out from the gods by divination: for to him who is in their grace the gods grant a sign’.66 That magic and religion share philosophical foundations problematises Frazer’s view that magical practices, or superstition, arose from ‘primitive’ mythology67: if we use mythology in the sense of primitive man’s ideas in general, then superstition is only applied mythology – superstition is primitive ideas plus practice, mythology is primitive ideas minus practice. Frazer to Henry Jackson, 22 August 1888 in Ackerman 1987: 87–9 Attitudes towards magic have often been folded into ‘superstition’. As we saw above, the three categories Cheke deploys are ‘religion’, ‘atheism’, and ‘superstition’, and magic is largely considered under the final category by him, a distinction he drew from the ancient world through Plutarch. Plutarch’s On Superstition has been marginalised in scholarship and dismissed as a facile work of Plutarch’s youth, but it is a serious work that describes contemporary discussions, as Whitmarsh has explored.68 Plutarch argued that

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atheism and superstition stem from the same mistake: they are both consequences of inappropriate degrees of fear of the gods, at opposite extremes. Cheke had differed from Plutarch in his equal condemnation of superstition and atheism. Instead, although Plutarch considered both impiety, the main thesis of the Superstition is that atheism was the better form of ‘wrong-religion’ compared with superstition, which was far less tolerable to others.69 At the opening of his On Superstition (peri tēs deisidaimōnias, lit. about god-fearing), Plutarch distinguishes between atheism and superstition70: Ignorance and blindness in regard to the gods (theōn) divides itself at the very beginning into two streams, of which the one produces in hardened characters, as it were in stubborn soils, atheism (atheotēta), and the other in tender characters, as in moist soils, produces superstition (deisidaimōnian). Plutarch On Superstition 164e (trans. Babbitt 1928) Both atheism and superstition are a consequence of ignorance of the gods, or blindness to them, depending on the mentality of the subject. Unlike atheism, in which the unbeliever has made an error of judgement leading to indifference and inaction, in the superstitious emotion is the corrupting factor.71 The superstitious man cares about unimportant things and allows his fear of the gods to dominate his life.72 Plutarch describes too much fear of the gods as equivalent to the belief that the gods are evil. So, there are three central parts to Plutarch’s judgement: atheism is characterised by a lack of fear of the gods, and superstition by too much fear; atheism is inaction, while superstition is overaction; finally, atheism is an error of reason, whereas superstition is one of emotion. Crucially, atheism, religion, and superstition are all perceived as built on, albeit radically different reactions to, the same shared worldview. ‘Plutarch’s aim’, Whitmarsh argues, is ‘less to define a specific societal group than to clump together a whole set of irrational, “foreign”, female, and low-class practices’.73 Plutarch’s basic position is put concisely and explicitly in an anonymous Hellenistic text74: So piety is the habit of attending on (therapeutichēn) gods and daimons, being between atheism (atheotētos) and superstition (deisidaimonias). Anonymous, Mullach 1867: 99, col. 1, 9–11 (my translation) We can trace the foundations of this discourse through Plutarch and Hellenistic thought, on to Theophrastus, and into earlier Greek thought in Aristotle, Plato, the Hippocratic author of On the Sacred Disease, and others. The idea of superstition as an extreme of belief had already been assumed by the fourth-century polymath and pupil of Aristotle, Theophrastus, in his Characters. In this set of caricatures, mocking opposing types of characters (e.g. the Filthy and the Fastidious, or the Obsequious and the Arrogant),

Othering 129 Theophrastus described the superstitious man as someone who takes religion too far.75 He portrayed the superstitious man as an object of derision, living in a world full of supernatural signs and symbols, and paralysed by his superstition76: The superstitious man (deisidaimōn) is the sort who washes his hands in three springs, sprinkles himself with water from a temple font, puts a laurel leaf in his mouth, and then is ready for the day’s perambulations. If a weasel runs across his path, he will not proceed on his journey until someone else has covered the ground or he has thrown three stones over the road. When he sees a snake in the house he invokes Sabazios if it is the red-brown one, and if it is the holy one he sets up a hero-shrine there and then. Theophrastus Characters 16.1–4 (trans. Diggle 2004) Theophrastus’ superstitious man has such a paralytic fear of the gods that he is unable to get anything done. The deisidaimōn (superstitious man) was obsessed with piety, but not in a traditional form: he has little interest in the major gods or normative religious practices. Instead, he is particularly gripped by Hecate and the crossroads, private worship at home, and fringe sects.77 Theophrastus does not mention atheism here: these are ‘characters’ who might prowl the streets of late fourth-century Athens and atheism could be hidden.78 Theophrastus’ argument that superstition was an extreme belief followed from Aristotle’s teaching that balance was key to character, and all values had extremes and excesses, as Aristotle had argued in his Nicomachean Ethics79: Enough has been said, then, to show that virtue of character is a mean, and in what sense it is so; that it is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency; and that it is such because it is the sort of thing able to hit the mean in feelings and actions. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1109a (trans. Crisp 2000) Aristotle argued that all vices come from extremes and excesses, or deficits, and virtue is the moderation between excess and deficiency: those who fear everything are cowards, but those who fear nothing are rash.80 It would naturally have followed that both atheism and superstition come from lack of moderation; they are diverging branches of the same root, of belief (or ‘fear’), but one is belief in excess (or ‘too much fear of the gods’) and the other is a deficit of belief (or ‘lack of fear of the gods’). Aristotle’s view of extremes and moderation were common, especially in medical treatises. In On the Sacred Disease the Hippocratic author argued that balance is key and it is crucial to avoid extremes: for him, illnesses arise, for instance, from too much heat or too much cold.81 As Martin has observed, the extremes that are characteristic of Aristotle and his student Theophrastus do not map on to specific consistent behaviours: moderation is relative for different people, as Aristotle recognised.82

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In Thucydides’ History, for instance, the author describes Nikias as ‘somewhat over-addicted to divination and practices of that kind’ (theiasmō): Nikias refuses to leave Syracuse because of a full moon, insisting they wait for 27 days as prescribed by the soothsayers, a delay that ends in disaster for the Athenians.83 In this case, where superstition is taking normal practices to the extreme, Thucydides blames both Nikias and the Athenians, who were deeply concerned about the eclipse and agreed with Nikias. This creates an interesting bookend to the Sicilian expedition: marked in the beginning by the extreme of atheistic impiety in the mutilation of the herms and mysteries, which compromises Alcibiades’ role in the expedition, and in the final part by the dithering superstition of Nikias, which compromises his role: these key moments result in the failure and catastrophic loss of the expedition.84 The Athenians assumed their behaviour was a reasonable middle ground, but Thucydides assessed it differently: caricaturing extremes allowed the Greeks to construct and reinforce the legitimacy of their own behaviour, while recognising the possibility of other views.85 Otherness was essentially subjective: specific practices and attitudes were differently assessed as normal and moderate by different people and groups, but most agreed that religious deviancy was potentially very dangerous and risky for the individual and those around them. It is sometimes argued today, as it was in the ancient world, that Thucydides ‘was (something approaching) an atheist’.86 Thucydides did not give the gods much of a visible role in his History. Thucydides dismisses magic and superstition (as above), but he excludes the gods in a more general sense: they are not obviously part of the causality of the natural world, and though he never explicitly denies the gods, his exclusion of them is systematic, and it is not justified with any statement or suggestion of any competing theological position. A good example of this is in Thucydides’ version of the haunting of Pausanias by Cleonice and his haunting of the Spartans, mentioned above, where there is no mention of ghosts, which leaves the story quite disjointed.87 Pausanias’ forced ejection from the temple is the motivation for his ghost’s requirement to be buried in the chamber (i.e. why they moved his body), as in Plutarch’s and Pausanias’ version of the story.88 Thucydides explains that the Spartans ‘later decided to move his body’ back to the temple entrance, because they were instructed to do so by Delphi, and to erect two statues, but he does not explain why. The absence of the supernatural is felt: it is possible to read this as anything from disbelief to pious respect for unknowability, and this ambiguity opened Thucydides up to accusations of atheism. Of course, the gods were not the subject of the History. Those arguing for a particular view of the cosmos, religion, or religious philosophy often defended the piety of their views by contrasting them with alternative, unacceptable ways of thinking about the gods and the supernatural. This kind of attempt to redefine normativity marks the works of Heraclitus, for instance, who was concerned to argue for his version of

Othering 131 ‘proper’ religion, as Catherine Osborne (now Rowett) has argued.89 The philosopher condemned the ‘night-wanderers’ (nuktipoloi), mages, and mystery-initiates to suffering after their death, for their sacrilege (anierōsti), describing their practices as ‘unholy’ (anierosti).90 Heraclitus believed that the methods of these individuals did not work: ‘they pray to these statues, as if one should talk with houses, not knowing what gods and heroes are’.91 For Heraclitus, correct religious practice was about knowing the appropriate things to do, and ignorance of the appropriate way to behave led to absurdity and impiety. Heraclitus’ personal influence rested on a similar type of claim to hidden knowledge to the initiates and mages he criticised: the legitimacy of his view rested on an element of competition. This approach is developed in the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease, where religious frauds are denounced as atheists, to legitimate the views of the Hippocratic author.92 For the Hippocratic author, it follows from their fraudulence that these quacks must be atheists in one sense or another: ‘I am sure that they are impious (dussebein), and cannot believe that the gods exist (theous oute einai nomizein) or have any strength (oute ischuein), and that they would not refrain from the most extreme actions’.93 For the Hippocratic author, belief that the gods can be controlled and manipulated is incompatible with belief in the gods at all. So, these frauds must believe the gods do not desire (or have the power) to help humans, or they must not believe in them at all. Religious frauds also feature in the Derveni Papyrus, where the author ridicules the idea of paying for wisdom; in Old Comedy, where oracles, seers, and diviners are mocked as greedy money-makers and false interpreters; and in Tragedy, where seers can be denounced as frauds, concerned only with making money.94 But the accusation that they are atheists is a crucial development in othering them. The criticism of charlatans and frauds peddling magical cures by the author of the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease is justified by the desire to defend proper religion against corruption. The author argues at the outset of On the Sacred Disease that the charlatans (alazones), as he describes his competitors in the field of medicine, claim that their power rests in reverence of the gods, and a greater knowledge of secret things.95 To counter this claim of piety the author argues that they are in fact frauds: ‘those who try to cure these diseases in this way believe them to be neither sacred nor divine’.96 The author grounds this view in a theological claim: magical techniques could be used for attacking and harming men, and so they cannot come from the gods because the gods are good, which means they must be caused by humans. His opponents, who say pious things only in order to deceive other men, are in fact atheists and frauds: But they seem to me impious (dussebein), to believe that the gods do not exist (kai theous oute einai nomizein) and that they have no power, and

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I think there is no extreme action that they would forbear to undertake, since the gods hold no terror for them. [Hippocrates] On the Sacred Disease, 3.14–21 (trans. Ogden 2002) For the Hippocratic author, claiming to enslave the divine is equivalent to disbelief. Both attack ‘charlatans’ on the basis of a theological claim (that the gods are always more powerful than men); and both defend, rather than attack, religion. The author of On the Sacred Disease criticises the other ‘quacks’ because he offers not only a competing theological system but also a competing service and these accusations help him to get ahead of his rivals.97 The aim of the Hippocratic author is to suggest an alternative method for treating epilepsy, and one that does not rely on magical and religious appeals, but on clinical treatment; the disease does not require a religious authority but a medical one (though he also casts himself as a religious one).98 So while in a philosophical sense the sacred disease as imagined by the Hippocratic author may have been rooted in (albeit, naturalistic) conceptions of the divine, and the author arms himself with the rhetoric of piety and impiety, the result might have seemed suspiciously devoid of the gods to the casual reader or gossip. Indeed, the consequence of his treatise is to undermine the divine: the gods, here, no longer seem to have a clear role in bringing disease, as they did in the Iliad for example.99 It was of overriding importance to package these views in a way that defended their religious legitimacy and piety. The views of Plato’s Socrates and Stranger represent a very similar approach, in delegitimating other views of the gods using easy targets of magicians and false diviners, to lend legitimacy to his own theological views. In Plato’s Republic Plato’s Socrates agrees with Adeimantus that the common superstitious beliefs peddled to the rich by priests, diviners, and other false religious authorities and charlatans are pernicious. These lies, that gods can be bribed to expunge past transgressions and magic used to harness the power of the gods, are only sold because they are profitable.100 Mendicant priests and seers knock at the rich man’s door, and try to persuade him that they have a power, bestowed on them by the gods in return for sacrifices and incantations, to use the delights of feasting to put right any wrong done by him or his ancestors. And that if anyone wants to harm an enemy, for a small charge they can injure just and unjust alike with charms and spells. They say they can persuade the gods to act or them. Plato Republic 2.364b (trans. Griffith 2003) The false priests and diviners are frauds who take advantage of the gullibility of the rich, which reveals a disrespect for the gods. Plato develops this view in the Laws. In a discussion framed around hubris, the Stranger traces the borders of appropriate religion and groups false diviners and

Othering 133 experts in deception alongside sophists, tyrants, and demagogues.101 Plato’s Stranger argues that there are three types of irreligion or atheism: belief that the gods do not exist, belief that the gods do not care, and belief that they are corruptible or possible to bribe.102 Plato’s Stranger then mounts a rhetorical defence against disbelievers: he clearly considers these the most significant offenders.103 But atheism is not restricted to only these: for Plato’s Stranger atheism is not just disbelief or unbelief but also bad beliefs about the gods; all different manifestations of extremes of religious ‘misapprehensions’ and atheism. Given the shared foundations of supernatural beliefs, critiques of what one person perceived as improper attitudes to the gods risked being perceived by others as irreligious, or even atheistic. Plato’s Socrates and Athenian were both critical of all sorts of beliefs and behaviours, and explicitly condemned and disbelieved in the efficacy of magicians (magoi), purifiers (kathartai), beggar-priests (agurtai), and charlatans (alazones), who were presented consistently as impious charlatans selling false beliefs.104 As I observed earlier, in both the Republic and the Laws, the importance of proper religious education is stressed, and it is argued that improper magical practices are damaging. Of the beliefs of magicians, particularly offensive to Plato’s Socrates was the idea (common to many magical practices) that gods were open to bribes or manipulation, which, for him, made this type of magic equivalent to impiety and atheism.105 For Plato’s Socrates, it was the power dynamic that made this impious: in the Greek world requests made of the god were expected to be reciprocal – the god expected something in exchange for an action – but the god was always in control of this relationship.106 Just as Plato’s Socrates and Stranger critiqued the conception of the gods held by some of their peers as atheistic, their own criticisms must have opened them up to the same sort of criticisms from others. The lack of doctrine, dogma, or centralised and official, controlled religion made it a contested domain. This is why Plato’s Stranger in the Laws does not offer a statement of general unbelief in magic. On magic in general the Stranger cautiously expresses his own neutrality, saying that he ‘has no certain opinion’ on such supernatural matters, maintaining his focus on criticism of specific individuals or roles.107 Likewise, Plato’s Socrates argued that magic was effective for two reasons: first, it used actual harmful substances like poison, and secondly, there were predictable psychological effects.108 This explanation is a rationalisation, but Plato’s Socrates is quite clear in asserting his belief in ghosts, for instance, and in his daimon: his rationalisation does not represent a dismissal of the underlying beliefs in magic or magic as a whole.109 These kinds of rationalisations were to some extent designed to launder esoteric and philosophical beliefs into a normative framework of religion, which was not always successful. For instance, Socrates’ daimon is certainly the subject of the accusation of his invention of new gods, and though he expends considerable energy explaining how it fit into a

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recognisably normative religious worldview, the impiety of this was the foundation of the accusations made against him at his trial (as observed in Chapter five).110 Plato’s Laws represented a pushback against the enforcement of the sort of religious views that had led to the prosecution of Socrates. The Stranger in the Laws proposed to legislate (in his theoretical city) against the harmful practices of magicians, purifiers, diviners, charlatans, and necromancers.111 Whether a magical act was criminal for Plato’ Stranger depended on the nature of the act, and its punishment depended on the nature of the crime and the nature of the criminal (professionals were punished far more severely).112 The opposition to these beliefs and practices was clearly motivated in these texts by a desire to prevent individuals from misleading the community or individuals in religious matters.113 This follows from the mission of Socrates, as Plato has it in the Republic, where he intends to mount a defence of (his version of) religion against that of the beggar-priests and frauds he had described: That’s the nature and force, Socrates, of all the things that are said about goodness and wickedness, Socrates, and the value put on them by men and gods. What effect do we think they have on the minds of the young when they hear them? Plato Republic 2.365a (trans. Griffith 2003) Plato’s Socrates objects to these portrayals of the gods because they are wrong and harm the religious education of the young. Plato is arguing for a cohesive, formal, controlled programme of education and enforcement that does not exist in any Greek state, but this is reactive against an awareness of the strength of informal socialisation and the possibility of targeted enforcement of a religious normativity that neither Plato nor Socrates could control. The Stranger in the Laws argues for the same thing: Athenian:

Cleinias: Athenians:

Our three claims – that there are gods, that they do care, and that they most emphatically cannot be bought off in defiance of justice – can we say, perhaps, that those have now been satisfactorily proved? Indeed we can. At least, your arguments would certainly get our vote. Though perhaps – in our desire to get the better of the wicked – expressed a little too forcefully. Plato Laws 10.907b–c (trans. Griffith 2016, his emphasis)

Those who break from religious normativity – as the Stranger perceives it – are labelled atheists who deserve punishment: whether positive disbelievers or frauds like certain diviners and other religious experts.114 Atheism is here the ultimate development in a package of othering that included religious fraud,

Othering 135 magic, and superstition, that could be used by a range of authors with a variety of different and opposing views to legitimate their own views in opposition to others’ and head off potential accusations themselves. The shared space that atheism, superstition, and magic occupied in the Greek imagination was inherently undefined, allowing its use in legitimating contrasting, and often opposing, views about the cosmos, which required entirely different understandings of the target beliefs and practices.115 For Greeks with little civic oversight or dogma to guide them on religion, where even the traditional works of Homer and Hesiod were not universally agreed to represent proper religion, there was no clear distinction between religion and other beliefs and practices, from divination to magic.116 There were a range of problematic ways to believe or behave towards the gods, but there was no agreement on a single corpus of specific beliefs and rituals that were ‘good’ or ‘official’, or ‘bad’ or ‘illegitimate’.117 Magic, superstition, and atheism, as we receive them are fundamentally defined by their ‘otherness’ (l’étrange). As Parker argued, ‘magic differs from religion as weeds differ from flowers, merely by negative social evaluation’: that evaluation was subjective, even if there were norms.118 Spectres of atheism, impiety, and forms of ‘superstition’ – each with a tangential and difficult relationship to real people and behaviours – were constructed to be an inversion of normal and desirable behaviours through which the Greeks articulated, explored, and reinforced their identity. This construction involved destruction: the critiques and caricatures of others were a way of challenging alternate types of religiosity as well as reinforcing their own.119 The fifth century is recognised as a watershed in the development of this category of the other in Greek society, with an emerging ‘discourse of barbarism’ and othering of magic as a part of this new discourse.120 This was a ‘powerful othering discourse, which connoted effeminate treachery, subversion, and oriental barbarism’, and connection with any of these deviant behaviours or beliefs becomes a ‘marginalising device’.121 Each of these ‘spectres’ implied the others, in a network of associations: the superstitious or magicians were also likely to be atheists and foreign, and so on.122 This has a profound impact on how we interpret the evidence on atheism. Scholars have commonly taken accusations of superstition, magic, or religious deviancy as incompatible with an accusation of atheism, as in the trial of Socrates (and argued by Socrates himself). In fact, they reinforced the accusation of atheism. It did not matter that Socrates could pin each of these individual beliefs or unbeliefs down, define them in his own way, and show how his own beliefs were not compatible with them or they were not compatible with each other.123 Defining them in a fixed way to excuse his own beliefs comes across as devious, evasive, and potentially even impious in and of itself, especially since his religious deviancy was easy to establish and he admits it in his divine sign: the rest followed naturally.

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The construction of oppositional identity was not just necessary for the creation of religious normativity; it created easy targets for blame and the expunging of doubt about religion. In his Possession at Loudun (originally published in French in 1970), the French Jesuit historian Michel De Certeau observed the association and correlation between atheism and other ‘superstitious’ beliefs and behaviours. De Certeau found that the increasing identifications of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries correlated with anxiety about and instances of public atheism.124 De Certeau theorised that witchcraft and atheism, and anxieties about these, arose as a result of (and helped to combat) the doubt and uncertainty that plagued the societies living under the collapsing medieval theology of the period.125 De Certeau argued that a communal theology under threat must admit doubt, or figures of doubt (like witches or atheists) in to the communal consciousness, in order to be punished or excluded.126 Magic and atheism, as part of a package of otherness, allowed for the compartmentalisation, demonisation, and punishment of figures of doubt and instability. This would, inevitably, come to the fore during crisis periods such as the end of the fifth century as we will see in the next chapter.127 Notes 1 The construction of an ‘other’ of ‘illegitimate’ religious beliefs and practices: see particularly Stratton 2007: esp. ch.2, Ogden 2002: 33; On the construction of the Greek identity through the invention of the barbarian, see particularly Hall 1989, and Hartog 1988. 2 See Chapter 4 n. 15 on lack of doctrine in Greek religion. See Gray 1995: 185, Edmonds 2019: 5, 10 on opposition to normativity. 3 Whitmarsh 2016: 116. At 26–7 he earlier contradicted this position by arguing that atheism only began to be constructed as an ‘other’ in Christian late antiquity. 4 J. Smith 1995: 19. See also Edmonds 2019: 10, Smith 1995: 19. 5 Edmonds 2019: 11. Oppositions were characteristic of Greek antiquity, as Lloyd 2018: 39 argues; see also Derrida 1982. See Tsoukala 2011 on the importance of oppositional schema in the construction of alterity in Greece. Whitmarsh 2021: 84 on atheism as an ‘outgroup label’. 6 Wax and Wax 1963: 495. 7 This legacy is only one of many attempts at demarcation over the centuries: see Tambiah 1990 for a broader perspective. Betz 1997: 244 and Versnel 2003: 910 argue that the negative connotations of magic need combating. See also Tambiah 1990: 4–41 on the history of demarcation of religion from science and magic as individual domains. 8 Phillips 1997: 266–8, and Betz 1997: 245–9 discuss Urdummheit and the history of prejudicial scholarship on magic. Tambiah 1990: 8–11. Edmonds 2019: 8 discusses the opposition of magic and science. 9 Burckhardt in Copenhaver 2015: 18. 10 See Brandsby in Mullinger 1884: 52–3, Milton, Sonnet XI, and others in McDiarmid 1997: 100–1. 11 Cheke’s most famous work was the Hurt of Sedition 1549, a violent polemic criticism of the first Book of Common Prayer, in support of Edward Seymour’s reforms. See McDiarmid 2012, ‘Cheke, John’: 183. Controversial reforms: McDiarmid 2012, ‘Cheke, John’: 182.

Othering 137 12 Presentation of De Superstitione: Strype 1821: 185; McDiarmid 1997: 100. The text is now in University College, Oxford, MS 171; see McDiarmid 1997, 2012, ‘Cheke, John’: 182. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910: ‘Cheke, Sir John (1514–1557)’. Bryson 2004: ‘Cheke, Sir John (1514–1557)’. ‘Atheism’ may have been used before Cheke – Wootton 1988: 705 claims in 1526 but it is unclear what he refers to – but Cheke borrowed the word from the Greek text rather than from an English or Latin-English work. 13 More than six times the length of the next longest preface Cheke presented to the King and twice as long as the text of Plutarch, as McDiarmid 1997: 101–2 observes. Strype 1821: 169 explains the function of the work as a religious lecture: ‘A very learned treatise. This was a discourse drawn up upon the argument of superstition, for the use of that King, in order to the reformation of religion, which in his reign was much pestered with superstitions. This was set by way of dedication before his translation of Plutarch’s book of that argument, and writ in a very elegant Latin style’. McDiarmid 1997: 119. McDiarmid 2012, ‘Cheke, John’: 182. 14 Strype 1821: 195–7. 15 Strype 1821: 198. 16 Strype 1821: 198–9, 200. 17 Edmonds 2019: 11–12. 18 Edmonds 2019: 12; Wittgenstein PI §66–71. 19 Foreigners and magic: Aesch. Pers. 598–693: the conjuring of Darius’ ghost. Egyptians: perhaps the best example is Helen’s drugging of her husband and his guests in Hom. Od. 4.219–24; Homer says that Helen gained the drug and knowledge of how to use it from the Egyptians but knowledge of the opium poppy (which it is presumed to be) was cultivated in Asia Minor, closer to the Greeks; see Scarborough 1997: 158–9. Instead the poet attributes it to the Egyptians, because of their reputation for pharmaka and magical knowledge. Ogden 2002: 33. Watson 2019: 167 argues that witches are presented as ‘symbols of alterity in ethnic terms’. Copenhaver 2015: 6 discusses the root of magic as doing what a magos does, and the embedding of foreign religious practice in this. 20 Females sorcerers included Medea, in Eur. Med., App. Rh. Arg. 3.475–539, 1026–277, 4.123–61, 445–80, 1638–93; and Circe, in Hom. Od. 10.133–399; Ogden 2002: 78, Versnel 2003: 909. 21 Versnel 2003: 909. 22 Magi as quacks: e.g. Soph. OT 385–9; cf. more neutral presentation in Hdt 1.101 as a Median tribe and 7.37 as prophets and advisers; the first reference, is in Heraclitus DK22B14: ‘those who wander in the night: magoi, bacchants, maenads, initiates’, which has a negative sting as Collins 2008: 54–5 argues. Goēs: e.g. Eur. Bacch. 234–42. Magos and goēs can be used interchangeably as abuse in Greek rhetoric, as in Aeschines 3.137 where magos kai goēs is best translated as ‘scoundrel’. See also Versnel 2003: 908. 23 So, in the fifth century, the historian Xanthus of Lydia FrGH 765 F31–2 observed, possibly in a book on Magica, that ‘mages have sex with their mothers’ and ‘with their daughters and sisters too’. The historicity of the Magica is disputed, as the only reference to this work is in this fragment, from Clem. Alex. Strom. 3.2.11. 24 Versnel’s 1991b popular four criteria of ‘attitude, action, intention, and social evaluation’ to distinguish magic from normative religion do not work very well in practice either, as argued by Edmonds 2019: 15–16. 25 Pl. Laws 10.909b. Luck 2006: 34. On Frazer’s influence on magical scholarship see Graf 1997: 188–9. 26 Graf 1997: 194.

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27 Luck 2006: 33. 28 Theoc. 2.53–7. ‘Voodoo’ dolls: Pl. Laws, 11.933b; see Ogden 2002: n.236–47, for examples of voodoo dolls. Versnel 2003: 909. 29 Eidinow 2019a: 351–2. 30 For example, see Ogden 2002: n.239, a binding love spell. Eidinow 2007: 154, 173, Faraone 1991: 165–6, 189–90. 31 Even in the Odyssey, Circe uses a harmful drug to turn the men into pigs and later a healing one to cure them: pharmaka, drugs, has a range of potential meanings in the Odyssey. Hom. Od. 10.385–97. Scarborough 1997: 139. Range of meanings are explained in Hom. Od. 4.230: Helen was given the use of drugs by the gods, which can be both healing or damaging; see Scarborough 1997: 139, n.14 for more specific examples of bad or good drugs. Versnel 2003: 909. 32 Graf 2019: 115, on ‘unsanctioned ritual’; Eidinow 2019b: 63 argues witchcraft is ‘illicit ritual practice’. 33 On this marginalisation, see esp. Woolf 1997. On the problems with magic, see e.g. Parker 2011: 259–62. 34 Phillips 1997: 262–5. Crimes using magic could be prosecuted in the Areopagos according to [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 57.3 or possibly through graphē asebeias e.g. Plut. Dem. 14.4 and [Dem.] 25.79–83; Eidinow 2007: 152, n.69, 2010: 12. As Eidinow 2019a: 366–7 has argued, there is no evidence it was illegal to write curse tablets. Copenhaver 2015: 32–3 discusses the evidence for laws against magic and concludes there was none. 35 Dem. 25.79–80. Likewise Aesop Fables 56 (Perry): a woman (witch) claims she can placate the anger of the gods with incantations and was taken to court for asebeia. Eidinow 2010: 11–13; Luck 2006: 102. 36 Homicide: Collins 2001: 488–9, MacDowell 1999: 60. Impiety: Eidinow 2016b: 42–3. 37 Kindt 2012: 117. 38 Phillips 1997: 266. 39 Meno 80a–b, observes that other cities than Athens would have considered Socrates a magician. See Ogden 2002: 275–6; Collins 2008: 133, Phillips 1997: 262. Eidinow 2007: 152. Versnel 1991: 62–3: argues secrecy about indicates shame not illegality; Faraone 1997: 17 argues secrecy was to avoid averting the curse. 40 Fire ritual: hDem 226–91. On purifications see Betz 1997: 250 and Versnel 2003: 910 for more discussion on magic in mystery cults. 41 Betz 1997: 250. On the tablets: Bernabé and Cristóbal 2008: 1–8. 42 Ducat 2006: 253 and Kennell 1995: 128. 43 Curse on assembly: Dem. 19.70; at the Areopagus: Dem. 23.67–8, 97; Din. 2.16; parodied by Ar. Thes. 335–51. Eidinow 2007: 140. 44 The term ‘shaman’ is used by scholars such as Ogden to avoid more negative ones that the sources use, like ‘sorcerer’, to refer to those who could ‘manipulate their own souls’. See Ogden 2002: 9–60. 45 Ogden 2002: 9. Hermotimus of Clazomenae’s powers of prediction: Apollonius, Historiae Mirabiles 3; DS 5.55 on the Telchines. Gaining insight from dreams: Astyages in Hdt 1.107–28, realising the prophecy his dream gave of the conquest of Asia by Cyrus; Ogden 2002: 36–7. Initiation: Orpheus: Strabo C333 F18; Philip the Orphic initiator: Plutarch Mor. 224ef; Dactyls: Diod. Sic. 5.64.3–5, 17.7.5. Graf 1997: 192 argues for importance of shamans to initiation. 46 Porphyry Life of Pythagoras 28–9. 47 As in Marinatos 1981, oracles reported routinely without criticism include Thuc. 1.25.1–2: Epidamnians gives their city to Corinth on oracular advice; 1.28.2: the Corcyrean-Corinthian dispute is referred to Delphi; 1.103.2–3: Spartans fulfil

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48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

66 67

oracle to let suppliant of Zeus go and helots surrender to them; 1.118.3: Apollo says Sparta will win if they go to war; 1.134.4: Apollo orders Spartans to make emends for Pausianias’ death; 3.92.5: Spartan question about colonising Herakleia; 3.104.1: Athenians purified Delos to comply with an oracle. See also Herodotus 7.140–4 on the Wooden Walls. Part of civic life: Eidinow 2007: 27–9. For example, Themistokles in Hdt 7.6.3–4. Cyrus is advised to learn these skills in Xen. Cyr. 1.6.2; Eidinow 2007: 30. Oracles and seers for politicians: Plut. Cim. 18, Nic. 13, and for Stilbides, 23.5; cf. Ar. Peace 1026–32; Eidinow 2007: 30. Xenophon consults Silenus in An. 5.6.29, and consults himself at 6.1.22–4, and he invites any soldier who also happens to be a mantis to attend a sacrifice and divine in Xen. An. 6.4.14. For example, ‘I register Isias, the daughter of A[u]toclea, before Hermes the Restrainer. Restrain her by your side! I bind Isias before Hermes the Restrainer, the hands, the feet of Isias, the entire body’. SGD 64, from Faraone 1997: 3. Or SGD 107, from Sicily, which registers its victims ‘in the presence of the holy goddess’; Eidinow 2007: 146–7. Or Gager 1992: 181, Fig. 20, from a lead defixio found in the Athenian Agora: where Hermes, Hecate, Hades, the Fates, Persephone, the Furies, and a number of unnamed gods (underworld goddesses and gods) are invoked. Eidinow 2007: 149. Gods are invoked, like the Mother of the Gods: DT 72.17, 79.3; Ares: DT 161.132; Hecate and the heroes: DT 52.7, 72.10, 76.10; and all of these are invoked in curse tablets. Collins 2008: 40. Harnessing power for a spell: e.g. DTA 89, 105; in Eidinow 2007: 147, Faraone 1997: 5. The order of frequency is slightly different in Versnel, based on Kagarow: Hermes, Kore/Persephone, Hecate, Hades/Pluto, Ge, and Demeter. Kagarow 1929: 59–61, from Versnel 1991: 64. Collins 2008: 40, Versnel 2003: 909. Scullion 1994: 76. Scullion 1994: 92. Eidinow 2007: 14, Parker 2005, Scullion 1994, Versnel 1991: 64. Scullion 1994: 89–90, 117–19. Kindt 2012: 117–18. Eidinow 2007: 140–1. Paus. 3.17.7–9. Paus. 3.17; cf. Thuc. 1.134, on Pausanias’ death and haunting, which involved the dedication of two statues to him and Athene. Discussion in Ogden 2002: 28 and Faraone 1991: 184–9. Christidis et al.1999, n.5., from Ogden 2002: 30. See also F273, F275. ‘Primitive man, therefore, lives and acts in an environment of beings and objects, all of which, in addition to the properties that we recognize them to possess, are endued with mystic attributes. He perceives their objective reality mingled with another reality. He feels himself surrounded by an infinity of imperceptible entities, nearly always invisible to sight, and always redoubtable: ofttimes the souls of the dead are about him, and always he is encompassed by myriads of spirits of more or less defined personality’. Lévy-Bruhl 1979: 65. Collins 2008: 8–9. Tambiah 1990: 11 makes a similar argument. Collins 2008: 2–5, and esp. Versnel 2003: 909–10. Eidinow 2007: 140. In Hom. Od. 10.488–540, for instance, Odysseus is told he needs to travel to the house of Hades and Persephone; this is book eleven’s necromantic ritual. See Ogden 2002: 179–82 for a discussion of the passage and the familiar religious elements versus the mysterious necromantic ones. Xen. Mem. 1.1.9, trans. Tredennick and Waterfield. Copenhaver 2015: 12.

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68 Marginalisation: Whitmarsh 2021: 84, 2022: 295 blames the anxiety of modern monotheists; Bowden 2008: 61 argues it bothers scholars determined to discover the nature of Plutarch’s ‘religious faith’. Common discussions: Whitmarsh 2022: 294. 69 Both are impiety: Plut. On Sup. 169; superstition is worse: On Sup. 164, 165d. Meijer 1981: 261–2. Plutarch’s belief that superstition was worse than atheism is confirmed in observations Plutarch makes on Alexander elsewhere: Plut. Al. 75.1–2: ‘while it is a dire thing to be incredulous towards indications of the divine will and to have contempt for them, superstition is likewise a dire thing, which, after the manner of water ever seeking the lower levels’. 70 Literally ‘daimon-fearing’: it may mean daimones in general, but in this case as the reference to theoi in Plutarch immediately makes clear, the focus is on the approach to belief in the gods. 71 Plut. On Sup. 165b–c. 72 Plut. On Sup. 165d–7a. 73 Whitmarsh 2022: 305–6. 74 Whitmarsh 2022: 295. 75 Luck 2006: 44, 101; Martin 2004: 22–35. 76 Discussion in Eidinow 2007: 42. 77 Hecate: Theophr. Char. 16.5, 7, 14; Sabazios and Hermaphroditos and private worship: 16.4, 10; fringe sects: 16.11–12. Diggle 2004: 350. 78 Diggle 2004: 8. 79 Arist. NE 1108a–b. Eidinow 2007: 42, n.1. Diggle 2004: 6 argues for Theophrastus’ characters as founded on Aristotle’s ideas on balance. Martin 2004: 68–9. 80 Arist. NE, throughout, esp. 1107a–1109a. On the ‘doctrine of the mean’: Avramenko and Promisel 2018: 852, Curzer 2017: 109, Martin 2004: 69. 81 [Hp.] On the Sacred Disease esp. 13, 17.13–26. 82 Arist. NE 1106a–b. 83 Thuc. 7.50.4. 84 Herms and Mysteries: Thuc. 6.27–8; Alcibiades’ recall for this: Thuc. 6.61; see Chapter 7. 85 Martin 2004: 70. 86 Quote in Harrison forthcoming: 1; Ancient accusations of atheism against Thucydides: Marcell. Life of Thuc. 22, who attributes sources to Antyllus. Badian 1989: 98 talks of the ‘contempt’ of Thucydides ‘for established Greek religion’, quoted in Hornblower 1992: 169, who agrees, and observes that Thucydides did neglect religion, and concedes he may have been an atheist. Veyne 1984: 232 observed that ‘the most surprising feature of Thucydides’ account is that one thing is missing: the gods’. Whitmarsh 2016: 82 says a defining feature of Thucydides is that ‘[t]here is no room in his system for divine intervention’; it ‘is a significant moment in intellectual history: the gods are no longer the motors of human action, even metaphorically’. 87 Thuc. 1.133–4. Paus. 3.17.7–9. The story is quite similar with its multiple staged exorcism and bronze statues to Paus 9.38.5, as in Faraone 1991: 186–7. The haunting of the Spartans by Pausanias’ ghost is confirmed in [Plutarch], Mor. 560e–f. 88 For a comparison of the versions, see Faraone 1991: 186. 89 Osborne 1997. 90 Heraclitus DK22B14; Ogden 2002: n.10. See Graf 2019: 116. Cf. Plut. On Sup. 166a–b. 91 Heraclitus DK22B5. 92 Frauds: [Hp.] SD 1–5. Collins 2008: 140.

Othering 141 93 [Hp.] SD 4.7–10. Martin, D. 2004: 40–6. 94 Derveni Pap: Betegh 2004: 363 on col. 20, 1–12; discussion in Eidinow 2007: 31. Aristophanes: Ar. Wasps 1–53, 158–61, Wealth 1–55. Eidinow 2007: 27–32. Smith 1989: 152 has argued that Aristophanes’ criticisms of oracles, seers, and divination are politically motivated, rather than religiously. But Aristophanes referenced familiar claims – for instance, Wasps 50–2 reveals the familiar accusation of money-making for ridiculous dream interpretations – so his accusations should be seen in a presocratic context too (or instead). Tragedy: Soph. Ant. 1033–47, 1055, 1061; OT 380–403; Eur. Bacch. 255–62; Eidinow 2007: 31–2. 95 ‘I think that the first people to have projected this disease [epilepsy] as “sacred” were men like those who are now mages (magoi) and purifiers (kathartai) and beggar-priests (agurtai) and vagrant-charlatans (alazones). These people purport to be extremely reverent of the gods and to know something more than the rest of us’. [Hp.] SD, 2.1–5. Iles Johnson 2019: 694 argued that the acquisition of secret knowledge is a core component of magic, but as explored in the previous chapter, the hidden and unknowable is a feature of Greek belief as a whole. 96 [Hp.] SD 3.1–3. For discussion, see Luck 2006: 97. 97 Eidinow 2007: 15, 31, Parker 1996: 211, Stratton 2007: 42. 98 Luck 2006: 97 interpreted the Sacred Disease as a scientific treatise opposed to earlier superstitious views. Collins 2008: 33–5 argues that it needs a medical rather than religious authority. Loosely, this is true, though the distinction between the two is unclear, not just because Hippocrates’ alternative was religious but also because priests had medical knowledge, for instance in curing eye diseases with medicine and healing environments, in the Asclepieia based on evidence from tablets and Ar. Wealth 652–747 in which the priest also heals: see Marketos, et al. 1989: 155–65. On the shared naturalisticpantheistic ideas of Herodotus and the author of On the Sacred Disease, see Thomas 2000: 32–5. 99 Hom. Il. 1.74. 100 See more broadly Pl. Rep. 2.362d–65a. 101 Pl. Laws 10.908b–d. 102 Pl. Laws 10.885b. 103 Pl. Laws 10.885d–90a. 104 Pl. Rep. 2.364b–e, Laws 905d–9d, 933a–e, Statesman 291b–c. Collins 2008: 42–3, Ogden 2002: 22–3. 105 Platonic Socrates in Pl. Rep. 2.364b–365a; and Athenian Stranger in Laws 10.905d–907d. Collins 2008: 139, Ogden 2002: 20. Xenophon’s Socrates was also mockingly sceptical towards magical spells: Xen. Mem. 2.6.10–14; Ogden 2002: 100–1. 106 On reciprocity in prayer, see Pulleyn 1997. 107 Laws 11.933b. In 10.909a he had called magicians ‘ravening beasts’ and called for them to be imprisoned. 108 Pl. Tht. 149c–d: midwives offering drugs and spells to ease the pain of birth; or Pl. Rep. 4.426b physicians’ tools including spells and other magical items. Collins 2008: 42–3. Statement on efficacy: Pl. Laws 11.933a–b. Collins 2008: 44. 109 Pl. Phd. 81c–d, has Socrates talk about ghosts roaming burial grounds, etc.; the wicked who must be chained to a body to exorcise them. Luck 2006: 213–4. 110 A. E. Taylor’s 1951: 94–137, esp. 110 insistence that the accusation was nothing to do with Socrates’ daimon has been very influential but is now widely discredited. See Versnel 1990: 126. 111 Pl. Laws 10.909b; 933a–e; Eidinow 2007: 31, Dickie 2001: 45, Luck 2006: 211. 112 Pl. Laws 11.933d–e; Collins 2008: 140.

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113 Pl. Laws 10.909b; Collins 2008: 43 argues that he did not disbelieve in necromancy, but the passage in The Republic clearly sets necromancers up as frauds pretending powers that they do not have. Luck 2006: 211. 114 Pl. Laws 10.908d–e. 115 Graf 2019: 115 on the ‘ambiguous semantics’ of magic. 116 Faraone 1997: 18. Harrison 2007a: 383 argues sensibly that Homer and Hesiod are not doctrine, but nonetheless become imbued with a ‘special authority’ and ‘provide, rather, one way, out of many – oral, written, and non-verbal, i.e. through imitation and participation in ritual: Burkert 1985: 95 – of reinforcing continuity, and disguising change, in ideology and practice’. See also Bremmer 1995. 117 Ober 2011: 140 argues for a ‘strong consensus’. 118 Parker 2006: 122. 119 Bowden 2008: 64–6. 120 See particularly Hall 1989, and on magic Lloyd 2018: 87 and Stratton 2007: 39–44. 121 Stratton 2007: 44. 122 Stratton 2007: 41 discusses the xenophobic associations of magic. Watson 2019: 167, 185, argues that just as witches are presented as foreign, foreigners are associated with witchcraft, each a ‘marker of their cultural otherness’. Copenhaver 2015: 32 argues that Greeks invented magic first ‘by inventing the barbarian to whom magic belonged as an anti-religion without much content’. As Tsoukala 2011: 1–2 argues, foreignness is a key principle in this, whether it is ethnic, religious, cultural, or other kind of foreignness. 123 Versnel 2011 on religious inconsistencies is key here. Copenhaver 2015: 7 has discussed how magic and be perceived as non-religious or anti-religious. 124 De Certeau 2000 [1970]: 101–3; commentary in Hyman 2010: 6; 2007: 27. 125 De Certeau 2000 [1970]: esp. 2, 101–3. 126 De Certeau 2000 [1970]: 102–3 argued that ‘doubt and blasphemy must be not only admitted, but punished … They are the accomplices of the chastisement that returns them to the religious “society” and that must return that society to itself’. 127 Eidinow 2019c: 758–9 has already explored how magic is used by people who feel uncertain, powerless, anxious, in crisis, or simply disempowered. Tsoukala 2011 discusses the importance of the other during times of crisis, as agents to be blamed for social evils, driving their punishment and exclusion.

7

Scapegoats The threat of atheism to the ancient Greek city

Twenty-five years ago David Cohen raised a ‘fundamental question’ on ancient atheism: ‘what sort of coercive political and social matrices underlay religious life in Athens’?1 This question has usually been answered with reference to the accusations in Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries for asebeia, or impiety, many of which amount to or include accusations of atheism.2 These are challenging to interpret, not least because asebeia was not a specific accusation consistently applied to a set list of practices or beliefs, but an intuitive, polysemic, infringement of identity and community with perpetrators who commonly correspond to Greek categories of alterity.3 Additionally, in Athens, the legal system did not define crimes, but depended on the judgement of the jurors attending that day.4 Prosecutions took place for infractions of process, like sacrifice of a victim by the wrong party or at the wrong time; profaning rituals, objects or spaces (by robbery, murder, or removing a suppliant); witchcraft; holding a sacred office when barred; parricide; violating oaths; and atheism, as unbelief, or the introduction of new gods without due process.5 Accusations of impiety could also be made without a legal process or specific details of transgression.6 The historicity of many of these accusations of impiety is hotly contested, as are the motivations for them: the broad consensus in scholarship is that the tradition was exaggerated and to some extent invented by writers of later periods, and the accusations that were made were politically motivated.7 Scepticism of the plausibility of a movement against atheism and impiety in this period has not just been informed by the general disbelief in atheism as a historical phenomenon, or of the Greek gods as the subject of genuinely held and defensible belief. Most importantly it has been underwritten by an unwillingness to believe that Athens at its democratic zenith, birthplace of the ‘open society’ as Karl Popper put it, could be persecuting intellectuals for religious crimes.8 For many scholars it has seemed incredible or ‘paradoxical’ that citizens could be prosecuted and even killed for atheism in the sophisticated intellectual environment of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, birthplace of democracy, free speech, and liberal ideals.9 As such the trial of Socrates, for many, is an ‘aberration’, and the other trials largely the result of faulty history by later writers or political DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-7

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machinations of ‘opponents’, in a historical Athens that stands as a bastion of tolerance and free speech.10 The first accusations of impiety date to the late 440 s, in Pericles’ circles. Scholarship has mostly treated these as ‘just another instance of an attack against a prominent politician through his associates’: that ‘these attacks hang together not only because they were aimed at Pericles but also because of their unique and special, viz. religious, colouring’ has been treated as a ‘clever strategy’.11 In interpreting the accusations in this way, scholars are following the ancient sources like Diodorus Siculus, who interprets these trials as primarily political and does not seriously consider that the impiety accusations were genuinely made: The statue of Athena was a work of Pheidias, and Pericles, the son of Xanthippus, had been appointed overseer of the undertaking. But some of the assistants of Pheidias, who had been prevailed upon by Pericles’ enemies, took seats as suppliants at the altars of the gods; and when they were called upon to explain their surprising action, they claimed that they would show that Pheidias had possession of a large amount of the sacred funds, with the connivance and assistance of Pericles the overseer. Consequently, when the Assembly convened to consider the affair, the enemies of Pericles persuaded the people to arrest Pheidias and lodged a charge against Pericles himself of stealing sacred property. Diodorus Siculus Library 12.39.2 (trans. Oldfather 1946) However, there is no good reason for thinking that these accusations were not motivated by genuine religious belief. Pericles associated with leading thinkers of the age, many of whom had dubious established reputations for irreligion: the damage was mutually reinforcing.12 Pericles’ unpopular, damaging, or impious, political actions could then be explained and exorcised through attempted punishment of his social group. The accusations against Pericles’ social group seem to have begun with the ostracism of Damon of Oea in 443–2.13 Damon’s ostracism was motivated by his association with naturalistic philosophy, as an associate of Anaxagoras and Zeno.14 Though Plutarch identifies politics as the key factor in Damon’s ostracism, he elsewhere argues Damon was ostracised for his ‘extraordinary wisdom’ or ‘surpassing ability’, and that Damon was a ‘sophist’ who ‘took refuge behind the name of music in order to conceal from the multitude his real power’.15 Parallels between Damon’s ostracism and Socrates’ trial for corrupting the young in atheism were explicitly drawn in antiquity: this was an action taken on the grounds of Damon’s perceived impiety.16 It was shortly before this, in 444 BC, that Thucydides son of Melesias first made the argument that Pericles had misspent public funds by making personal dedications with public money: the result was the ostracism of both Thucydides and Pericles’ ally Damon in 442 BC.17 This seems bizarre, unless the implied accusation of impiety against Pericles had led to increased scrutiny of his

Scapegoats 145 affairs and were taken sufficiently seriously that the Athenians took action to address potential impiety and sources of pollution. Next was the double prosecution of Phidias in 437–8 BC for embezzlement from the construction of the chryselephantine Athena Parthenos (an undeniable crime of impiety), and impiety for portraying himself and Pericles on the statue.18 The usual and probably correct view is that Phidias was tried alone in 437–8, despite Diodorus’ statement (based on Ephorus) that Pericles was tried alongside him.19 At around this time also Pericles’ partner Aspasia was, according to Plutarch, accused of impiety and brought to trial, against which Pericles defended her (successfully) in court.20 The trial is probably an elaboration, but Aspasia certainly had a reputation for impiety.21 Some time in the next few years, Anaxagoras was accused and brought to trial for asebeia, either in 437–6, 433–2, or in 430.22 He was tried for ‘not believing in the gods’ (ta theia mē nomizontas, in Plutarch), ‘because he declared the sun to be a hot ball of metal’ instead of a god and ‘declared the firmament was made of stones’.23 The outcome of Anaxagoras’ trial is unclear: he may have been smuggled out of Athens by Pericles, and possibly sentenced to death in his absence; or fined five talents and exiled; or acquitted due to illness; or imprisoned and awaiting execution when Pericles was able to obtain voluntary exile on his behalf.24 In 430 BC Pericles himself was finally prosecuted for klopē (theft), possibly of sacred funds, for which he had to pay a fine.25 For scholars who see the religious components of these trials as a political pretext, it seems ‘an inexplicable discrepancy’ that the Athenians waited seven years, or 13 if we count Damon’s ostracism, to take action against Pericles himself.26 In fact, it makes perfect sense. The Athenians certainly blamed Pericles for bringing Athens to war with Sparta, especially for a series of actions culminating in the breach of the 30 Years’ Peace of 446–5 with the Megara Decree in 432 BC, part of a reactive and impious response to Megarian impiety which drew the Athenians into oath breaking and war.27 Aristophanes explicitly connects Pericles’ sponsorship of the Megarian decree and impiety trials: Pericles got frightened that he’d share Phidias’ bad luck, dreading your inherently mordant behaviour, so before he had to face anything terrible himself, he torched the city by tossing in a small spark of a Megarian decree and blew up so great a war that the smoke brought tears to the eyes of all Greeks. Aristophanes Peace 603–14 (trans. Henderson 1998) Pericles no doubt had other reasons for sponsoring the decree, but it is clear that by this time he had a reputation for impiety. Many Athenian actions under the guidance of Pericles had been undeniably impious, if politically astute, which generated a need to understand and exorcise pollution and divine anger, but a general political reluctance to topple the statesman. The easy targets found in Pericles’ teachers and associates no doubt damaged

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Pericles but targeting them protected him until 430–29 BC, when the plague of Athens ravaged the city. Thucydides offers the main account: [2.47] their supplications at sanctuaries and recourse to prophecies and the like were all of no avail. In the end they abandoned these, vanquished by the disaster … [2.52] the dead and dying lay on top of one another, and half-dead men tumbled in the streets and around all the springs in their craving for water. The sanctuaries in which they had found shelter were filled with corpses, since they had died there on the spot; people, seeing nothing they could do as the disaster overwhelmed them, developed indifference toward sacred and profane alike. All the funeral customs they had previously observed were thrown into confusion, and they gave burial as each found the means. Many of them, in the absence of relatives because of the number who had already died, turned to shameless burial methods; some put a corpse of their own on the pyres of others and set fire to them before those who had built them could, while others put the body they were carrying on top of another that was being burned and went away … [53.3] Neither fear of the gods nor law of man was a deterrent, since it was judged all the same whether they were pious or not because of seeing everyone dying with no difference, and since no one anticipated that he would live till trial and pay the penalty for his crimes, but that the much greater penalty which had already been pronounced was hanging over them, and it was reasonable to get some satisfaction from life before that descended. Thucydides History 2.47–53 (trans. Lattimore 1998) There is no good reason to doubt the truthfulness of Thucydides’ account as a record of personal and collective memory in Athens, especially regarding religious feeling, of events that occurred around 430 BC that the historian himself witnessed.28 Thucydides documents a loss of faith under pressure, the weeding out of the good people in Athens because they visited the sick, and the lack of protection afforded by the sanctuaries as they filled with the dead: all of these are reasonable claims and they draw on anxieties about the justice and efficacy of the divine.29 The plague was both a manifestation of divine vengeance for impiety and a cause of further impiety.30 It killed a third of the Athenian population: it ‘was the crucial event in the life of the Athenians at the beginning of the war’ and its consequences ‘marked the public conscience for a long time’.31 In the memory of the historian and, it is reasonable to speculate, the collective memory of Athens at the close of the fifth century, there had been a ‘crisis of religion’ during the plague years. This is, however, only one side of the story. As Michael Flower has argued, the plague posed as a ‘series of challenges’: this ‘crisis’ was not a simple case of mass loss of faith.32 War, suffering, and disaster pose problems of theology and theodicy; they do not enforce a particular position on those issues, but generate a range of responses in

Scapegoats 147 scepticism, criticism, and atheism, and equally entrenchment of beliefs and religious fanaticism. Stuart Bell has observed that the trauma experienced during and after the First World War bolstered faith and even created religious fanaticism, for some, but there was equally a trend towards decline in faith and belief, as many people were increasingly troubled by issues of omnipotence and benevolence.33 Bell observed that ‘the sheer scale of human suffering must, one might well think, have had a significant deleterious influence on religious belief’, just as Snape and Parker observed that ‘such deterioration of faith was no doubt widespread’.34 Bell concludes that the War posed ‘questions of faith’, which resulted in different responses.35 Some clung to traditional perspectives on God, theologians tended to advocate modifications to theology to explain events, and others saw the war as a Holy War with refreshed divine purpose; others lost their faith entirely. Thucydides does not anywhere claim that abandoning their religious devotions (as Furley conservatively puts it) was the only reaction of those in the city, either at the time or later; in the ancient city different demographics, groups, and individuals had different, and even opposite, reactions to calamity and these could change and coalesce in very different ways over time.36 Religious fanaticism had been on the rise in Athens, too. The failure of the seers to predict accurately and advise during the war surely led to some, like Thucydides, losing confidence in their ability; while others offered increasingly potent defences of seers.37 Indeed, the demand for manteis (seers) and chresmologoi (diviners, or oracle-readers) significantly increased during times of crisis, as during the plague and after the end of the war.38 It was around this time, in the 430s BC, that the influential mantis, or seer, Diopeithes was prominent and may have proposed his psephisma, or decree, outlawing specific forms of impiety.39 As MitchellBoyask has explored in his study of the plague and the Athenian imagination, Athens was increasingly viewed by some as a ‘sick city’, as manifested through the preoccupation with sickness, in both a literal and an abstracted and metaphorical way, that Sophocles and Euripides demonstrate in their plays of the 420s.40 The belief in Athens that Apollo was aiding the Spartans against Athens likely led to the introduction of the Asclepius cult in 420 BC: to heal the ‘sick city’.41 Part of this movement was an increasing hostility towards sceptics and atheists in the fifth century, and a climate of political, religious, and intellectual suspicion.42 It was in this climate that Protagoras was accused of atheism, some time after 420 BC, based on an established reputation for impiety in his teachings and his writing, such as About the Gods, which opened: ‘concerning the gods, I cannot ascertain whether they do or do not exist’ (peri men theōn ouk echo eidenai outh’ ōs eisin, outh ōs ouk eisin).43 There was probably no trial, but it is plausible to suggest that shortly after 420 Protagoras was driven from Athens due to suspicion of atheistic natural philosophy.44 The accusations against Protagoras came shortly after the Peace of Nicias in 421 BC and the disaster at Amphipolis: the Athenians no doubt, again, reflecting and looking to

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explain the continued and extreme losses and pain of the war and plague, and finding cause in pollution from impiety. This idea that the accusations against Protagoras were aimed at exorcising pollution seem to have survived in later, spurious, traditions. Diogenes Laertius records that Protagoras’ books were collected together and burned in the agora: this is almost unanimously rejected by modern scholarship as an elaboration based on the comment of Timon of Phleious, that the Athenians ‘desired’ to burn Protagoras’ work.45 While very likely untrue, it is interesting. On the one hand, book burning is a way of halting the spread of ideas, which is especially relevant in a tradition of philosophers accused of corrupting those around them. For instance, according to Aristoxenos, the midlate fourth-century peripatetic philosopher, Plato wanted to burn his collection of Democritus’ books, but was prevented from doing so because his friends argued that they were already commonly read and owned.46 But the idea Protagoras’ books were burned is likely a recognition of the pollution of his impiety and a reference to purification.47 Greeks burned impure things: monstrous births and the waste from purification and sacrifice rituals, oxuthumia, were burned on wild trees or fig wood.48 The closest comparison to Protagoras is in the Alexander by Lucian: a priest denounces Epicurus and his followers as atheists and burns one of his books on fig wood (as oxuthumia) in the centre of the agora, then casts the remains into the sea; the books meant to be a substitute for Epicurus himself.49 Building on an established reputation for atheism by at least the time of Aristophanes’ Clouds in 415 BC, Diagoras was accused of impiety in Athens for, as Lysias said, an offence of word rather than action.50 Later tradition added to Diagoras of Melos’ criminal activity that he divulged the Mysteries and chopped up a statue of Herakles to use as fire-wood, but this contradicts Lysias’ reference, only 16 years after the trial.51 This myth connects Diagoras to polluting crimes and the turning of sacred wood into fire-wood to burn acts as an inversion of the burning of polluted material (as with Protagoras). The reference to divulging the Mysteries and defacing of statues makes the connection between Diagoras and the scandals around the mutilation of the herms and parodies of the Mysteries in 415 BC. Diagoras had famously criticised the Eleusinian Mysteries, which made him an obvious target during a period in which the hermokopids and those accused of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries were ‘hotly pursued’.52 The revelation in 415 BC that on the eve of the Sicilian expedition all of the beards (or phalluses) of the herms in Athens had been mutilated in an act of symbolic violence sparked a set of investigations into impiety.53 At some point in the same year, it was revealed that groups of individuals had performed versions of the Eleusinian Mysteries in private homes.54 It has been argued that these were legitimate, pious performances of the Mysteries executed in private by groups of aristocrats aimed at some kind of coup.55 The group did comprise of aristocrats with alternate social groups and their own private ties of all kinds, who acted together in secret and clearly held

Scapegoats 149 very different values to the larger Athenian citizen body.56 But private performances of the Mysteries were illegal and impious by definition, and their nature as ‘illegal, sacrilegious, and immoral’, as Murray puts it, makes these performances parodies: not in the comedic sense, but as distorted, impious, imitations.57 The mutilation of the herms occurred just before the Sicilian expedition – as Thucydides observed, the timing of the mutilations was troubling – it was natural to perceive this group of concealed impieties as the root cause of pollution and divine anger that caused the disasters of the war years.58 Andocides records that in the last-minute meeting of the assembly to make final arrangements for the expedition in 415 BC, Pythonicus, the person who first accused Alcibiades of profaning the Mysteries, argued that this act of impiety would endanger the Sicilian expedition.59 Equally, after the disaster Thucydides’ Nicias observed that the divine retribution was probably the cause of the loss of ships.60 The next cluster of prosecutions took place at the end of the fifth century: of Andocides in 400–399 BC, and Nicomachus and Socrates in 399. In 400 or 399 BC Andocides was prosecuted by Meletus on a double charge of impiety: for attending the Mysteries when banned and placing a suppliant’s bough at the Eleusinian shrine.61 Nicomachus, who had been a scribe in charge of revisions to the sacred law after the defeat of the 411 BC coup, was tried for introducing new sacrifices and changing traditional sacrifices, sacred laws, customs, and elements of the calendar without authority.62 The same Meletus who had prosecuted Andocides also accused Socrates of corrupting the young in atheism: having educated those political classes whose impieties had been revealed as herm-mutilators and mystery-ridiculers.63 As with the mutilation of the herms, parodies of the Mysteries, and many other impiety trials and accusations, the charge of impiety and atheism made against Socrates has been wrongly dismissed as ‘a pretext’ for a political prosecution.64 The prosecution was premised on Socrates’ role as religious, moral, and civic corrupter, as we have explored in previous chapters.65 These trials were fuelled by the religious fervour generated by the loss of the war in 404–3 BC and the restitution of democracy in 399 BC, during a period in which the Athenian citizen body took a retrospective look at the whole of a disastrous war marked by impiety and perceived divine aggression. The grim situation in Athens at the dawn of the fourth century lent itself to being viewed as the result of divine punishment due to transgressions against the gods.66 The war had been punctuated with major calamitous plagues, earthquakes, and eclipses, which were traditionally associated with divine anger: Thucydides, who documented these and was not known for his comfort with religious causation, states that the Athenians believed plague was judgement or punishment (most likely by Apollo) for perceived crimes.67 The ‘wounds of recent history’ had generated a sense of ‘religious anxiety’ and a ‘fierce reaction’ towards resolving perceived divine anger.68 As Paul Cartledge observed69:

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In the extraordinarily awe-ful circumstances of 399, ordinary pious Athenians were practically bound to ask themselves the following questions: since the gods (or ‘the god’, ‘the divine’) were manifestly angry with the Athenians, causing them to lose the Atheno-Peloponnesian War and experience civil war, suffering so acutely in the process […] Put another way, had the gods deserted the Athenians – or had the Athenians deserted the gods? Or both? In this context those like Meletus, Diopeithes, and Euthyphro were able to get their way in a ‘wave of religious fundamentalism’, defending ‘traditional religion’ with a ‘fanatical zeal’.70 The mutilation of the herms and parodies of the Mysteries gave the Athenians some sense of an undercurrent of impiety that had caused this divine displeasure and ultimate the loss of the war.71 The Athenians were not just worried about the disasters of the past, but of the future for Athens that had a chance at a fresh start: as Rubel observed, ‘the Athenians, stricken by a terrible plague, the horrors of war, and the loss of an empire, similarly feared that “the sky would fall on their heads”’.72 This generated a ‘collective paranoia’, ‘moral panic’, and atmosphere of blame in which the community united against well-known agitators to blame for the events that had occurred and the long term obstacles to Athens gaining the perceived favour of the gods.73 To some extent, this fell along class lines: the short-lived oligarchic revolution in 411 BC had brought a lot of the increasing class tensions to the fore, but it had not expunged them.74 The supporters of the newly empowered democracy blamed the loss of the war on the subversive, hidden religious transgressions of the aristocracy, while the aristocrats blamed the poneria, the young, uncultured, democratic leaders who were commonly associated with impiety.75 But in this sort of energetic religious environment, the excluded and marginalised are particularly blamed for misfortune, with gossip giving rise to allegations, and political allegiances forged in the persecution of a shared enemy.76 Esther Eidinow has evocatively explored how some of the blame for the trauma generated by the events of the fifth century fell on women, who were believed by some (like Plato and Aristotle) to have excessive freedom in Athens and used as scapegoats.77 Blame could fall on anyone marginalised: people perceived as atheists were another obvious choice.78 This anxiety drove the Athenians to the use of scapegoats, both in the general sense and the more specific Greek notion of pharmakos, sacrificing a member of the community to purify the city of hidden sources of pollution and free them from divine anger.79 The best description of the ritual pharmakoi is given by a scholion on Aristophanes’ Knights: By dēmosious ‘those who are public’ he means those who are called pharmakoi, who cleanse the cities by their death. For the Athenians would nourish some who were exceedingly low-born, penniless, and useless

Scapegoats 151 [akhrēstous], and when a time of a disaster of some sort came upon the city, I mean a famine or something similar, they would sacrifice these to cleanse the city from the pollution and from their evil, and to find a cure [therapeian] for the disaster they were enduring. They also gave the pharmakoi the name offscourings [katharmata]. Scholion on Aristophanes, Knights 1136c (trans Dawson 2013) And a scholion on Aristophanes’ Wealth (454): ‘Off scourings’ [katharma] is abomination. It follows from such a reference, that in Athens there was such a custom, that if it happened that the city committed some offence [hamartēsai] against the gods, to atone [eis exileōsin] for such an offence [apopēmatos], the people separated out [aphorizen] one man who was ugliest of everyone. In sum, they sacrificed him [ethuon] as a payment [lutron] for all. [e]. For when there was an oracle concerning such an event [a disaster or offence against the gods], a thoroughly ugly man was found and brought to that place. They burned him, making him the off scourings [katharma] of the city because of divine wrath. Therefore, when he had been selected for burning, everyone wiped him clean [periepsōn], saying, ‘Become a deliverance from evils for us’. From this we also have the word peripsēma. [‘anything wiped off, off scouring’, LSJ]. [f]. They would call the scapegoats [pharmakous] of the city and the swindlers [goētas, ‘sorceror, wizard, juggler, cheat’, LSJ] off scourings [katharmata] Scholion on Aristophanes, Wealth 454 (trans. Dawson 2013) Ionian cities, including Athens, had an annual ritual of scapegoating that took place at the Thargalia, in which two men were led out of the city to purify it.80 But as the scholia make clear, ritualised purification through pharmakoi could take place in response to any perceived crisis: there was an ‘underlying unritualized behavior’ that lay behind the strict formula for the ritual.81 The most polluting crises, like the Plague of Athens, generated, as Frazer observed, a perceived ‘period of general license, during which the ordinary restraints of society are thrown aside, and all offences, short of the gravest, are allowed to pass unpunished’.82 Plagues, in particular, and natural disasters in general, required scapegoats: the pharmakos stood for the citizen body and transferred the sickness outside the boundaries of the city, making them both the carrier and the cure.83 The pharmakos was a medicine: like a pharmakon (drug), it could be harmful or destructive, but it could also cure; it is an ‘irreducably ambivalent’ tradition.84 The trial and death of Socrates in 399 BC was pursued by Meletus as a purification of the city through a pharmakos and represents the final crystallisation of a tradition of using atheists to expunge pollution.85 By the time of the Apology, Plato’s Socrates was already able to speak of accusations of atheism levelled against philosophers as routine but perhaps more than any of

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his associates or earlier victims of accusations of impiety, Socrates seemed to fit the traditional character of a pharmakos.86 The targets for pharmakos victims were the marginalised, lower class, criminals, slaves, ugly people, strangers, the young, royalty, and corrupters of youth.87 Socrates was known as a ‘babbling beggar who ponders everything except provisions for his plate’: depicted on stage as unwashed and barefoot, wearing a tribon, or threadbare cloak, and foregoing dinner.88 Socrates also marginalised himself as foreigner to speech and the methods of justice in his own country, and self-excluded from civic activity.89 His ugliness was historic, as Guthrie observed90: In appearance Socrates was universally admitted to be extraordinarily ugly, but it was the kind of ugliness which fascinates. His chief features were a broad, flat and turned-up nose, prominent staring eyes, thick fleshy lips and a paunch, or, as he phrases it himself in Xenophon’s Symposium (2.18): ‘a stomach rather too large for convenience’. Aside from his appearance and character, Socrates’ views were marginal and subversive, which is another key feature of the pharmakos.91 It was easy to imagine him as pharmakeus, a magician, sorcerer, or poisoner; the association between pharmakeus and pharmakos, scapegoat, built on the category of religious alterity explored in the previous chapter, with a further network of associations between atheism, magic, and false diviners or prophets.92 Pharmakoi were often people who believed that they were doing good but later discovered they were impure: at his trial, Socrates argued that if he corrupted the young, it was unintentional.93 As Foucault argued, the impure person behaves badly because their impurity makes them ignorant of the city’s customs, or nomoi.94 Socrates’ religious views were suspect and certainly not distinguishable from sophistic atheism by the ordinary citizen, in his perceived rejection of the traditional gods of the state.95 Socrates’ divine sign was not a defence but a confirmation of the accusation Meletus made against him and of his appropriateness as a pharmakos.96 Socrates’ divine sign was Apollo, with whom pharmakos rituals were generally associated, and in whose honour the Thargelia festival was celebrated.97 As Ogden has argued, ‘scapegoats were held to be in some sort of divinely possessed, ecstatic and exceptionally powerful state’, in which the victim was ‘god-nurtured’: Socrates’ abnormal divine character through his divine sign made him the perfect target.98 In this sense and others, the scapegoat has to be marginalised, but they are simultaneously also a very important member of community.99 The ideal pharmakos was connected to the impurity that they were meant to be cleansing.100 As explored in previous chapters, Meletus argued that Socrates had taught and corrupted the men who had become associated with the parodies of the mysteries, mutilation of the herms, and other systematic impieties. This explains why at the trial Socrates is focussed on the events of the past 20 years and especially with the Clouds, where his character was

Scapegoats 153 blamed and played the role of pharmakos for Aristophanes, who cast himself as the purifier of the city.101 For all of these reasons Socrates was an obvious candidate for prosecution as a pharmakos: as Brickhouse and Smith remark, if anything it is strange that Socrates was not brought to trial sooner.102 At his trial Socrates recognised that he was being treated as a pharmakos and attempted to reimagine this. In speaking to Euthyphro Socrates correctly identifies that Meletus is trying to purify the city with his indictment against Socrates’ corruption and disease.103 At the trial, Socrates rebuked the jurors for this: just as they knew that his comic counterpart in the Clouds was a scapegoat for the real villains offstage, he forced them to recognise they were scapegoating him for crimes committed by others.104 Socrates represented both the cause of corruption that had made the city sick and the cure of it, both in his own perception as a gadfly-philosopher and in the city’s perception of his death.105 This ambiguity that is both fundamental to the pharmakos tradition and Socrates himself, turns the accusation on its head in a way that is protective of his reputation, role, and goodness106: The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected. Beneficial insofar as he cures – and for that, venerated and cared for – harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil – and for that, feared and treated with caution. Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed. The most striking indication of Socrates’ ambiguous reimagining of his pharmakos role is that after he is found guilty as his punishment Socrates proposes sitesis, dining at the city’s expense at the prytaneum, which was reserved for prominent athletes and ritual pharmakoi.107 This offer forces the jurors to confront their use of him as a pharmakos; and it was ironically achieved through his extended stay in the prison, where he was fed and housed.108 Socrates was at ease with his impending death: he understood and to some degree embraced his role as a pharmakos, prosecuted and dying to purify the city.109 He had a choice between expulsion or death: since he could not live with exile and would not deprive the Athenians of a pharmakos when one was so clearly needed, he opted for death.110 Socrates’ extended stay in prison was inevitable because of his trial date: the 7th of Mounichion.111 Plato makes a point of mentioning this: when Echecrates asks why Socrates died so long after the trial (a clearly unusual and noteworthy detail), Phaedo says that it was due to the festival of Apollo taking place the day before.112 This triggered the ritual re-enactment voyage of the ship of Theseus that travelled to Delos, as part of a sacred period in which the city could not be polluted by public executions.113 Part of the process of scapegoating was ‘separation to establish the polar opposition, those active and safe on the one side, the passive victim on the other’.114 So, after being forced to wait for 30 days, the ship returned and Socrates was scheduled for execution on 6th of Thargelion: the very day that the annual

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pharmakos ritual took place in Athens.115 A later tradition reinforced the association: Diogenes Laertius claims Socrates’ birthday was also on the 6th of Thargelion ‘when the Athenians purify their city’.116 Socrates’ death on the day of annual scapegoat ritual seems such an incredible coincidence that it is very difficult to believe Phaedo’s statement that it happened by chance. Perhaps Socrates was right: Meletus was a ‘clever young man’ and had somehow arranged this.117 Meletus may have prosecuted Socrates when he did to encourage the treatment of Socrates as pharmakos, knowing that the result would be a ritual stay of execution and (winds allowing) that the ship from Delos might return in time for Socrates to be executed during the thargelia.118 Finally, all of the imagery around the death of Socrates evokes the pharmakos.119 Plato explicitly notes that 13 friends were in attendance at Socrates’ death: this parallels the 13 pharmakoi intended to be sacrificed to the minotaur, before Theseus alone heroically takes their place, as Phaedo observes.120 The hemlock Socrates ingests is a pharmakon and Socrates argues it allows him both a transformation and catharsis.121 Socrates’ last words according to Plato, just before he died and after his body had almost completely numbed, to request that Crito sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, are incredibly meaningful in this context.122 Ancient commentators had some insights: Tertullian believed that this sacrifice was in gratitude also to Asclepius’ father Apollo, Socrates’ divine sign, and Origen that it was part of a death rite.123 The sacrifice of the cock to Asclepius (and Apollo), the gods of healing and purification, was to mark, with Socrates’ death, the completion of the pharmakos ritual and the successful purification of the city.124 Socrates’ friends had an ambivalent relationship with the idea of Socrates as pharmakos. As Tyrrell argues, Socrates’ condemnation also condemned his friends and followers, so Plato and others wrote in the wake of his trial not only to defend Socrates but also themselves.125 The fear of similar accusations against him colours the whole of Plato’s dialogues, which are an ‘artful attempt to present and inspire philosophical enquiry within the city, while avoiding the condemnation directed against Socrates by the men of Athens in 399 BCE’.126 On the one hand, much of the picture of Socrates as pharmakos is a product of the emphasis of Plato and later traditions.127 There are echoes of Socrates-pharmakos across Plato’s works: not just in the Apology, written by Plato while he and some other Socratics were in hiding in Megara; many of Plato’s later works were about pharmaka, such as the Phaedrus, which is on the topic of writing as a pharmakon, a cure or poison, and the Euthyphro, which is about purity and pollution.128 Plato knew what the cues were for pharmakoi and was capable of intentionally signalling them.129 But it is rarely explicit. For instance, pharmakos is never explicitly used in the Phaedrus: Derrida famously argues that we have to read into Plato’s subconscious to detect it.130 By accepting the pharmakos role and forging it into his own narrative, Socrates had pre-empted the potential blowback against his friends as far as

Scapegoats 155 possible: Plato built on this, reluctantly. Plato casts Socrates as taking the blame and role as pharmakos to save his friends, while rehabilitating his curative role in teaching them, inverting the accusations of his corruption of the young men of Athens.131 So the Theseus-Socrates is not just a pharmakos to save his city, but also to save his friends.132 Casting Socrates as pharmakos absolved the philosopher of guilt, as pharmakoi were neither guilty nor innocent, but it also reinforced that philosophers were appropriate targets for this ritual and risked making his associates targets for it too.133 By teaching in religious centres, celebrating religious festivals, and conducting the rituals of state religion, philosophers protected themselves even if they were perceived as critical of religion.134 Heraclitus was associated with the temple of Artemis; Parmenides was a member of the association of Apollo the Healer, attended the Great Panathenaia well into his mid-sixties, and set up a public shrine for a dead friend; Empedocles sacrificed on behalf of the delegates at the Olympics; and Democritus participated in ordinary oxsacrifices.135 Plato had lectured in the gymnasium or in a small shrine he had erected to the Muses, his patron goddesses of philosophy, located in a sacred public precinct dedicated to the hero Akademos and Athena, where various festivals and ceremonies were held, alongside the ceremonial monuments to the dead, state mausoleum, altars to numerous gods, and the temples to Artemis and Dionysus Eleutherios.136 In contrast, neither Anaxagoras nor Diagoras are recorded participating in rituals (with Diagoras actively rejecting them), and of Anaxagoras it is noted that he actively avoided civic activity and distanced himself from normal social behaviour.137 But these men were prosecuted. Xenophon records that Socrates claimed the best defence he had against the criticisms and accusations of atheism and corruption, and the first one that he made at the trial, was his participation in traditional religion.138 Of course, Socrates was prosecuted too, despite his outward conformity: while outward orthopraxy was helpful and protective, private dissent could still drive a prosecution, as Plato has Socrates observe at his trial and elsewhere.139 Many, like Plato, also sought to explicitly distance themselves from the accusation of atheism and advocated for harsh punishments against atheists.140 Most of all, philosophers were careful to ensure their lectures did not provide the sort of easy targets for critics of their piety that the works of Anaxagoras or Protagoras had provided.141 They attempted to navigate the nomos agraphos, an unwritten law, that meant some kinds of topics like impious philosophy, were more acceptable to talk about in specific contexts, such as drama, particularly Old Comedy, but ultimately impious talk was condemned even in these contexts, and the limits of parrhēsia, acceptable speech, tended to change.142 All of these helped, but there was no real protection from being targeted as a scapegoat during times of crisis. After Socrates’ trial there was a real threat to philosophers based on an established model for persecution. In the fourth century the famous, highly educated hetaira Phryne was prosecuted with impiety and possibly

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corruption of the youth, and the priestess Ninon was prosecuted and executed for impiety in profaning the Mysteries.143 In 318–17 BC both Demetrius of Phalerum himself and Theophrastus were prosecuted for impiety with accusations of corruption of the youth and atheism; the latter forced to leave the city under penalty of death.144 In the late fourth century, Theodorus of Cyrene, nicknamed ‘atheist’ (epiklēthenta atheon, according to Philo), was also prosecuted for impiety, atheism, and corrupting the youth and either put to death or exiled, and the philosopher Stilpo of Megara was reportedly prosecuted for impiety for arguing that the Athena of Pheidias was not a god.145 The idea of philosophers being scapegoated for corrupting the young in atheism became so cliché that later authors retroactively added details to earlier stories to fit this model. For instance, later authors report that Prodicus of Ceos, who had a reputation for atheism, was executed for corruption of the young, but this probably did not happen.146 Demetrius of Phelerum reports that Diogenes of Apollonia, a famous fifth century natural philosopher and associate of Anaxagoras (and Anaximenes) who argued for a materialistic conception of the world traditional deities reimagined as natural forces, almost lost his life due to his unpopularity in Athens.147 It is unclear whether a trial occurred or this was a general comment on his vulnerability, or even a confused comment about Anaxagoras. Aristotle reports that Euripides, who had a reputation for atheism, was prosecuted by Hygiaenon for impiety for having represented Herakles as mad in a play, but, again, it is unlikely that a trial ever occurred.148 Likewise, on the basis of Aristotle’s comment on the prosecution of philosophers for impiety that ‘if generals are not contemptible because they are frequently put to death, neither are sophists …’, Roman authors recorded that Aristotle apparently withdrew from Athens so ‘that the Athenians would not sin twice against philosophy’.149 Scholars have rightly warned against believing that Greece in general, and Athens in particular, was a bastion of free speech in which ‘the public airing of radical theological and religious views carried no social risk’.150 Ultimately, ‘to express such doubts in ancient Greece’, or even be perceived to have done so, ‘was to expose yourself to a certain risk, not just of disapproval but of legal sanction’.151 The core traditions and conditions of these trials and accusations rests on solid, contemporary evidence of individuals with well-known reputations for atheism; genuine and widely-held belief in Greek society in divine anger, pollution, and justice; consistent, discernible features of these traditions that mark pollution and scapegoating; and the major historical events in which they were embedded.152 That the scapegoating of those suspected of atheism became a cliché that caused later elaboration by later authors demonstrates that this process was clearly identifiable and made sense in the ancient world. But this ‘certain risk’ of legal sanction was not inevitable, nor predictable, and it was of a specific and not a general type. If certain conditions were met,

Scapegoats 157 namely a general perception of crisis and disaster, rarely predictable and even more uncommonly controllable, marginalisation could evolve into legal sanction. This was done through the specific vehicle of the pharmakos whereby the impious philosopher, who had angered the gods and caused the corruption and pollution of atheism, could be expelled to expunge the pollution in the community. The focus on teaching and ritual malpractice in accusations is easy to understand in this context. It is not primarily a distinction between word and action: teaching and ritual misbehaviour both spread corruption and thus pollution beyond the individual. Brickhouse and Smith observed that153: Greek religious sentiments would have been remarkable indeed if the Greeks saw atheism as not impious in itself, so long as proper rituals were performed (in utter hypocrisy ex hypothesi) by the atheist. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was, basically, the case most of the time; at least in practice, they behaved as if it were. Vlastos neatly observed the impact of this combination of the cultural and social censure backed by the ultimate, unpredictable legal sanction154: Born into this system of religious belief, Socrates, a deeply religious man, could not have shrugged it off. And he could not have reasonably denied it without good reason: when a belief pervades the public consensus the burden of justifying dissent from it falls upon the dissident. And here his problem would be aggravated by the fact that the religious consensus has legal sanction. To flout it publicly is an offence against the state punishable by death. As Sedley has insightfully observed, ‘[i]t is no accident at all, I suggest, that, despite Plato’s clear evidence for the existence of an established atheist movement, we cannot name its protagonists and authorities’.155 Sedley argued that these groups chose to remain anonymous because they understood the dangers of public atheism: these individuals had very little to gain from public identifiability.156 Those suspected of atheism were regularly ridiculed, marginalised, and criticised, so they developed their own social ties and creating safer, open environments for themselves and their colleagues – a network of associations that ultimately made them more vulnerable. The appropriateness of the atheist as pharmakos was, after all, underwritten by the belief in the unknown, suspicious, subversive, and hidden Other at the heart of the community. Notes 1 Cohen 1989: 211; Whitmarsh 2016: 116 has recently reiterated the call to conceive of atheism in social terms.

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2 Adcock 1927: 478-80, Gomme 1956: 187, Horstmanschoff 1989: 226: explicitly linked to outbreak of plague; and Rubel 2014: 40 dated Anaxagoras’ trial to a conservative movement spawned in 430. Cf. also Prandi 1977: 26. See Rubel 2014: 64–73. 3 Asebeia as vague and flexible: Finley 1969: 162, Rubel 2014: 33, Todd 1993: 307–10. Rudhardt 1960 argued that asebeia included attitudes. E.g. Pl. Euthphr. 7a. Cohen 1989: 204–5, Todd 1993: 310–1, Versnel 1990: 123. On the debate: Cohen 1989: 81–105, Kindt 2012: 117, Parker 1996: 199–217, Rudhardt 1960: 87–105, Versnel 1990: 123–30, and 2011: 139. Naiden 2012: 217–9. 4 Cohen 1989: 209, Rubel 2014: 34. 5 For example, [Dem.] 59.116, the priest Archias, sacrificing on the wrong day and instead of the priestess. Mysteries and mutilating sacred objects: Thuc. 6.27, 53, Plut. Alc, 18.3–19.3, Andoc. Myst 1. Witchcraft: e.g. Plut. Dem. 14.4 and [Dem.] 25.79–83, Aesop Fables 56 (Perry). Eidinow 2010: 11–13, 2007: 152, n.69; Luck 2006: 102. Temples: Isoc. 4.156, Xen. Hell. 4.4.3, Hdt 1.159, 2.139, 8.129; Thuc. 4.97–98, Lys. 2.7, 10; Lyc. Leoc. 81, 147. Offences against cults, rituals, and sacred offices: Dem. 22.72–78, 23.51–55, 59.77, 116–7; Andoc. 1.71, 132; Lyc. Leoc. 129; Hdt 6.81. Parricide: Dem. 22.2–3; Pl. Rep. 615c, Symp. 188c, Euthphr. 3b; Lyc. Leoc. 94. Oaths: Arist. Rh. 1377a20–4, 1416a30; Lyc. Leoc. 76; Dem. 21.104–5, 120; 59.82; Xen. Cyr. 8.8.3; Andoc. 1.31–33; Ant. 5.88; see esp. Cohen 1989: 206 and Todd 1993: 307–8. On belief vs action: Xenophanes in Arist. Rh. 1399b argued that asserting the gods were born was as impious as ‘asserting’ they will die. The term ‘assert’, phaskontes implies public statement, unlike nomizein, ‘think’. Cohen 1989: 211 argued that wrong belief became a legal problem primarily when it was taught or caused impious action. E.g. Isoc. 11.40 argued those who tell and believe lies about the gods equally committed asebeia; the Athenians indicted Socrates for corrupting the young in atheism; and Lysias 6.17 claimed Andocides was more impious than Diagoras of Melos because he actioned asebeia, and against his own city, while Diagoras only spoke it, and against foreign cult. 6 For example, Lysias 12.24, Antiphon Tetr. 2.1.3, 9, 11; exaggerated rebuke: Isoc. 12.203. Cohen 1989: 205. 7 Most scholars agree that Anaxagoras, Diagoras, and Socrates were prosecuted for impiety, even if only as a pretext. See Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 19, O’Sullivan 1997, Rubel 2014: 68–70, Slings 1994: 94, Wallace 1994: 128, Whitmarsh 2016: 120. On suspicious scholars: Cohen 1989: 211, 215; predominantly those in the tradition of Dover 1988. 8 Popper 1945: 15. 9 Whitmarsh 2016: 118 argues similarly, but then in 2021: 92 describes the ‘handling of atheism’ in Athens as ‘paradoxical’. 10 ‘Abberation’: Saxonhouse 2005: 102; see also Parker 1996: 147. Other trials excused: e.g. see Wallace 1994: 142–3. So Connor 1991: 49 asks: ‘How could a jury in Greece’s greatest democracy have put to death Greece’s greatest philosopher?’ One important modern example is Stone 1988, who claimed that the Athenians sinned against their own credo of free-speech by putting Socrates to death. 11 Mansfeld 1980: 77–79. 12 As Yunis 1988: 66–69 argued on behalf of Anaxagoras; cf. Plut. Per. 32.3 on Pericles’ fear for Anaxagoras. Wallace 1994: 142 argues that Damon had a reputation for sophistry. 13 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 27.4, and ostraca with ‘Damon’ written on them: see Wallace 1994: 139. Date of ostracism: Wallace 2004b: 252. 14 Plut. Per. 4.2. 15 Plut. Arist. 1.7: extraordinary wisdom; Nic. 6.1: surpassing ability; Per. 4.1–3.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

Wallace 2004b esp. 266–7, agrees and claims his ‘musical investigations’ were perceived as sneaky, meddling innovations. Libanius Defence of Socrates 1.157; cf. [Arist.] Ath Pol. 27.4, who claims that Damon was ostracised for his corrupting instruction of Pericles. Wallace 2004b: 249. Plut. Per. 14. DS 12.39, Plut. Per. 31–32, cf. Philochorus FGrH 328 F121. See Rubel 2014: 196, fn.163 for a discussion of the literature demonstrating that the trial took place in 438–7. DS 12.39.3 argues the Athenians prosecuted Pericles alongside Phidias for the possession of sacred funds. Aspasia: Plut. Per. 32.1, 5; Ath. 13.589e; Ar. Ach. 515–39; Filonik 2013: 28, Kagan 1991: 186. Henry 1995: 15–16, 72–74 argues that the trial is fictitious. Mansfeld 1980: 32 argued for a trial in 438–7. Rubel 2014: 36 and no.146 discusses the trial and concludes it was invented based on ‘misogynistic literary allusions’. For a discussion of the scholarship on dating the trial, see Rubel 2014: 37–38, n.161. DL 2.3.8, 2.3.12–15. The accusation: Ephorus, FrGrHist 70 F196 ap. DS 12.39.2; Plut. Per. 32.1–3. Cohen 1989: 212, Dover 1988: 135. The plausibility of the trial is mostly agreed post-Dover: Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 19, O’Sullivan 1997, Whitmarsh 2016: 120. Rubel 2014: 156 observes the connection with the plague. Smuggled: Plut. Per. 32.3; sentenced in his absence: Satyrus in DL 2.3; fined and exiled: Sotion in DL; acquitted due to illness: Hieronymus of Rhodes in DL; voluntary exile: Plut. Nic. 23.4. Dover 1988: 140. Pl. Gorg. 516 A on Pericles’ prosecution for klopē. Thuc. 2.65.3 is usually seen as a reference to a trial fine. Plut. Per. 35.4 and DS 12.45.4 record a trial and fine. ‘Inexplicable discrepancy’: Rubel 2014: 38. The Athenians blamed Pericles in Thuc. 1.127.3, esp. 2.59.1–2, 2.65.2; DS 12.45.4; Plut. Per. 35.3. Megara Decree: Ar. Ach. 495–556. Breach of the peace, as the Megarians believed in Thuc. 1.67.4. Cawkwell 1997: 25–33. Mikalson 1984: e.g. 255, for instance, argued the continued religious observation after the plague (and during, by the state) meant Thucydides was exaggerating. This is speculative and assumes incorrectly that continued religious participation correlates with belief, which has been dismissed since at least Durkheim. Flower 2009: 3 argued Thucydides’ ‘tendency to minimise the importance of religious activity as a factor in human affairs’ makes him an unreliable source, and 2009: 16 that ‘[t]here is surely some rhetorical exaggeration in all of this’, but offers no evidence that contradicts him (or why those who ‘maximise’ it are not similarly unreliable). That the plague narrative, as Woodman 1988: 35 observes, ‘dramatically and ironically overturns everything of which Thucydides made Pericles boast in the funeral oration’, is ironic foreshadowing in the funeral oration itself and not a reflection on the accuracy of the plague narrative. Rubel 2014 argues the downplaying of the plague narrative comes from the (incorrect) idea that atheism is impossible; and the converse reluctance by some scholars e.g. Hornblower 1991: 62–64 and Furley 2006: 422–3, to believe Thucydides’ ‘irrational’ insistence that the Peloponnesian war had an unusual amount of natural disasters, in Thuc. 1.23.3. Scholars who insist on the importance of the plague for morality and religion in Athens: Mitchell-Boyask 2008, Schaps 2011, and Rubel 2014. The independent evidence collaborates Thucydides’ story, like the mass graves found during the construction of the Athenian metro, as with a fifth-century grave in the Kerameikos with 150 male and female bodies hastily thrown in a

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40 41 42 43

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Scapegoats pit with 30 assorted small vases; see Baziotopoulou-Valavani 2002 and Parlama and Stambolidis 2000: 271–3, as well as Flower 2009: 17. Weeding out the good people is not quoted, but in Thuc. 2.51. Thucydides’ claim of piled corpses is a breach of norms in restricted areas like the temples of Eleusinian Demeter or the Acropolis (which Thuc. 2.17 says are restricted). On anxieties about justice see chapters Two and Four. Athenians were familiar with the idea that doubts about the character and will of the gods come naturally from despairing people: e.g. Eur. IA 1033–5. At Thuc. 2.64.2 Pericles says the plague was a ‘supernatural’ affliction. Thucydides’ account was later interpreted in Byzantine literature as justifying a divine origin for the plague on the basis that Thuc. 2.50 – see also 2.47.3–4 on its unusual extent and virility – says that it was ‘unusual’ because animals also died; see Reinsch 2006: 775–6. Furley 2006: 431 observes that ‘doubts arose in Athenians’ minds whether the plague might not be god’s punishment of them’. Rubel 2014: 3. Flower 2009: 1. He is certainly wrong to claim that ‘there was no ‘crisis’ of belief or practice in late fifth-century Athenian religion’, however. On how the crisis transcended religion, see Schaps 2011: 130–1. Bell 2016: 1–7, 208–306. Snape and Parker 2001: 408. Bell 2016: 307. Baron 1952: 534 talked of a ‘widespread religious revival’ caused by WWII. Furley 2006: 432, for instance, argued that ‘[a]ccording to Thucydides, the Athenians’ more immediate response to the desperate situation caused by the plague was not (pace Rubel) to intensify their religious devotions, but to abandon them altogether as futile’. Furley does recognise that attitudes were more mixed later in his article. On the scepticism of Thucydides towards seers, see Furley 2006. Demand for manteis: Gould 1985: 11–12. Plut. Per. 32.2, possibly based on a collection of decrees from the state archive in Athens copied by the Macedonian Craterus, as argued by Rubel 2014: 35, or following Demetrius of Phalerum. The intricacies and historicity of this controversial decree have been explored very adequately elsewhere: see Rubel 2014: 35–45, 71; Ostwald 1986: 191–8; and Whitmarsh 2021: 90, who consider it historical. Filonik 2013: 33–34, 58, 81; and Lefkowitz 2012: 93–95, 104–12; following Dodds 1951: 180–95 consider it a later invention. Mitchell-Boyask 2008: esp. 6, 45–104. Preoccupation with the illness of the city can be seen throughout Eur. Hipp., in 428, and in Soph. OT, in the 420 s, both of which use disease in literal and metaphorical ways. Flower 2009: 4–6. IG ii2 496, on the introduction of Asclepius from Epidaurus to Athens; see also the attempt to invade Epidauros, the site of Asclepius’ sanctuary, in Thuc. 2.56.4. Mikalson 1984: 220. Wallace 2004b: 266 argues for an increasing climate of suspicion. Prot. DK80B4; Arist. F67 Rose = Sophistes F3 Ross. Arist. ap. DL 9.51–54; Dover 1988: 136, Parker 1996: 204–10. Plato’s Hippocrates in the Protagoras 310e claims that everyone praised Protagoras and his speechcraft, but this is a set up, alongside his portrayal in the dialogue as a priest representative of tradition, that Socrates inverts to portray Protagoras as a subversive sceptic of the gods, as argued in Johnson 1992: 85–86. Protagoras’ reputation was already established by 421BC: he is ‘an offender in regard to celestial matters’ for the Old Comic poet Eupolis F157, in DL 9.50, a fragment of Flatterers. Wallace 1994: 134. Wallace 1994: 134–5 argues that Protagoras was driven out of Athens on suspicion of atheistic natural philosophy.

Scapegoats 161 45 DL 9.52; see also Cic. Nat. D. 1.23.6; Timon of Phleious F5 Diels, ap. Sext. Emp. Math. 9.56–57; Dover 1988: 136, 143–4 speculated this was a record of a comment made in court that his works should be burnt to prevent further corruption. Rubel 2014: 66–67 considers it unlikely but not impossible. 46 Aristoxenos F131 Wehrli; Dover 1988: 143. In Sue. Aug. 31 the Augustus burned all false or unofficial prophetic books as part of his programme of restoration of Roman religion. 47 Collective purification: Rubel 2014: 67–68. 48 Monstrous births: Dion. Hal. Rh. 9.10, the children of a cow; DS 32.12.2, hermaphrodites. Burning of katharmata: Eupolis F120; Parker 1983: 221 n.75 for fuller list. Hughes 1991: 143. 49 Lucian Alex. 47:143, 148. Hughes 1991: 143, 147. 50 The first reference to Diagoras’ atheism is in Ar. Cl. 831, where Socrates is called ‘the Melian’: a comparison between the sort of atheistic and naturalistic investigations and brazen impiety of the fictional Aristophanic Socrates and Diagoras. See more explicitly Ar. Birds 1071–87 and Lys. 6.17. Dover 1988: 135–7, Rubel 2014: 68–70, Wallace 1994: 128. 51 Statue of Herakles: Athenagoras Plea 4, Suda sv. Diagoras; The Mysteries: Melanthios FGrHist 326 F3, Krateros FGrHist 342 F16. 52 Winiarczyk 2016: 16, 77. 53 Thuc. 6.27–28; Thucydides was in exile at the time; Symbolic: Todd 1993: 314, Osborne 1985: 53–54, 65–66. 54 Andoc. Mys.; Plut. Alc. 22.4, Dem. 21.147. 55 Original argument in McGlew 2002: 122, elaboration and ‘usurpation’ in Hobden 2004: 149. Murray 1990: 155–6 in particular has insisted that calling the Mysteries ‘parodies’ is inappropriate, since they seem to have been accurate performances. 56 The religious and social importance of the Mysteries Affair, particularly in pitting sympotic bonds against democracy, is explored also in Murray 1990, who argues for the religious explanations of the herms and Mysteries affairs, esp. 157–9 on the weakness of political interpetations. Cf. also Dover 1988: 136. 57 Murray 1990: 155. 58 Thuc. 6.27. As Thuc. 6.60.2 observed, the facts on the Mysteries were never established for certain, and he did not understand the motivations of the hermokopidai, violators of the herms. Andocides confessed under immunity and gave up his friends, telling the jury of the aristocrats who assembled to drink, gamble, criticise democracy, and gate-crash parties, explaining how this got out of hand and ended up with mutilation. On the Mysteries and herms, see Plut. Alc, Andoc. Myst., Lys. 6. Dillon, J. 2004: 168–76, 179–81. There were repeated parodies of the Mysteries; they were not a one-off event: Andoc. 1.11 poiounta ‘making’, is present rather than aorist, which implies repeated events i.e. ‘he has been holding Mystery parodies’, rather than ‘he held a parody of the mysteries’. Moreover, Andocides records at least five independent occasions in Andoc. 1.11, 15–18. Thuc. 6.28 observed that there had been other instances of young symposiasts damaging religious statues at night; Murray 1990: 151–4. 59 Andoc. 1.11; Schaps 2011: 132. 60 Thuc. 7.77.2–4. 61 On the religious backdrop: Connor 1991: 51–52. 62 Lys. 30.18–22; the trial was not a formal charge of asebeia but impiety was at the centre of the case, as in Edwards 1999: 167–8, Rubel 2014: 156 and no.83. 63 Pythonikos offered the first info, with a slave of Alcibiades who confessed they parodied the mysteries; 9 out of 10 went into exile and the other was caught; all were rich intellectuals and followers of the ‘sophists’. See Athen. 5.220b–c, who

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74 75

Scapegoats records Aeschines’ Callias was a lampoon of the sophists Prodicus and Anaxagoras for exactly this. ‘Pretext’: Janko 2006: 48; see Parker 1996: 202, or Cooper 1995 esp. 306; see Rubel 2014: 41 on Anaxagoras. Also Slings 1994: 92, on Anytus’ motives as ‘of a political nature’; Stone 1988: 138 rejects the religious explanation because, for him, the Athenians prima facie did not prosecute people for expressing unorthodox beliefs – and in rejecting Socrates’ trial as one such example via cascade effect the other examples of trials for unorthodox beliefs are made less plausible; so Stone’s claim becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Against the political motivation: Cartledge 2009: 77 and Waterfield 2009, Bussanich and Smith 2013: 323–4. Parker 1996: 202 argues similarly about the inseparability of different anxieties. McPherran 1996: 171: ‘the belief that Athens had been the recipient of punishments that – in the end – had a divine origin would be easily incited’. Earthquakes: 2.8, during a time of religious fervour, in anticipation of war. Thucydides 2.53.4 blames the plague on divine punishment. At 3.87–89 he records earthquakes, the plague, and tidal waves together in 427–6. At 5.45, an earthquake forces the adjournment of the assembly who are deciding on the Athenian and Argive alliance. At 5.50, again, an attempt by the Eleans and Spartans to persuade the Corinthians to join the alliance is broken up by an earthquake. Cf. also Thuc. 1.101, 6.95, 8.42. See Flower 2009: 4. Nails 2006: 10 observes something similar: ‘Over the years, as Athens suffered war, plague, loss of empire, and defeat, its citizenry became increasingly alarmed that the new learning was somehow to blame, and anti-intellectualism grew’. Hole 2011: 361–2: mutilation of the herms and the plague led to a ‘fear that they were being punished by the gods’. As well as Flower 2009 and Schaps 2011: 129 take this interpretation. See also Janko 2006: 54–57. Loss of the war as context for trial of Socrates: Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 18. Todd 1993: 312 argues the trial of Socrates and the mutilation of the herms were one large scandal. ‘wounds’: Parker 1996: 147; ‘anxiety’: Rubel 2014: 3 and Whitmarsh 2021: 92; ‘fierce reaction’: Janko 2006: 48. Hole 2011: 369 has suggested that fear of divine retribution led to the vote for Socrates’ death. Waterfield 2009: 240 argued the Athenians saw brutality and stupidity but more than anything divine displeasure. Recreo 2018: 359 argues the rhetoric against atheists was driven by crisis in Athens. Cartledge 2009: 82–83. For instance, Thuc. 8.1.1 remarks on the meddling oracles and diviners in Athens at the time of the Sicilian expedition. ‘Religious fundamentalism’: Nails 2006: 5. Euthyphro as a fanatic: Allen 1970: 9–12, Burnyeat 1997: 233. ‘fanatical zeal’: Slings 1994: 94. See also Rubel 2014: 43–45. Waterfield 2009: 241. Rubel 2014: vii. Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 19. Socrates as scapegoat: Bussanich and Smith 2013: 301–27, esp. 314–25; Rubel 2014: 74–73, Wallace 2004a: 230. ‘collective paranoia’: Garland 1992: 141; ‘moral panic’: Hunter 1985: 157; atmosphere of fear and mistrust: Recreo 2018: 360. Murray 1990: 149. On the debate over the relevance and power of the thetic rower-class and the aristocracy who, as trierarchs, organised and paid for triremes, see [Xen] Ath. Pol. 2–3; Van Wees 1995, esp. 158–9. Jordan 1975: 221 argues that rowing in the fleet was not only a military act but also a political one: they were asserting their political significance. On poneria, impiety, and blame in the fifth century, see Rosenbloom 2002: esp. 329–32.

Scapegoats 163 76 Eidinow 2007: 236: the ‘dynamics of risk, misfortune, and blame’ lie behind impiety trials; the marginalised are blamed for misfortune, gossip giving rise to allegations. Burkert 1979: 70: ‘Hacking at the outsider is a well-known group reflex’. E.g. the search for asebountes after the mutilation of the herms involved trusting poneroi informers in Thuc. 8.73.3, 6.92.3; Rosenbloom 2002: 333–4. 77 Eidinow 2016b: 267–91, 326–36; 2019b: 67–68. 78 Eidinow 2019b: 80 explicitly argues a similar phenomenon in the case of Socrates with ‘unacceptable ritual activities’. See also Tsoukala 2011: 1 on blaming the Other during crises. 79 Anxiety as driver of scapegoating: Burkert 1979: 67. Purification: Cartledge 2009: 89–90. Catharsis: Eidinow 2010: 23–24. Hidden pollution to save the city from ‘impurity/a concealed offence against the gods, which must be removed to restore the safety of the city’: Eidinow 2022: 3–4. Diamond 2012 argues that the trials of Socrates and Euthyphro’s father are both about pollution, of polis and oikos respectively. The differences between the Jewish concept of scapegoat and the Greek pharmakos especially in the systematising theories of Frazer and Girard has been explored in Dawson 2013: x, Douglas 2003: 121, 2004: 41–42; and McLean 1990: 168. Community sacrifices one of its members to save its own skin: Bremmer 2008: 175; Burkert 1979: 70, 1985: 84. 80 Harpoc., Suda, and Etymologicum Genuinum s. v. pharmakos; Hellad. Phot. Bibl. 279. Dodds 1951: 36. Bremmer 2008: 177. Pharmakos rituals took place at Abdera, Athens, Colophon, Chaeronea, Massilia, Leucas, Kourion and across the Ionian world: Burkert 1979: 66, Hughes 1991: 139, 155–65. 81 Burkert 1979: 70. Faraone 2004: 216 argues that pharmakos rituals are part of a larger context of expelling pollution. Burkert 1985: 83–84 emphasises the performance of the ritual in times of great anxiety. Compton 2006: 13 and Parker 1996: 258 discuss crisis and pharmakoi. 82 Frazer 1890: 204. 83 Derrida 2004: 130, Cooke 2015: 2, 74–78, and Hughes 1991: 140 discuss association with preventing disease. Bremmer 2008: 177: pharmakos rituals took place ‘during extraordinary circumstances such as plague, famine, and drought (events which can of course hardly be separated)’; see also Bremmer 1983: 301; scholion on Ar. Kn. 1136; Suda s.v. katharma and pharmakos. Massalia-Marseilles used a scapegoat during time of plague as in Tzetzes Chiliades (‘Thousands’) 5.728; Burkert 1985: 82, Compton 2006: 14. Helladios in Photius, Lexicon 534a records the Athenians using pharmakoi to purify the city of the pollution caused by killing Androgeos of Crete; cf. also 279. 84 ‘Irreducably ambivalent’: Sharpe 2021: 160; see also Derrida 2004: 97–99, 103. Pharmakon as harmful cure: Pl. Prot. 354a, Phil. 46a. Compton 2006: 13, Emelyanov 2021: 36, Parker 1983: 258. 85 Socrates has been discussed as pharmakos before, in Cavallero 2007, Compton 2006, Emelyanov 2021, Tyrrell 2012, and Waterfield 2009: 240–2. The records of his life and trial meet every major theme in the identification of pharmakoi traditions in Compton 2006: 23–25: communal disaster, the expulsion of the hero, the ambiguous ‘worstness’ of the hero because of crime or ugliness, and execution, and almost every minor theme. Cavallero 2007: 97 observes that many of the traditions around the trials and accusations of the fifth century suggest that they were perceived either at the time or later as something like pharmakoi, purifying the city of pollution. 86 Pl. Ap. 23d6; cf. Pl. Gorg. 486a–b. O’Sullivan 2008: 206. 87 Marginalised: Bremmer 1983: 303, Eidinow 2022: 4–6. For pharmakoi as ugly, criminal, etc: Ar. Frogs 727–33, scholion on Aesch. Seven 680 and scholion on Ar. Frogs 742, 733a. On these features, see: Bremmer 2008: 179–80, Compton 2006:

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88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111

Scapegoats 14, Eidinow 2022: 4–6, Hughes 1991: 149, Parker 1996: 258. Specifically as criminals and poneroi see Rosenbloom 2002: 332. ‘Babbling beggar’: Eupolis Taxiarchoi, F357 Edmonds. Unwashed Ar. Birds 1554; barefoot: Ar. Cl. 358; tribon: Ameipsias, DL 2.27; no dinner: Cl. 175. Futter 2014: 11, Tyrrell 2012: 75–77. Speech: Pl. Ap. 17d; political exclusion: Pl. Ap. 31c–d. Tyrrell 2012: 107. Guthrie 1971: 66–67. Douglas 2004: 42. Derrida 2004: 119, Sharpe 2021: 166–7. Cf. Lys. Andoc. 6.53, Eidinow 2022: 13. Foucault 2013: 188. About other people: Pl. Ap. 22e; about himself in 24c–26a involuntarily corrupting the young; Lys. Andoc. 6.53; Eidinow 2022: 14, 16. Tyrrell 2012: 93. Emelyanov 2021: 34. Hughes 1991: 140–1 and Waterfield 2009: 242 discuss the association of Apollo and pharmakoi. Ogden 1997:21, cf. Seaford 1994: 313–8; Compton 2006: 15. Frazer 1890: 205–6 argues for the importance of the divine character of the scapegoat. Likewise, Socrates’ claim that the god is letting him die because he wants to avoid the degeneracy of old age, according to Xenophon Ap. 5–7, meets Frazer’s second condition for the employment of a ‘god’ as a scapegoat. Socrates meets Frazer’s conditions so perfectly that it is difficult to imagine that Frazer did not have Socrates in mind when discussing them: Frazer was, after all, by training and employment a Classicist; see Copenhaver 2015: 9–17. On ‘god-nurtured’ king pharmakos: Parker 1996: 267. The jurors specifically respond with jeers to Socrates’ mention of his divine sign in Pl. Ap. 20c and 21a. Chaerophon’s consultation of the oracle is part of the mythmaking of the pharmakos, as in Pl. Ap. 21a; Tyrrell 2012: 111–3. In Pl. Phd. 63b and 64a Socrates says he accepts dying because he knows he will join the gods. Bremmer 2008: 181–2, Eidinow 2022: 4. Eidinow 2022: 12. Aristophanes as purifier of the city: Ar. Wasps 1043. Cavallero 2007: 96–97, Tyrrell 2012: xviii. Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 23. They argue that Socrates’ oligarchic friends, Critias and Charmides, protected him during the coup, but after 403 they were powerless or dead. Pl. Euth. 2c–3a; Parker 1996: 263, Sharpe 2021: 166. Cavallero 2007: 97. Tyrrell 2012: xvii, 120. Derrida 2004: 134. Ambiguity is also stressed by Eidinow 2022: 12–14. The sausage seller in the Knights is a pharmakos and awarded sitesis; see Ar. Kn. 1404–5. As Bremmer 1983: 305 argues, in Abdera the pharmakos was treated to dinner before being exiled; Call. F90. Preferential treatment in prytaneion e.g. in Massalia: Petron. F1; schol. on Stat. Theb. 15.793; schol. on Luc. 10.334; see Eidinow 2022: 7. The exit of the pharmakos from the city started from the public hearth: Plutarch Mor. 693e; Bremmer 1983: 313, 2008: 189. Allusion is recognised e.g. in Cavallero 2007: 95, Hughes 1991: 150. It also pre-empts Plato’s Phd. 118 verdict of him as bravest, wisest, and just; Tyrrell 2012: 70. Futter 2014: 11 notices Socrates’ feeding at the state’s expense in prison. Socrates was at ease with his death: Pl. Cr. 43b. Tyrrell 2012: 140. Waterfield 2009: 203–4, 242. Eidinow 2022: 3. Futter 2014: 3–4; Emelyanov 2021: 35 has the date as the 8th.

Scapegoats 165 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135

136

Pl. Phd 58a1–c5. Pl. Phd. 58a–c. Burkert 1979: 67. 30 day wait: Xen. Mem. 4.8.2. Date of death: Futter 2014: 3–4, 11; White 2000: 155ff. DL 2.5.44. Derrida 2004: 135; Sharpe 2021: 166. As Waterfield argues, this was probably not historical but shows that at some point someone made the connection with the thargelia. Pl. Euth. 2c. The thirty tyrants had already tried to narrativise their murders as purification, as in Lys. 12.5, of which Meletus would have been aware; Burkert 1985: 83, Rosenbloom 2002: 336. [Lys.] 6.53 and [Dem.] 25.80 are also both examples of trying to make someone a pharmakos in a lawcourt in the fourth century, Hughes 1991: 151. Bailey 2018: 6. Pl. Phd. 58b1; Bailey 2018: 7. Futter 2014 notes this and argues the Socratics are purifying themselves through a re-enaction. Derrida 2004: 126–7. Madison 2002: 422 and Emelyanov 2021: 27 argue that too little attention has been paid to the philosophical significance of these last words. Bailey 2018: 6 examines the timing of the request. Tertullian Ap. 46; Origen Adv. Cel. 6.632; Emelyanov 2021: 27. Emelyanov 2021: 28, 32, Waterfield 2009: 242. Waterfield 2012: 300–1: Socrates’ dying words (‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius’) played on the link between pharmakos, scapegoat, and pharmakon, cure; Socrates presented himself as dying to heal the city’s ills. This resolves Wells 2008’s interpretation that sees Socrates’ death as part of the traditional threefold practice: libation (which Socrates requests but is denied), prayer, and sacrifice. Tyrrell 2012: xix. Sharpe 2021: 155, 165. Tyrrell 2012: 94. Socratics in exile: Tyrrell 2012: 94. Sharpe 2021: 155. Tyrrell 2012: 58. Derrida 2004: 131–32; Benardete 2012: 355–6, Sharpe 2021: 163. Bailey 2018: 7. Bailey 2018: 7. Cooke 2015: 83; Frye 1990: 41–42. Heraclitus, e.g. DK22B5, criticised some rituals and individuals and denied humans could communicate with gods through their statues: views that have been taken by scholars and ancients as impious and atheistic. Osborne 1997 and Adomenas 1999 argue Heraclitus was defending true religion. A similar argument is followed towards Xenophanes by Tor (forthcoming). Either way, Heraclitus is arguing against ‘popular religion’. Heraclitus: DL 9.1.1–6; 5–6 says he dedicated his On Nature to the temple. Parmenides: shrine: DL 9.3.21–23; Panathenaia: Pl. Par. 127b; herm that shows membership is in Ebner 1962; Graham 2010: 208–9, n.6. Empedocles: DL 8.2.51–69; Democritus: DL 9.7.36. Paus. 1.29.2. Muses as patrons of philosophy: Pl. Phd. 61a, Phlb. 67b; present of the gods to man: Tim. 47a–b; Baltes 1993: 7, n.32–4. Altars: Eros: Paus. 1.30.1, Athen. Deipn. 13.609D, Plut. Sol. 1.4; Prometheus, the Muses, Hermes, Athena, Heracles: Paus. 1.30.2; Zeus Kataibates: FGrHist 244, 120; Hephaestus, and joined altar of Hephaestus and Prometheus: FGrHist 244 147; festival days and runners: Paus. 1.30.2, Plut. Sol. 1.4; funeral games:

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140 141 142 143

144

145

146

147 148

Scapegoats Philostratus Vit. Soph. 2.30 (624), FGrHist 330 F2; Baltes 1993: 6–7, n.15; 9, 19, 20, Marchiandi 2020. Anaxagoras and Diagoras: DL. 2.3.6–15. Xen. Ap. 3, 5, 10–11. Xenophon himself maintained a reputation for piety, divination, divine consultation, and oath-keeping, as D. Johnson 2020: 432–4 has argued. Pl. Ap. 31d5–32a3. See Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 172–4 on this passage, and Brickhouse and Smith 2004: 140–1 on the idea that public life corrupted the virtuous. Pl. Tht. 172c–177c: philosophers are misunderstood and become prone to prosecution because they do not participate in civic affairs, including religion. See Nails 2006: 9 for discussion. Pl. Laws, 10 esp. 888b–c, 907d–9a. This was partly behind Plato and Xenophon’s concern to identify wrongdoing in the Athenian elite; see Gottesman 2020: 245–8. For example, Pl. Ap. 26d could mention Anaxagoras’ cheap leaflet as a commonknown example of impious literature; Prot. DK80B4, Cic. Nat. D. 1.24.63. Nomos agraphos: Halliwell 2004: 115. Tragedy e.g. Sisyphus F in Critias TGrF F1, ad. Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. 9.54. This was enforced through shame: Thuc. 2.37.3. Phryne: Impiety: according to [Plut.] Lives of the 10 orators, 849d–e. On the story see Athen. 13.590d–e. Corrupting the youth: Cooper 1995: 306 argues this because she did business in the Lyceum. Ninon: Schol. on Dem. 19.281. Joseph. Ap. 2.267. Eidinow 2010: 13–14, 2016b: 20; Cooper 1995: 303–18. DL 5.37–38, Athen. 13.92 = 611a. During the trial of Theophrastus, Aelian VH 8.12 records, Theophrastus was unable to speak to the Areopagos, overwhelmed by their grandeur: the prosecutor Demochares remarked that ‘the Judges are Athenians, not the Twelve gods’, the implication being that Theophrastus had undermined the Twelve gods either by disavowing them or proposing Alexander as a thirteenth. O’Sullivan 1997: 138; 2008: 204. Philo, Every Good Man is Free, 127–30. Death: Athen. 13.92 = 611a. Implied exile: DL 2.102. O’Sullivan 1997: 143. Theodorus atheistic views were shown in his work ‘About the Gods’ according to DL 2.97, Sext. Emp. Phys. 1.55 Pyrrh. 3.218, Cic. Nat. D. 1.1–2, and Plut. De. Com. Not. 1075. There is no reason to think the trial was principally for political reasons as O’Sullivan 1997: 145 has argued; see Bauman 1990: 125. Stilpo: DL 2.116. Suda, sv. ‘Prodikos’ [Suda Online: π,2365]. Reputation for atheism: e.g. Phld. On Piety, 9.7, Sext. Math. 9.18, 51, 52, Them. Or. 30.422. Based on the silence of Xenophon and Plato about Prodicus’ fate. Rubel 2014: 35–36 agrees that it being a fiction is very likely. Equally Bett 2020: 198 describes it as ‘a fanciful extrapolation’. Demetrius of Phalerum FGrHist 228 F42 ap. DL 9.57, Athen. 12.60 = 542e. Arist. Rh. 1416a., also Satyrus, Vita Eur. C10. Herakles as mad: POxy 2400, third century AD, probably based on Satyrus. Dover 1988: 139. One anecdote has Euripides edit the opening line of his Melanippe on its first performance because it was so impious it apparently caused such an outcry that the show was stopped. Fragment by Euripides: Plut. Amat. 13; Cf. Lucian Zeus Rants. The original line read ‘Zeus, whoever Zeus is, for I don’t know him, except through hearsay’. On impiety in Euripides’ plays see esp. Eur. Tro. 884–9, Hecuba’s impious prayer, the apparently Prodican Bacch. 275–80, and rebuke of Zeus by Amphitryon in Her. 339–47; also, the atheistic Sisyphus fragment, TGrF F1 ad. Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. 9.54 is sometimes attributed to him, in [Plut.] Plac. Phil. 1.7. See Lefkowitz 1989; 1987: 150–1, 154–8. Comic fragments reveal popular opinions about Euripides, as Dover 1988: 138–9: in Ar. Thesm. 450–1 woman claims Euripides spoiled her livelihood by persuading people of atheism. Euripides in Frogs 889–93

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149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

prays only to ‘Ether, my food, pivot of my tongue, comprehension, and nostrils’. See also Lefkowitz 1989: 71, cf. n.5; Rubel 2014: 26–28. Arist. Rh. 1397b24. ‘sin twice’: Ael. VH. 3.36, possibly from Hermippus. Tor 2017: 46. See also Parker 2011: 38. Lloyd 2018: 78. Contra e.g. Cohen 1989, Dover 1988. Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 33. Vlastos 2000: 56. Sedley 2013a: 335. Hussey 1995: 536, Sutton 1981: 37.

Conclusion Belief in unbelief

This book set out to perform a reappraisal of atheism in ancient Greece, to break what I called the ‘almost unbroken academic consensus that atheism did not exist in the ancient world’, a position that has recently, and I think fairly, been described as ‘absurd’.1 In fact, atheism has turned out to be far from unthinkable in the ancient Greek city: atheism is indispensable for the study and the mechanics of ancient religion and it has incredible explanatory value in many of the major ‘mysteries’ of the Greek world. Believing in atheism led to any number of insights. In the introduction I examined the main reasons that scholars of the ancient Greek world have neglected ancient atheism. I argued for the importance of belief as an object of study in Greek religion, but as part of this I also advocated for a move away from approaches that individualise belief and unbelief. Instead, informed by approaches in other fields, I laid out the grounds for a fresh approach, conceiving of atheism in sociological, cultural, terms, and focused on the way that the Greeks themselves conceived of atheism. In the second chapter, I argued for the importance of appropriate education in belief in the Greek world, in the development of civic-minded religion and in marking the progress into and through the citizenry. I demonstrated how this meant that atheists posed a perceived problem in undermining and subverting traditional educational structures that trained civic values. In the third chapter, I examined the complicated and tangential connection between the divine and moral spheres in the Greek world, and argued that instead of a straightforward evolution, there were multiple consecutive and competing moral theories available in Greece, with fashions for each waxing and waning depending on current events. I also argued that Greeks from an early period developed moral codes largely independent from the gods, that were centred around collective living, which meant that atheism was not inevitably or inextricably perceived as connected with immorality. In the fourth chapter, I argued that there was a vibrant discourse and exchange of ideas about the gods throughout the archaic and classical periods, in which doubting, critical, atheistic perspectives were not only welcome but crucial to the evolution of the discourse and religious and theological beliefs. In the fifth chapter, I argued that uncertainty of the gods is DOI: 10.4324/9781003393085-8

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foundational for Greek religion and theology: a crucial let-out clause that propped up the flexibility of Greek religion. Uncertainty was appropriate moderacy in belief and not some kind of third category or a signal of impiety and unbelief for the Greeks: instead, claiming certainty of knowledge either way was more of a problem. In the sixth chapter I argued that Greek belief was moderated by normativity, moderacy, and appropriateness instead of doctrine. As such, atheism was perceived as part of a category of otherness that reinforced appropriate belief, alongside magic and superstition. In the seventh chapter I argued that while atheism was, in general, accepted and relatively normal, at times of crisis accusations of atheism that led to hostile action could be made against people who had relevant suspect views and were seen as outcasts. These accusations were a release valve for theological and divine pressure, driven by the need to expel pollution. Despite the opposition of this work to the consensus, I have drawn upon a range of useful work on atheism in ancient Greece. These include Tim Whitmarsh’s Battling the Gods, a readable presentation of individual cosmologies and philosophies, and his work since; David Sedley’s atheist underground, describing a private network of atheists in the fifth century; Winiarczyk’s ongoing work on Diagoras and atheism; and the work of those sceptics of ancient atheism, such as Bremmer, O’Sullivan, and Cohen, with their careful and critical textual and historical analyses.2 Nonetheless, this book has fundamentally departed from many of these works on the most important issues: the existence of atheism, a focus on civic discourse rather than individual beliefs, and the importance of religion and its embeddedness in both the polis and the Greek mind. In doing so, I have followed the leads of scholarship outside Classics: in sociology, theology and philosophy, and elsewhere. There are incredible opportunities for future research in this field, much of which will no doubt be corrective of a great deal that I have written here. Books could be written on the subject of any of the chapters discussed, and a range of different approaches taken. The cognitive science of religion has rightly become a crucial tool for the study of Greek religion in recent years: grounded in the study of ‘how ancient people’s minds worked’, it examines the cognitive architecture that provides the roots of beliefs and behaviours.3 I have deployed cognitive science at specific points; however, I am cautious about its use here, for two main reasons. First, because of the tendency of scholars to theorise over ‘contradictions’, rather than assume misunderstanding, which is a particular problem when studying an outgroup, about which multiple competing contradicting beliefs are likely to coincide, and in a subject like atheism that is laden with so much ideological baggage.4 Secondly, and most importantly, because this study is not about the beliefs and unbeliefs of individual minds, or the ‘individual worshipper’, which is the strength of cognitive science.5 A cognitive science of ancient atheism is, however, certainly possible, with the appropriate care, and hopefully this study will have helped clear the way for one.

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Conclusion

The embeddedness of religion in the Greek city state is still a subject of some debate, but I have here found that atheism was fundamentally bound to normativity, both on an individual scale and as mediated by the polis. Religion was cognitively embedded as well as embedded in the physical landscape of the Greeks: I basically accept ‘religious universalism’, the idea that religion is natural to the human brain.6 Greeks may be predisposed to believe in gods, but predisposition does not mean predetermination: atheism was no more unthinkable than it is today.7 Susan Reynolds remarked: None of this is intended to deny that most people probably accepted the Church’s teachings without agonizing over them. The Church was in every sense established. Its teachings, however misunderstood or adapted to secular moralities, permeated life. To judge from the doubts some of them expressed, peasants and poor townspeople sometimes knew a fair amount about Christianity.8 But instead of viewing these as religious teachings and ideas, in the shadow of doctrine, they are ideas about religion, that embed and provided a platform for discussion and disagreement. After all, the atheist of Plato’s Laws 10 is assumed to have drawn his atheism not just from the ‘critical stream of thought’ in natural philosophy and drama, but also from the most ancient and ‘traditional’ sources of theological thought, in Hesiod and Homer.9 Obviously, much more research needs to be done on the definition of atheism advanced here for historical study, particularly in studying how applicable it is to other ancient religions and polytheistic religions today. This is the definition that I advanced in the introduction: Atheism is the various forms of unbelief in the right gods and/or the failure to worship them in appropriate ways. This definition returns atheism to a fundamentally ‘parasitic’, culturally contingent one, and one that centres the beliefs and practices of the citizen body, in a way that is most appropriate, applicable, and useful for historical application. Just as Greek religion was not doctrinal, atheism was not; just as Greek religion cannot be picked out, extracted, and isolated from discourses, practices, and behaviours, neither can Greek atheism. It must be studied in context and embedded in Greek society.10 No doubt this definition will still be criticised for being too broad. However, this study has hopefully demonstrated that such an understanding gives a sensible, appropriate, and cohesive set of material that hangs together well enough to allow for a whole range of insights and conclusions, and allows for the identification of distinct movements and trains of thought and practice. It also avoids all kinds of common issues and mires, such as the importance of defining ‘god’ for the purposes of a definition of atheism, since gods would be defined according to the culture studied. Moreover, that the

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previous definition is far too narrow and inapplicable to ancient polytheism, seems almost incontrovertible: its use has effectively arrested the study of historical atheism to such a degree that scholars are limited to speculating on unspoken beliefs or arguing that atheism did not exist at all.11 In many ways, that the contemporary understanding of atheism does not work for ancient polytheism is not a surprise, as the modern definition of atheism is grounded in the perspective of evangelising Western Christian monotheism.12 For ancient polytheists, monotheists were often atheists: monotheists, and particularly Christians, did not on the whole subscribe to the view that different cultures worshipped different gods and this was fine and appropriate.13 While unbelief in any or all gods was conceivable for these ancient polytheists, it did not particularly matter: their focus was on whether people believed in the right and appropriate gods for their community in the correct ways, and consequently the Christian belief that people from other religious and cultural backgrounds should worship their god represented a core denial of this religious framework. The history of atheism is a history of marginalisation. The methodologies used here have been influenced by various approaches to similar topics, such as in the study of magic, women, foreigners, ethnicity, and LGBT+ groups, which I have referenced at various points in this book. It is not enough to study marginalised individuals, groups, and ideas by reframing a history of persecution in positive terms, or from the perspective of the victims: the study of magic led the way in demonstrating the dubious results of this, but all histories of marginalisation can show examples of the failures of this approach.14 The writing of an ancient history of atheism is not a creation ex nihilo, or ex silentio, either, but a kind of reclamation project, as the best examples of histories of marginalised groups are today: extracting the histories of one marginalised group from broader histories of the Other. It is decolonial in other aspects too. This study has not only involved the reclamation of the history of Greek atheism but embedded it firmly in ancient religion. In doing so it has supported modern studies of a Greek religion in emphasising that it was vibrant, open, engaging, theologically flexible, adaptive, and pragmatic, with a central role for uncertainty, and generated strongly held belief and engagement that drove historical events and movements. Atheism was hiding in plain sight in the ancient Greek world: it was always a part of the imagined, intellectual, ritual, and political landscape of the ancient world. That it has been neglected is not just a consequence of a collection of modern misconceptions, but also a consequence of the way that the Greeks themselves thought about it and recorded it. Today we typically think through atheism in the lens of philosophy, and history, but both of these disciplines marginalise atheism in the ancient world. Plato’s uneasy reimagining of Socrates pharmakos involved imaginative and creative effort from the very beginning; a constructed image built on by Xenophon and later tradition that has troubled scholars for

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centuries.15 It was obvious to everyone that Socrates had been made a pharmakos to purge the city of Athens of pollution, and while Socrates had accepted his role in curing the city, Plato was nonetheless uneasy with his prosecution for atheism, despite its appropriateness, and the threat that the scapegoating of philosophers posed as a result. In ‘the most successful illusionist trick in history’, M. I. Finley recognised, Plato ‘persuaded posterity that the trial of Socrates was unique … among all events in Athenian history’.16 The picture he presented was of a noble, wise, and just Socrates who was unjustly singled-out and scapegoated for the impiety and evils of other people, against the principles of the ancient city; a crime that caused a guilt that wracked the Athenians for years. Plato was not interested in proving atheism did not exist. Plato explicitly commented on its commonality and denounced it, multiple times, dedicating almost the entirety of book ten of the Laws to discussion of how to deal with it: for Plato, the idea of an ancient city without atheists was unimaginable, even in his ideal Magnesia.17 But he dedicated a great deal of energy throughout his corpus to explaining that Socrates himself was not an atheist despite being put to death for atheism, and neither were his companions. First Plato platformed what Tyrrell calls ‘Socrates’ sophistry’ in the Apology: clever, logical arguments intended to exonerate Socrates of atheism, which were nonetheless clearly unpersuasive to the jury.18 Then, in his dialogues, Plato opened up to the city the private discussions of Socrates and his companions: an ‘artful attempt to present and inspire philosophical enquiry within the city, while avoiding the condemnation directed against Socrates by the men of Athens in 399 BCE’.19 This might have helped to dispel the fear of private, hidden, and secret philosophical networks and teaching, leading to impious activities, that partly lay behind Socrates’ prosecution. It is inevitable that such a denial of atheism at the heart of Plato’s intellectual enterprise would cast a shadow over the history of Western philosophy. For later recipients of this tradition, neither Socrates nor his companions could have been atheists, nor could the Athenians have plausibly prosecuted for this more generally, and so the entire tradition of accusations was brought into question. In thinking about the history, or historiography, rather than the philosophy, of atheism, we encounter similar issues. The origin of history is often traced back to Herodotus or Thucydides, both crucial authors in the history of Greek religion and atheism. In this, Herodotus is called the ‘father of history’, or perhaps, the ‘father of lies’: he offers unsubstantiated or even apparently false source ascriptions to justify supernatural or unbelievable accounts, and his approach is more one of a naïve ethnographer or even a tourist than a historian.20 Scholars have often found the transition into the use of the ‘historical method’ in Thucydides. In apparent stark contrast to Herodotus, Thucydides appears to ignore the gods, leaving ‘no room in his system for divine intervention’, which has been viewed as variously scandalous and innovative: for Whitmarsh it is ‘a significant moment in

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intellectual history as the gods are no longer the motors of human action, even metaphorically’.21 Then, the story goes, Xenophon took his lead from Thucydides, equally excluding the gods from causality, and the discipline of history was established.22 As such the critical point of development in the discipline of history specifically turns on the move away from myth and belief and into concrete, factual, secular narratives. This whole narrative is problematic, but it is critical for the study of ancient atheism. As I have observed, Herodotus relies on pious unknowability, and Thucydides assumes divine causality at various places in his History (which he is reluctant to identify) and records the importance of belief as a driver of historical events.23 But this narrative of transition from mythos to logos, with history positioned as a secular discipline defined by movement away from talking about myth, is nonetheless fundamental to the way we envision historical practice today. It may or may not be a sensible distinction to apply when examining the nature and ‘invention’ of history, but it has been destructive for the study of religion and irreligion. This discourse often slips into the assumption that myth, belief, and religion, are not important as drivers of historical events, precisely because sources perceived to be more ‘historical’ are those that are perceived to leave religion out of the picture. As W. K. Pritchett points out, ‘where the ancients assigned a religious motive to some military action, modern discussion seeks political or military ones’.24 Yet both in philosophy and history there is clear, explicit evidence of the importance of religion and atheism: from Thucydides’ description of the mutilation of the herms and parodies of the mysteries, and the Plague; to Plato’s atheists in the Laws and his record of Socrates’ trial, conviction, and execution for atheism. Because of the exclusion of religion and irreligion, these events are often explained in secular terms as vaguely political, even where such explanations are clearly inadequate or incoherent, or simply treated as mysteries lost to time. The marginalisation of ancient atheism is thus the marginalisation of ancient religion. Notes 1 Roubekas 2017: 43. 2 Whitmarsh 2014, 2016, 2021, 2022; Winiarczyk 1980, 1984, 1990, 1992, 2016; Sedley 1983, 2013a, 2013b. 3 Larson 2016: xii–xiii. 4 Larson 2016: 50. A tendency already common in classics: see Harrison 2000: 1: ‘Herodotus has been growing increasingly ingenious in recent years’. 5 ‘Individual worshipper’: Harrison 2017: 31. 6 Whitmarsh 2016: 5 argues against this position. 7 Cf. Whitmarsh 2016: 5, who argues against ‘religious universalism’. 8 Reynolds 1991: 38. 9 Annas 2017: 134–5. 10 Compare, for instance, Nongbri 2013: 4: ‘What is modern about the ideas of “religions” and “being religious” is the isolation and naming of some things as “religious” and others as “not religious”’.

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11 Whitmarsh 2021: 85 on necessity of broader understanding of atheism in polytheism. 12 It is not necessary to explain this as polytheists confusing monotheism as idol worship and then for atheism, or that their denial of Christian gods was due to practical rather than theoretical e.g. in Drachmann 1922: 128–9. Pharo 2007: 28 argues many of the modern definitions for terms like belief, religion, and atheism were constructed for evangelising purposes. 13 Christians: Polycarp Martyrdom 3:2; Justin Martyr First Apology 6:1, Tertullian Apology X, Julian Letter 22. Josephus Against Apion, 2.15.148. 14 As Eidinow 2019c: 747 observed, the distinction has often been enforced between (i) magical practices and (ii) accusations of magical practices among individuals; but these typically share an evidence base, as the former has been divined out of the latter. 15 Creative effort to design Socrates pharmakos: Tyrell 2012: 94. Obfuscation of trial by construction: Emelyanov 2021: 32. 16 Finley 1980: 102; in Rubel 2014: 71. 17 Annas 2017: 122. 18 Tyrell 2012: 119. 19 Sharpe 2021: 155. 20 For example, Fehling 1989, Redfield 1985. On this movement, see Pritchett 1993. Whitmarsh 2016: 80–81 argues Herodotus is looking through a pre-Socratic lens as a ‘way of expressing the hidden coherence of things’. 21 Whitmarsh 2016: 82. Hornblower 1992: 170 discusses the scandalous nature of Thucydides’ exclusion of the gods. Harrison forthcoming: 1; Badian 1989: 98 talks of ‘contempt’ of Thucydides ‘for established Greek religion’, in Hornblower 1992: 169, who agrees and observes that Thucydides neglected religion, conceding he may have been an atheist. Veyne 1984: 232 observed that ‘the most surprising feature of Thucydides’ account is that one thing is missing: the gods’. 22 See Pownall 1998: 251–77 on Xenophon and the muted divine presence in the Hellenica. 23 The History is a consistently bleak work, with humans still largely miserable, suffering, creatures: Thucydides’ reluctance to make the gods concrete may represent a desire not to blame them: see Hornblower 2009: 64–65. 24 Pritchett 1979: 3 in Serafim 2021: 68.

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Index

Page numbers followed by “n” indicate notes. accusations 8, 12–15, 21, 37–39, 55–56, 130–35, 141–57 agnosticism 7–8, 20–21, 98–99, 103, 113–14, 114, 119–20 agōgē 31, 44n88 Alcibiades 31, 37–38, 46–7, 66, 130, 140, 149, 161n63 aletrides 28, 42n54 ambiguity 97–8, 100, 130, 153, 164n106 anagkē 14, 104 Andocides 85, 149, 158n5, 161n58 anger 11, 81, 107, 138n35 anxieties 36, 39, 46n126, 49, 62–63, 102, 136, 146–50, 160–163 appropriateness 20n56, 91n2, 152, 157, 169, 172 Archaic pessimism 76–78, 92n32 aretē 40n2, 46n140, 68n91, 92n23 aristocracy 36–37, 148, 150, 161–162 Aristophanes 12, 16, 28, 36, 38, 55–56, 77–78, 145–148, 150–51, 153 Aristophanes: caricature of Euripides 56; caricature of Socrates 55, 77, 161n50; criticisms of oracles 141n94 Arktoi 28, 42n52 asebeia 5, 16, 18n29, 54, 138n35, 143–145, 158, 161–163 Aspasia 145, 159n20 Athenian invasion of Melos 52 atheos 8–9, 21n61, 54 barbarians 24, 108, 121, 136n1, 142n122 belief, appropriate 34 belief, in ghosts and necromancy 127 belief, nomizein 8, 18n22, 38, 85, 158n5 belief, official 124

belief, and piety 14–16, 38–39, 51–57, 84–87, 128–32, 166 belief, in the supernatural 5, 8, 19n42, 70n126, 121, 127, 133, 170 Bellerophon 9–10, 84, 91, 95n87 blaspheming 25, 95n87 burning 96n103, 148, 151, 161n48 caricatures 6, 45n114, 56, 60, 67n67, 128, 135 catalogues of atheists 6 causality 83, 99, 106, 130, 149, 173 children 23–33, 40, 51, 55–56, 75, 85–86, 114–115 children, adolescence 23, 34–35 children, Athenian 30–31, 33, 43n74 Chorus 28–29, 42n56, 43n62, 54, 80, 104, 117n89 chresmologoi 147 Christianity 2–3, 49, 105, 136n3, 170–171, 174n13 citizenship 23–24, 31, 33, 40, 58, 62 classes, political 36, 51, 72, 149, 152 cleansing 14, 150–52 Cleinias 11, 36, 134 cognitive science 32, 41n8, 169 contingent denials 106 corruption 36–39, 48–49, 95–97, 128, 131, 148–149, 153–161 corruption, of justice and morality 12 corruption, and pollution 157 cosmic order 62, 74, 80 counterintuitiveness 72 courts 7, 16, 36, 57–58, 83, 125, 138n35, 145, 161n45 Criminality 11, 16, 74–79, 85–87, 134, 143–149, 153

204

Index

crisis 85, 89, 136, 146–47, 151–157, 160–163, 169 Critias 9, 38, 47n145, 60, 68–69, 83–84, 95, 164n102 Crito 154, 165n124 Croesus 51, 76–79, 88, 93–96, 107, 109, 118 cults 26, 30, 41–42, 78, 108, 125–26, 158n5 cults, civic 20n55 cults, foreign 118n98, 158n5 curses 101, 113, 115n31, 124–27, 138–139 Cyclops 12 daimōn 79–80, 93–94, 103, 128, 133, 140–141 Damon 144–45, 158–159 death 85–87, 117–118, 126, 131, 145, 150–158, 164–166 deceptiveness 8, 14, 131 definition of atheism 20n57, 170 delayed fortune 87 Delos 118n100, 139n47, 153–54 Delphi 42n49, 49, 51, 88, 93, 101, 110, 115–118, 130 demiourgiké techné 58 democracy 35–38, 47n146, 143, 149–50, 158n10, 161 democracy, factions 38, 47n146 Derveni Papyrus 75, 92n29, 131, 141n94 despair 11, 55, 74, 90, 92n21, 160n29 deviancy 18n29, 63, 121 dikaios 51–52, 65n28 dikaiosyne 68n91 dikē 68n91, 77, 83, 92n23, 95n76 Diopeithes 147, 150 disaster 10, 21–22, 53, 56, 80, 146–51, 157 disbelief 1, 4, 7–8, 12, 20–22, 130–34, 142–143 divination 26, 48n149, 88, 126–27, 130, 135, 141n94, 166n138 divine causality 39, 89, 173 divine justice 21, 51, 58, 65–67, 73–87, 91, 95n86, 104, 108 divine law 9, 11, 35, 51 diviners 125, 131–134, 147, 152, 162n70 doctrine 4, 47n148, 51, 63–65, 73, 106, 133–136, 169–70 drama 40n6, 61, 69n108, 155, 170 drama, Aeschylus 9, 52, 56, 80, 86, 104, 126–27 drama, Euripides 9–10, 13–16, 21, 54–56, 67–68, 84, 86, 113–115, 166n148

drama, Menander 53, 66n52, 81 drama, Sophocles 9, 50, 93n35, 96n96, 107, 115n30, 147 eclipses 130, 149 ecstatic utterances 103 Eleusis 26, 86, 111, 119n122, 125 embeddedness 11, 17n9, 169–70 Ephebes 27, 34, 41–45, 66n66, 116n46 Epidaurus 160n41 Eteocles 52 ethnicity 108, 171 eupatridai 51, 65n26 eusebia 51, 68n91 Euthyphro 38, 51–52, 75, 92–94, 103, 150, 154, 162n70 Euthyphro, literalism 84, 92–93 evil 74, 81, 93–95, 122–128, 151, 153 evil, problem of 86 execution 83, 145, 153–54, 163n85, 173 exegetai 51, 65n26 exile 63, 145, 153, 159–161, 165n128 exorcisms 126, 140n87 faith 4, 8, 18–21, 54, 62, 88, 95n86, 146–47 falsifiability 6, 88–89 falsifiability, blocks to 87–88, 96n105, 96n106 family 24–25, 36, 41n12, 107, 123, 125 famine 88, 151, 163n83 fate 9, 29, 76–81, 94n67, 107–8, 139n50 fear 10–11, 59–61, 64n2, 83–85, 123, 128–29, 146, 154, 162 festivals 1, 24, 40n6, 43n66, 152, 155 festivals, Cheese Race 27, 33, 42n43, 45n102, 125 festivals, Heraia 28, 42n49, 42n51 festivals, Karneia 26, 41n25, 44n87 festivals, Panathenaea 26, 28, 36, 41n22, 155, 165n135 festivals, Thargalia 29, 43n60, 151–154, 165n116 festivals, Thesmophoria 26, 56 figurines 28, 42n41, 124 foreigners 7–8, 109, 118n98, 123, 137n19, 142n122, 152, 171 foreign gods 15–16, 22n79, 108–9, 118n98 frauds 131–134, 140n92, 142n113 gnomai 58, 78, 89 godlessness 9, 19n45, 20n57, 54–55 gods, ancestral 118n98

Index 205 gods, anger of 29, 77–78, 93n40, 145–51, 156, 162n68 gods, Apollo 49, 51, 64, 79, 102, 107, 115–118, 147, 149, 152–55 gods, Artemis 26–29, 31, 42, 50, 155 gods, Asclepius 22n88, 141n98, 147, 154, 160n41, 165n124 gods, Athena 21n74, 26–28, 50, 115n23, 144, 155–56, 165n136 gods, character of 85, 152, 164n98 gods, chthonian 124, 126–27, 139n50 gods, Demeter 78, 86, 100, 118, 139n50 gods, Dionysus 15, 78 gods, Dioscuri 31, 44n89, 108 gods, Erinyes 86, 139n50 gods, Eros 165n136 gods, Eumenides 83, 86 gods, Genetyllis 24, 41n14 gods, Great Mother 118n98 gods, Hades 127, 139n50, 139n65 gods, Hecate 95n90, 100, 126, 129, 139n50, 140n77 gods, Hephaestus 29, 43n60, 75, 165n136 gods, Hera 9, 21n74, 27, 39, 75, 108, 115n32 gods, Hermes 64n16, 101, 109, 126, 139n50, 165n136 gods, Hestia 24, 108 gods, local 109, 118n98 gods, misidentifying 107 gods, Muses 43n79, 76, 92n22, 96n96, 155, 165n136 gods, nature of 60, 84, 98–99 gods, new 14–16, 21n60, 38, 103, 133, 143 gods, old 39 gods, Olympian 126 gods, Persephone 126–27, 139n50, 139n65 gods, Poseidon 72, 74, 80, 92–93, 96n104, 108 gods, Sabazios 129, 140n77 gods, of the state 15, 21n60, 39 gods, traditional 55–56, 62, 152 gods, universal 108–9, 118n97 gods, unknown 98, 114n6, 139n50 gods, usurping 12 gods, Zeus 12–15, 25–26, 49–50, 74–78, 81–82, 92–93, 98–99, 104, 107 goēs 123, 137n22 grammatistēs 30–32, 45n95 graphē asebeias 138n34 graphē paranomōn 58 graves 103, 125–26, 159n28

guilt 13–14, 38, 49, 56–58, 74, 86, 93n36, 153, 155, 172 gymnasia 26–30, 35–36, 41n25, 46n135, 155 healing 115n21, 124, 138n31, 141n98, 154 Hecuba 13–14, 104, 115, 166n148 Helen 42n49, 54, 66n57, 104, 115n27, 137n19, 138n31 Herakles 9, 27, 86, 115n21, 118n97, 148, 156, 161n51, 165–166 herms 109, 114n9, 140n84, 148–152, 161–163n76, 165, 173 heroes 107–8, 114n15, 116n46, 118n99, 129, 131, 139n50 heroes, Achilles 34, 49, 115n25 heroes, Agamemnon 104 heroes, Ajax 50, 64n10–11, 107 heroes, Odysseus 9, 50, 74, 100, 106, 115n23, 139n65 Hippocrates 14, 112, 117n84, 128–132, 141n98 history, of atheism 1, 3, 6, 60, 63n2, 121, 171–72 history, Ephorus 145, 159n23 history, Thucydides 10–11, 52–56, 88, 93–94, 130, 140, 146–149, 159–160, 172–74 Homer 30–33, 43–44, 65, 73–75, 81–82, 92–96, 99–102, 110 Homer, gods of 14 hosia 51–52, 65n28, 68n91 identity 16, 121, 136n1 immorality 14, 49, 54–57, 63–66, 113, 122, 168 impiety 16, 38–39, 54–57, 66–67, 102–4, 111–12, 124–135, 143–50, 155–56 impiety, accusations of 111, 143–44, 152 impiety, and atheism 104, 133, 149 impiety, committed 85 impiety, concealed 149 impiety, trials for 144–149, 163n76 impurity 54, 148, 152 incest 56, 67n72, 124 ineffability 104, 106 inversions 33, 35, 123, 125, 135, 148 jury 15, 21n60, 48–58, 65n33, 67n66, 153, 158–164 justice, divine and human 10, 52, 58–59, 65n33, 82–85, 94n72 justice, and morality 9, 11–12, 66n39, 107

206

Index

justice, natural 21n65, 66n39, 75, 78, 82, 86, 95n86 justice, punishing 50, 75, 86 justice, retributive 77, 85 justice, state 83 kaloskagathos 40n3 kanephoroi 26, 28, 42n55 katharmata 151, 161n48, 163n83 kitharistēs 30, 43n74 knowledge, hidden 86, 116n41, 127, 131, 141n95 knowledge, human 98, 110 knowledge, magical 137n19 Laches 22n89, 37, 46n137, 46n138 lawlessness 10, 54, 60, 84, 96n101 legitimation 7, 39, 57, 121, 130–32, 135 let-out clauses 88–89, 96n111, 104, 169 libation 80, 116n46, 165n124 lightning 12, 15, 60, 77, 82 literacy 32, 44n91, 44n92 loss 10–11, 20n55, 31, 62, 130, 146, 149–150, 162n67 loutrides 26, 41n23 Lucretius 19n45 luxuriant multiplicity 12, 21n67, 89, 97n119, 106, 126 madness 55, 86 magic 18n29, 121–142 magic, beliefs 87, 125 magic, black 124 magic, incantations 132, 138n35 magic, items 123, 141n108 magic, practitioners 121–125, 131–141, 152 magic, quacks 112, 131–32, 137n22 magic, spell 138n30, 139n50 magic, study of 171 magic, and superstition 169 magic, witchcraft 94n69, 121, 136–143, 158n5 manteis 139n49, 147, 160n38 marginalisation 4, 18n27, 100, 124, 135, 138n33, 140n68, 157, 171, 173 Massagetae 15, 108 Medea 115n27 medicine 131, 141n98, 151 Megara Decree 145, 154–159 Meletus 8, 15, 35, 39, 72, 103, 149–54, 165n118

Melian dialogue 37, 52–53, 66n40, 161n50 memorability 26, 32, 45n99, 88, 146 Meno 40n2, 45n105, 46n140, 57, 69n112, 125, 138n39 mentalités 3, 41n8, 113, 128 misfortune 76–81, 86–88, 97n121, 107, 109, 150, 163n76 moderacy 68n91, 129, 169 morality, human 51, 57 morality, humanistic 61 morality, and justice 7, 10 morality, and piety 49, 52–54, 65n19, 159n28 morality, religious 61 mousikē 30 murder 9, 51, 54, 124, 143, 165n118 mutilation 37, 114n9, 130, 148–152, 161–163, 173 mysteries, Dionysiac 103 mysteries, Eleusis 4, 37, 86, 148, 160n29 mysteries, Samothracian 119n123 mysteries affair 37, 39, 99–105, 125, 148–152, 156, 161, 173 mystery ideas 46n123 nameless 98, 113 naturalistic investigations 13, 82, 94n72, 132, 161n50 necessity 14, 79, 104, 107, 115n28, 174n11 negative catechism 4, 18n23 Nicias 37, 53, 66n43, 130, 147, 149 night-wanderers 126, 131 Ninon 156, 166n143 nomoi 59, 61, 68, 152 nomos agraphos 155, 166n142 normativity 121–23, 134–137, 169–70 oaths 42n33, 51, 55, 57, 63n2, 66–67, 116n46, 125–26 oaths, violating 10, 56, 84, 143 Oedipus 9, 107, 117n89 offscourings 151 omens 7, 19n49, 22n84, 87, 97n121 oracles 51, 88–89, 95–97, 101–102, 107–110, 115, 125–126, 138–141 oracles, answers 65n25, 88–89 oracles, Delphi 51, 97n118, 99, 115n32 oracles, Dodona 42n49, 51, 88, 97n116, 101, 115n32 oracles, meddling 162n70 oracles, Pythian 79, 97n118

Index 207 oracles, shrines 88, 101 oracles, trust in 18n22 oratory, Athenaeus 67n82, 95n91, 96n93 oratory, Demosthenes 25, 52, 57–58, 108 oratory, Lysias 42–44, 67, 85, 95–96, 148, 158–161, 165n118 oratory, and rhetoric 21n60, 36, 54–55, 66n66, 83, 95n79, 125, 132, 159n28, 162n68 Orphic 96n97, 113, 125, 138n45 othering 16, 18n29, 100, 103, 121–143 oxuthumia 148 paidagōgoi 31, 44n84 paideia 24, 44n82, 46n135 paidonomos 31, 44n90 paidotribēs 30, 43n74 pais aph’hestias 26, 41n20 parrhēsia 155 parthenoi 26, 29, 41n22 Pausanias 27, 117n93, 126, 130 Peisistratids 97n118 Pericles 56, 144–46, 159–160 peripsēma 151 perjury 54, 77, 93n36 Phaedo 153–54 pharmakeus 152 pharmakos 124–25, 150–157, 163–165, 171–72 Pheidias 144–145, 156, 159n19 philosophy, Anaxagoras 13, 21n69, 56, 144–45, 155–158, 162, 166 philosophy, Antiphon 16, 34, 59–61, 68, 158n6 philosophy, Aristotle 24, 50, 64–67, 103, 128–29, 150, 156 philosophy, Democritus 16, 61–62, 64n15, 67n67, 82, 84, 95, 148, 155, 165n135 philosophy, Diagoras 21n70, 67n74, 69n107, 148, 155, 158, 161, 166n137, 169 philosophy, Diogenes 156 philosophy, Heraclitus 110–13, 119, 130–131, 137n22, 140, 155, 165 philosophy, humanistic theories 13, 57–59, 62–63, 68n98, 91n4 philosophy, natural 8, 12, 21n60, 56, 104, 147, 160n44, 170 philosophy, naturalistic 144 philosophy, Parmenides 109, 112, 118n104, 155, 165n135 philosophy, presocratics 69n108, 72

philosophy, Prodicus 19n43, 21n69, 34, 46n120, 63, 84, 114n9, 156, 162n63, 166n146 philosophy, Protagoras 40, 56–63, 67, 91, 110–14, 119n115, 147–148, 160n43 philosophy, relativism 13, 15, 34, 67n67, 72, 91n7, 109 philosophy, Theophrastus 128–29, 140n79, 156, 166n144 philosophy, Xenophanes 13, 91, 93n35, 109–113, 119, 158n5, 165n134 philosophy, Xenophon 27, 30, 38–42, 94n57, 107–8, 126–27, 152, 164–166, 171–174 philosophy, Xenophon’s Socrates 38, 46n140, 114n2, 141n105 philosophy, Zeno 144 Phryne 155, 166n143 Pindar 9, 40n2, 43–44, 68n91, 78, 93n35 Plato 8–14, 23–24, 33–39, 51–55, 72–75, 132–134, 153–55, 170–72 Plato, Academy 35, 46n135 Plato, Apology 12–15, 34–39, 48n155, 55, 72–73, 151, 154, 172, 174n13 Plato, Socrates 31–34, 37, 39, 45–48, 54–56, 101, 112, 114n15, 132–34 Plutarch 19n44, 122–130, 137–140, 144–45 poetry, Alcman 29, 32, 43n68 poetry, Archilochus 78, 93n45 poetry, Cinesias 67n82, 85, 95n90 poetry, Eupolis 160n43, 161n48, 164n88 poetry, Hesiod 50–51, 59, 61, 65, 68–69, 74–75, 82, 84, 92–94 poetry, Theognis 34, 45n104, 51, 76–78, 82–83, 93n42 poison 125, 133, 154 Polis Religion 4–5, 18n28, 19n38, 124 politikē technē 59 pollution 51, 57, 145–51, 154–157, 163, 169, 172 pollution, expunge 145, 148, 151, 163n81 pollution, mark of 156 pollution, of materials 148 poneroi 150, 162n75, 163n76, 164n87 prayers 13–14, 24, 80, 101, 104–7, 115–117, 124 prayers, humble 122, 124, 127 prayers, new 14, 104 priests 26, 33, 41n20, 99, 102, 107, 112, 141n98, 148, 158n5, 160n43 priests, false 132

208

Index

proof 7, 64n18, 84, 87, 103, 108 prophētai 21n60, 102, 116n47, 137n22, 152 proxenoi 47n146 prytaneion 153, 164n107 psephisma 147 psychagogoi 127 punishment, generational 92n18 purification 14, 25–27, 51, 54, 133–134, 148, 150–154, 161–165 reciprocity 50, 141n106 religion, civic 20n55, 47n148, 48n158, 94n57, 155, 168 religion, education 24–28, 30–33, 41n9, 41n12, 133–34 religion, fervour 149–50, 162 religion, foreign 31, 117n70, 137n19 religion, household 23 religion, official authority 35 religion, official practices 125 religion, personal 19n38, 126 religion, shrines 27–28, 95n90, 155, 165n135 religion, state festivals 26 religion, temples 1, 15, 26, 30, 56, 126, 129–30, 155, 158n5, 160n29, 165n135 religion, unofficial 4, 124, 161n46 religious environment 23, 32, 39, 91, 150 ressentiment 121 reversals 79, 84, 93n43, 94n59 revolution 34, 45n111, 47n146 ritual 102 ritual, behaviours 24, 39, 107, 113 ritual, conformity 47n148 ritual, illicit 138n32 ritual, mourning 25, 41n17 ritual, participation 4–5, 7, 21n60, 32, 38, 47n148 ritual, performance 5, 18n30, 19n41, 29, 40, 43n64, 116n42 ritual school 5 sacred and profane 10, 55, 146, 148–49, 156 Sacred Disease 14, 112, 117n84, 128–29, 131–32, 140n81, 141n98 sacred funds 144–45, 159n19 sacred laws 149 sacred offices 143, 158n5 sacred property 144

sacrifices 22–28, 51, 53, 57, 67n81, 100–101, 115, 139n49, 151, 154 sacrilege 33, 126, 131, 149 sanctuaries 10, 25–27, 41–42, 102, 126, 146 satyr 60, 69n104, 83, 114n15, 126 scapegoat 143–57, 158–165 scapegoat Jewish concept of 163n79 Scyles 16, 118n99 Scythians 16, 22n81, 118n99 sea 27, 74, 76, 85, 96n104, 100, 148–49, 153–54 seers 34, 107, 126, 131–32, 139–141, 147, 160n37 shame 10, 61, 69n109, 138n39, 146, 166n142 Sicilian expedition 53, 130, 139n50, 148–49, 162n70 sickness 74, 147, 151 sickness, of the city 147, 165n124 sickness, and cures 86, 131, 138n31, 151–54, 163n84, 165n124 sickness, as disease 76, 117n84, 131–32, 141, 153, 160n40, 163n83 sickness, and plague 10, 55, 88, 146–51, 158–163 Sisyphus 9, 60–61, 68–69, 83–84, 166n142 Sisyphus fragment 60–61, 63, 70n127, 83, 95n84, 166n142 sitesis 153, 164n107 slavery 11, 25–26, 31, 36, 41n27, 101, 104, 107, 152, 161n63 social evaluation 21nS8, 135, 137n24, 157, 161n56 Socrates 8, 12–14, 37–40, 52–56, 77–78, 133–35, 149–55, 164–165, 171–72 Socrates, appearance 152 Socrates, beliefs 8, 15, 38, 53, 55 Socrates, caricature 45n114 Socrates, comic depiction 55 Socrates, death 154, 162n68, 165n124 Socrates, divine sign 8, 15, 21n60, 64n17, 102–3, 116n48, 135, 152, 154, 164n98 Socrates, mission 134 Socrates, prosecuted 154, 158n5 Socrates, teacher 39, 46n136, 55, 149, 154 Socrates, as Theseus 155 Socrates, trial 15, 38, 48n161, 56, 63n1, 144, 155, 162n64, 173 Solon 43n74, 45n96, 76, 79, 82–86, 93–96 soothsayers 130

Index 209 sophists 68n91 sophrosyne 29, 47n148, 62, 103, 125, 127, 138n44, 139n61 souls 27–29, 31, 33, 41–45, 126, 130, 138–140, 145 Sparta, education 29, 31, 43n65, 44n86 Sparta, festivals 28, 42n50 Sparta, women and girls 29, 31, 42n47, 44n92 speech 46, 52, 58–61, 83–84, 143–44, 152–156, 160n43, 164n89 speech, thorubos 21n60 splanchnoptai 26, 41n27 stasis 55, 66n62 Sunousia 16, 31–39, 45–48, 80, 152, 154 sunthēmata 125 superstition 18n29, 121–23, 127–132, 135–36, 137, 140n69, 169 supplications 10, 24, 26, 41n24, 100, 139n47, 143–49 survivorship bias 19n45, 72, 87 symposia 24, 30, 40, 62, 152, 161n58 teaching 23, 30–39, 40n2, 44n91, 46–47, 67n72, 155, 157, 170, 172 teaching, professional 37, 40n2 technē 34–35, 67n90 Tertullian 103, 154, 165n123, 174n13 theism 7–8, 20n54, 49, 103, 121 theodicy 76–92, 107, 110, 146 Theodorus 69n107, 156, 166n145 theoi 47n148, 79–80, 85, 93n54, 94n59, 99, 114n15, 140n70 theology 32–33, 72–91, 91–98, 146–147, 169 Theoris 125 thunder 12, 15–16, 60, 82, 103, 116n55 topoi 6, 86

tragedy 21n69, 76, 86, 96n96, 107, 131, 141n94, 166n142 transcendent 29, 103–4, 109 transgression 53, 59, 93n36, 96n102, 100, 132, 143, 149–50 trials 39, 55–57, 67n81, 134–35, 143–156, 159, 162–163 tyranny 10, 38–39, 47n146, 60, 68n102, 82–84, 133, 165n118 ugliness 152, 163n85 uncertainty 90, 99–102, 105–7, 111, 114n5, 116n41, 136, 168–69, 171 uncertainty, principle of 98, 109 unknowability 98–120 unknowability, and agnosticism 98–99 unknowability, pious 104, 110–11, 173 unpredictability 99 usurpation 12, 161n55 violence 33, 38, 60, 81–82, 148 visions 80, 89 war 10, 53, 64–65, 79, 107, 139, 145–50, 162n67 wealth 25, 35–36, 46n121, 50, 56, 141n94, 141n98, 151 women 19n46, 25, 28–32, 44n91–92, 56, 79, 101, 138n35, 150 women, and girls 26–29, 41n22, 41n24, 42n49, 43n62, 44n91, 117n68, 126 women, Pythagoreans 32, 44n93 women, users of magic 123, 137n20 worship 4, 8, 11, 16–17, 30–31, 40, 115n32, 118n94, n98, 122, 170–71; private 129, 140n77, 169, 173n5