Atheism in Pagan Antiquity

by A. B. Drachmann

From a purely practical point of view also, the criticism of the sophists was far more dangerous than that of the old philosophers. They were not theorists themselves, but practitioners; their business was to impart the higher education to the more mature youth. It was therefore part of their profession to disseminate their views not by means of learned professional writings, but by the persuasive eloquence of oral discourse. And in their criticism of the existing state of things they did not start with special results which only science could prove, and the correctness of which the layman need not recognise; they operated with facts and principles known and acknowledged by everybody. It is not to be wondered at that such efforts evoked a vigorous reaction on the part of established society, the more so as in any case the result of sophistic criticism—though not consciously its object—was to liquefy the moral principles on which the social order was based.

Such, in principle, appeared to be the state of things. In practice, here as elsewhere, the devil proved not so black as he was painted. First, not all the sophists—hardly even the majority of them—drew the logical conclusions from their views in respect of either morals or religion. They were teachers of rhetoric, and as such they taught, for instance, all the tricks by which a bad cause might be defended; that was part of the trade. But it must be supposed that Gorgias, the most distinguished of [pg 038] them, expressly insisted that rhetoric, just like any other art the aim of which was to defeat an opponent, should only be used for good ends. Similarly many of them may have stopped short in their criticism of popular belief at some arbitrary point, so that it was possible for them to respect at any rate something of the established religion, and so, of course, first and foremost the very belief in the existence of the gods. That they did not as a rule interfere with public worship, we may be sure; that was based firmly on “the Law.” But, in addition, even sophists who personally took an attitude radically contradictory to popular belief had the most important reasons for being careful in advancing such a view. They had to live by being the teachers of youth; they had no fixed appointment, they travelled about as lecturers and enlisted disciples by means of their lectures. For such men it would have been a very serious thing to attack the established order in its tenderest place, religion, and above all they had to beware of coming into conflict with the penal laws. This risk they did not incur while confining themselves to theoretical discussions about right and wrong, nor by the practical application of them in their teaching of rhetoric; but they might very easily incur it if attacking religion. This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that we do not find many direct statements of undoubtedly atheistical character handed down from the more eminent sophists, and that trials for impiety are rare in their case. But, nevertheless, a few such cases are met with, and from these as our starting-point we will now proceed.

As to Protagoras of Abdera, one of the earliest and most famous of all the sophists, it is stated that he began a pamphlet treating of the gods with the words: “Concerning the gods I can say nothing, neither that they exist nor that they do not exist, nor of what form they are; because there are many things which prevent one from knowing that, namely, both the uncertainty of the matter and the shortness of man's life.” On this account, it is said, he was charged with impiety at Athens and was outlawed, and his works were publicly burned. The date of this trial is not known for certain; but it is reasonably supposed to have coincided with that of Diagoras, namely, in 415. At any rate it must have taken place after 423-421, as we know that Protagoras was at that time staying in Athens. As he must have been born about 485, the charge overtook him when old and famous; according to one account, his work on the gods seems to belong to his earlier writings.

To doubt the correctness of this tradition would require stronger reasons than we possess, although it is rather strange that the condemnation of Protagoras is mentioned neither in our historical sources nor in Aristophanes, and that Plato, who mentions Protagoras rather frequently as dead, never alludes to it. At any rate, the quotation from the work on the gods is certainly authentic, for Plato himself referred to it. Hence it is certain that Protagoras directly stated the problem as to the existence of the gods and regarded it as an open question. But beyond that nothing much can be deduced from the short quotation; and as [pg 040] to the rest of the book on the gods we know nothing. The meagre reasons for scepticism adduced probably do not imply any more than that the difficulties are objective as well as subjective. If, in the latter respect, the brevity of life is specially mentioned it may be supposed that Protagoras had in mind a definite proof of the existence of the gods which was rendered difficult by the fact that life is so brief; prediction of the future may be guessed at, but nothing certain can be stated.

Protagoras is the only one of the sophists of whom tradition says that he was the object of persecution owing to his religious views. The trial of Socrates, however, really belongs to the same category when looked at from the accusers' point of view; Socrates was accused as a sophist. But as his own attitude towards popular religion differed essentially from that of the sophists, we cannot consider him in this connexion. Protagoras's trial itself is partly determined by special circumstances. In all probability it took place at a moment when a violent religious reaction had set in at Athens owing to some grave offences against the public worship and sanctuaries of the State (violation of the Mysteries and mutilation of the Hermae). The work on the gods had presumably been in existence and known long before this without causing scandal to anybody. But, nevertheless, the trial, like those of Anaxagoras and Socrates, plainly bears witness to the animosity with which the modern free-thought was regarded in Athens. This animosity did not easily manifest itself publicly without [pg 041] special reasons; but it was always there and might always be used in case of provocation.

As to Protagoras's personal attitude to the question of the existence of the gods, much may be guessed and much has been guessed; but nothing can be stated for certain. However, judging from the man's profession and his general habit of life as it appears in tradition, we may take for granted that he did not give offence in his outward behaviour by taking a hostile attitude to public worship or attacking its foundations; had that been so, he would not for forty years have been the most distinguished teacher of Hellas, but would simply not have been tolerated. An eminent modern scholar has therefore advanced the conjecture that Protagoras distinguished between belief and knowledge, and that his work on the gods only aimed at showing that the existence of the gods could not be scientifically demonstrated. Now such a distinction probably, if conceived as a conscious principle, is alien to ancient thought, at any rate at the time of Protagoras; and yet it may contain a grain of truth. When it is borne in mind that the incriminated passage represents the very exordium of the work of Protagoras, the impression cannot be avoided that he himself did not intend his work to disturb the established religion, but that he quite naïvely took up the existence of the gods as a subject, as good as any other, for dialectic discussion. All that he was concerned with was theory and theorising; religion was practice and ritual; and he had no more intention of interfering with that than the other earlier sophists of assailing the legal [pg 042] system of the community in their speculation as to relativity of right and wrong.

All this, however, does not alter the fact that the work of Protagoras posed the very question of the existence of the gods as a problem which might possibly be solved in the negative. He seems to have been the first to do this. That it could be done is significant of the age to which Protagoras belongs; that it was done was undoubtedly of great importance for the development of thought in wide circles.

Prodicus of Ceos, also one of the most famous sophists, advanced the idea that the conceptions of the gods were originally associated with those things which were of use to humanity: sun and moon, rivers and springs, the products of the earth and the elements; therefore bread was identified with Demeter, wine with Dionysus, water with Poseidon, fire with Hephaestus. As a special instance he mentioned the worship of the Nile by the Egyptians.

In Democritus, who was a slightly elder contemporary of Prodicus, we have already met with investigation into the origin of the conceptions of the gods. There is a close parallel between his handling of the subject and that of Prodicus, but at the same time a characteristic difference. Democritus was a naturalist, hence he took as his starting-point the natural phenomena commonly ascribed to the influence of the gods. Prodicus, on the other hand, started from the intellectual life of man. We learn that he had commenced to study synonyms, and that he was interested in the interpretation of [pg 043] the poets. Now he found that Homer occasionally simply substituted the name of Hephaestus for fire, and that other poets went even further on the same lines. Furthermore, while it was common knowledge to every Greek that certain natural objects, such as the heavenly bodies and the rivers, were regarded as divine and had names in common with their gods, this to Prodicus would be a specially attractive subject for speculation. It is plainly shown by his instances that it is linguistic observations of this kind which were the starting-point of his theory concerning the origin of the conceptions of the gods.

In the accounts of Prodicus it is taken for granted that he denied the existence of the gods, and in later times he is classed as atheos. Nevertheless we have every reason to doubt the correctness of this opinion. The case of Democritus already shows that a philosopher might very well derive the conceptions of the gods from an incorrect interpretation of certain phenomena without throwing doubt on their existence. As far as Prodicus is concerned it may be assumed that he did not believe that Bread, Wine or Fire were gods, any more than Democritus imagined that Zeus sent thunder and lightning; nor, presumably, did he ever believe that rivers were gods. But he need not therefore have denied the existence of Demeter, Dionysus and Hephaestus, much less the divinity of the sun and the moon. And if we consider his theory more closely it points in quite a different direction from that of atheism. To Prodicus it was evidently the conception of utility that mattered: if these objects came to be [pg 044] regarded as gods it was because they “benefited humanity.” This too is a genuinely sophistic view, characteristically deviating from that of the naturalist Democritus in its limitation to the human and social aspect of the question. Such a point of view, if confronted with the question of the existence of the gods, may very well, according to sophistic methods of reasoning, lead to the conclusion that primitive man was right in so far as the useful, i.e. that which “benefits humanity,” really is an essential feature of the gods, and wrong only in so far as he identified the individual useful objects with the gods. Whether Prodicus adopted this point of view, we cannot possibly tell; but the general body of tradition concerning the man, which does not in any way suggest religious radicalism, indicates as most probable that he did not connect the question of the origin of the conceptions of the gods with that of the existence of the gods, which to him was taken for granted, and that it was only later philosophers who, in their researches into the ideas of earlier philosophers about the gods, inferred his atheism from his speculations on the history of religion.