§ 9
The overthrow of the “free” political life of Athens was followed by a certain increase in intellectual activity, the result of throwing back the remaining store of energy on the life of the mind. By this time an almost open unbelief as to the current tales concerning the Gods would seem to have become general among educated people, the withdrawal of the old risk of impeachment by political factions being so far favourable to outspokenness. It is on record that the historian Ephoros (of Cumæ in Æolia: fl. 350 B.C.), who was a pupil of Isocrates, openly hinted in his work at his disbelief in the oracle of Apollo, and in fabulous traditions generally.[295] In other directions there were similar signs of freethought. The new schools of philosophy founded by Zeno the Stoic (fl. 280: d. 263 or 259) and Epicurus (341–270), whatever their defects, compare not ill with those of Plato and Aristotle, exhibiting greater ethical sanity and sincerity if less metaphysical subtlety. Of metaphysics there had been enough for the age: what it needed was a rational philosophy of life. But the loss of political freedom, although thus for a time turned to account, was fatal to continuous progress. The first great thinkers had all been free men in a politically free environment: the atmosphere of cowed subjection, especially after the advent of the Romans, could not breed their like; and originative energy of the higher order soon disappeared. Sane as was the moral philosophy of Epicurus, and austere as was that of Zeno, they are alike static or quietist,[296] the codes of a society seeking a regulating and sustaining principle rather than hopeful of new achievement or new truth. And the universal skepticism of Pyrrho has the same effect of suggesting that what is wanted is not progress, but balance. It is significant that he, who carried the Sokratic profession of Nescience to the typical extreme of doctrinal Nihilism, was made high-priest of his native town of Elis, and had statues erected in his honour.[297]
Considered as freethinkers, all three men tell at once of the critical and of the reactionary work done by the previous age. Pyrrho, the universal doubter, appears to have taken for granted, with the whole of his followers, such propositions as that some animals (not insects) are produced by parthenogenesis, that some live in the fire, and that the legend of the Phœnix is true.[298] Such credences stood for the arrest of biological science in the Sokratic age, with Aristotle, so often mistakenly, at work; while, on the other hand, the Sokratic skepticism visibly motives the play of systematic doubt on the dogmas men had learned to question. Zeno, again, was substantially a monotheist; Epicurus, adopting but not greatly developing the science of Demokritos,[299] turned the Gods into a far-off band of glorious spectres, untroubled by human needs, dwelling for ever in immortal calm, neither ruling nor caring to rule the world of men.[300] In coming to this surprising compromise, Epicurus, indeed, probably did not carry with him the whole intelligence even of his own school. His friend, the second Metrodoros of Lampsakos, seems to have been the most stringent of all the censors of Homer, wholly ignoring his namesake’s attempts to clear the bard of impiety. “He even advised men not to be ashamed to confess their utter ignorance of Homer, to the extent of not knowing whether Hector was a Greek or a Trojan.”[301] Such austerity towards myths can hardly have been compatible with the acceptance of the residuum of Epicurus. That, however, became the standing creed of the sect, and a fruitful theme of derision to its opponents. Doubtless the comfort of avoiding direct conflict with the popular beliefs had a good deal to do with the acceptance of the doctrine.
This strange retention of the theorem of the existence of anthropomorphic Gods, with a flat denial that they did anything in the universe, might be termed the great peculiarity of average ancient rationalism, were it not that what makes it at all intelligible for us is just the similar practice of modern non-Christian theists. The Gods of antiquity were non-creative, but strivers and meddlers and answerers of prayer; and ancient rationalism relieved them of their striving and meddling, leaving them no active or governing function whatever, but for the most part cherishing their phantasms. The God of modern Christendom had been at once a creator and a governor, ruling, meddling, punishing, rewarding, and hearing prayer; and modern theism, unable to take the atheistic or agnostic plunge, relieves him of all interference in things human or cosmic, but retains him as a creative abstraction who somehow set up “law,” whether or not he made all things out of nothing. The psychological process in the two cases seems to be the same—an erection of æsthetic habit into a philosophic dogma, and an accommodation of phrase to popular prejudice.
Whatever may have been the logical and psychological crudities of Epicureanism, however, it counted for much as a deliverance of men from superstitious fears; and nothing is more remarkable in the history of ancient philosophy than the affectionate reverence paid to the founder’s memory[302] on this score through whole centuries. The powerful Lucretius sounds his highest note of praise in telling how this Greek had first of all men freed human life from the crashing load of religion, daring to pass the flaming ramparts of the world, and by his victory putting men on an equality with heaven.[303] The laughter-loving Lucian two hundred years later grows gravely eloquent on the same theme.[304] And for generations the effect of the Epicurean check on orthodoxy is seen in the whole intellectual life of the Greek world, already predisposed in that direction.[305] The new schools of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics had alike shown the influence in their perfect freedom from all religious preoccupation, when they were not flatly dissenting from the popular beliefs. Antisthenes, the founder of the former school (fl. 400 B.C.), though a pupil of Sokrates, had been explicitly anti-polytheistic, and an opponent of anthropomorphism.[306] Aristippos of Cyrene, also a pupil of Socrates, who a little later founded the Hedonic or Cyrenaic sect, seems to have put theology entirely aside. One of the later adherents of the school, Theodoros, was like Diagoras labelled “the Atheist”[307] by reason of the directness of his opposition to religion; and in the Rome of Cicero he and Diagoras are the notorious atheists of history.[308] To Theodoros, who had a large following, is attributed an influence over the thought of Epicurus,[309] who, however, took the safer position of a verbal theism. The atheist is said to have been menaced by Athenian law in the time of Demetrius Phalereus, who protected him; and there is even a story that he was condemned to drink hemlock;[310] but he was not of the type that meets martyrdom, though he might go far to provoke it.[311] Roaming from court to court, he seems never to have stooped to flatter any of his entertainers. “You seem to me,” said the steward of Lysimachos of Thrace to him on one occasion, “to be the only man who ignores both Gods and kings.”[312]
In the same age the same freethinking temper is seen in Stilpo of Megara (fl. 307), of the school of Euclides, who is said to have been brought before the Areopagus for the offence of saying that the Pheidian statue of Athênê was “not a God,” and to have met the charge with the jest that she was in reality not a God but a Goddess; whereupon he was exiled.[313] The stories told of him make it clear that he was an unbeliever, usually careful not to betray himself. Euclides, too, with his optimistic pantheism, was clearly a heretic; though his doctrine that evil is non-ens[314] later became the creed of some Christians. Yet another professed atheist was the witty Bion of Borysthenes, pupil of Theodoros, of whom it is told, in a fashion familiar to our own time, that in sickness he grew pious through fear.[315] Among his positions was a protest or rather satire against the doctrine that the Gods punished children for the crimes of their fathers.[316] In the other schools, Speusippos (fl. 343), the nephew of Plato, leant to monotheism;[317] Strato of Lampsakos, the Peripatetic (fl. 290), called “the Naturalist,” taught sheer pantheism, anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action of the Gods to account for the making of the world;[318] Dikaiarchos (fl. 326–287), another disciple of Aristotle, denied the existence of separate souls, and the possibility of foretelling the future;[319] and Aristo and Cleanthes, disciples of Zeno, varied likewise in the direction of pantheism; the latter’s monotheism, as expressed in his famous hymn, being one of several doctrines ascribed to him.[320]
Contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno and Pyrrho, too, was Evêmeros (Euhemerus), whose peculiar propaganda against Godism seems to imply theoretic atheism. As an atheist he was vilified in a manner familiar to modern ears, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus labelling him an “arrogant old man vomiting impious books.”[321] His lost work, of which only a few extracts remain, undertook to prove that all the Gods had been simply famous men, deified after death; the proof, however, being by way of a fiction about old inscriptions found in an imaginary island.[322] As above noted,[323] the idea may have been borrowed from skeptical Phoenicians, the principle having already been monotheistically applied by the Bible-making Jews,[324] though, on the other hand, it had been artistically and to all appearance uncritically acted on in the Homeric epopees. It may or may not then have been by way of deliberate or reasoning Evêmerism that certain early Greek and Roman deities were transformed, as we have seen, into heroes or hetairai.[325] In any case, the principle seems to have had considerable vogue in the later Hellenistic world; but with the effect rather of paving the way for new cults than of setting up scientific rationalism in place of the old ones. Quite a number of writers like Palaiphatos, without going so far as Evêmeros, sought to reduce myths to natural possibilities and events, by way of mediating between the credulous and the incredulous.[326] Their method is mostly the naïf one revived by the Abbé Banier in the eighteenth century of reducing marvels to verbal misconceptions. Thus for Palaiphatos the myth of Kerberos came from the facts that the city Trikarenos was commonly spoken of as a beautiful and great dog; and that Geryon, who lived there, had great dogs called Kerberoi; Actæon was “devoured by his dogs” in the sense that he neglected his affairs and wasted his time in hunting; the Amazons were shaved men, clad as were the women in Thrace, and so on.[327] Palaiphatos and the Herakleitos who also wrote De Incredibilibus agree that Pasiphae’s bull was a man named Tauros; and the latter writer similarly explains that Scylla was a beautiful hetaira with avaricious hangers-on, and that the harpies were ladies of the same profession. If the method seems childish, it is to be remembered that as regards the explanation of supernatural events it was adhered to by German theologians of a century ago; and that its credulity in incredulity is still to be seen in the current view that every narrative in the sacred books is to be taken as necessarily standing for a fact of some kind.
One of the inferrible effects of the Evêmerist method was to facilitate for the time the adoption of the Egyptian and eastern usage of deifying kings. It has been plausibly argued that this practice stands not so much for superstition as for skepticism, its opponents being precisely the orthodox believers, and its promoters those who had learned to doubt the actuality of the traditional Gods. Evêmerism would clinch such a tendency; and it is noteworthy that Evêmeros lived at the court of Kassander (319–296 B.C.) in a period in which every remaining member of the family of the deified Alexander had perished, mostly by violence; while the contemporary Ptolemy I of Egypt received the title of Sotêr, “Saviour,” from the people of Rhodes.[328] It is to be observed, however, that while in the next generation Antiochus I of Syria received the same title, and his successor Antiochus II that of Theos, “God,” the usage passes away; Ptolemy III being named merely Evergetês, “the Benefactor” (of the priests), and even Antiochus III only “the Great.” Superstition was not to be ousted by a political exploitation of its machinery.[329]
In Athens the democracy, restored in a subordinate form by Kassander’s opponent, Demetrius Poliorkêtes (307 B.C.), actually tried to put down the philosophic schools, all of which, but the Aristotelian in particular, were anti-democratic, and doubtless also comparatively irreligious. Epicurus and some of his antagonists were exiled within a year of his opening his school (306 B.C.); but the law was repealed in the following year.[330] Theophrastos, the head of the Aristotelian school, was indicted in the old fashion for impiety, which seems to have consisted in denouncing animal sacrifice.[331] These repressive attempts, however, failed; and no others followed at Athens in that era; though in the next century the Epicureans seem to have been expelled from Lythos in Crete and from Messenê in the Peloponnesos, nominally for their atheism, in reality probably on political grounds.[332] Thus Zeno was free to publish a treatise in which, besides far out-going Plato in schemes for dragooning the citizens into an ideal life, he proposed a State without temples or statues of the Gods or law courts or gymnasia.[333] In the same age there is trace of “an interesting case of rationalism even in the Delphic oracle.”[334] The people of the island of Astypalaia, plagued by hares or rabbits, solemnly consulted the oracle, which briefly advised them to keep dogs and take to hunting. About the same time we find Lachares, temporarily despot at Athens, plundering the shrine of Pallas of its gold.[335] Even in the general public there must have been a strain of surviving rationalism; for among the fragments of Menander (fl. 300), who, in general, seems to have leant to a well-bred orthodoxy,[336] there are some speeches savouring of skepticism and pantheism.[337]
It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos and the great Carneades (213–129), and later of the Carthaginian Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence called Academic—a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods.