Atheism didn’t start with Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins in the modern era. Neither can any of Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, or Friedrich Nietzsche take full credit for exposing the delusion of theism. Atheism began way back in antiquity, and has a long and distinguished pedigree. This superb book by Cambridge Professor of Greek Culture Tim Whitmarsh (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/professor-tim-whitmarsh) traces these deep roots admirably. Few scholars are better equipped for the task.
Battling the Gods covers the millennium that separates Homer from Theodosius the Great. Naturally, there are starring roles for those who were particular heroes for the Enlightenment: Lucretius, for example. There is also Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who first inspired On the Nature of Things, and whose atomistic vision of the universe delighted scientists in the 17th century. Other great names from antiquity are placed in eye-opening perspective by Whitmarsh’s narrative. Thucydides, whose project of explaining human affairs without reference to divine interference provides historical practice today with its ultimate model, is given due acknowledgement for his originality and boldness. His account of the Peloponnesian War, Whitmarsh writes, “can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history”.
The great Athenian tragedians, too – despite the gods and prophecies that frequently featured in their plays, and the religious festival that provided the setting for performances of drama notwithstanding – are shown to have been fascinated by atheistic ideas, if not necessarily atheists in their own right. Most notably, Euripides, whom Aristophanes openly accused of promoting disbelief in the divine, repeatedly portrayed his heroes as ruined by their trust in the beneficence of the gods. A play such as The Trojan Women, in which the women of fallen Troy struggle fruitlessly to find meaning in the annihilation of their city, is one where atheism comes to seem almost a palliative. “O vehicle of the earth and possessor of a seat on earth,” Hecuba, the Trojan queen, prays, “whoever you are, most difficult to know, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of men: I offer you my prayers.” Predictably, Zeus does not answer her; and, throughout the play, misery follows swift upon misery. Either the gods do not exist or else, like wanton boys, they kill for sport.
The most revelatory aspect of Battling the Gods is a product of Whitmarsh’s detective work in tracing lines of evolution from the first philosophers to the networks of atheists which had come to exist across the Roman empire by the time of its heyday in the 2nd century AD. A few decades after the death of Hadrian, a philosopher named Sextus listed the most prominent atheists in history, but the only one whose influence was destined to endure into the Enlightenment was Epicurus.
Doubly condemned to oblivion, first by their more god-fearing contemporary opponents and then by Christians, philosophers who promoted disbelief in the supernatural rarely survived as much more than a name. Whitmarsh’s accomplishment is to give to some of these ghosts at least a semblance of solidity. When he hails Diagoras of Melos as “the first person in history to self-identify in a positive way as an atheist”, or describes Clitomachus, a sceptic from Carthage who ended up leading a philosophical school in Athens, as “that prodigious figure in the history of atheism”, it is a measure of his scholarship that we are able to accept the force of these descriptions. The great achievement of Battling the Gods is to trace in a manner that can be followed readily the evolution of sceptical attitudes towards the divine across the whole span of ancient history.
Nevertheless, Whitmarsh is too good a scholar not to acknowledge that the fragmented and ambivalent nature of the evidence is such that it remains hard to pin down the precise character of disbelief in antiquity. His own preference is to emphasise the similarities between ancient and modern atheism, and to see Clitomachus and Lucretius as the forebears of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. ‘Atheism, in my opinion,’ he declares, ‘is demonstrably at least as old as the monotheistic religions of Abraham.’ This is to cast it as the equivalent of Judaism or Christianity; a recognisably coherent tradition that has evolved unbroken over the millennia, so that Christopher Hitchens can be viewed as the heir of Diagoras and ancient philosophy as the seedbed of modern secularism. In other words, atheists no less than believers can feel pride in the sheer pedigree of their beliefs. Who knows, in reading this book you may come to share in those same beliefs. May the spirit of Epicurus be with you.
Enquire at your local library or consult http://www.amazon.co.uk/Battling-Gods-Atheism-Ancient-World/dp/0571279309/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1455053015&sr=8-1&keywords=battling+the+gods for full bibliographic detail.
304 pages in Faber & Faber
First published 2016
ISBN 978-0571279302
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Professor Tim Whitmarsh