Ancient Greek naturalism is essentially calculated to collide with the
popular belief. It seeks a natural explanation of the world, first and
foremost of its origin, but in the next place of individual natural
phenomena. As to the genesis of the world, speculations of a mythical kind
had already developed on the basis of the popular belief. They were not,
however, binding on anybody, and, above all, the idea of the gods having
created the world was altogether alien to Greek religion. Thus, without
offence to them it might be maintained that everything originated from a
primary substance or from a mixture of several primary substances, as was
generally maintained by the ancient naturalists. On the other hand, a
conflict arose as soon as the heavenly phenomena, such as lightning and
thunder, were ascribed to natural causes, or when the heavenly bodies were
made out to be natural objects; for to the Greeks it was an established
fact that Zeus sent lightning and thunder, and that the sun and the moon
were gods. A refusal to believe in the latter was especially dangerous
because they were _visible_ gods, and as to the person who did not believe
in their divinity the obvious conclusion would be that he believed still
less in the invisible gods.
That this inference was drawn will appear before long. But the epithet
“atheist” was very rarely attached to the ancient naturalists; only a few
of the later (and those the least important) were given the nickname
_atheos_. Altogether we hear very little of the relation of these
philosophers to the popular belief, and this very silence is surely
significant. No doubt, most of them bestowed but a scant attention on this
aspect of the matter; they were engrossed in speculations which did not
bring them into conflict with the popular belief, and even their
scientific treatment of the “divine” natural phenomena did not make them
doubt the _existence_ of the gods. This is connected with a peculiarity in
their conception of existence. Tradition tells us of several of them, and
it applies presumably also to those of whom it is not recorded, that they
designated their primary substance or substances as gods; sometimes they
also applied this designation to the world or worlds originating in the
primary substance. This view is deeply rooted in the Greek popular belief
and harmonises with its fundamental view of existence. To these ancient
thinkers the primary substance is at once a living and a superhuman power;
and any living power which transcended that of man was divine to the
Greeks. Hylozoism (the theory that matter is alive) consequently, when it
allies itself with popular belief, leads straight to pantheism, whereas it
excludes monotheism, which presupposes a distinction between god and
matter. Now it is a matter of experience that, while monotheism is the
hereditary foe of polytheism, polytheism and pantheism go very well
together. The universe being divine, there is no reason to doubt that
beings of a higher order than man exist, nor any reason to refuse to
bestow on them the predicate “divine”; and with this we find ourselves in
principle on the standpoint of polytheistic popular belief. There is
nothing surprising, then, in the tradition that Thales identified God with
the mind of the universe and believed the universe to be animated, and
filled with “demons.” The first statement is in this form probably
influenced by later ideas and hardly a correct expression of the view of
Thales; the rest bears the very stamp of genuineness, and similar ideas
recur, more or less completely and variously refracted, in the succeeding
philosophers.
To follow these variations in detail is outside the scope of this
investigation; but it may be of interest to see the form they take in one
of the latest and most advanced representatives of Ionian naturalism. In
Democritus’s conception of the universe, personal gods would seem excluded
_a priori_. He works with but three premises: the atoms, their movements,
and empty space. From this everything is derived according to strict
causality. Such phenomena also as thunder and lightning, comets and
eclipses, which were generally ascribed to the gods, are according to his
opinion due to natural causes, whereas people in the olden days were
afraid of them because they believed they were due to the gods.
Nevertheless, he seems, in the first place, to have designated Fire, which
he at the same time recognised as a “soul-substance,” as divine, the
cosmic fire being the soul of the world; and secondly, he thought that
there was something real underlying the popular conception of the gods. He
was led to this from a consideration of dreams, which he thought were
images of real objects which entered into the sleeper through the pores of
the body. Now, since gods might be seen in dreams, they must be real
beings. He did actually say that the gods had more senses than the
ordinary five. When he who of all the Greek philosophers went furthest in
a purely mechanical conception of nature took up such an attitude to the
religion of his people, one cannot expect the others, who were less
advanced, to discard it.
Nevertheless, there is a certain probability that some of the later Ionian
naturalists went further in their criticism of the gods of popular belief.
One of them actually came into conflict with popular religion; it will be
natural to begin with him.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Anaxagoras of
Clazomenae was accused of impiety and had to leave Athens, where he had
taken up his abode. The object of the accusation was in reality political;
the idea being to hit Pericles through his friend the naturalist. What
Anaxagoras was charged with was that he had assumed that the heavenly
bodies were natural objects; he had taught that the sun was a red-hot
mass, and that the moon was earth and larger than Peloponnese. To base an
accusation of impiety on this, it was necessary first to carry a public
resolution, giving power to prosecute those who gave natural explanations
of heavenly phenomena.
As to Anaxagoras’s attitude to popular belief, we hear next to nothing
apart from this. There is a story of a ram’s head being found with one
horn in the middle of the forehead; it was brought to Pericles, and the
soothsayer Lampon explained the portent to the effect that, of the two
men, Pericles and Thucydides, who contended for the leadership of Athens,
one should prove victorious. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, had the ram’s
head cut open and showed that the brain did not fill up the cranium, but
was egg-shaped and lay gathered together at the point where the horn grew
out. He evidently thought that abortions also, which otherwise were
generally considered as signs from the gods, were due to natural causes.
Beyond this, nothing is said of any attack on the popular belief on the
part of Anaxagoras, and in his philosophy nothing occurred which logically
entailed a denial of the existence of the gods. Add to this that it was
necessary to create a new judicial basis for the accusation against
Anaxagoras, and it can be taken as certain that neither in his writings
nor in any other way did he come forward in public as a denier of the
gods.
It is somewhat different when we consider the purely personal point of
view of Anaxagoras. The very fact that no expression of his opinion
concerning the gods has been transmitted affords food for thought.
Presumably there was none; but this very fact is notable when we bear in
mind that the earlier naturalists show no such reticence. Add to this
that, if there is any place and any time in which we might expect a
complete emancipation from popular belief, combined with a decided
disinclination to give expression to it, it is Athens under Pericles. Men
like Pericles and his friends represent a high level, perhaps the zenith,
in Hellenic culture. That they were critical of many of the religious
conceptions of their time we may take for granted; as to Pericles himself,
this is actually stated as a fact, and the accusations of impiety directed
against Aspasia and Pheidias prove that orthodox circles were very well
aware of it. But the accusations prove, moreover, that Pericles and those
who shared his views were so much in advance of their time that they could
not afford to let their free-thinking attitude become a matter of public
knowledge without endangering their political position certainly, and
possibly even more than that. To be sure, considerations of that kind did
not weigh with Anaxagoras; but he was—and that we know on good authority—a
quiet scholar whose ideal of life was to devote himself to problems of
natural science, and he can hardly have wished to be disturbed in this
occupation by affairs in which he took no sort of interest. The question
is then only how far men like Pericles and himself may have ventured in
their criticism. Though all direct tradition is wanting, we have at any
rate circumstantial evidence possessing a certain degree of probability.
To begin with, the attempt to give a natural explanation of prodigies is
not in itself without interest. The mantic art, _i.e._ the ability to
predict the future by signs from the gods or direct divine inspiration,
was throughout antiquity considered one of the surest proofs of the
existence of the gods. Now, it by no means follows that a person who was
not impressed by a deformed ram’s head would deny, _e.g._, the ability of
the Delphic Oracle to predict the future, especially not so when the
person in question was a naturalist. But that there was at this time a
general tendency to reject the art of divination is evident from the fact
that Herodotus as well as Sophocles, both of them contemporaries of
Pericles and Anaxagoras, expressly contend against attempts in that
direction, and, be it remarked, as if the theory they attack was commonly
held. Sophocles is in this connexion so far the more interesting of the
two, as, on one hand, he criticises private divination but defends the
Delphic oracle vigorously, while he, on the other hand, identifies denial
of the oracle with denial of the gods. And he does this in such a way as
to make it evident that he has a definite object in mind. That in this
polemic he may have been aiming precisely at Anaxagoras is indicated by
the fact that Diopeithes, who carried the resolution concerning the
accusation of the philosopher, was a soothsayer by profession.
The strongest evidence as to the free-thinking of the Periclean age is,
however, to be met with in the historical writing of Thucydides. In his
work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides completely eliminated the
supernatural element; not only did he throughout ignore omens and
divinations, except in so far as they played a part as a psychological
factor, but he also completely omitted any reference to the gods in his
narrative. Such a procedure was at this time unprecedented, and contrasts
sharply with that of his immediate forerunner Herodotus, who constantly
lays stress on the intervention of the gods. That is hardly conceivable
except in a man who had altogether emancipated himself from the religious
views of his time. Now, Thucydides is not only a fellow-countryman and
younger contemporary of Pericles, but he also sees in Pericles his ideal
not only as a politician but evidently also as a man. Hence, when
everything is considered, it is not improbable that Pericles and his
friends went to all lengths in their criticism of popular belief,
although, of course, it remains impossible to state anything definite as
to particular persons’ individual views. Curiously enough, even in
antiquity this connexion was observed; in a biography of Thucydides it is
said that he was a disciple of Anaxagoras and _accordingly_ was also
considered something of an atheist.
While Anaxagoras, his trial notwithstanding, is not generally designated
an atheist, probably because there was nothing in his writings to which he
might be pinned down, that fate befell two of his contemporaries, Hippo of
Rhegium and Diogenes of Apollonia. Very little, however, is known of them.
Hippo, who is said to have been a Pythagorean, taught that water and fire
were the origin of everything; as to the reason why he earned the nickname
_atheos_, it is said that he taught that Water was the primal cause of
all, as well as that he maintained that nothing existed but what could be
perceived by the senses. There is also quoted a (fictitious) inscription,
which he is said to have caused to be put on his tomb, to the effect that
Death has made him the equal of the immortal gods (in that he now exists
no more than they). Otherwise we know nothing special of Hippo; Aristotle
refers to him as shallow. As to Diogenes, we learn that he was influenced
by Anaximenes and Anaxagoras; in agreement with the former he regarded Air
as the primary substance, and like Anaxagoras he attributed reason to his
primary substance. Of his doctrine we have extensive accounts, and also
some not inconsiderable fragments of his treatise _On Nature_; but they
are almost all of them of purely scientific, mostly of an anatomical and
physiological character. In especial, as to his relation to popular
belief, it is recorded that he identified Zeus with the air. Indirectly,
however, we are able to demonstrate, by the aid of an almost contemporary
witness, that there must have been some foundation for the accusation of
“atheism.” For in _The Clouds_, where Aristophanes wants to represent
Socrates as an atheist, he puts in his mouth scraps of the naturalism of
Diogenes; that he would hardly have done, if Diogenes had not already been
decried as an atheist.
It is of course impossible to base any statement of the relation of the
two philosophers to popular belief on such a foundation. But it is,
nevertheless, worth noticing that while not a single one of the earlier
naturalists acquired the designation atheist, it was applied to two of the
latest and otherwise little-known representatives of the school. Take this
in combination with what has been said above of Anaxagoras, and we get at
any rate a suspicion that Greek naturalism gradually led its adherents
beyond the naïve stage where many individual phenomena were indeed
ascribed to natural causes, even if they had formerly been regarded as
caused by divine intervention, but where the foundations of the popular
belief were left untouched. Once this path has been entered on, a point
will be arrived at where the final conclusion is drawn and the existence
of the supernatural completely denied. It is probable that this happened
towards the close of the naturalistic period. If so early a philosopher as
Anaxagoras took this point of view, his personal contribution as a member
of the Periclean circle may have been more significant in the religious
field than one would conjecture from the character of his work.
Before we proceed to mention the sophists, there is one person on our list
who must be examined though the result will be negative, namely, Diagoras
of Melos. As he appears in our records, he falls outside the
classification adopted here; but as he must have lived, at any rate, about
the middle of the fifth century (he is said to have “flourished” in 464)
he may most fitly be placed on the boundary line between the Ionian
philosophy and Sophistic.
For later antiquity Diagoras is the typical atheist; he heads our lists of
atheists, and round his person a whole series of myths have been formed.
He is said to have been a poet and a pious man like others; but then a
colleague once stole an ode from him, escaped by taking an oath that he
was innocent, and afterwards made a hit with the stolen work. So Diagoras
lost his faith in the gods and wrote a treatise under the title of
_apopyrgizontes logoi_ (literally, destructive considerations) in which he
attacked the belief in the gods.
This looks very plausible, and is interesting in so far as it, if correct,
affords an instance of atheism arising in a layman from actual experience,
not in a philosopher from speculation. If we ask, however, what is known
historically about Diagoras, we are told a different tale. There existed
in Athens, engraved on a bronze tablet and set up on the Acropolis, a
decree of the people offering a reward of one talent to him who should
kill Diagoras of Melos, and of two talents to him who should bring him
alive to Athens. The reason given was that he had scoffed at the
Eleusinian Mysteries and divulged what took place at them. The date of
this decree is given by a historian as 415 B.C.; that this is correct is
seen from a passage in Aristophanes’s contemporary drama, _The Birds_.
Furthermore, one of the disciples of Aristotle, the literary historian
Aristoxenus, states that no trace of impiety was to be found in the works
of the dithyrambic poet Diagoras, and that, in fact, they contained
definite opinions to the contrary. A remark to the effect that Diagoras
was instrumental in drawing up the laws of Mantinea is probably due to the
same source. The context shows that the reference is to the earlier
constitution of Mantinea, which was a mixture of aristocracy and
democracy, and is praised for its excellence. It is inconceivable that, in
a Peloponnesian city during the course of, nay, presumably even before the
middle of the fifth century, a notorious atheist should have been invited
to advise on the revision of its constitution. It is more probable that
Aristoxenus adduced this fact as an additional disproof of Diagoras’s
atheism, in which he evidently did not believe.
The above information explains the origin of the legend. Two fixed points
were in existence: the pious poet of _c._ 460 and the atheist who was
outlawed in 415; a bridge was constructed between them by the story of the
stolen ode. This disposes of the whole supposition of atheism growing out
of a basis of experience. But, furthermore, it must be admitted that it is
doubtful whether the poet and the atheist are one and the same person. The
interval of time between them is itself suspicious, for the poet,
according to the ancient system of calculation, must have been about forty
years old in 464, consequently between eighty and ninety in 415. (There is
general agreement that the treatise, the title of which has been quoted,
must have been a later forgery.) If, in spite of all, I dare not
absolutely deny the identity of the two Diagorases of tradition, the
reason is that Aristophanes, where he mentions the decree concerning
Diagoras, seems to suggest that his attack on the Mysteries was an old
story which was raked up again in 415. But for our purpose, at any rate,
nothing remains of the copious mass of legend but the fact that one
Diagoras of Melos in 415 was outlawed in Athens on the ground of his
attack on the Mysteries. Such an attack may have been the outcome of
atheism; there was no lack of impiety in Athens at the end of the fifth
century. But whether this was the case or not we cannot possibly tell; and
to throw light on free-thinking tendencies in Athens at this time, we have
other and richer sources than the historical notice of Diagoras.