During the three or four centuries which passed between the downfall of
free Hellas and the beginning of the Roman Empire, great social and
political changes took place in the ancient world, involving also vital
changes in religion. The chief phenomenon in this field, the invasion of
foreign, especially oriental, religions into Hellas, does not come within
the scope of this investigation. On the one hand, it is an expression of
dissatisfaction with the old gods; on the other, the intrusion of new gods
would contribute to the ousting of the old ones. There is no question of
atheism here; it is only a change within polytheism. But apart from this
change there is evidence that the old faith had lost its hold on men’s
minds to no inconsiderable extent. Here, too, there is hardly any question
of atheism properly speaking, but as a background to the—not very
numerous—evidences of such atheism in our period, we cannot well ignore
the decline of the popular faith. Our investigation is rendered difficult
on this point, and generally within this period, by the lack of direct
evidence. Of the rich Hellenistic literature almost everything has been
lost, and we are restricted to reports and fragments.
In order to gain a concrete starting-point we will begin with a quotation
from the historian Polybius—so to speak the only Greek prose author of the
earlier Hellenistic period of whose works considerable and connected
portions are preserved. Polybius wrote in the latter half of the second
century a history of the world in which Rome took the dominant place. Here
he gave, among other things, a detailed description of the Roman
constitution and thus came to touch upon the state of religion in Rome as
compared with that in Greece. He says on this subject:
“The greatest advantage of the Roman constitution seems to me to lie in
its conception of the gods, and I believe that what among other peoples is
despised is what holds together the Roman power—I mean superstition. For
this feature has by them been developed so far in the direction of the
‘horrible,’ and has so permeated both private and public life, that it is
quite unique. Many will perhaps find this strange, but I think they have
acted so with an eye to the mass of the people. For if it were possible to
compose a state of reasonable people such a procedure would no doubt be
unnecessary, but as every people regarded as a mass is easily impressed
and full of criminal instincts, unreasonable violence, and fierce passion,
there is nothing to be done but to keep the masses under by vague fears
and such-like hocus-pocus. Therefore it is my opinion that it was not
without good reason or by mere chance that the ancients imparted to the
masses the notions of the gods and the underworld, but rather is it
thoughtless and irrational when nowadays we seek to destroy them.”
As a proof of this last statement follows a comparison between the state
of public morals in Greece and in Rome. In Greece you cannot trust a man
with a few hundred pounds without ten notaries and as many seals and
double the number of witnesses; in Rome great public treasure is
administered with honesty merely under the safeguard of an oath.
As we see, this passage contains direct evidence that in the second
century in Hellas—in contradistinction to Rome—there was an attempt to
break down the belief in the gods. By his “we” Polybius evidently referred
especially to the leading political circles. He knew these circles from
personal experience, and his testimony has all the more weight because he
does not come forward in the rôle of the orthodox man complaining in the
usual way of the impiety of his contemporaries; on the contrary, he speaks
as the educated and enlightened man to whom it is a matter of course that
all this talk about the gods and the underworld is a myth which nobody
among the better classes takes seriously. This is a tone we have not heard
before, and it is a strong indirect testimony to the fact that Polybius is
not wrong when he speaks of disbelief among the upper classes of Greece.
In this connexion the work of Polybius has a certain interest on another
point. Where earlier—and later—authors would speak of the intervention of
the gods in the march of history, he operates as a rule with an idea which
he calls Tyche. The word is untranslatable when used in this way. It is
something between chance, fortune and fate. It is more comprehensive and
more personal than chance; it has not the immutable, the “lawbound”
character of fate; rather it denotes the incalculability, the
capriciousness associated, especially in earlier usage, with the word
fortune, but without the tendency of this word to be used in a good sense.
This Tyche-religion—if we may use this expression—was not new in Hellas.
Quite early we find Tyche worshipped as a goddess among the other deities,
and it is an old notion that the gods send good fortune, a notion which
set its mark on a series of established phrases in private and public
life. But what is of interest here is that shifting of religious ideas in
the course of which Tyche drives the gods into the background. We find
indications of it as early as Thucydides. In his view of history he lays
the main stress, certainly, on human initiative, and not least on rational
calculation, as the cause of events. But where he is obliged to reckon
with an element independent of human efforts, he calls it Tyche and not
“the immortal gods.” A somewhat similar view we find in another great
political author of the stage of transition to our period, namely,
Demosthenes. Demosthenes of course employs the official apparatus of gods:
he invokes them on solemn occasions; he quotes their authority in support
of his assertions (once he even reported a revelation which he had in a
dream); he calls his opponents enemies of the gods, etc. But in his
political considerations the gods play a negligible part. The factors with
which he reckons as a rule are merely political forces. Where he is
compelled to bring forward elements which man cannot control, he shows a
preference for Tyche. He certainly occasionally identifies her with the
favour of the gods, but in such a way as to give the impression that it is
only a _façon de parler_. Direct pronouncements of a free-thinking kind
one would not expect from an orator and statesman, and yet Demosthenes was
once bold enough to say that Pythia, the mouthpiece of the Delphic Oracle,
was a partisan of Macedonia, an utterance which his opponent Aeschines,
who liked to parade his orthodoxy, did not omit to cast in his teeth. On
the whole, Aeschines liked to represent Demosthenes as a godless fellow,
and it is not perhaps without significance that the latter never directly
replied to such attacks, or indirectly did anything to impair their force.
During the violent revolutions that took place in Hellas under Alexander
the Great and his successors, and the instability of social and political
conditions consequent thereon, the Tyche-religion received a fresh
impetus. With one stroke Hellas was flung into world politics. Everything
grew to colossal proportions in comparison with earlier conditions. The
small Hellenic city-states that had hitherto been each for itself a world
shrank into nothing. It is as if the old gods could not keep pace with
this violent process of expansion. Men felt a craving for a wider and more
comprehensive religious concept to answer to the changed conditions, and
such an idea was found in the idea of Tyche. Thoughtful men, such as
Demetrius of Phalerum, wrote whole books about it; states built temples to
Tyche; in private religion also it played a great part. No one reflected
much on the relation of Tyche to the old gods. It must be remembered that
Tyche is a real layman’s notion, and that Hellenistic philosophy regarded
it as its task precisely to render man independent of the whims of fate.
Sometimes, however, we find a positive statement of the view that Tyche
ruled over the gods also. It is characteristic of the state of affairs;
men did not want to relinquish the old gods, but could not any longer
allow them the leading place.
If we return for a moment to Polybius, we shall find that his conception
of Tyche strikingly illustrates the distance between him and Thucydides.
In the introduction to his work, on its first page, he points out that the
universally acknowledged task of historical writing is partly to educate
people for political activities, partly to teach them to bear the
vicissitudes of fortune with fortitude by reminding them of the lot of
others. And subsequently, when he passes on to his main theme, the
foundation of the Roman world-empire, after having explained the plan of
his work, he says: “So far then our plan. But the _co-operation of
fortune_ is still needed if my life is to be long enough for me to
accomplish my purpose.” An earlier—or a later—author would here either
have left the higher powers out of the game altogether or would have used
an expression showing more submission to the gods of the popular faith.
In a later author, Pliny the Elder, we again find a characteristic
utterance throwing light upon the significance of the Tyche-religion.
After a very free-thinking survey of the popular notions regarding the
gods, Pliny says: “As an intermediate position between these two views
(that there is a divine providence and that there is none) men have
themselves invented another divine power, in order that speculation about
the deity might become still more uncertain. Throughout the world, in
every place, at every hour of the day, Fortune alone is invoked and named
by every mouth; she alone is accused, she bears the guilt of everything;
of her only do we think, to her is all praise, to her all blame. And she
is worshipped with railing words—she is deemed inconstant, by many even
blind; she is fickle, unstable, uncertain, changeable; giving her favours
to the unworthy. To her is imputed every loss, every gain; in all the
accounts of life she alone fills up both the debit and the credit side,
and we are so subject to chance that Chance itself becomes our god, and
again proves the incertitude of the deity.” Even if a great deal of this
may be put down to rhetoric, by which Pliny was easily carried away, the
solid fact itself remains that he felt justified in speaking as if Dame
Fortune had dethroned all the old gods.
That this view of life must have persisted very tenaciously even down to a
time when a strong reaction in the direction of positive religious feeling
had set in, is proved by the romances of the time. The novels of the
ancients were in general poor productions. Most of them are made after the
recipe of a little misfortune in each chapter and great happiness in the
last. The two lovers meet, fall in love, part, and suffer a series of
troubles individually until they are finally united. The power that
governs their fates and shapes everything according to this pattern is
regularly Tyche, never the gods. The testimony of the novels is of special
significance because they were read by the general mass of the educated
classes, not by the select who had philosophy to guide them.
Another testimony to the weakening of popular faith in the Hellenistic age
is the decay of the institution of the Oracle. This, also, is of early
date; as early as the fifth and fourth century we hear much less of the
interference of the oracles in political matters than in earlier times.
The most important of them all, the Delphic Oracle, was dealt a terrible
blow in the Holy War (356-346 B.C.), when the Phocians seized it and used
the treasures which had been accumulated in it during centuries to hire
mercenaries and carry on war. Such proceedings would assuredly have been
impossible a century earlier; no soldiers could have been hired with money
acquired in such a way, or, if they could have been procured, all Hellas
would have risen in arms against the robbers of the Temple, whereas in the
Holy War most of the states were indifferent, and several even sided with
the Phocians. In the succeeding years, after Philip of Macedonia had put
an end to the Phocian scandal, the Oracle was in reality in his hands—it
was during this period that Demosthenes stigmatised it as the mouthpiece
of Philip. In the succeeding centuries, too, it was dependent on the
various rulers of Hellas and undoubtedly lost all public authority. During
this period we hear very little of the oracles of Hellas until the time
before and after the birth of Christ provides us with definite evidence of
their complete decay.
Thus Strabo, who wrote during the reign of Augustus, says that the
ancients attached more importance to divination generally and oracles more
particularly, whereas people in his day were quite indifferent to these
things. He gives as the reason that the Romans were content to use the
Sibylline books and their own system of divination. His remark is made _a
propos_ of the Oracle in Libya, which was formerly in great repute, but
was almost extinct in his time. He is undoubtedly correct as to the fact,
but the decline of the oracular system cannot be explained by the
indifference of the Romans. Plutarch, in a monograph on the discontinuance
of the oracles, furnishes us with more detailed information. From this it
appears that not only the Oracle of Ammon but also the numerous oracles of
Boeotia had ceased to exist, with one exception, while even for the Oracle
at Delphi, which had formerly employed three priestesses, a single one
amply sufficed. We also note the remark that the questions submitted to
the Oracle were mostly unworthy or of no importance.
The want of consideration sometimes shown to sacred places and things
during the wars of the Hellenistic period may no doubt also be regarded as
the result of a weakening of interest in the old gods. We have detailed
information on this point from the war between Philip of Macedonia and the
Aetolians in 220-217 B.C. The Aetolians began by destroying the temples at
Dium and Dodona, whereupon Philip retaliated by totally wrecking the
federal sanctuary of the Aetolians at Thermon. Of Philip’s admiral
Dicaearchus we are told by Polybius that wherever he landed he erected
altars to “godlessness and lawlessness” and offered up sacrifice on them.
Judging by the way he was hated, his practice must have answered to his
theory.
One more phenomenon must be mentioned in this context, though it falls
outside the limits within which we have hitherto moved, and though its
connexion with free-thought and religious enlightenment will no doubt, on
closer examination, prove disputable. This is the decay of the established
worship of the Roman State in the later years of the Republic.
In the preceding pages there has been no occasion to include conditions in
Rome in our investigation, simply because nothing has come down to us
about atheism in the earlier days of Rome, and we may presume that it did
not exist. Of any religious thought at Rome corresponding to that of the
Greeks we hear nothing, nor did the Romans produce any philosophy.
Whatever knowledge of philosophy there was at Rome was simply borrowed
from the Greeks. The Greek influence was not seriously felt until the
second century B.C., even though as early as about the middle of the third
century the Romans, through the performance of plays translated from the
Greek, made acquaintance with Greek dramatic poetry and the religious
thought contained therein. Neither the latter, nor the heresies of the
philosophers, seem to have made any deep impression upon them. Ennius,
their most important poet of the second century, was no doubt strongly
influenced by Greek free-thinking, but this was evidently an isolated
phenomenon. Also, by birth Ennius was not a native of Rome but half a
Greek. The testimony of Polybius (from the close of the second century) to
Roman religious conservatism is emphatic enough. Its causes are doubtless
of a complex nature, but as one of them the peculiar character of the
Roman religion itself stands out prominently. However much it resembled
Greek religion in externals—a resemblance which was strengthened by
numerous loans both of religious rites and of deities—it is decidedly
distinct from it in being restricted still more to cultus and, above all,
in being entirely devoid of mythology. The Roman gods were powers about
the rites of whose worship the most accurate details were known or could
be ascertained if need were, but they had little personality, and about
their personal relations people knew little and cared less. This was,
aesthetically, a great defect. The Roman gods afforded no good theme for
poetry and art, and when they were to be used as such they were invariably
replaced by loans from the Greeks. But, as in the face of Greek
free-thought and Greek criticism of religion, they had the advantage that
the vital point for attack was lacking. All the objectionable tales of the
exploits of the gods and the associated ideas about their nature which had
prompted the Greek attack on the popular faith simply did not exist in
Roman religion. On the other hand, its rites were in many points more
primitive than the Greek ones, but Greek philosophy had been very reserved
in its criticism of ritual. We may thus no doubt take it for granted,
though we have no direct evidence to that effect, that even Romans with a
Greek education long regarded the Greek criticism of religion as something
foreign which was none of their concern.
That a time came when all this was changed; that towards the end of the
Republic great scepticism concerning the established religion of Rome was
found among the upper classes, is beyond doubt, and we shall subsequently
find occasion to consider this more closely. In this connexion another
circumstance demands attention, one which, moreover, has by some been
associated with Greek influence among the upper classes, namely, the decay
of the established worship of the Roman State during the last years of the
Republic. Of the actual facts there can hardly be any doubt, though we
know very little about them. The decisive symptoms are: that Augustus,
after having taken over the government, had to repair some eighty
dilapidated temples in Rome and reinstitute a series of religious rites
and priesthoods which had ceased to function. Among them was one of the
most important, that of the priest of Jupiter, an office which had been
vacant for more than seventy-five years (87-11 B.C.), because it excluded
the holder from a political career. Further, that complaints were made of
private persons encroaching on places that were reserved for religious
worship; and that Varro, when writing his great work on the Roman
religion, in many cases was unable to discover what god was the object of
an existing cult; and generally, according to his own statement he wrote
his work, among other things, in order to save great portions of the old
Roman religion from falling into utter oblivion on account of the
indifference of the Romans themselves. It is obvious that such a state of
affairs would have been impossible in a community where the traditional
religion was a living power, not only formally acknowledged by everybody,
but felt to be a necessary of life, the spiritual daily bread, as it were,
of the nation.
To hold, however, that the main cause of the decay of the established
religion of Rome was the invasion of Greek culture, together with the fact
that the members of the Roman aristocracy, from whom the priests were
recruited and who superintended the cult, had become indifferent to the
traditional religion through this influence, this, I think, is to go
altogether astray. We may take it for granted that the governing classes
in Rome would not have ventured to let the cult decay if there had been
any serious interest in it among the masses of the population; and it is
equally certain that Greek philosophy and religious criticism did not
penetrate to these masses. When they became indifferent to the national
religion, this was due to causes that had nothing to do with free-thought.
The old Roman religion was adapted for a small, narrow and homogeneous
community whose main constituent and real core consisted of the farmers,
large and small, and minor artisans. In the last centuries of the Republic
the social development had occasioned the complete decay of the Roman
peasantry, and the free artisans had fared little better. In the place of
the old Rome had arisen the capital of an empire, inhabited by a
population of a million and of extraordinarily mixed composition. Not only
did this population comprise a number of immigrant foreigners, but, in
consequence of the peculiar Roman rule that every slave on being set free
attained citizenship, a large percentage of the citizens must of necessity
have been of foreign origin. Only certain portions of the Roman religion,
more especially the cult of the great central deities of the State
religion, can have kept pace with these changed conditions; the remainder
had in reality lost all hold on Roman society as it had developed in
process of time, and was only kept alive by force of habit. To this must
be added the peculiar Roman mixture of mobility and conservatism in
religious matters. The Roman superstition and uncertainty in regard to the
gods led on the one hand to a continual setting up of new cults and new
sanctuaries, and on the other hand to a fear of letting any of the old
cults die out. In consequence thereof a great deal of dead and worthless
ritual material must have accumulated in Rome in the course of centuries,
and was of course in the way during the rapid development of the city in
the last century of the Republic. Things must gradually have come to such
a pass that a thorough reform, above all a reduction, of the whole cult
had become a necessity. To introduce such a reform the republican
government was just as unsuited as it was to carry out all the other tasks
imposed by the development of the empire and the capital at that time. On
this point, however, it must not be forgotten that the governing class not
only lacked ability, for political reasons, to carry out serious reforms,
but also the will to do so, on account of religious indifference, and so
let things go altogether to the bad. The consequence was anarchy, in this
as in all other spheres at that time; but at the same time the tendency
towards the only sensible issue, a restriction of the old Roman
State-cult, is plainly evident. The simultaneous strong infusion of
foreign religions was unavoidable in the mixed population of the capital.
That these influences also affected the lower classes of the citizens is
at any rate a proof that they were not indifferent to religion.
In its main outlines this is all the information that I have been able to
glean about the general decline of the belief in the gods during the
Hellenistic period. Judging from such information we should expect to find
strong tendencies to atheism in the philosophy of the period. These
anticipations are, however, doomed to disappointment. The ruling
philosophical schools on the whole preserved a friendly attitude towards
the gods of the popular faith and especially towards their worship,
although they only accepted the existing religion with strict reservation.
Most characteristic but least consistent and original was the attitude of
the Stoic school. The Stoics were pantheists. Their deity was a substance
which they designated as fire, but which, it must be admitted, differed
greatly from fire as an element. It permeated the entire world. It had
produced the world out of itself, and it absorbed it again, and this
process was repeated to eternity. The divine fire was also reason, and as
such the cause of the harmony of the world-order. What of conscious reason
was found in the world was part of the divine reason.
Though in this scheme of things there was in the abstract plenty of room
for the gods of popular belief, nevertheless the Stoics did not in reality
acknowledge them. In principle their standpoint was the same as
Aristotle’s. They supposed the heavenly bodies to be divine, but all the
rest, namely, the anthropomorphic gods, were nothing to them.
In their explanation of the origin of the gods they went beyond Aristotle,
but their doctrine was not always the same on this point. The earlier
Stoics regarded mythology and all theology as human inventions, but not
arbitrary inventions. Mythology, they thought, should be understood
allegorically; it was the naïve expression partly of a correct conception
of Nature, partly of ethical and metaphysical truths. Strictly speaking,
men had always been Stoics, though in an imperfect way. This point of view
was elaborated in detail by the first Stoics, who took their stand partly
on the earlier naturalism which had already broken the ground in this
direction, and partly on sophistic, so that they even brought into vogue
again the theory of Prodicus, that the gods were a hypostasis of the
benefits of civilisation. Such a standpoint could not of course be
maintained without arbitrariness and absurdities which exposed it to
embarrassing criticism. This seems to have been the reason why the later
Stoics, and especially Poseidonius, took another road. They adopted the
doctrine of Xenocrates with regard to demons and developed it in fantastic
forms. The earlier method was not, however, given up, and at the time of
Cicero we find both views represented in the doctrine of the school.
Such is the appearance of the theory. In both its forms it is evidently an
attempt to meet popular belief half-way from a standpoint which is really
beyond it. This tendency is seen even more plainly in the practice of the
Stoics. They recognised public worship and insisted on its advantages; in
their moral reflections they employed the gods as ideals in the Socratic
manner, regardless of the fact that in their theory they did not really
allow for gods who were ideal men; nay, they even went the length of
giving to their philosophical deity, the “universal reason,” the name of
Zeus by preference, though it had nothing but the name in common with the
Olympian ruler of gods and men. This pervading ambiguity brought much
well-deserved reproof on the Stoics even in ancient times; but, however
unattractive it may seem to us, it is of significance as a manifestation
of the great hold popular belief continued to have even on the minds of
the upper classes, for it was to these that the Stoics appealed.
Far more original and consistent is the Epicurean attitude towards the
popular faith. Epicurus unreservedly acknowledged its foundation, _i.e._
the existence of anthropomorphic beings of a higher order than man. His
gods had human shape but they were eternal and blessed. In the latter
definition was included, according to the ethical ideal of Epicurus, the
idea that the gods were free from every care, including taking an interest
in nature or in human affairs. They were entirely outside the world, a
fact to which Epicurus gave expression by placing them in the empty spaces
between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There
his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of
this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from
Homer’s description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to
uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical
aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed to
beings whose existence expressed the human ideal.
The reasons why Epicurus assumed this attitude towards popular belief are
simple enough. He maintained that the evidence of sensual perception was
the basis of all knowledge, and he thought that the senses (through
dreams) gave evidence of the existence of the gods. And in the popular
ideas of the bliss of the gods he found his ethical ideal directly
confirmed. As regards their eternity the case was more difficult. The
basis of his system was the theory that everything was made of atoms and
that only the atoms as such, not the bodies composed of the atoms, were
eternal. He conceived the gods, too, as made of atoms, nevertheless he
held that they were eternal. Any rational explanation of this postulate is
not possible on Epicurus’s hypotheses, and the criticism of his theology
was therefore especially directed against this point.
Epicurus was the Greek philosopher who most consistently took the course
of emphasising the popular dogma of the perfection of the gods in order to
preserve the popular notions about them. And he was the philosopher to
whom this would seem the most obvious course, because his ethical
ideal—quietism—agreed with the oldest popular ideal of divine existence.
In this way Epicureanism became the most orthodox of all Greek
philosophical schools. If nevertheless Epicurus did not escape the charge
of atheism the sole reason is that his whole theology was denounced
off-hand as hypocrisy. It was assumed to be set up by him only to shield
himself against a charge of impiety, not to be his actual belief. This
accusation is now universally acknowledged to be unjustified, and the
Epicureans had no difficulty in rebutting it with interest. They took
special delight in pointing out that the theology of the other schools was
much more remote from popular belief than theirs, nay, in spite of
recognition of the existing religion, was in truth fundamentally at
variance with it. But in reality their own was in no better case: gods who
did not trouble in the least about human affairs were beings for whom
popular belief had no use. It made no difference that Epicurus’s
definition of the nature of the gods was the direct outcome of a
fundamental doctrine of popular belief. Popular religion will not tolerate
pedantry.
In this connexion we cannot well pass over a third philosophical school
which played no inconspicuous rôle in the latter half of our period,
namely, Scepticism. The Sceptic philosophy as such dates from Socrates,
from whom the so-called Megarian school took its origin, but it did not
reach its greatest importance until the second century, when the Academic
school became Sceptic. It was especially the famous philosopher Carneades,
a brilliant master of logic and dialectic, who made a success by his
searching negative criticism of the doctrines of the other philosophical
schools (the Dogmatics). For such criticism the theology of the
philosophers was a grateful subject, and Carneades did not spare it. Here
as in all the investigations of the Sceptics the theoretical result was
that no scientific certainty could be attained: it was equally wrong to
assert or to deny the existence of the gods. But in practice the attitude
of the Sceptics was quite different. Just as they behaved like other
people, acting upon their immediate impressions and experience, though
they did not believe that anything could be scientifically proved, _e.g._
not even the reality of the world of the senses, so also did they
acknowledge the existing cult and lived generally like good heathens.
Characteristic though Scepticism be of a period of Greek spiritual life in
which Greek thought lost its belief in itself, it was, however, very far
from supporting atheism. On the contrary, according to the correct Sceptic
doctrine atheism was a dogmatic contention which theoretically was as
objectionable as its antithesis, and in practice was to be utterly
discountenanced.
A more radical standpoint than this as regards the gods of the popular
faith is not found during the Hellenistic period except among the less
noted schools, and in the beginning of the period. We have already
mentioned such thinkers as Strato, Theodorus, and Stilpo; chronologically
they belong to the Hellenistic Age, but in virtue of their connexion with
the Socratic philosophy they were dealt with in the last chapter. A
definite polemical attitude towards the popular faith is also a
characteristic of the Cynic school, hence, though our information is very
meagre, we must speak of it a little more fully.
The Cynics continued the tendency of Antisthenes, but the school
comparatively soon lost its importance. After the third century we hear no
more about the Cynics until they crop up again about the year A.D. 100.
But in the fourth and third centuries the school had important
representatives. The most famous is Diogenes; his life, to be sure, is
entangled in such a web of legend that it is difficult to arrive at a true
picture of his personality. Of his attitude towards popular belief we know
one thing, that he did not take part in the worship of the gods. This was
a general principle of the Cynics; their argument was that the gods were
“in need of nothing” (cf. above, pp. 60 and 41). If we find him accused of
atheism, in an anecdote of very doubtful value, it may, if there is
anything in it, be due to his rejection of worship. Of one of his
successors, however, Bion of Borysthenes, we have authentic information
that he denied the existence of the gods, with the edifying legend
attached that he was converted before his death. But we also hear of Bion
that he was a disciple of the atheist Theodorus, and other facts go to
suggest that Bion united Cynic and Hedonistic principles in his mode of
life—a compromise that was not so unlikely as might be supposed. Bion’s
attitude cannot therefore be taken as typical of Cynicism. Another Cynic
of about the same period (the beginning of the third century) was Menippus
of Gadara (in northern Palestine). He wrote tales and dialogues in a
mixture of prose and verse. The contents were satirical, the satire being
directed against the contemporary philosophers and their doctrines, and
against the popular notions of the gods. Menippus availed himself partly
of the old criticism of mythology and partly of the philosophical attacks
on the popular conception of the gods. The only novelty was the facetious
form in which he concealed the sting of serious criticism. It is
impossible to decide whether he positively denied the existence of the
gods, but his satire on the popular notions and its success among his
contemporaries at least testifies to the weakening of the popular faith
among the educated classes. In Hellas itself he seems to have gone out of
fashion very early; but the Romans took him up again; Varro and Seneca
imitated him, and Lucian made his name famous again in the Greek world in
the second century after Christ. It is chiefly due to Lucian that we can
form an idea of Menippus’s literary work, hence we shall return to Cynic
satire in our chapter on the age of the Roman Empire.
During our survey of Greek philosophical thought in the Hellenistic period
we have only met with a few cases of atheism in the strict sense, and they
all occur about and immediately after 300, though there does not seem to
be any internal connexion between them. About the same time there appeared
a writer, outside the circle of philosophers, who is regularly listed
among the _atheoi_, and who has given a name to a peculiar theory about
the origin of the idea of the gods, namely, Euhemerus. He is said to have
travelled extensively in the service of King Cassander of Macedonia. At
any rate he published his theological views in the shape of a book of
travel which was, however, wholly fiction. He relates how he came to an
island, Panchaia, in the Indian Ocean, and in a temple there found a
lengthy inscription in which Uranos, Kronos, Zeus and other gods recorded
their exploits. The substance of the tale was that these gods had once
been men, great kings and rulers, who had bestowed on their peoples all
sorts of improvements in civilisation and had thus got themselves
worshipped as gods. It appears from the accounts that Euhemerus supposed
the heavenly bodies to be real and eternal gods—he thought that Uranos had
first taught men to worship them; further, as his theory is generally
understood, it must be assumed that in his opinion the other gods had
ceased to exist as such after their death. This accords with the fact that
Euhemerus was generally characterised as an atheist.
The theory that the gods were at first men was not originated by
Euhemerus, though it takes its name (Euhemerism) from him. The theory had
some support in the popular faith which recognised gods (Heracles,
Asclepius) who had lived as men on earth; and the opinion which was
fundamental to Greek religion, that the gods had _come into existence_,
and had not existed from eternity, would favour this theory. Moreover,
Euhemerus had had an immediate precursor in the slightly earlier Hecataeus
of Abdera, who had set forth a similar theory, with the difference,
however, that he took the view that all excellent men became real gods.
But Euhemerus’s theory appeared just at the right moment and fell on
fertile soil. Alexander the Great and his successors had adopted the
Oriental policy by which the ruler was worshipped as a god, and were
supported in this by a tendency which had already made itself felt
occasionally among the Greeks in the East. Euhemerus only inverted
matters—if the rulers were gods, it was an obvious inference that the gods
were rulers. No wonder that his theory gained a large following. Its great
influence is seen from numerous similar attempts in the Hellenistic world.
At Rome, in the second century, Ennius translated his works into Latin,
and as late as the time of Augustus an author such as Diodorus, in his
popular history of the world, served up Euhemerism as the best scientific
explanation of the origin of religion. It is characteristic, too, that
both Jews and Christians, in their attacks on Paganism, reckoned with
Euhemerism as a well-established theory. As every one knows, it has
survived to our day; Carlyle, I suppose, being its last prominent
exponent.
It is characteristic of Euhemerism in its most radical form that it
assumed that the gods of polytheism did not exist; so far it is atheism.
But it is no less characteristic that it made the concession to popular
belief that its gods had once existed. Hereby it takes its place, in spite
of its greater radicalism, on the same plane with most other ancient
theories about the origin of men’s notions about the gods. The gods of
popular belief could not survive in the light of ancient thought, which in
its essence was free-thought, not tied down by dogmas. But the
philosophers of old could not but believe that a psychological fact of
such enormous dimensions as ancient polytheism must have something
answering to it in the objective world. Ancient philosophy never got clear
of this dilemma; hence Plato’s open recognition of the absurdity; hence
Aristotle’s delight at being able to meet the popular faith half-way in
his assumption of the divinity of the heavenly bodies; hence Xenocrates’s
demons, the allegories of the Stoics, the ideal Epicureans of Epicurus,
Euhemerus’s early benefactors of mankind. And we may say that the more the
Greeks got to know of the world about them the more they were confirmed in
their view, for in the varied multiplicity of polytheism they found the
same principle everywhere, the same belief in a multitude of beings of a
higher order than man.
Euhemerus’s theory is no doubt the last serious attempt in the old pagan
world to give an explanation of the popular faith which may be called
genuine atheism. We will not, however, leave the Hellenistic period
without casting a glance at some personalities about whom we have
information enough to form an idea at first hand of their religious
standpoint, and whose attitude towards popular belief at any rate comes
very near to atheism pure and simple.
One of them is Polybius. In the above-cited passage referring to the
decline of the popular faith in the Hellenistic period, Polybius also
gives his own theory of the origin of men’s notions regarding the gods. It
is not new. It is the theory known from the Critias fragment, what may be
called the political theory. In the fragment it appears as atheism pure
and simple, and it seems obvious to understand it in the same way in
Polybius. That he shows a leaning towards Euhemerism in another passage
where he speaks about the origin of religious ideas, is in itself not
against this—the two theories are closely related and might very well be
combined. But we have a series of passages in which Polybius expressed
himself in a way that seems quite irreconcilable with a purely atheistic
standpoint. He expressly acknowledged divination and worship as justified;
in several places he refers to disasters that have befallen individuals or
a whole people as being sent by the gods, or even as a punishment for
impiety; and towards the close of his work he actually, in marked contrast
to the tone of its beginning, offers up a prayer to the gods to grant him
a happy ending to his long life. It would seem as if Polybius at a certain
period of his life came under the influence of Stoicism and in consequence
greatly modified his earlier views. That these were of an atheistic
character seems, however, beyond doubt, and that is the decisive point in
this connexion.
Cicero’s philosophical standpoint was that of an Academic, _i.e._ a
Sceptic. But—in accord, for the rest, with the doctrines of the school
just at this period—he employed his liberty as a Sceptic to favour such
philosophical doctrines as seemed to him more reasonable than others,
regardless of the school from which they were derived. In his philosophy
of religion he was more especially a Stoic. He himself expressly insisted
on this point of view in the closing words of his work on the _Nature of
the Gods_. As he was not, and made no pretence of being, a philosopher,
his philosophical expositions have no importance for us; they are
throughout second-hand, mostly mere translations from Greek sources. That
we have employed them in the foregoing pages to throw light on the
theology of the earlier, more especially the Hellenistic, philosophy, goes
without saying. But his personal religious standpoint is not without
interest.
As orator and statesman Cicero took his stand wholly on the side of the
established Roman religion, operating with the “immortal gods,” with
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, etc., at his convenience. In his works on the
_State_ and the _Laws_ he adheres decidedly to the established religion.
But all this is mere politics. Personally Cicero had no religion other
than philosophy. Philosophy was his consolation in adversity, or he
attempted to make it so, for the result was often indifferent; and he
looked to philosophy to guide him in ethical questions. We never find any
indication in his writings that the gods of popular belief meant anything
to him in these respects. And what is more—he assumed this off-hand to be
the standpoint of everybody else, and evidently he was justified. A great
number of letters from him to his circle, and not a few from his friends
and acquaintances to him, have been preserved; and in his philosophical
writings he often introduces contemporary Romans as characters in the
dialogue. But in all this literature there is never the faintest
indication that a Roman of the better class entertained, or could even be
supposed to entertain, an orthodox view with regard to the State religion.
To Cicero and his circle the popular faith did not exist as an element of
their personal religion.
Such a standpoint is of course, practically speaking, atheism, and in this
sense atheism was widely spread among the higher classes of the
Graeco-Roman society about the time of the birth of Christ. But from this
to theoretical atheism there is still a good step. Cicero himself affords
an amusing example of how easily people, who have apparently quite
emancipated themselves from the official religion of their community, may
backslide. When his beloved daughter Tullia died in the year 45 B.C., it
became evident that Cicero, in the first violence of his grief, which was
the more overwhelming because he was excluded from political activity
during Cæsar’s dictatorship, could not console himself with philosophy
alone. He wanted something more tangible to take hold on, and so he hit
upon the idea of having Tullia exalted among the gods. He thought of
building a temple and instituting a cult in her honour. He moved heaven
and earth to arrange the matter, sought to buy ground in a prominent place
in Rome, and was willing to make the greatest pecuniary sacrifices to get
a conspicuous result. Nothing came of it all, however; Cicero’s friends,
who were to help him to put the matter through, were perhaps hardly so
eager as he; time assuaged his own grief, and finally he contented himself
with publishing a consolatory epistle written by himself, or, correctly
speaking, translated from a famous Greek work and adapted to the occasion.
So far he ended where he should, _i.e._ in philosophy; but the little
incident is significant, not least because it shows what practical ends
Euhemerism could be brought to serve and how doubtful was its atheistic
character after all. For not only was the contemplated apotheosis of
Tullia in itself a Euhemeristic idea, but Cicero also expressly defended
it with Euhemeristic arguments, though speaking as if the departed who
were worshipped as gods really had become gods.
The attitude of Cicero and his contemporaries towards popular belief was
still the general attitude in the first days of the Empire. It was of no
avail that Augustus re-established the decayed State cult in all its
splendour and variety, or that the poets during his reign, when they
wished to express themselves in harmony with the spirit of the new régime,
directly or indirectly extolled the revived orthodoxy. Wherever we find
personal religious feeling expressed by men of that time, in the Epistles
of Horace, in Virgil’s posthumous minor poems or in such passages in his
greater works where he expresses his own ideals, it is philosophy that is
predominant and the official religion ignored. Virgil was an Epicurean;
Horace an Eclectic, now an Epicurean, then a Stoic; Augustus had a
domestic philosopher. Ovid employed his genius in writing travesties of
the old mythology while at the same time he composed a poem, serious for
him, on the Roman cult; and when disaster befell him and he was cast out
from the society of the capital, which was the breath of life to him, he
was abandoned not only by men, but also by the gods—he had not even a
philosophy with which to console himself. It is only in inferior writers
such as Valerius Maximus, who wrote a work on great deeds—good and
evil—under Tiberius, that we find a different spirit.
Direct utterances about men’s relationship to the gods, from which
conclusions can be drawn, are seldom met with during this period. The
whole question was so remote from the thoughts of these people that they
never mentioned it except when they assumed an orthodox air for political
or aesthetic reasons. Still, here and there we come across something. One
of the most significant pronouncements is that of Pliny the Elder, from
whom we quoted the passage about the worship of Fortune. Pliny opens his
scientific encyclopedia by explaining the structure of the universe in its
broad features; this he does on the lines of the physics of the Stoics,
hence he designates the universe as God. Next comes a survey of special
theology. It is introduced as follows: “I therefore deem it a sign of
human weakness to ask about the shape and form of God. Whoever God is, if
any other god (than the universe) exists at all, and in whatever part of
the world he is, he is all perception, all sight, all hearing, all soul,
all reason, all self.” The popular notions of the gods are then reviewed,
in the most supercilious tone, and their absurdities pointed out. A polite
bow is made to the worship of the Emperors and its motives, the rest is
little but persiflage. Not even Providence, which was recognised by the
Stoics, is acknowledged by Pliny. The conclusion is like the beginning:
“To imperfect human nature it is a special consolation that God also is
not omnipotent (he can neither put himself to death, even if he would,
though he has given man that power and it is his choicest gift in this
punishment which is life; nor can he give immortality to mortals or call
the dead to life; nor can he bring it to pass that those who have lived
have not lived, or that he who has held honourable offices did not hold
them); and that he has no other power over the past than that of oblivion;
and that (in order that we may also give a jesting proof of our
partnership with God) he cannot bring it about that twice ten is not
twenty, and more of the same sort—by all which the power of Nature is
clearly revealed, and that it is this we call God.”
An opinion like that expressed here must without doubt be designated as
atheism, even though it is nothing but the Stoic pantheism logically
carried out. As we have said before, we rarely meet it so directly
expressed, but there can hardly be any doubt that even in the time of
Pliny it was quite common in Rome. At this point, then, had the educated
classes of the ancient world arrived under the influence of Hellenistic
philosophy.