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GREEK ATHEISM: A MIRAGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2025
Abstract
Taking its start from an argument of H. S. Versnel, that Greek expressions of disbelief in the existence of the gods are evidence of the possibility of belief, this article reviews the evidence of such expressions, and of ascriptions of atheism in Greek sources, and suggests that there was a difference of type, not only of degree, between Greek ‘atheism’ and our understanding of the term today. Atheist discourse in Greek sources is characterized by frequent slippages: for example, between the charge of ‘existential atheism’ and the failure to give the gods due acknowledgement; between introducing new gods and disrespecting the old. Ascriptions of atheism to third parties are commonly based on inferences from an individual's actions, lifestyle or presumed disposition – which in turn are rooted in a network of theological assumptions. The phenomenon of ‘Greek atheism’ is, fundamentally, a scholarly mirage.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Footnotes
This article originates from a workshop, ‘Belief and the individual in ancient Greek religion’, organized by Esther Eidinow, Andrej Petrovic, and Ivana Petrovic at the Institute of Classical Studies, London, in July 2017. I am grateful to the contributors to the discussion, especially to Richard Janko, for their suggestions; my thoughts here have also benefited from discussions with Madhavi Nevader, Catherine Pickstock, Alain Gough-Olaya, Jay Ford, and (not least) Henk Versnel.
References
1 Versnel, H. S., Coping with the Gods. Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden, 2011), 553CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 The Ithyphallic hymn is perhaps an exception (‘Now know that other gods are far away, or have no ears, or don't exist or do not care for us’; cf. Parker, Robert, Athenian Religion. A History (Oxford, 1996), 259–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar (concluding, p. 263: ‘Saviour kings could be assimilated to saviour gods precisely because saviour gods still had power’).
3 Versnel (n. 1), 553: ‘In the 5th century Diagoras gained his epithet atheos not only for despising and mocking but also for straightforwardly denying (the existence of) gods.’
4 DK B4 = D10 Laks-Most.
5 Critias F19 Laks-Most.
6 The argument developed in Harrison, Thomas, Divinity and History. The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar in the context of Herodotus; see also ‘Greek Religion and Literature’, in D. Ogden (ed.) Blackwell Companion to Greek Religion (Oxford, 2007), 273–84, for the extended example of divine retribution. It is an approach influenced heavily e.g. by Parker, Robert, ‘Greek States and Greek Oracles’, in Cartledge, P. A. and Harvey, F. D. (eds.) Crux. Essays Presented to Geoffrey de Ste Croix (Oxford, 1985), 289–326Google Scholar [reprinted in Buxton, R. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek Religion (Oxford, 2000), 76–108Google Scholar] on divination, in turn influenced by Edward Evans-Pritchard.
7 Tim Whitmarsh, ‘Atheistic Aesthetics: the Sisyphus Fragment, Poetics and the Creativity of Drama’, CCJ 60, 114.
8 Cf. Harrison (n. 6), 20, Versnel (n. 1), 554.
9 William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London, 1894), 20. For the identification of Robertson Smith as an originator of the ‘ritualistic trend’, see Matthew W. Dickie, ‘Who were privileged to see the gods?’, Eranos 100 (2002), 109–27, Versnel (n. 1), 542; Thomas Harrison, ‘Belief vs. Practice’, in Esther Eidinow and Julia Kindt (eds.) The Oxford Handbook to Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford, 2015), 21–5; more broadly Andrej and Ivana Petrovic, Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion. Volume I: Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 2016), 2.
10 Simon Price on Christianizing assumptions: Rituals and Power (Cambridge, 1984), 10–11, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Cambridge, 1999), 3. For speculation on the influence of Price's and others’ religious background, Ronald Mellor, Review of Price, Rituals and Power, AJPh 107 (1986), 296–8, 298 (‘under every bed’ his phrase); Robert Parker, On Greek Religion (Ithaca, NY), vii, Versnel (n. 1), 552–4; Jan Bremmer, ‘Manteis, Magic, Mysteries and Mythography: Messy Margins of polis Religion’, Kernos 23 (2010), 13–35, 24 (on Sourvinou-Inwood). For wider context, see here esp. Alain Gough-Olaya, Personal Commitment and Academic Practice. An Anthropology of the Study of Ancient Religion (unpublished Liverpool PhD thesis, 2014).
11 I differ from James C. Ford, Atheism at the Agora. A History of Unbelief in Ancient Greek Polytheism (Abingdon, 2024) in his characterization (p. 1) of an ‘unbroken academic consensus that atheism did not exist in the ancient world’.
12 This is one of the premises of a book in progress, Belief and Classical Greek Religion, a foolhardy attempt to map Greek religious beliefs.
13 So, e.g., Whitmarsh strikingly marshals Evans-Pritchard's account of scepticism towards diviners among the Azande as proof that there are even ‘skeptics in non-Western cultures’: Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods. Atheism in the Ancient World (London and New York, 2015), 6.
14 Thanks, in particular, to Peter Southern and Henrietta Leyser, and to (my fellow student) John Kingman whose copy of Febvre I have not returned for more than three decades. I underline my own lack of religious commitment not because I think my own intellectual formation interesting but simply because so many assumptions are commonly projected.
15 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais, tr. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge MA, 1982), 11.
16 So, e.g., in print: Versnel (n. 1), 197, 436.
17 Febvre (n. 15), 16. Cf. Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History & Theory 8 (1969), 28: ‘No agent can…be said to have meant or achieved something which they could never have been brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.’
18 Febvre (n. 15), 336.
19 Cf. Jan Bremmer, ‘Atheism in Antiquity’, in Michael Martin (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge, 2007), 11–26, 11. Febvre's account of the penetration of Christianity in daily life runs from pp. 335–53.
20 J. H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005), 4 (cf. pp. 216–31); see also e.g. Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of “Atheism” in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985), 135–57; David Wootton, ‘Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), 695–730; also ‘New Histories of Atheism’, in M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds.) Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992), 13–53; Susan Reynolds, ‘Social Mentalities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1 (1991), 21–41, crediting an obsession with ‘mentalities’ as eliding the possibility of individual divergence.
21 So, for example, unbelief in the terms of John Arnold's 2005 book (n. 20) on the medieval period is a capacious term, mostly focused on non-orthodox beliefs, ‘more or less extreme attack[s] on orthodox Christianity’; cf. e.g. Hunter (n. 20), 142.
22 Cited by Hunter (n. 20), 137.
23 Febvre (n. 15), 460. For the mythology of prolepsis, Skinner (n. 17), 22; this is the ‘type of mythology we are prone to generate when we are more interested in the retrospective significance of a given episode than in its meaning for the agent at the time’.
24 Whitmarsh (n. 13), 4; cf. p. 59 for the characterization of Xenophanes as pre-empting the theories of cognitive theorists.
25 David Sedley, ‘From the Presocratics to the Hellenistic Age’, in S. Bullivant and M. Ruse (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to Atheism (Oxford), 139–51, 141.
26 Gavin Hyman, ‘Atheism in Modern History’, in Michael Martin (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge, 2007), 27–46, 28–9; see also the observations of Ford (n. 11), 9–10, 170–1. Cf. Reynolds’ acknowledgement (in the medieval context), (n. 20), 35: ‘When people doubted or disbelieved they naturally did so on different grounds from modern agnostics or atheists. Unbelief, like belief, is socially conditioned.’
27 See here Bremmer (n. 19), 19–20, Dirk Obbink, Philodemus On Piety: Part 1. Critical Text with Commentary (Oxford, 1996), 142–3; cf. the observations of Glenn Most, ‘Ancient Philosophy and Religion’, in D. Sedley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003), at 304, with my italics (‘just as monotheism was not a viable cultural option in antiquity, so too, symmetrically, atheism was virtually unknown: ancient lists of those philosophers who denied altogether the very existence of the gods never manage to come up with more than a handful of names’).
28 Parker (n. 2), 213, n. 58.
29 David Sedley, ‘The Atheist Underground’, in Verity Harte and Melissa Lane (eds.) Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge, 2013), 334, citing Marek Winiarczyk, ‘Methodisches zum antiken Atheismus’, RhM 133 (1990), 12.
30 Sedley (n. 29), 348; cf. p. 335 (‘Theorists of atheism…were likely to think twice before coming out. If atheism was explored through the speeches of characters in drama, rather than defended by any philosopher in his own voice, that should not surprise us at all’).
31 Febvre (n. 15), 335.
32 Ibid. 335, 352, 415, 419, 456, acknowledged by Wootton (n. 20, 1988), 701–3 (n. 20, 1992), 52.
33 Sedley (n. 29), 347.
34 Obbink (n. 27), 143.
35 So, e.g., R. B. Braithwaite, ‘The Nature of Believing’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 33 (1933), 132–3; Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London, 1959), 159; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Compiled from Notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor (Oxford, 1966), 53–4, 56.
36 Lysias ap. Athenaeus 12.76.
37 Versnel (n. 1), 292.
38 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 22, cited by Gregory Crane, The Blinded Eye Thucydides and the New Written Word (Lanham MD, 1996), 163; cf. Bremmer (n. 19), 11, for a similar line in the Greek context (‘If we find atheism at all, it is usually a “soft” atheism, or the imputation of atheism to others as a means to discredit them’).
39 Febvre (n. 15), 137: ‘so you see God played a strange role as a policeman in the prose and verse of these liberated men. And atheists were apparently rather inclined to be scandalized by the atheism of others.’
40 Febvre (n. 15), 135, 142.
41 Pl. Ap. 23d: ‘And when anyone asks them what it is he does and what it is he teaches, they can't say and don't know, and in order not to appear to be lost for words, they trot out the stuff ready to hand against all philosophers, such as “the things in heaven and the things under the ground”, and “not acknowledging the gods”, and “he makes the weaker argument the stronger”.’ Cf. Parker (n. 2), 202–3, for ‘stereotype and distortion’ in the prosecution of Socrates.
42 Cf. Parker (n. 2), 211.
43 See here Quentin Skinner's classic essay (n. 17), 45–7, developing J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962).
44 Cited from the King James Bible. For the association of the Fool with wicked deeds, cf. Ps. 5.5, 73.3, 74.18.
45 Whitmarsh (n. 13), 7–8.
46 John Barton, ‘Sin in the Psalms’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 28 (2015), 52–3, writing of Ps. 10.
47 Eur. Bacch. 995, 1015, Andr. 491, Hel. 1148; cf. Gorg. Pal. 36.
48 See further Harrison (n. 6), 215–16. Cf. the ‘daiva’ inscription of Xerxes in which the act of rebellion against the King renders the god of a particular people a ‘daiva’ or demon, and so their shrine worthy of destruction: R. G. Kent, Old Persian. Texts, Grammar, Lexicon (New Haven CT, 1953), XPh.
49 Sedley (n. 25), 139–40. ‘The above passage [Pl. Apol. 28c] is therefore unusual, to the extent that Plato has inserted an explicit mention of failure to recognize the gods’ very existence.’
50 For this phrase, see e.g. Parker (n. 2), 201, n. 8 (the phrase ‘poised between a reference to “custom, customary (worship)”…and “belief”’); Versnel (n. 1), 555–9; Sedley (n. 25), 139–40 (‘when “gods” are its grammatical object, its semantic scope fails to distinguish between the outward practice of “cultivating” gods and the inner state of “believing” in them, that is, in their existence.’)
51 Protagoras R24 Laks-Most. ‘This is not quite as crass a conflation as may at first appear’, Sedley notes (n. 29), 331, ‘because for an Epicurean the gods are self-evidently known to us: hence anyone claiming not to know whether there are gods is sufficiently deranged to deny a basic fact of human awareness, a derangement fully shared with the outright atheists’.
52 Parker (n. 2), 203 (‘but no one who knew anything of the real character of Socrates’ sign could suppose that it was in any kind of rivalry with the traditional gods’).
53 See esp. chs. 2–4.
54 Translated by P. J. Rhodes and Robin Osborne, Greek Historical Inscriptions 404–323 BC (Oxford, 2003), no. 102, iii.
55 Whitmarsh (n. 13), 10.
56 Parker (n. 2), 210: ‘We need to ask what in all this was truly threatening or “impious”; what constituted an attack from without rather than from within the traditional religious framework, that loose and accommodating structure within which certain forms of doubt, criticism and revision were, in fact, traditional.’ See Parker (n. 10), 36–9, for discussion of the bounds of allowable free speech on religion in the Greek world; Parker (n. 2), 207–14 for a parallel discussion focused specifically on Athens.
57 Parker (n. 2), 213–14 (‘key elements in the Stoic solution’). For the relationship of atheism and unknowability, cf. Ford (n. 11), 98–120.
58 Cf. Versnel (n. 1), 473 (‘Do as if by just performing the proper rituals’), Harrison (n. 12) a (‘The impossibility of certain knowledge’).
59 Eur. Fr. 286, Eur. El. 583–4 (‘if unjust deeds win out over justice, it will no longer be necessary to believe in [or take heed of?] the gods’ (ἢ χρὴ μηκέθ' ἡγεῖσθαι θεούς,| εἰ τἄδικ' ἔσται τῆς δίκης ὑπέρτερα,). Variations at Ar. Nub. 398–402, Soph. El. 245–50, OT 883–910; the complaint of divine injustice is a long-standing theme, evidenced esp. by Theognis, ll. 149–50, 373–82, 743–6. A recurrent biographical tradition has it that Diagoras only turned to atheism after a fellow-poet successfully stole one of his paeans: Suda Δ 523.
60 Sedley (n. 29), 347.
61 Sedley (n. 25), 141.
62 Versnel (n. 1), 82, 430 (continuing ‘Religious language is of a rhetorical, (self-)persuasive and (self-)assuring nature and cannot but produce contradictions with other types of discourse…Greeks – at least most Greeks – could not care less.’).
63 Cf. Sedley (n. 25), 139 for reference to an atheist creed.
64 Cic. Nat. D. 1.43.120.
65 Diagoras F 738 Laks-Most.
66 Sext. Emp. Math. 9.53.
67 Contrast Whitmarsh (n. 13), 86 (‘the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history’).
68 Protagoras D10 Laks-Most = DK 80 B 4, Xenophanes D49 = B34; cf. Pl. Cra. 400e.
69 Heraclitus 22 B 57 DK = D25 Laks-Most, Xenophanes B10 = D10.
70 Democritus D207 = A75, D15 = B5, Pl. Prot. 322a, or the Sisyphus fragment.
71 Whitmarsh on Hdt., (n. 13), 80–1, seeing e.g. the historian's use of ‘god’ not as a religious category but as an ‘extension of his rationalistic discourse’.
72 As observed sharply by Fowler, Robert, ‘Gods in Early Greek Historiography’, in Bremmer, J. N. and Erskine, A. (eds.) The Gods of Ancient Greece. Identities and Transformations (Edinburgh, 2010), 319Google Scholar, n. 5 (responding to Scullion, Scott, ‘Herodotus and Greek Religion’, in Dewald, C. and Marincola, J. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge, 2006), 199–200Google Scholar); Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion, tr. Raffan, J. (Oxford, 1985), 131Google Scholar (they ‘mistake Herodotus’ reluctance to speak of theology for scepticism about the existence of gods’).
73 So e.g. Scullion (n. 72), 199–200.
74 D210 Laks Most = B30.
75 See here (and for a more systematic exploration of presocratic parallels with Herodotus), Thomas Harrison, ‘Herodotus, Homer and the Character of the Gods’, in I. Matijasic (ed.) Herodotus – the Most Homeric Historian (Histos supplementary vol. 14, 2022), 91–105. Questions of knowledge of the gods are scarcely touched upon by Kingsley, K. Scarlett, Herodotus and the Presocratics. Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century BCE (Cambridge, 2024)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see e.g. p. 209 on 2.3.2 (‘a wry remark on man's real ignorance in matters of the divine’).
76 Sedley (n. 25), 140.
77 I do not deny, for example, that, when the wreath-seller of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae laments the impact of Euripides on business (ll. 443–58), the audience can conceive of those who are persuaded that the gods do not exist (τοὺς ἄνδρας ἀναπέπεικεν οὐκ εἶναι θεούς), only that that claim had a different force in context, and that ‘atheism’ was not a worked-out position with an associated ‘life-style’. For James Ford (n. 11), clearly, this is to set too high a threshold for atheism.
78 Sedley (n. 29), 329; the idea of ‘weak belief’ was the focus of a 2011 Oxford-Princeton ‘weak belief’ seminar.
79 Versnel (n. 1), 552 (‘Is not more often than not reciting the Apostles’ Creed rather an act of ritual than of conscious belief?’); cf. Needham, Rodney, Belief, Language and Experience (Oxford, 1972), 88Google Scholar, for declarations of belief as ‘a form of code among the faithful, signalling mutually a common adherence, against the world, to a way and purpose of life’. Clearly also, reducing Christianity to a single (distinctly Protestant) position here is absurd.
80 To this extent, I am in agreement with Whitmarsh (n. 7), 113–14, in his suggestion that a ‘closural resolution – such as a divine punishment (as in Hippolytus or Bacchae) – certainly reorientates any reading of the play, but does not necessarily neutralise all other positions taken in the course of the narrative’.
81 Col. 5.