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Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient…
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Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (original 2015; edition 2015)

by Tim Whitmarsh (Author)

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3361276,630 (3.78)8
While this was a bit more of a polemic than I'd anticipated – Whitmarsh claims in his Preface that “it is not my aim to prove the truth (or indeed falsehood) of atheism as a philosophical position,” but he then practically ties himself in knots trying to work out ways in which the most unlikely of the ancients (Sophocles?) might be construed to be atheists – it is, nevertheless, interesting and entertaining. Whitmarsh writes nicely, only occasionally slipping into flippancy or inserting too many popular references (for purposes of illustration) into his history. His quest to “out” the atheists of ancient Greece and Rome, if often unconvincing (and he is honest enough to conclude his discussions, in most cases, with the recognition that the figures he discusses, while unconventional, would generally not qualify as atheists by most modern standards) offers an interesting angle from which to examine a variety of Greek and Roman philosophical and religious positions.

ETA To clarify, what I mean by “polemic” is that Whitmarsh is working very hard to establish the ancient Greek (and Roman) world as one in which,
“atheism was not treated as a heretical position, the “other” of true belief; it was seen rather as one of the many possible stances one could take on the question of the gods (albeit an extreme one). It was only in Christian late antiquity that atheism began to be constructed in systematically antithetical terms, as the inverse of proper religion, a threat to the very foundations of human civilization. Until that moment – borrowing from Assman, we might speak of “the Christian distinction” – atheism was an integral part of the cultural life of Greece.”


Of course, as Socrates, Aristotle, Theodorus of Cyrene, etc.….. discovered, even the ancient Greeks were not consistently open-minded about religious disbelief. Atheism seems to have been “integral” in the ancient world in the sense that questioning the nature and/or interest of the gods was sometimes done. And a few writers openly doubted. But … “integral”? ( )
  meandmybooks | Apr 28, 2016 |
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What I found especially fascinating about this book was the fundamental point that he makes about peoples attitudes towards religion. The idea of a single unified faith community is a mirage ..both in the ancient world, in the medieval world and in the modern world: there has always been a spectrum of faith, belief and unbelief. As the author says: "This book represents a kind of archeology of religious skepticism". And he is open about the difficulty of relying on ancient texts (which may or may not represent accurately the common way of thinking). To my mind there is a over-reliance on the greek Dramatists and interpreting their works. However, even given some doubts about these sources, Whitmarsh manages to amass enough evidence to bolster his point that skepticism about the Gods and religion is not a new phenomenon. It has existed for thousands of years ...even in societies with no background in rational thought or debate.
There is an interesting discussion about the introduction of Diopeithe's decree in the 430's BC...Whitmarsh calls him a religious crackpot but his decree has massive and long lasting impact. Up until this decree the Athenians were pretty tolerant of varying beliefs about the gods. But following the decree ...to be a good citizen you not only had to do right but to think right too. In a way, this intolerance about "right-thinking" has echoed down through the ages with religious bigotry and intolerance and justified all sorts of terrible pogroms and religious wars....especially after the 300's AD when Christianity gained the ascendancy.
Atheists, after this decree, ran very real risks of being condemned for impiety and disbelief in the gods. and one hears the echoes of this intolerance with Galilio being shown the instruments of torture...to help change his beliefs; and Charles Darwin being reluctant to publish his findings for fear of offending his religious wife ....let alone the rest of the establishment of Victorian England.
There seem to be many in the ancient Greek world who not only didn't believe in the riotous goings-on at Mt Olympus but who rejected the concept of gods altogether. And I take my hat off to them. Diogenes, the cynic, who, whilst one man was marvelling at a series of temple inscriptions put up by survivors of sea storms, retorted that there would have been many more if the the non-survivors had also left dedications. Whitmarsh also makes the point that, as a rule, polytheism...the belief in many gods....was infinitely more hospitable to unbelievers than monotheism. Under Christianity, by contrast, there was no good way of being an atheist. Atheism was the categorical rejection of the very premise on which Christianity defined itself. (I think Augustine of Hippo bears a fair bit or responsibility for this intolerance which has continued don through the centuries ...and probably held back western civilisation from intellectual development for about a thousand years).
I would have liked to have seen more about atheism in other societies (for example, Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, Indian). But the author explains that although China for example had its atheists and other places also, the best historical writings and materials were available for Greece ....hence his concentration on this state. Rome is considered in the latter part of the book and, in general, was fairly tolerant of all sorts of religions and non-believers until the formal adoption of Christianity as the state religion...and with it....as mentioned above...came those wonderful attributes of intolerance, persecution, and execution for those who did not profess the "right-beliefs".
Generally, I found the book quite fascinating ..though also mildly depressing ...especially the persecution of non-believers that is a recurring theme. I give it four stars. ( )
  booktsunami | Oct 18, 2021 |
This a really interesting book.
I would have rated it higher but I really struggle with these history books which are full of names and names and names and I can remember who anyone is and it all gets an it complicated. Sometimes the ideas got a bit lost in the detailing of events too, but I guess someone else might find this okay.

I didn't find it preachy or anything like that. Just a nice pile of thoughts and facts and commentary.
5 stars if I wasn't dyslexic and Greek memes weren't really hard to read and pretty confusing? I dunno, maybe. ( )
  mjhunt | Jan 22, 2021 |
Really enjoyed this book. I really enjoy anything based on history. ( )
  AndreaWay | Nov 15, 2020 |
Disappointing as most of the philosophers discussed didn't really seem to be atheists. ( )
  Robertgreaves | Jun 21, 2020 |
This is a very good history of ancient Greek society and the role of mythology. It also extends in the peak of the Roman empire. Unfortunately, there is little about the existence or role of atheism during this period. The author does an admirable job of trying to tease out references to and insinuation of atheism from the existing texts, but its pretty slim pickings.

( )
  grandpahobo | Sep 26, 2019 |
If you, like me, tended to think atheism as a somewhat more recent phenomenon (a product of the European enlightenment), this book will definitely challenge your views.

The author carries us on a historical journey through ancient Greco-Roman history, providing ample examples on how atheism came to be a defensible philosophical position in late antiquity.

On the whole, the book offers an alternative reading of Ancient Philosophy on the lookout for the atheistic positions throughout the scattered and fragmentary evidence of the extant texts. This will broaden your view on how the many philosophical debates were carried, how the ideas came to be and what were ultimately their consequences to the furthering the debate.

With a solid argumentation, a clear style and a compelling narrative, this book is not only insightful as it is also entertaining, making it very easy to read and understand. Even if you do not agree with the author's speculations and liberties in the way he treats the ancient texts, you can rest assured that you will no longer view the history of philosophy in the same way. ( )
1 vote adsicuidade | Sep 8, 2018 |
Reviewed in the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/11/long-time-no-gods-2017.html
  Impossibilist | Nov 11, 2017 |
While this was a bit more of a polemic than I'd anticipated – Whitmarsh claims in his Preface that “it is not my aim to prove the truth (or indeed falsehood) of atheism as a philosophical position,” but he then practically ties himself in knots trying to work out ways in which the most unlikely of the ancients (Sophocles?) might be construed to be atheists – it is, nevertheless, interesting and entertaining. Whitmarsh writes nicely, only occasionally slipping into flippancy or inserting too many popular references (for purposes of illustration) into his history. His quest to “out” the atheists of ancient Greece and Rome, if often unconvincing (and he is honest enough to conclude his discussions, in most cases, with the recognition that the figures he discusses, while unconventional, would generally not qualify as atheists by most modern standards) offers an interesting angle from which to examine a variety of Greek and Roman philosophical and religious positions.

ETA To clarify, what I mean by “polemic” is that Whitmarsh is working very hard to establish the ancient Greek (and Roman) world as one in which,
“atheism was not treated as a heretical position, the “other” of true belief; it was seen rather as one of the many possible stances one could take on the question of the gods (albeit an extreme one). It was only in Christian late antiquity that atheism began to be constructed in systematically antithetical terms, as the inverse of proper religion, a threat to the very foundations of human civilization. Until that moment – borrowing from Assman, we might speak of “the Christian distinction” – atheism was an integral part of the cultural life of Greece.”


Of course, as Socrates, Aristotle, Theodorus of Cyrene, etc.….. discovered, even the ancient Greeks were not consistently open-minded about religious disbelief. Atheism seems to have been “integral” in the ancient world in the sense that questioning the nature and/or interest of the gods was sometimes done. And a few writers openly doubted. But … “integral”? ( )
  meandmybooks | Apr 28, 2016 |
Review of: Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, by Tim Whitmarsh
by Stan Prager (4-17-16)

How do we define atheism today? What exactly constitutes an atheist? Although I am not a believer in magical sky gods, I avoid describing myself as an atheist, which not only has a bit of an arrogant ring to it but these days is additionally burdened by the negative fallout from the militant atheism – actually “anti-theism” – of a Richard Dawkins or a Bill Maher, as of late further tarnished by blatant Islamophobia. On the other hand, agnostic sounds a bit tentative, so I coined my own term, “dogmatic skeptic,” to sum up my outlook in this regard. My point here is that while there are lots of variations of the religious experience, there may be just as many varieties and degrees of non-belief (un-belief?). Armed with a stunningly encyclopedic knowledge of ancient times, renowned Classicist Tim Whitmarsh sets out in Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World to establish that atheism is not only a post-Enlightenment phenomenon but has as well a solid foundation in the remote past.
There are problems almost from the very start. Once more, how do we define atheism? If one rejects established religion, does that establish them as atheist? Hardly. Plato rejected the Olympian pantheon, but he believed in mysterious perfect forms and a vague supreme being, so he was hardly atheist. And we know a lot about Plato from the relatively large body of his work that has survived. In contrast, most of what we know about the rest of the ancient world is fragmentary, so much interpretation is required, and whenever possible Whitmarsh interprets to suit his thesis. What if all we had were portions of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses challenging the Roman Catholic Church on indulgences? We might conclude that Luther was an atheist, but we would of course be very wrong.
I would take this one step further: there remains a heated debate in some circles of twenty-first century American historiography as to the religious beliefs, or lack thereof, of the various Founders, with some even asserting that Jefferson or Madison were atheists, and others vigorously challenging that notion. In this case, we have a vast collection of writings both by the subjects in question and by those who knew them intimately, yet much dispute remains. This is further complicated by the fact that spiritual beliefs can change dramatically over a lifetime; many become more devout as they grow older and mortality looms. A perfect example is Hamilton, a devoted Presbyterian in his youth who seemed to lose interest in religion entirely during the Revolution; he later briefly flirted with Deism (according to biographer Ron Chernow), and yet on his deathbed spoke with great passion about his commitment to a loving god. These men lived only a little more than a couple of centuries ago, yet there remains great ambiguity. How can we then reach back thousands of years with fragmentary evidence and make pronouncements with such certainty?
Whitmarsh takes us on an extremely well-written and often delightful tour of the philosophical and religious realms of the ancient Mediterranean in his studied attempt to turn up committed atheists, but leaves me mostly unconvinced, not because they did not exist but because after all he presents little incontrovertible evidence of their presence. The author himself hints at them more than locating them in their respective haystacks. At one point, Whitmarsh cites the famous rhetorical flourish of the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes: “Now if cows, horses or lions had hands, and were able to draw with those hands and create things as humans do, horses would draw gods in the form of horses, and cows in the form of cows, and create bodies just like they had.” Yet, on the very next page he concedes that Xenophanes, a believer in “one god, greatest among gods and mortals, not at all like mortals in body or thought,” is hardly the atheist the former quotation might suggest. [p60-61] Battling the Gods is replete with such material. I have no reason to doubt that there were atheists at the very dawn of the human experience, but I remain unconvinced that they ever comprised more than a very tiny minority. I would also grant that this number may have been greater during the heyday of ancient Greek and Roman scientific inquiry, but if in the twentieth-first century at the height of modern science and medicine so many billions stubbornly cling to supernatural beliefs, we should not be surprised if these numbers were dramatically larger in the days when the forces of earthquakes and lightening remained objects of some great and terrible mystery.
I was a bit troubled by the treatment of Socrates in this work, whom Whitmarsh buzzes around tenuously in dozens of references. We all know that Socrates was charged with impiety (More specifically according to Xenophon’s Memorabilia for "refusing to recognize the gods acknowledged by the state, and importing strange divinities of his own; he is further guilty of corrupting the young.") but there is a consensus among historians that this was but a pretext to punish the great gadfly for his former association with members of the “Thirty Tyrants,” the Spartan-supported reactionary regime that came to briefly rule Athens after her defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and especially his one-time pupil, Critias, their cruel leader. Whitmarsh makes much of the fact that the existence of the capital charge of impiety had to imply that there was a wealth of the impious, but I find him careless in failing to underscore that Socrates was hardly an example of the same.
The charges levied against Socrates, however, do raise an issue that Whitmarsh barely explores but perhaps buttresses his thesis: if you could likely be put to death simply for challenging religious orthodoxy – never mind atheism – in an unusually open society like the Athenian polis, few would advertise such proclivities nor leave written confirmation of the same. Thus, as they say, absence of evidence is hardly evidence of absence. Susan Jacoby’s marvelous book Freethinkers resurrects the relatively large cast of agnostics that publically populated nineteenth century America, but they lived in a free society where they could perhaps be shunned but not jailed or burned at the stake. You would hardly expect to find something similar elsewhere on the globe back then, or in such places as Saudi Arabia today. Atheist remains a dirty word in the United States in 2016, but at least in Massachusetts you cannot be stoned to death for proclaiming yourself one.
Remarkably, while I often found Battling the Gods to lack focus and ultimately concluded that Whitmarsh failed to substantively make his case, I still enjoyed reading this book for the author’s wide acquaintance and articulate commentary upon philosophy, religion and ancient history. I would caution that some background in these disciplines is requisite in order for the reader to properly place the narrative in context, as this volume is hardly suitable for the general audience. Finally, I would note that while I agree with Whitmarsh that atheism is not purely a modern phenomenon, I would maintain that in the past its adherents likely remained lurking quietly at the periphery, even much more so than they do today.

https://regarp.com/2016/04/17/review-of-battling-the-gods-atheism-in-the-ancient... ( )
  Garp83 | Apr 17, 2016 |
The author looks at the history of atheism in the ancient world, in an effort to demonstrate that it isn't just a "fad" that arose with the Enlightenment. He traces atheism back to the early period of Judaism, and evaluates the role of atheists and other non-conformists in the classical world, with the greatest focus on Greece. For someone like myself, who realizes the first atheist was probably created simultaneously with the first god, this book rings a lot of bells. The author writes accessibly, avoiding most of the jargon that paralyzes so many books in this area. He has less need to "look smart" than to write a book that can be read. The details are well laid out, and when he is disagreeing with conventional wisdom, he doesn't hesitate to let us know that this is not what is presented in most sources. Highly recommended for anyone who thinks atheism is just today's black. ( )
2 vote Devil_llama | Mar 4, 2016 |
In Battling the Gods Tim Whitmarsh counters the idea that atheism is a new phenomenon, a result of the 18th century European Enlightenment, by using reason, history, and a careful examination of written works from the classical ages of Greece and Rome. Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, states in the Preface that his book is a work of history and that his goal isn’t to prosthelytize for or against atheism as a philosophical position, and I found that to be true, though he does believe that dismissing atheism as a recent fad can make the persecution of atheists seem like a less serious problem than the persecution of religious minorities.

In the opening chapter Whitmarsh argues convincingly that adopting a skeptical attitude toward miracles or supernatural beings would not be a strange, unheard of position at any time in history, and that there would have always been a spectrum of belief and unbelief. After this initial chapter the book is divided into four sections--Archaic Greece, Classical Athens, The Hellenistic Era, and Rome--and it’s in these that the author delves deeply into the written works of ancient poets, philosophers, historians, and playwrights, looking for evidence of atheism from the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers in early Greece to the rise of Christianity during Constantine’s rule of the Roman Empire.

As a history I found the book fascinating, but because I’m less invested than the author in dissecting texts to discover which particular people from the ancient past may have held atheist views, my interest flagged at times. Obviously the author needed to do these close and considered readings to support his contention that atheism has been around since at least the dawn of history, and considering the scholarly slant and serious subject matter, it’s a highly readable book and far from dry. Like any well written history, more than a few parts are deeply moving--the chapters on the death sentence imposed on Socrates and the long ranging repercussions of that act, for instance. ( )
2 vote Jaylia3 | Oct 8, 2015 |
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