Original sinners?

On a study of religious disbelief in the ancient world that shows that atheism is far older than we may think

MILES RUSSELL Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh Before reading this book, I had assumed atheism was a product of the European enlightenment, when 17th and 18th-century philosophers began to question the absolute nature of religion and religious thinking. Tim Whitmarsh shows that, before the imposition of state-sanctioned Roman imperial monotheism, many in the ancient world openly expressed doubt about the gods and their role in the natural order of things.

Whitmarsh is at pains to point out that he is not part of a larger movement determined to prove a ‘truth’ or expose an ancient falsehood; his book is “a work of history, not of proselytism”. In guiding us through the lives of those who set out to question the divine, from the first stirrings of the Greek city state to the establishment of Christian orthodoxy in the Roman empire of the fourth century AD, Whitmarsh is a thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging guide.

We encounter free-thinking characters such as Plato, Thucydides, Diagoras (arguably the first self-professed atheist) and Democritus, who pondered if reality comprised nothing more than particles spinning randomly in the void. Perhaps most prescient is Lucretius who, in the political turmoil at the end of the Roman republic, used the example of Agamemnon – who was advised to sacrifice his daughter to allay the wrath of the goddess Artemis – to act as a warning of the “terrible evil that religion was able to induce”. The specifics of belief and the names of the gods may change over time but the dangerous consequences

“Democritus pondered if reality was nothing but particles spinning randomly in the void”