Who were the first atheists?
Atheists, like believers, can feel pride in the pedigree of their beliefs, as Tim Whitmarsh's new book on atheism in the ancient world shows.
1 February 2016
By Tom Holland
When Memoirs of Hadrian was published in 1951 it included a postscript in which its author, Marguerite Yourcenar, explained why she had fixed on the 2nd century AD as the setting for her novel. “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”
These words were not her own, but a quotation from Flaubert, whose aestheticisation of atheism was deeply appealing to Yourcenar and had exercised a strong influence on her portrayal of Hadrian. Flaubert in turn was heir to assorted philosophes, libertines and natural philosophers whose daring rejection of Christian orthodoxies had been much seasoned with allusions to classical precedents. Voltaire, in a celebrated early poem, had consciously modelled himself on the Roman poet Lucretius, whose materialism and contempt for religion had been exciting freethinkers ever since the rediscovery of his masterpiece On the Nature of Things back in the Renaissance. “How admirable he is,” Voltaire wrote, “in his encomia, in his descriptive passages, in his ethics, and in all his criticisms of superstition.”
Nowadays, when the place of classics in the school curriculum is a spectral shadow of what it was in Yourcenar’s time, let alone during the Enlightenment, there are few atheists in the habit of looking back to Lucretius to sustain their own scepticism. Indeed, Tim Whitmarsh worries there are many who believe that atheism is an exclusively modern phenomenon, a fruit of the 18th century. But few scholars are better equipped to combat this misapprehension than he. Although his specialisation is the culture of the very period that Flaubert identified as the one “when man stood alone”, his appointment to the professorship of Greek culture at Cambridge in 2014 was due recognition of his mastery of the whole sweep of ancient history. Thus, unsurprisingly, his new book on atheism in the ancient world is as learned as it is intellectually thrilling. Covering the millennium and more that separates Homer from Theodosius the Great, Battling the Gods fills a gap that probably few of us had even been aware of, and does so comprehensively.
Naturally, there are starring roles for the particular heroes of the Enlightenment: Lucretius, of course, but also Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who first inspired On the Nature of Things, and whose atomistic vision of the universe delighted scientists in the 17th century. Other great names from antiquity are placed in eye-opening perspective by Whitmarsh’s narrative. Thucydides, whose project of explaining human affairs without reference to divine interference provides historical practice today with its ultimate model, is given due acknowledgement for his originality and boldness. His account of the Peloponnesian War, Whitmarsh writes, “can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history”.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/02/who-were-first-atheists
Batting the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh is published by Faber & Faber (304pp, £25)
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