Read Online Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh - Free Book Online

of dominion and immortality are the objects of constant craving and envy. Such stories capture—through narrative rather than philosophical exposition—an essential theological aspect of the Greek gods. They are not omnipotent in the way that Yahweh, Allah, and the Christian God are. They could in principle be defeated. In fact, the Prometheus of Athenian drama claims to be in possession of a prophecy predicting precisely that: Zeus will one day bear a son who will overthrow his father. In other words, atheism was a narrative possibility within Greek myth. A world without gods could be imagined. The possibility that the Olympian gods might cease to exist (or at least to hold power over the cosmos, which amounts to the same thing) was built into the Greeks’ story-world. 4
    It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of divine power in Greek antiquity. For those brought up in monotheistic traditions, the ingrained assumption is that “power” means omnipotence and eternal rule: as the Christian hymn has it, “Immortal, invincible, God only wise.” These are the attributes of the transcendent deity of monotheism. Now in fact the idea of an all-powerful deity is a far from straightforward concept. The critique of omnipotence is usually traced back to the twelfth-century Arab philosopher Averroës, but in fact a version of it is already found in the Roman writer Pliny the Elder: “Not even a god can do anything: for he cannot, even if he wanted to, kill himself…” (Pliny goes on to list a number of things that it is impossible for a god to do, e.g., make humans immortal, change the past, or make twice ten equal something other than twenty.) But this is rarefied argumentation. The gods of Greece were in general beset by no such problems. The ancient polytheist god, even the king of the gods, has power of a different kind. Zeus’s authority consists in his monopolization of violence (
bia
) and force (
kratos
). On the Athenian stage, Bia and Kratos appear personified as two thugs who serve as Zeus’s enforcers. From a Greek point of view, divine power means brute force, the ability to battle down your foes. Not for nothing is Zeus the wielder of the thunderbolt, the ancient equivalent of the atom bomb: if the power of the Olympian order is in dispute, the thunderbolt settles matters definitively and irrevocably. For the Greeks, divine authority was defined, ultimately, by firepower. 5
    The god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam holds power in the absolute. The power of Greek gods, by contrast, is relative to others: it consists in the ability to beat down rivals (whether mortal or immortal), to quell dissent, to emerge victorious in battle. For example, the
Iliad
contains an episode telling of grumbling on Olympus. Hera picks a public fight with her husband Zeus, whom she accuses of favoring another goddess. Zeus’s response, however, is uncompromising: “Sit down in silence, and obey my word,” he tells her, “otherwise all the gods on Olympus will not help you as I draw close and lay my invincible hands upon you.” Hera “was seized with fear and sat down in silence, curbing her heart.” It is this kind of power that makes Zeus the king of the gods: the power to impose his will on others, even his awesome wife. 6
    There is a reason for this difference. Greece was, fundamentally, an honor-based society, and honor was generated—for humans and gods alike—through success in competition with others. It is no accident that sport is one of the Greeks’ most enduring legacies, for competitiveness lay at the very heart of the Greek concept of (particularly male) honor. Individuals can increase their own standing in the public’s eyes only by decreasing that of another. If I want to move up a notch on the honor board, I need to move you down: this is a form of what game theorists call a “zero-sum game.” Hera’s challenge to Zeus in the
Iliad
follows this logic: it is an attempt to enhance her own standing