As seen in their earliest historical documents (especially portions of the Book of Judges), the Hebrews are a group of agricultural and pastoral but warlike tribes of Semitic speech, with household Gods and local deities,2 living among communities at the same or a higher culture stage. Their ancestral legends show similar religious practice.3 Of the Hebrew tribes some may have sojourned for a time in Egypt; but this is uncertain, the written record being a late and in large part deliberately fictitious construction.4 At one time twelve such tribes may have confederated, in conformity with a common ancient superstition, seen in Arab and Greek history as well as in the Jewish, as to the number twelve. As they advanced in civilization, on a basis of city life existing among a population settled in Canaan before them, parts of which they conquered, one of their public cults, that of Yahu or Yahweh, finally fixed at Jerusalem, became politically important. The special worshippers of this God (supposed to have been at first a Thunder-God or Nature-God)5 were in that sense monotheists; but not otherwise than kindred neighbouring communities such as the Ammonites and Moabites and Edomites, each of which had its special God, like the cities of Babylonia and Egypt. But that the earlier conceptions of [98]the people had assumed a multiplicity of Gods is clear from the fact that even in the later literary efforts to impose the sole cult of Yahweh on the people, the plural name Elohim, “Powers” or “Gods” (in general, things to be feared),6 is retained, either alone or with that of Yahweh prefixed, though cosmology had previously been written in Yahweh’s name. The Yahwists did not scruple to combine an Elohistic narrative, varying from theirs in cosmology and otherwise, with their own.7

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This primary polytheism is seen to the full in that constant resort of Israelites to neighbouring cults, against which so much of the Hebrew doctrine is directed. To understand their practice the modern reader has to get rid of the hallucination imposed on Christendom by its idea of revelation. The cult of Yahweh was no primordial Hebrew creed, deserted by backsliding idolaters, but a finally successful tyranny of one local cult over others. It is probable that it was originally not Palestinian, but Sinaitic, and that Yahweh became the God of Caleb-Judah only under David.8 Therefore, without begging the question as to the moral sincerity of the prophets and others who identified Yahwism with morality, we must always remember that they were on their own showing devotees of a special local worship, and so far fighting for their own influence. Similar prophesying may conceivably have been carried on in connection with the same or other God-names in other localities, and the extant prophets freely testify that they had Yahwistic opponents; but the circumstance that Yahweh was worshipped at Jerusalem without any image might be an important cause of differentiation in the case of that cult. In any case it must have been through simple “exclusivism” that they reached any form of “monotheism.”9

The inveterate usage, in the Bible-making period, of forging and interpolating ancient or pretended writings, makes it impossible to construct any detailed history of the rise of Yahwism. We can but proceed upon data which do not appear to lend themselves to the purposes of the later adaptors. In that way we see cause to believe that at one early centre the so-called ark of Yahweh contained various objects held to have supernatural virtue.10 In the older historic documents it has, however, no such sacredness as accrues to it later,11 and no great traditional prestige. This ark, previously moved from place to place as a fetish,12 is said to have been transferred to Jerusalem by the early king David,13 whose story, like that of his predecessors Saul and his son Solomon, is in part blended with myth.

At other places, however, Yahweh was symbolized and worshipped in the image of a young bull,14 a usage associated with the neighbouring Semitic cult of Molech, but probably indigenous, or at least early, in the case of Yahweh also. A God, for such worshippers, needed to be represented by something, if he were to be individualized as against others; and where there was not an ark or a sacred stone or special temple or idol there could be no cult at all. “The practices of ancient religion require a fixed meeting-place between the worshippers and their God.”15 The pre-Exilic history of Yahweh-worship seems to be in large part that of a struggle between the devotees of the imageless worship fixed to the temple at Jerusalem, and other worships, with or without images, at other and less influential shrines.

So far as can be gathered from the documents, it was long before monotheistic pretensions were made in connection with Yahwism. They must in the first instance have seemed not only tyrannical but blasphemous to the devotees of the old local shrines, who in the earlier Hebrew writings figure as perfectly good Yahwists; and they clearly had no durable success before the period of the Exile. Some three hundred years after the supposed period of David,16 and again eighty years later, we meet with ostensible traces17 of a movement for the special aggrandizement of the Yahweh cult and the suppression of the others which competed with it, as well as of certain licentious and vicious practices carried on in connection with Yahweh worship. Concerning these, it could be claimed by those who had adhered to the simpler tradition of one of the early worships that they were foreign importations. They were, in fact, specialties of a rich ancient society, and were either native to Canaanite cities which the Hebrews had captured, or copied by them from such cities. But the fact that they were thus, on the showing of the later Yahwistic records, long associated with Yahwist practice, proves that there was no special elevation about Yahwism originally.

Given the co-existence of a multitude of local cults, and of various local Yahweh-worships, it is conceivable that the Yahwists of Jerusalem, backed by a priest-ridden king, should seek to limit all worship to their own temple, whose revenues would thereby be much increased. But insoluble perplexities are set up as to the alleged movement by the incongruities in the documents. Passing over for the moment the prophets Amos and Hosea and others who ostensibly belong to the eighth century B.C., we find the second priestly reform,18 consequent on a finding or framing of “the law,” represented as occurring early in the reign of Josiah (641–610 B.C.). But later in the same reign are placed the writings of Jeremiah, who constantly contemns the scribes, prophets, and priests in mass, and makes light of the ark,19 besides declaring that in Judah20 there are as many Gods as towns, and in Jerusalem as many Baal-altars as streets. The difficulty is reduced by recognizing the quasi-historical narrative as a later fabrication; but other difficulties remain as to the prophetic writings; and for our present purpose it is necessary briefly to consider these.

1. The “higher criticism,” seeking solid standing-ground at the beginning of the tangible historic period, the eighth century, singles out21 the books of Amos and Hosea, setting aside, as dubious in date, Nahum and Joel; and recognizing in Isaiah a composite of different periods. If Amos, the “herdsman of Tekoa,” could be thus regarded as an indubitable historical person, he would be a remarkable figure in the history of freethought, as would his nominal contemporary Hosea. Amos is a monotheist, worshipping not a God of Israel but a Yahweh or Elohim of Hosts, called also by the [105]name Adon or Adonai, “the Lord,” who rules all the nations and created the universe. Further, the prophet makes Yahweh “hate and despise” the feasts and burnt-offerings and solemn assemblies of his worshippers;22 and he meddles impartially with the affairs of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. In the same spirit Hosea menaces the solemn assemblies, and makes Yahweh desire “mercy and not sacrifice.”23 Similar doctrine occurs in the reputedly genuine or ancient parts of Isaiah,24 and in Micah.25 Isaiah, too, disparages the Sabbath and solemn meetings, staking all upon righteousness.

2. These utterances, so subversive of the priestly system, are yet held to have been preserved through the ages—through the Assyrian conquest, through the Babylonian Captivity, through the later period of priestly reconstruction—by the priestly system itself. In the state of things pictured under Ezra and Nehemiah, only the zealous adherents of the priestly law can at the outset have had any letters, any literature; it must have been they, then, who treasured the anti-priestly and anti-ritual writings of the prophets—unless, indeed, the latter were preserved by the Jews remaining at Babylon.

3. The perplexity thus set up is greatly deepened when we remember that the period assigned to the earlier prophets is near the beginning of the known age of alphabetic writing,26 and before the known age of writing on scrolls. A herdsman of Judea, with a classic and flowing style, is held to have written out his hortatory addresses at a time when such writing is not certainly known to have been practised anywhere else;27 and the pre-eminent style of Isaiah is held to belong to the same period.

4. The specialist critics, all trained as clergymen, and mostly loth to yield more than is absolutely necessary to skepticism, have surrendered the antiquity claimed for Joel, recognizing that the arguments for that are “equally consistent with a date after the Captivity.”28 One of the conclusions here involved is that “Egypt is probably mentioned only as the typical instance of a Power hostile to Judah.” Thus, when we remember the later Jewish practice of speaking of Rome as “Babylon,” or “Edom,” allusions by Amos and Hosea to “Assyria” have no evidential force. The same reasoning applies to the supposed ancient portions of Isaiah.

5. Even on the clerical side, among the less conservative critics, it is already conceded that there are late “insertions” in Amos. Some of these insertions are among, or analogous to, the very passages relied on by Kuenen to prove the lofty monotheism of Amos. If these passages, however, suggest a late date, no less do the others disparaging sacrifices. The same critics find interpolations and additions in Hosea. But they offer no proof of the antiquity of what they retain.

6. The same school of criticism, while adhering to the traditional dating of Amos and Hosea, has surrendered the claim for the Psalms, placing most of these in the same age with the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiasticus.29 Now, the sentiment of opposition to burnt-offerings is found in some of the Psalms in language identical with that of the supposed early prophets.30 Instead of taking the [107]former for late echoes of the latter, we may reasonably suspect that they belong to the same culture-stage.

7. From the scientific point of view, finally, the element of historical prediction in the prophets is one of the strongest grounds for presuming that they are in reality late documents. In regard to similar predictions in the gospels (Mt. xxiv, 15; Mk. xiii, 2; Lk. xxi, 20), rational criticism decides that they were written after the event. No other course can consistently be taken as to early Hebrew predictions of captivity and restoration; and the adherence of many Biblical scholars at this point to the traditional view is psychologically on a par with their former refusal to accept a rational estimate of the Pentateuchal narrative.

It is true that where hardly any documentary datum is intrinsically sure, it is difficult to prove a negative for one more than for another. The historical narratives being systematically tampered with by one writer after another, and even presumptively late writings being interpolated by still later scribes, we can never have demonstrative proof as to the original date of any one prophet. Thus it is arguable that fragments of utterance from eighth-century prophets may have survived orally and been made the nucleus of later documents. This view would be reconcilable with the fact that the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah are all introduced with some modification of the formula that they prophesied “in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah,” Jeroboam’s name being added in the cases of Hosea and [109]Amos. But that detail is also reconcilable with absolute fabrication. To say nothing of sheer bad faith in a community whose moral code said nothing against fraud save in the form of judicial perjury, the Hebrew literature is profoundly compromised by the simple fact that the religious development of the people made the prestige of antiquity more essential there for the purposes of propaganda than in almost any other society known to us. Hence an all-pervading principle of literary dissimulation; and what freethinking there was had in general to wear the guise of the very force of unreasoning traditionalism to which it was inwardly most opposed. Only thus could new thought find a hearing and secure its preservation at the hands of the tribe of formalists. Even the pessimist Koheleth, wearied with groping science, yet believing nothing of the doctrine of immortality, must needs follow precedent and pose as the fabulous King Solomon, son of the half-mythic David.

We are forced, then, to regard with distrust all passages in the “early” prophets which express either a disregard of sacrifice and ritual, or a universalism incongruous with all that we know of the native culture of their period. The strongest ground for surmising a really “high” development of monotheism in Judah before the Captivity is the stability of the life there as compared with northern Israel.31 In this respect the conditions might indeed be considered favourable to priestly or other culture; but, on the other hand, the records themselves exhibit a predominant polytheism. The presumption, then, is strong that the “advanced” passages in the prophets concerning sacrifice belong to an age when such ideas had been reached in more civilized nations, with whose thought travelled Jews could come in contact.

It is clear that not only did they accept a cosmogony from the Babylonians, but they were influenced by the lore of the Zoroastrian Persians, with whom, as with the monotheists or pantheists of Babylon, they would have grounds of sympathy. It is an open question whether their special hostility to images does not date from the time of Persian contact.32 Concerning the restoration, it has been argued that only a few Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem “both under Cyrus and under Dareios”; and that, though the temple was rebuilt under Dareios Hystaspis, the builders were not the Gola or returned exiles, but that part of the Judahite population which had not been deported to Babylon.33 The problem is obscure;34 but, at least, the separatist spirit of the redacted narratives of Ezra and Nehemiah (which in any case tell of an opposite spirit) is not to be taken as a decisive clue to the character of the new religion. For the rest, the many Jews who remained in Babylon or spread elsewhere in the Persian Empire, and who developed their creed on a non-local basis, were bound to be in some way affected by the surrounding theology. And it is tolerably certain that not only was the notion of angels derived by the Jews from either the Babylonians or the Persians, but their rigid Sabbath and their weekly synagogue meetings came from one or both of these sources.

Of the general effect of such contacts we have clear traces in two of the most remarkable of the later books of the Old Testament, Job and Ecclesiastes, both of which clearly belong to a late period in religious development. The majority of the critics still confidently describe Job as an original Hebrew work, mainly on the ground, apparently, that it shows no clear marks of translation, though its names and its local colour are all non-Jewish. In any case it represents, for its time, a cosmopolitan culture, and contains the work of more than one hand, the prologue and epilogue being probably older than the rest; while much of the dialogue is obviously late interpolation. [112]

What marks off the book of Job from all other Hebrew literature is its dramatic and reflective handling of the ethical problem of theism, which the prophets either evade or dismiss by declamation against Jewish sins. Not that it is solved in Job, where the rôle of Satan is an inconclusive resort to the Persian dualistic solution, and where the deity is finally made to answer Job’s freethinking by sheer literary thunder, much less ratiocinative though far more artistic than the theistic speeches of the friends. But at least the writer or writers of Job’s speeches consciously grasped the issue; and the writer of the epilogue evidently felt that the least Yahweh could do was to compensate a man whom he had allowed to be wantonly persecuted. The various efforts of ancient thought to solve the same problem will be found to constitute the motive power in many later heterodox systems, theistic and atheistic.

Broadly speaking, it is solved in practice in terms of the fortunes of priests and worshippers. At all stages of religious evolution extreme ill-fortune tends to detach men from the cults that have failed to bring them succour. Be it in the case of African indigenes slaying their unsuccessful rain-doctor, Anglo-Saxon priests welcoming Christianity as a surer source of income than their old worship, pagans turning Christian at the fall of Julian, or Christians going [114]over to Islam at the sight of its triumph—the simple primary motive of self-interest is always potent on this as on other sides; and at all stages of Jewish history, it is evident, there were many who held by Yahweh because they thought he prospered them, or renounced him because he did not. And the very vicissitude of things would breed a general skepticism.35 In Zephaniah (i, 12) there is a specific allusion to those “that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil.”

Judaism is thus historically a series of socio-political selections rather than a sequence of hereditary transmission. The first definite and exclusive Yahwistic cult was an outcome of special political conditions; and its priests would adhere to it in adversity insofar as they had no other economic resort. Every return of sunshine, on the other hand, would minister to faith; and while many Jews in the time of Assyro-Babylonian ascendancy decided that Yahweh could not save, those Yahwists who in the actual Captivity prospered commercially in the new life would see in such prosperity a fresh proof of Yahweh’s support,36 and would magnify his name and endow his priests accordingly. For similar reasons, the most intense development of Judaism occurs after the Maccabean revolt, when the military triumph of the racial remnant over its oppressors inspired a new and enduring enthusiasm.

On the other hand, foreign influences would chronically tend to promote doubt, especially where the foreigner was not a mere successful votary exalting his own God, but a sympathetic thinker questioning all the Godisms alike. This consideration is a reason the more for surmising a partly foreign source for the book of Job, where, as in the passage cited from Zephaniah, there is no thought of one deity being less potent than another, but rather an impeachment of divine rule in terms of a conceptual monotheism. In any case, the book stands for more than Jewish reverie; and where it is finally turned to an irrelevant and commonplace reaffirmation of the goodness of deity, a certain number of sincerer thinkers in all likelihood fell back on an “agnostic” solution of the eternal problem.

In certain aspects the book of Job speaks for a further reach of early freethinking than is seen in Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), which, however, at its lower level of conviction, tells of an unbelief that could not be overborne by any rhetoric. It unquestionably derives from late foreign influences. It is true that even in the book of [115]Malachi, which is commonly dated about 400 B.C., there is angry mention of some who ask, “Where is the God of judgment?” and say, “It is vain to serve God”;37 even as others had said it in the days of Assyrian oppression;38 but in Malachi these sentiments are actually associated with foreign influences, and in Koheleth such influences are implicit. By an increasing number of students, though not yet by common critical consent, the book is dated about 200 B.C., when Greek influence was stronger in Jewry than at any previous time.

But the thought of the book is, as Renan says, profoundly fatigued; and the sombre avowals of the absence of divine moral government are ill-balanced by sayings, probably interpolated by other hands, averring an ultimate rectification even on earth. What remains unqualified is the deliberate rejection of the belief in a future life, couched in terms that imply the currency of the doctrine;39 and the deliberate caution against enthusiasm in religion. Belief in a powerful but remote deity, with a minimum of worship and vows, is the outstanding lesson.40

That there was a good deal of this species of tired or stoical semi-rationalism among the Jews of the Hellenistic period may be inferred from various traces. The opening verses of the thirtieth chapter of the book of Proverbs, attributed to Agur, son of Jakeh, are admittedly the expression of a skeptic’s conviction that God cannot be known,41 the countervailing passages being plainly the additions of a believer. Agur’s utterances probably belong to the close of the third century B.C. Here, as in Job, there are signs of Arab influence;42 but at a later period the main source of skepticism for Israel was probably the Hellenistic civilization. It is told in the Talmud that in the Maccabean period there came into use the formula, “Cursed be the man that cherisheth swine; and cursed be the man that teacheth his son the wisdom of the Greeks”; and there is preserved the saying of Rabbi Simeon, son of Gamaliel, that in his father’s school five hundred learnt the law, and five hundred the wisdom of the Greeks.43 Before Gamaliel, the Greek influence had affected Jewish philosophic thought; and it is very probable that among the Sadducees who resisted the doctrine of resurrection there were some thinkers of the Epicurean school. To that school may have belonged the unbelievers who are struck at in several Rabbinical passages which account for the sin of Adam as beginning in a denial of the omnipresence of God, and describe Cain as having said: “There is no judgment; there is no world to come, and there is no reward for the just, and no punishment for the wicked.”44 But of Greek or other atheism there is no direct trace in the Hebrew literature;45 and the rationalism of the Sadducees, who were substantially the priestly party,46 was like the rationalism of the Brahmans and the Egyptian priests—something esoteric and withheld from the multitude. In the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, which belongs to the first century A.C., the [117]denial of immortality, so explicit in Ecclesiastes, is treated as a proof of utter immorality, though the deniers are not represented as atheists.47 They thus seem to have been still numerous, and the imputation of wholesale immorality to them is of course not to be credited;48 but there is no trace of any constructive teaching on their part.

So far as the literature shows, save for the confused Judaic-Platonism of Philo of Alexandria, there is practically no rational progress in Jewish thought after Koheleth till the time of contact with revived Greek thought in Saracen Spain. The mass of the people, in the usual way, are found gravitating to the fanatical and the superstitious levels of the current creed. The book of Ruth, written to resist the separatism of the post-Exilic theocracy,49 never altered the Jewish practice, though allowed into the canon. The remarkable Levitical legislation providing for the periodical restoration of the land to the poor never came into operation,50 any more than the very different provision giving land and cities to the children of Aaron and the Levites. None of the more rationalistic writings in the canon seems ever to have counted for much in the national life. To conceive of “Israel,” in the fashion still prevalent, as being typified in the monotheistic prophets, whatever their date, is as complete a misconception as it would be to see in Mr. Ruskin the expression of the everyday ethic of commercial England. The anti-sacrificial and universalist teachings in the prophets and in the Psalms never affected, for the people at large, the sacrificial and localized worship at Jerusalem; though they may have been esoterically received by some of the priestly or learned class there, and though they may have promoted a continual exodus of the less fanatical types, who turned to other civilizations. Despite the resistance of the Sadducees and the teaching of Job and Ecclesiastes, the belief in a resurrection rapidly gained ground51 in the two or three centuries before the rise of Jesuism, and furnished a basis for the new creed; as did the Messianic hope and the belief in a speedy ending of the world, with both of which Jewish fanaticism sustained itself under the long frustration of nationalistic faith before the Maccabean interlude and after the Roman conquest. It was in vain that the great teacher Hillel declared, “There is no Messiah for [118]Israel”; the rest of the race persisted in cherishing the dream.52 With the major hallucination thus in full possession, the subordinate species of superstition flourished as in Egypt and India; so that at the beginning of our era the Jews were among the most superstitious peoples in the world.53 When their monotheism was fully established, and placed on an abstract footing by the destruction of the temple, it seems to have had no bettering influence on the practical ethics of the Gentiles, though it may have furthered the theistic tendency of the Stoic philosophy. Juvenal exhibits to us the Jew proselyte at Rome as refusing to show an unbeliever the way, or guide him to a spring.54 Sectarian monotheism was thus in part on a rather lower ethical and intellectual55 plane than the polytheism, to say nothing of the Epicureanism or the Stoicism, of the society of the Roman Empire.

It cannot even be said that the learned Rabbinical class carried on a philosophic tradition, while the indigent multitude thus discredited their creed. In the period after the fall of Jerusalem, the narrow nationalism which had always ruled there seems to have been even intensified. In the Talmud “the most general representation of the Divine Being is as the chief Rabbi of Heaven; the angelic host being his assessors. The heavenly Sanhedrim takes the opinion of living sages in cases of dispute. Of the twelve hours of the day three are spent by God in study, three in the government of the world (or rather in the exercise of mercy), three in providing food for the world, and three in playing with Leviathan. But since the destruction of Jerusalem all amusements were banished from the courts of heaven, and three hours were employed in the instruction of those who had died in infancy.”56 So little can a nominal monotheism avail, on the basis of a completed Sacred Book, to keep thought sane when freethought is lacking.

Finally, Judaism played in the world’s thought the great reactionary and obscurantist part by erecting into a dogma the irrational conception that its deity made the universe “out of nothing.” At the time of the redaction of the book of Genesis this [119]dogma had not been glimpsed: the Hebrew conception was the Babylonian—that of a pre-existent Chaos put into shape. But gradually, in the interests of monotheism, the anti-scientific doctrine was evolved57 by way of negative to that of the Gentiles; and where the great line of Ionian thinkers passed on to the modern world the developed conception of an eternal universe,58 Judaism passed on through Christianity, as well as in its own “philosophy,” the contrary dogma, to bar the way of later science. [120]

By the tacit admission of one of the ablest opponents of the theory of foreign influence, Hellenic religion as fixed by Homer for the Hellenic world was partly determined by Asiatic influences. Ottfried Müller decided not only that Homer the man (in whose personality he believed) was probably a Smyrnean, whether of Æolic or Ionic stock,19 but that Homer’s religion must have represented [124]a special selection from the manifold Greek mythology, necessarily representing his local bias.20 Now, the Greek cults at Smyrna, as in the other Æolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor, would be very likely to reflect in some degree the influence of the Karian or other Asiatic cults around them.21 The early Attic conquerors of Miletos allowed the worship of the Karian Sun-God there to be carried on by the old priests; and the Attic settlers of Ephesos in the same way adopted the neighbouring worship of the Lydian Goddess (who became the Artemis or “Great Diana” of the Ephesians), and retained the ministry of the attendant priests and eunuchs.22 Smyrna was apparently not like these a mixed community, but one founded by Achaians from the Peloponnesos; but the genera] Ionic and Æolic religious atmosphere, set up by common sacrifices,23 must have been represented in an epic brought forth in that region. The Karian civilization had at one time spread over a great part of the Ægean, including Delos and Cyprus.24 Such a civilization must have affected that of the Greek conquerors, who only on that basis became civilized traders.25

It is not necessary to ask how far exactly the influence may have gone in the Iliad: the main point is that even at that stage of comparatively simple Hellenism the Asiatic environment, Karian or Phoenician, counted for something, whether in cosmogony or in furthering the process of God-grouping, or in conveying the cult of Cyprian Aphrodite,26 or haply in lending some characteristics to Zeus and Apollo and Athênê,27 an influence none the less real because the genius of the poet or poets of the Iliad has given to the whole Olympian group the artistic stamp of individuality which thenceforth distinguishes the Gods of Greece from all others. Indeed, the very creation of a graded hierarchy out of the independent local deities of Greece, the marrying of the once isolated Pelasgic Hêrê to Zeus, the subordination to him of the once isolated Athênê and Apollo—all this tells of the influence of a Semitic world in which each Baal had [125]his wife, and in which the monarchic system developed on earth had been set up in heaven.28 But soon the Asiatic influence becomes still more clearly recognizable. There is reason to hold with Schrader that the belief in a mildly blissful future state, as seen even in the Odyssey29 and in the Theogony ascribed to Hesiod,30 is “a new belief which is only to be understood in view of oriental tales and teaching.”31 In the Theogony, again, the Semitic element increases,32 Kronos being a Semitic figure;33 while Semelê, if not Dionysos, appears to be no less so.34 But we may further surmise that in Homer, to begin with, the conception of Okeanos, the earth-surrounding Ocean-stream, as the origin of all things,35 comes from some Semitic source; and that Hesiod’s more complicated scheme of origins from Chaos is a further borrowing of oriental thought—both notions being found in ancient Babylonian lore, whence the Hebrews derived their combination of Chaos and Ocean in the first verses of Genesis.36 It thus appears that the earlier oriental37 influence upon Greek thought was in the direction of developing religion,38 with only the germ of rationalism conveyed in the idea of an existence of matter before the Gods,39 which we shall later find scientifically developed. But the case is obscure. Insofar as the Theogony, for instance, partly moralizes the more primitively savage myths,40 it may be that it represents the spontaneous need of the more highly evolved race to give an acceptable meaning to divine tales which, coming from another race, have not a quite sacrosanct prescription, though the tendency is to [126]accept them. On the other hand, it may have been a further foreign influence that gave the critical impulse.

Whatever be the determining conditions, it is clear that the Homeric epos stands for a new growth of secular song, distinct from the earlier poetry, which by tradition was “either lyrical or oracular.” The poems ascribed to the pre-Homeric bards “were all short, and they were all strictly religious. In these features they contrasted broadly with the epic school of Homer. Even the hexameter metre seems not to have been used in these old hymns, and was called a new invention of the Delphic priests.41 Still further, the majority of these hymns are connected with mysteries apparently ignored by Homer, or with the worship of Dionysos, which he hardly knew.”42 Intermediate between the earlier religious poetry and the Homeric epic, then, was a hexametric verse, used by the Delphic priesthood; and to this order of poetry belongs the Theogony which goes under the name of Hesiod, and which is a sample of other and older works,43 probably composed by priests. And the distinctive mark of the Homeric epos is that, framed as it was to entertain feudal chiefs and their courts, it turned completely away from the sacerdotal norm and purpose. “Thus epic poetry, from having been purely religious, became purely secular. After having treated men and heroes in subordination to the Gods, it came to treat the Gods in relation to men. Indeed, it may be said of Homer that in the image of man created he God.”44

Still, it cannot be said that in the Iliad there is any clear hint of religious skepticism, though the Gods are so wholly in the likeness of men that the lower deities fight with heroes and are worsted, while Zeus and Hêrê quarrel like any earthly couple. In the Odyssey there is a bare hint of possible speculation in the use of the word atheos; but it is applied only in the phrase οὐκ ἀθεεὶ, “not without a God,”45 in the sense of similar expressions in other passages and in the Iliad.46 The idea was that sometimes the Gods directly meddled. When Odysseus accuses the suitors of not dreading the Gods,47 he has no thought of accusing them of unbelief.48 [128]Homer has indeed been supposed to have exercised a measure of relative freethought in excluding from his song the more offensive myths about the Gods,49 but such exclusion may be sufficiently explained on the score that the epopees were chanted in aristocratic dwellings, in the presence of womenkind, without surmising any process of doubt on the poet’s part.

On the other hand, it was inevitable that such a free treatment of things hitherto sacred should not only affect the attitude of the lay listener towards the current religion, but should react on the religious consciousness. God-legends so fully thrust on secular attention were bound to be discussed; and in the adaptations of myth for liturgical purposes by Stesichoros (fl. circa 600 B.C.) we appear to have the first open trace of a critical revolt in the Greek world against immoral or undignified myths.50 In his work, it is fair to say, we see “the beginning of rationalism”: “the decisive step is taken: once the understanding criticizes the sanctified tradition, it raises itself to be the judge thereof; no longer the common tradition but the individual conviction is the ground of religious belief.”51 Religious, indeed, the process still substantially is. It is to preserve the credit of Helena as a Goddess that Stesichoros repudiates the Homeric account of her,52 somewhat in the spirit in which the framers of the Hesiodic theogony manipulated the myths without rejecting them, or the Hebrew redactors tampered with their text. But in Stesichoros there is a new tendency to reject the myth altogether;53 so that at this stage freethought is still part of a process in which religious feeling, pressed by an advancing ethical consciousness, instinctively clears its standing ground.

It is in Pindar, however (518–442 B.C.), that we first find such a mental process plainly avowed by a believer. In his first Olympic Ode he expressly declares the need for bringing afterthought to bear on poetic lore, that so men may speak nought unfitting of the Gods; and he protests that he will never tell the tale of the blessed ones banqueting on human flesh.54 In the ninth Ode he again protests that his lips must not speak blasphemously of such a thing as strife among the immortals.55 Here the critical [129]motive is ethical, though, while repudiating one kind of scandal about the Gods, Pindar placidly accepts others no less startling to the modern sense. His critical revolt, in fact, is far from thoroughgoing, and suggests rather a religious man’s partial response to pressure from others than any independent process of reflection.56

For such a development we are not, of course, forced to assume a foreign influence: mere progress in refinement and in mental activity could bring it about; yet none the less it is probable that foreign influence did quicken the process. It is true that from the beginnings of the literary period Greek thought played with a certain freedom on myth, partly perhaps because the traditions visibly came from various races, and there was no strong priesthood to ossify them. After Homer and Hesiod, men looked back to those poets as shaping theology to their own minds.57 But all custom is conservative, and Pindar’s mind had that general cast. On the other hand, external influence was forthcoming. The period of Pindar and Æschylus [525–455 B.C.] follows on one in which Greek thought, stimulated on all sides, had taken the first great stride in its advance beyond all antiquity. Egypt had been fully thrown open to the Greeks in the reign of Psammetichos58 (650 B.C.); and a great historian, who contends that the “sheer inherent and expansive force” of “the” Greek intellect, “aided but by no means either impressed or provoked from without,” was the true cause, yet concedes that intercourse with Egypt “enlarged the range of [130]their thoughts and observations, while it also imparted to them that vein of mysticism which overgrew the primitive simplicity of the Homeric religion,” and that from Asia Minor in turn they had derived “musical instruments and new laws of rhythm and melody,” as well as “violent and maddening religious rites.”59 And others making similar à priori claims for the Greek intelligence are forced likewise to admit that the mental transition between Homer and Herodotos cannot be explained save in terms of “the influence of other creeds, and the necessary operation of altered circumstances and relations.”60 In the Persae of Æschylus we even catch a glimpse of direct contact with foreign skepticism;61 and again in the Agamemnon there is a reference to some impious one who denied that the Gods deigned to have care of mortals.62 It seems unwarrantable to read as “ridicule of popular polytheism” the passage in the same tragedy:63 “Zeus, whosoever he be; if this name be well-pleasing to himself in invocation, by this do I name him.” It may more fitly be read64 as an echo of the saying of Herakleitos that “the Wise [= the Logos?] is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.”65 But in the poet’s thought, as revealed in the Prometheus, and in the Agamemnon on the theme of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, there has occurred an ethical judgment of the older creeds, an approach to pantheism, a rejection of anthropomorphism, and a growth of pessimism that tells of their final insufficiency.

In this primary entrance of critical doubt into drama we have one of the sociological clues to the whole evolution of Greek thought. It has been truly said that the constant action of the tragic stage, the dramatic putting of arguments and rejoinders, pros and cons—which in turn was a fruit of the actual daily pleadings in the Athenian dikastery—was a manifold stimulus alike to ethical feeling and to intellectual effort, such as no other ancient civilization ever knew. “The appropriate subject-matter of tragedy is pregnant not only with ethical sympathy, but also with ethical debate and speculation,” to an extent unapproached in the earlier lyric and gnomic poetry and the literature of aphorism and precept. “In place of unexpanded results, or the mere communication of single-minded sentiment, we have even in Æschylus, the earliest of the great tragedians, a large latitude of dissent and debate—a shifting point of view—a case better or worse—and a divination of the future advent of sovereign and instructed reason. It was through the intermediate stage of tragedy that Grecian literature passed into the Rhetoric, Dialectics, and Ethical speculation which marked the fifth century B.C.”66 [134]

This development was indeed autochthonous, save insofar as the germ of the tragic drama may have come from the East in the cult of Dionysos, with its vinous dithyramb: the “Greek intellect” assuredly did wonderful things at Athens, being placed, for a time, in civic conditions peculiarly fitted for the economic evocation of certain forms of genius. But the above-noted developments in Pindar and in Æschylus had been preceded by the great florescence of early Ionian philosophy in the sixth century, a growth which constrains us to look once more to Asia Minor for a vital fructification of the Greek inner life, of a kind that Athenian institutions could not in themselves evoke. For while drama flourished supremely at Athens, science and philosophy grew up elsewhere, centuries before Athens had a philosopher of note; and all the notable beginnings of Hellenic freethought occurred outside of Hellas proper.

The Greeks varied from the general type of culture-evolution seen in India, Persia, Egypt, and Babylon, and approximated somewhat to that of ancient China, in that their higher thinking was done not by an order of priests pledged to cults, but by independent laymen. In Greece, as in China, this line of development is to be understood as a result of early political conditions—in China, those of a multiplicity of independent feudal States; in Greece, those of a multiplicity of City States, set up first by the geographical structure of Hellas, and reproduced in the colonies of Asia Minor and Magna Graecia by reason of the acquired ideal and the normal state of commercial competition. To the last, many Greek cults exhibited their original character as the sacra of private families. Such conditions prevented the growth of a priestly caste or organization.67 Neither China nor Pagan Greece was imperialized till there had arisen enough of rationalism to prevent the rise of a powerful priesthood; and the later growth of a priestly system in Greece in the Christian period is to be explained in terms first of a positive social degeneration, accompanying a complete transmutation of political life, and secondly of the imposition of a new cult, on the popular plane, specially [135]organized on the model of the political system that adopted it. Under imperialism, however, the two civilizations ultimately presented a singular parallel of unprogressiveness.

In the great progressive period, the possible gains from the absence of a priesthood are seen in course of realization. For the Greek-speaking world in general there was no dogmatic body of teaching, no written code of theology and moral law, no Sacred Book.68 Each local cult had its own ancient ritual, often ministered by priestesses, with myths, often of late invention, to explain it;69 only Homer and Hesiod, with perhaps some of the now lost epics, serving as a general treasury of myth-lore. The two great epopees ascribed to Homer, indeed, had a certain Biblical status; and the Homerids or other bards who recited them did what in them lay to make the old poetry the standard of theological opinion; but they too lacked organized influence, and could not hinder higher thinking.70 The special priesthood of Delphi, wielding the oracle, could maintain their political influence only by holding their function above all apparent self-seeking or effort at domination.71 It only needed, then, such civic conditions as should evolve a leisured class, with a bent towards study, to make possible a growth of lay philosophy.

Those conditions first arose in the Ionian cities; because there first did Greek citizens attain commercial wealth,72 as a result of adopting the older commercial civilization whose independent cities they conquered, and of the greater rapidity of development which belongs to colonies in general.73 There it was that, in matters of religion and philosophy, the comparison of their own cults with those of their foreign neighbours first provoked their critical reflection, as the age of primitive warfare passed away. And there it was, accordingly, that on a basis of primitive Babylonian science there originated with Thales of Miletos (fl. 586 B.C.), a Phoenician by descent,74 the higher science and philosophy of the Greek-speaking race.75 [136]

Thales, like Homer, starts from the Babylonian conception of a beginning of all things in water; but in Thales the immediate [137]motive and the sequel are strictly cosmological and neither theological nor poetical, though we cannot tell whether the worship of a God of the Waters may not have been the origin of a water-theory of the cosmos. The phrase attributed to him, “that all things are full of Gods,”76 clearly meant that in his opinion the forces of things inhered in the cosmos, and not in personal powers who spasmodically interfered with it.77 It is probable that, as was surmised by Plutarch, a pantheistic conception of Zeus existed for the Ionian Greeks before Thales.78 To the later doxographists he “seems to have lost belief in the Gods.”79 From the mere second-hand and often unintelligent statements which are all we have in his case, it is hard to make sure of his system; but that it was pantheistic80 and physicist seems clear. He conceived that matter not only came from but was resolvable into water; that all phenomena were ruled by law or “necessity”; and that the sun and planets (commonly regarded as deities) were bodies analogous to the earth, which he held to be spherical but “resting on water.”81 For the rest, he speculated in meteorology and in astronomy, and is credited with having predicted a solar eclipse 82—a fairly good proof of his knowledge of Chaldean science83—and with having introduced geometry into Greece from Egypt.84 To him, too, is ascribed a wise counsel to the Ionians in the matter of political federation,85 which, had it been followed, might have saved them from the Persian conquest; and he is one of the many early moralists who laid down the Golden Rule as the essence of the moral law.86 With his maxim, “Know thyself,” he seems to mark a broadly new departure in ancient thought: the balance of energy is shifted from myth and theosophy, prophecy and poesy, to analysis of consciousness and the cosmic process.

From this point Greek rationalism is continuous, despite reactions, till the Roman conquest, Miletos figuring long as a [138]general source of skepticism. Anaximandros (610–547 B.C.), pupil and companion of Thales, was like him an astronomer, geographer, and physicist, seeking for a first principle (for which he may or may not have invented the name87); rejecting the idea of a single primordial element such as water; affirming an infinite material cause, without beginning and indestructible,88 with an infinite number of worlds; and—still showing the Chaldean impulse—speculating remarkably on the descent of man from something aquatic, as well as on the form and motion of the earth (figured by him as a cylinder89), the nature and motions of the solar system, and thunder and lightning.90 It seems doubtful whether, as affirmed by Eudemus, he taught the doctrine of the earth’s motion; but that this doctrine was derived from the Babylonian schools of astronomy is so probable that it may have been accepted in Miletos in his day. Only by inferring a prior scientific development of remarkable energy can we explain the striking force of the sayings of Anaximandros which have come down to us. His doctrine of evolution stands out for us to-day like the fragment of a great ruin, hinting obscurely of a line of active thinkers. The thesis that man must have descended from a different species because, “while other animals quickly found food for themselves, man alone requires a long period of suckling: had he been originally such as he is now, he could never have survived,” is a quite masterly anticipation of modern evolutionary science. We are left asking, how came an early Ionian Greek to think thus, outgoing the assimilative power of the later age of Aristotle? Only a long scientific evolution can readily account for it; and only in the Mesopotamian world could such an evolution have taken place.91

Anaximenes (fl. 548 B.C.), yet another Milesian, pupil or at least follower in turn of Anaximandros, speculates similarly, making his infinite and first principle the air, in which he conceives the earth to be suspended; theorizes on the rainbow, earthquakes, the nature and the revolution of the heavenly bodies (which, with the earth, he supposed to be broad and flat); and affirms the eternity of [139]motion and the perishableness of the earth.92 The Ionian thought of the time seems thus to have been thoroughly absorbed in problems of natural origins, and only in that connection to have been concerned with the problems of religion. No dogma of divine creation blocked the way: the trouble was levity of hypothesis or assent. Thales, following a Semitic lead, places the source of all things in water. Anaximandros, perhaps following another, but seeking a more abstract idea, posited an infinite, the source of all things; and Anaximenes in turn reduces that infinite to the air, as being the least material of things. He cannot have anticipated the chemical conception of the reduction of all solids to gases: the thesis was framed either à priori or in adaptation of priestly claims for the deities of the elements; and others were to follow with the guesses of earth and fire and heat and cold. Still, the speculation is that of bold and far-grasping thinkers, and for these there can have been no validity in the ordinary God-ideas of polytheism.

There is reason to think that these early “schools” of thought were really constituted by men in some way banded together,93 thus supporting each other against the conservatism of religious ignorance. The physicians were so organized; the disciples of Pythagoras followed the same course; and in later Greece we shall find the different philosophic sects formed into societies or corporations. The first model was probably that of the priestly corporation; and in a world in which many cults were chronically disendowed it may well have been that the leisured old priesthoods, philosophizing as we have seen those of India and Egypt and Mesopotamia doing, played a primary part in initiating the work of rational secular thought.

What is clear is that the religious or theistic basis had ceased to [141]exist for many educated Greeks in that environment. The old God-ideas have disappeared, and a quasi-scientific attitude has been taken up. It is apparently conditioned, perhaps fatally, by prior modes of thought; but it operates in disregard of so-called religious needs, and negates the normal religious conception of earthly government or providence. Nevertheless, it was not destined to lead to the rationalization of popular thought; and only in a small number of cases did the scientific thinkers deeply concern themselves with the enlightenment of the mass.

In another Ionian thinker of that age, indeed, we find alongside of physical and philosophical speculation on the universe the most direct and explicit assault upon popular religion that ancient history preserves. Xenophanes of Kolophon (? 570–470), a contemporary of Anaximandros, was forced by a Persian invasion or by some revolution to leave his native city at the age of twenty-five; and by his own account his doctrines, and inferribly his life, had gone “up and down Greece”—in which we are to include Magna Graecia—for sixty-seven years at the date of writing of one of his poems.95 This was presumably composed at Elea (Hyela or Velia), founded about 536 B.C., on the western Italian coast, south of Paestum, by unsubduable Phokaians seeking a new home after the Persian conquest, and after they had been further defeated in the attempt to live as pirates in Corsica.96 Thither came the aged Xenophanes, perhaps also seeking freedom. He seems to have lived hitherto as a rhapsode, chanting his poems at the courts of tyrants as the Homerids did the Iliad. It is hard indeed to conceive that his recitations included the anti-religious passages which have come down to us; but his resort in old age to the new community of Elea is itself a proof of a craving and a need for free conditions of life.97

Setting out on his travels, doubtless, with the Ionian predilection for a unitary philosophy, he had somewhere and somehow attained a pantheism which transcended the concern for a “first principle”—if, indeed, it was essentially distinct from the doctrine of Anaximandros.98 “Looking wistfully upon the whole heavens,” says Aristotle,99 “he affirms that unity is God.” From the scattered [142]quotations which are all that remain of his lost poem, On Nature (or Natural Things),100 it is hard to deduce any full conception of his philosophy; but it is clear that it was monistic; and though most of his later interpreters have acclaimed him as the herald of monotheism, it is only in terms of pantheism that his various utterances can be reconciled. It is clearly in that sense that Aristotle and Plato101 commemorate him as the first of the Eleatic monists. Repeatedly he speaks of “the Gods” as well as of “God”; and he even inculcates the respectful worship of them.102 The solution seems to be that he thinks of the forces and phenomena of Nature in the early way as Gods or Powers, but resolves them in turn into a whole which includes all forms of power and intelligence, but is not to be conceived as either physically or mentally anthropomorphic. “His contemporaries would have been more likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else.”103

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Whether as teaching meant for public currency or as a philosophic message for the few, the pantheism of Xenophanes expressed itself in an attack on anthropomorphic religion, no less direct and much more ratiocinative than that of any Hebrew prophet upon idolatry. “Mortals,” he wrote, in a famous passage, “suppose that the Gods are born, and wear man’s clothing,104 and have voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and make works of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.” And again: “Ethiopians make their Gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have reddish hair and blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the Gods to be like themselves.”105 On Homer and Hesiod, the myth-singers, his attack is no less stringent: “They attributed to the Gods all things that with men are of ill-fame and blame; they told of them countless nefarious things—thefts, adulteries, and deception of each other.”106 It is recorded of him further that, like Epicurus, he absolutely rejected all divination.107 And when the Eleans, perhaps somewhat shaken by such criticism, asked him whether they should sacrifice and sing a dirge to Leukothea, the child-bereft Sea-Goddess, he bade them not to sing a dirge if they thought her divine, and not to sacrifice if she were human.108

Beside this ringing radicalism, not yet out of date, the physics of the Eleatic freethinker is less noticeable. His resort to earth as a material first principle was but another guess or disguised theosophy added to those of his predecessors, and has no philosophic congruity with his pantheism. It is interesting to find him reasoning from fossil-marks that what was now land had once been sea-covered, and been left mud; and that the moon is probably inhabited.109 Yet, with all this alertness of speculation, Xenophanes sounds the note of merely negative skepticism which, for lack of fruitful scientific research, was to become more and more common in Greek thought:110 “no man,” he avows in one verse, “knows truly anything, and no man ever will.”111 More fruitful was his pantheism or pankosmism. [144]“The All (οὖλος)” he declared, “sees, thinks, and hears.”112 “It was thus from Xenophanes that the doctrine of Pankosmism first obtained introduction into Greek philosophy, recognizing nothing real except the universe as an indivisible and unchangeable whole.”113 His negative skepticism might have guarded later Hellenes against baseless cosmogony-making if they had been capable of a systematic intellectual development. His sagacity, too, appears in his protest114 against that extravagant worship of the athlete which from first to last kept popular Greek life-philosophy unprogressive. But here least of all was he listened to.

It is after a generation of such persistent questioning of Nature and custom by pioneer Greeks that we find in Herakleitos of Ephesus (fl. 500 B.C.)—still in the Ionian culture-sphere—a positive and unsparing criticism of the prevailing beliefs. No sage among the Ionians (who had already produced a series of powerful thinkers) left a deeper impression than he of massive force and piercing intensity: above all of the gnomic utterances of his age, his have the ring of character and the edge of personality; and the gossiping Diogenes, after setting out by calling him the most arrogant of men, concedes that the brevity and weight of his expression are not to be matched. It was due rather to this, probably, than to his metaphysic—though that has an arresting quality—that there grew up a school of Herakliteans calling themselves by his name. And though doubt attaches to some of his sayings, and even to his date, there can be small question that he was mordantly freethinking, though a man of royal descent. He has stern sayings about “bringing forth untrustworthy witnesses to confirm disputed points,” and about eyes and ears being “bad witnesses for men, when their souls lack understanding.”115 “What can be seen, heard, and learned, this I prize,” is one of his declarations; and he is credited with contemning book-learning as having failed to give wisdom to Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hekataios.116 The belief in progress, he roundly insists, stops progress.117 From his cryptic utterances it maybe gathered that he too was a pantheist;118 and from his insistence on the immanence of strife in all things,119 as from others of his sayings, that he was of the Stoic mood. It was [145]doubtless in resentment of immoral religion that he said120 Homer and Archilochos deserved flogging; as he is severe on the phallic worship of Dionysos,121 on the absurdity of prayer to images, and on popular pietism in general.122 One of his sayings, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων,123 “character is a man’s dæmon,” seems to be the definite assertion of rationalism in affairs as against the creed of special providences.

Much discussion has been set up by the common attribution to Herakleitos in antiquity of the doctrine of the ultimate conflagration of all things. But for this there is no ground in any actual passage preserved from his works; and it appears to have been a mere misconception of his doctrine in regard to Fire. His monistic doctrine was, in brief, that all the opposing and contrasted things in the universe, heat and cold, day and night, evil and good, imply each other, and exist only in the relation of contrast; and he conceived fire as something in which opposites were solved.124 Upon this stroke of mysticism was concentrated the discussion which might usefully have been turned on his criticism of popular religion; his negative wisdom was substantially ignored, and his obscure speculation, treated as his main contribution to thought, was misunderstood and perverted.

A limit was doubtless soon set to free speech even in Elea; and the Eleatic school after Xenophanes, in the hands of his pupil Parmenides (fl. 500 B.C.), Zeno (fl. 464), Melissos of Samos (fl. 444), and their successors, is found turning first to deep metaphysic and then to verbal dialectic, to discussion on being and not being, the impossibility of motion, and the trick-problem of Achilles and the tortoise. It is conceivable that thought took these lines because others were socially closed. Parmenides, a notably philosophic spirit (whom Plato, meeting him in youth, felt to have “an exceptionally wonderful depth of mind,” but regarded as a man to be feared as well as reverenced),125 made short work of the counter-sense of not being, but does not seem to have dealt at close quarters with popular creeds. Melissos, a man of action, who led a successful sally to capture the Athenian fleet,126 was apparently the most pronounced freethinker of the three named,127 in that he said of the Gods “there was no need to define them, since there was no knowledge of them.”128 Such utterance could not be carried far in any Greek community; and there lacked the spirit of patient research which [147]might have fruitfully developed the notable hypothesis of Parmenides that the earth is spherical in form.129 But he too was a loose guesser, adding categories of fire and earth and heat and cold to the formative and material “principles” of his predecessors; and where he divagated weaker minds could not but lose themselves. From Melissos and Parmenides there is accordingly a rapid descent in philosophy to professional verbalism, popular life the while proceeding on the old levels.

It was in this epoch of declining energy and declining freedom that there grew up the nugatory doctrine, associated with the Eleatic school,130 that the only realities are mental,131 a formula which eluded at once the problems of Nature and the crudities of religion, and so made its fortune with the idle educated class. Meant to support the cause of reason, it was soon turned, as every slackly-held doctrine must be, to a different account. In the hands of Plato it developed into the doctrine of ideas, which in the later Christian world was to play so large a part, as “Realism,” in checking scientific thought; and in Greece it fatally fostered the indolent evasion of research in physics.132 Ultimately this made for supernaturalism, which had never been discarded by the main body even of rationalizing thinkers.133 Thus the geographer and historian Hekataios of Miletos (fl. 500 B.C.), living at the great centre of rationalism, while rejecting the mass of Greek fables as “ridiculous,” and proceeding in a fashion long popular to translate them into historical facts, yet affected, in the poetic Greek fashion, to be of divine descent.134 At the same time he held by such fables as that of the floating island in the Nile and that of the supernormal Hyperboreans. This blending of old and new habits of mind is indeed perhaps the strongest ground for affirming the genuineness of his fragments, which has been disputed.135 But from his time forward there are many signs of a broad movement of criticism, doubt, inquiry, and reconstruction, involving an extensive discussion of historical as well as religious tradition.136 There had begun, in short, for the rapidly-developing Greeks, a “discovery of man” such as is ascribed in later times to the age of the Italian Renaissance. In the next generation came the father of humanists, Herodotos, who [148]implicitly carries the process of discrimination still further than did Hekataios; while Sophocles [496–405 B.C.], without ever challenging popular faith, whether implicitly as did Æschylus, or explicitly as did Euripides, “brought down the drama from the skies to the earth; and the drama still follows the course which Sophocles first marked out for it. It was on the Gods, the struggles of the Gods, and on destiny that Æschylus dwelt; it is with man that Sophocles is concerned.”137

Still, there was only to be a partial enlightenment of the race, such as we have seen occurring, perhaps about the same period, in India. Sophocles, even while dramatizing the cruel consequences of Greek religion, never made any sign of being delivered from the ordinary Greek conceptions of deity, or gave any help to wiser thought. The social difference between Greece and the monarchic civilizations was after all only one of degree: there, as elsewhere, the social problem was finally unsolved; and the limits to Greek progress were soon approached. But the evolution went far in many places, and it is profoundly interesting to trace it.

Compared with the early Milesians and with Xenophanes, the elusive Pythagoras (fl. 540–510 B.C.) is not so much a rationalistic as a theosophic freethinker; but to freethought his name belongs insofar as the system connected with it did rationalize, and discarded mythology. If the biographic data be in any degree trustworthy, it starts like Milesian speculation from oriental precedents.138 Pythagoras was of Samos in the Ægean; and the traditions have it that he was a pupil of Pherekydes the Syrian, and that before settling at Krôton, in Italy, he travelled in Egypt, and had intercourse with the Chaldean Magi. Some parts of the Pythagorean code of life, at least, point to an eastern derivation.

As regards the mystic doctrine that numbers are, as it were, the moving principle in the cosmos—another thesis not unlikely to arise in that Babylonian world whence came the whole system of numbers for the later ancients139—we can but pronounce it a development of thought in vacuo, and look further for the source of Pythagorean influence in the moral and social code of the movement, in its science, in its pantheism,140 its contradictory dualism,141 and perhaps in its doctrine of transmigration of souls. On the side of natural science, its absurdities142 point to the fatal lack of observation which so soon stopped progress in Greek physics and biology.143 Yet in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, and the science of sound the school seems to have done good scientific work; being indeed praised by the critical Aristotle for doing special service in that way.144 It is recorded that Philolaos, the successor of Pythagoras, [150]was the first to teach openly (about 460 B.C.) the doctrine of the motion of the earth145—which, however, as above noted, was also said to have been previously taught by Anaximandros146 (from whom some incline to derive the Pythagorean theory of numbers in general147) and by Hiketas or Iketas (or Niketas) of Syracuse.148 Ekphantos, of that city, is also credited with asserting the revolution of the earth on its axis; and he too is grouped with the Pythagoreans, though he seems to have had a pantheism of his own.149 Philolaos in particular is said to have been prosecuted for his teaching,150 which for many was a blasphemy; and it may be that this was the reason of its being specially ascribed to him, though current in the East long before his day. In the fragments ascribed to him is affirmed, in divergence from other Pythagoreans, the eternity of the earth; and in other ways he seems to have been an innovator.151 In any case, the Pythagorean conception of the earth’s motion was a speculative one, wide of the facts, and not identical with the modern doctrine, save insofar as Pythagoras—or Philolaos—had rightly conceived the earth as a sphere.152

As to politics, finally, it seems hard to solve the anomaly that Pythagoras is pronounced the first teacher of the principle of community of goods,153 and that his adherents at Krôton formed an aristocratic league, so detested by the people for its anti-democratism that its members were finally massacred in their meeting-place, their leader, according to one tradition, being slain with them, while according to a better grounded account he had withdrawn and died at Metapontion. The solution seems to be [151]that the early movement was in no way monastic or communistic; that it was, however, a secret society; that it set up a kind of puritanism or “methodism” which repelled conservative people; and that, whatever its doctrines, its members were mostly of the upper class.154 If they held by the general rejection of popular religion attributed to Pythagoras, they would so much the more exasperate the demos; for though at Krôton, as in the other Grecian colonial cities, there was considerable freedom of thought and speech, the populace can nowhere have been freethinking.155 In any case, it was after its political overthrow, and still more in the Italian revival of the second century B.C., that the mystic and superstitious features of Pythagoreanism were most multiplied; and doubtless the master’s teachings were often much perverted by his devotees. It was only too easy. He had laid down, as so many another moralist, that justice consisted in reciprocity; but he taught of virtue in terms of his theory of numbers156—a sure way of putting conduct out of touch with reality. Thus we find some of the later Pythagoreans laying it down as a canon that no story once fully current concerning the Gods was to be disbelieved157—the complete negation of philosophical freethought and a sharp contradiction of the other view which represented the shade of Pythagoras as saying that he had seen in Tartaros the shade of Homer hanged to a tree, and that of Hesiod chained to a pillar of brass, for the monstrous things they had ascribed to the Gods.158 It must have taken a good deal of decadence to bring an innovating sect to that pass; and even about 200 B.C. we find the freethinking Ennius at Rome calling himself a Pythagorean;159 but the course of things in Magna Graecia was mostly downward after the sixth century; the ferocious destruction of Sybaris by the Krotoniates helping to promote the decline.160 Intellectual life, in Magna Graecia as in Ionia, obeyed the general tendency.

Before the decadence comes, however, the phenomenon of rationalism occurs on all sides in the colonial cities, older and younger alike; and direct criticism of creed kept pace with the indirect. About 520 B.C. Theagenes of Rhegion, in Southern Italy, had begun for the Greeks the process of reducing the unacceptable God-stories in Homer and Hesiod—notably the battle of the Gods in the Iliad—to mere allegories of the cosmic elements161—a device natural to and practised by liberal conservatives in all religious systems under stress of skeptical attack, and afterwards much employed in the Hellenic world.162 Soon the attack became more stringent. At Syracuse we find the great comic dramatist Epicharmos, about 470 B.C., treating the deities on the stage in a spirit of such audacious burlesque163 as must be held to imply unbelief. Aristophanes, at Athens, indeed, shows a measure of the same spirit while posing as a conservative in religion; but Epicharmos was professedly something of a Pythagorean and philosopher,164 and was doubtless protected by Hiero, at whose court he lived, against any religious resentment he may have aroused. The story of Simonides’s answer to Hiero’s question as to the nature of the Gods—first asking a day to think, then two days, then four, then avowing that meditation only made the problem harder165—points to the prevalent tone among the cultured.

At last the critical spirit finds utterance, in the great Periklean period, at Athens, but first by way of importation from Ionia, where Miletos had fallen in the year 494. Anaxagoras of Klazomenai (fl. 480–450 B.C.; d. 428) is the first freethinker historically known to have been legally prosecuted and condemned166 for his freethought; [153]and it was in the Athens of Perikles, despite Perikles’s protection, that the attack was made. Coming of the Ionian line of thinkers, and himself a pupil of Anaximenes of Miletos, he held firmly by the scientific view of the cosmos, and taught that the sun, instead of being animated and a deity as the Athenians believed, was “a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesos”167—and the moon a fiery (or earthy) solid body having in it plains and mountains and valleys—this while asserting that infinite mind was the source and introducer of all the motion in the infinite universe;168 infinite in extent and infinitely divisible. This “materialistic” doctrine as to the heavenly bodies was propounded, as Sokrates tells in his defence, in books that in his day anyone could buy for a drachma; and Anaxagoras further taught, like Theagenes, that the mythical personages of the poets were mere abstractions invested with name and gender.169 Withal he was no brawler; and even in pious Athens, where he taught in peace for many years, he might have died in peace but for his intimacy with the most renowned of his pupils, Perikles.

It is told of Perikles (499–429 B.C.) by the pious Plutarch, himself something of a believer in portents, that he greatly admired Anaxagoras, from whom he “seems to have learned to despise those superstitious fears which the common phenomena of the heavens produce in those who, ignorant of their cause, and knowing nothing about them, refer them all to the immediate action of the Gods.”170 And even the stately eloquence and imperturbable bearing of the great statesman are said to have been learned from the Ionian master, whom he followed in “adorning his oratory with apt illustrations from physical science.”171 The old philosopher, however, [154]whom men called “Nous” or Intelligence because of the part the name played in his teaching, left his property to go to ruin in his devotion to ideas; and it is told, with small probability, that at one time, old and indigent, he covered his head with his robe and decided to starve to death; till Perikles, hearing of it, hastened to beseech him to live to give his pupil counsel.172

At length it occurred to the statesman’s enemies to strike at him through his guide, philosopher, and friend. They had already procured the banishment of another of his teachers, Damon, as “an intriguer and a friend of despotism”;173 and one of their fanatics, Diopeithes, a priest and a violent demagogue,174 laid the way for an attack on Anaxagoras by obtaining the enactment of a law that “prosecutions should be laid against all who disbelieved in religion and held theories of their own about things on high.”175 Anaxagoras was thus open to indictment on the score alike of his physics and of his mythology; though, seeing that his contemporary Diogenes of Apollonia (who before Demokritos taught “nothing out of nothing: nothing into nothing,” and affirmed the sphericity of the earth) was also in some danger of his life at Athens,176 it is probable that the prosecution was grounded on his physicist teaching. Saved by Perikles from the death punishment, but by one account fined five talents,177 he either was exiled or chose to leave the intolerant city; and he made his home at Lampsakos, where, as the story runs, he won from the municipality the favour that every year the children should have a holiday in the month in which he died.178 It is significant of his general originality that he was reputed the first Greek who wrote a book in prose.179

Philosophically, however, he counted for less than he did as an innovating rationalist. His doctrine of Nous amounted in effect to a reaffirmation of deity; and he has been not unjustly described180 as the philosophic father of the dualistic deism or theism which, whether from within or from without the Christian system, has been the prevailing form of religious philosophy in the modern world. It was, in fact, the only form of theistic philosophy capable of winning any wide assent among religiously biassed minds; and it is the more remarkable that such a theist should have been prosecuted [155]because his notion of deity was mental, and excluded the divinization of the heavenly bodies.

In the memorable episode of his expulsion from Athens we have a finger-post to the road travelled later by Greek civilization. At Athens itself the bulk of the free population was ignorant and bigoted enough to allow of the law being used by any fanatic or malignant partisan against any professed rationalist; and there is no sign that Perikles dreamt of applying the one cure for the evil—the systematic bestowal of rationalistic instruction on all. The fatal maxim of ancient skepticism, that religion is a necessary restraint upon the multitude, brought it about that everywhere, in the last resort, the unenlightened multitude became a restraint upon reason and freethought.181 In the more aristocratically ruled colonial cities, as we have seen, philosophic speech was comparatively free: it was the ignorant Athenian democracy that brought religious intolerance into Greek life, playing towards science, in form of law, the part that the fanatics of Egypt and Palestine had played towards the worshippers of other Gods than their own.

With a baseness of which the motive may be divided between the instincts of faction and of faith, the anti-Periklean party carried their attack yet further; and on their behalf a comic playwright, Hermippos, brought a charge of impiety against the statesman’s unwedded wife, Aspasia.182 There can be no doubt that that famous woman cordially shared the opinions and ideals of her husband, joining as she habitually did in the philosophic talk of his home circle. As a Milesian she was likely enough to be a freethinker; and all that was most rational in Athens acknowledged her culture and her charm.183 Perikles, who had not taken the risk of letting Anaxagoras come to trial, himself defended Aspasia before the dikastery, his indignation breaking through his habitual restraint in a passion of tears, which, according to the jealous Æschines,184 won an acquittal.

Placed as he was, Perikles could but guard his own head and heart, leaving the evil instrument of a religious inquisition to subsist. How far he held with Anaxagoras we can but divine.185 There is probably no truth in Plutarch’s tale that “whenever he ascended [156]the tribune to speak he used first to pray to the Gods that nothing unfitted for the occasion might fall from his lips.”186 But as a party leader he, as a matter of course, observed the conventions; and he may have reasoned that the prosecutions of Anaxagoras and Aspasia, like that directed against Pheidias, stood merely for contemporary political malice, and not for any lasting danger to mental freedom. However that might be, Athens continued to remain the most aggressively intolerant and tradition-mongering of Hellenic cities. So marked is this tendency among the Athenians that for modern students Herodotos, whose history was published in 445 B.C., is relatively a rationalist in his treatment of fable,187 bringing as he did the spirit of Ionia into things traditional and religious. But even Herodotos remains wedded to the belief in oracles or prophecies, claiming fulfilment for those said to have been uttered by Bakis;188 and his small measure of spontaneous skepticism could avail little for critical thought. To no man, apparently, did it occur to resist the religious spirit by systematic propaganda: that, like the principle of representative government, was to be hit upon only in a later age.189 Not by a purely literary culture, relating life merely to poetry and myth, tradition and superstition, were men to be made fit to conduct a stable society. And the spirit of pious persecution, once generated, went from bad to worse, crowning itself with crime, till at length the overthrow of Athenian self-government wrought a forlorn liberty of scientific speech at the cost of the liberty of political action which is the basis of all sound life.

Whatever may have been the private vogue of freethinking at Athens in the Periklean period, it was always a popular thing to attack it. Some years before or after the death of Perikles there came to Athens the alien Hippo, the first specifically named atheist190 of Greek antiquity. The dubious tradition runs that his tomb bore the epitaph: “This is the grave of Hippo, whom destiny, in destroying him, has made the equal of the immortal Gods.”191 If, as seems likely, he was the Hippo of Rhegion mentioned by Hippolytos,192 he speculated as to physical origins in the manner of Thales, making water generate fire, and that in turn produce the world.193 But this [157]is uncertain. Upon him the comic muse of Athens turned its attacks very much as it did upon Socrates. The old comic poet Kratinos, a notorious wine-bibber, produced a comedy called The Panoptai (the “all-seers” or “all eyes”), in which it would appear that the chorus were made to represent the disciples of Hippo, and to wear a mask covered with eyes.194 Drunkenness was a venial fault in comparison with the presumption to speculate on physics and to doubt the sacred lore of the populace. The end of the rule of ignorance was that a theistic philosopher who himself discouraged scientific inquiry was to pay a heavier penalty than did the atheist Hippo.

While Athens was gaining power and glory and beauty without popular wisdom, the colonial city of Abdera, in Thrace, founded by Ionians, had like others carried on the great impulse of Ionian philosophy, and had produced in the fifth century some of the great thinkers of the race. Concerning the greatest of these, Demokritos, and the next in importance, Protagoras, we have no sure dates;195 but it is probable that the second, whether older or younger, was influenced by the first, who indeed has influenced all scientific philosophy down to our own day. How much he learned from his master Leukippos cannot now be ascertained.196 The writings which went under his name appear to have been the productions of the whole Abderite school;197 and Epicurus declared that Leukippos was an imaginary person.198 What passes for his teaching was constructive science of cardinal importance; for it is the first clear statement of the atomic theory; the substitution of a real for an abstract foundation of things. Whoever were the originator of the theory, there is no doubt as to the assimilation of the principle by Demokritos, who thus logically continued the non-theistic line of thought, and developed one of the most fruitful of all scientific principles. That this idea again is a direct development from Babylonian science is not impossible; at least there seems to be no doubt that Demokritos had travelled far and wide,199 whether or not he had been brought up, as the tradition goes, by Persian magi;200 and that he told how the cosmic views of Anaxagoras, [158]which scandalized the Athenians, were current in the East.201 But he stands out as one of the most original minds in the whole history of thought. No Greek thinker, not Aristotle himself, has struck so deep as he into fundamental problems; though the absurd label of “the laughing philosopher,” bestowed on him by some peculiarly unphilosophic mind, has delayed the later recognition of his greatness, clear as it was to Bacon.202 The vital maxim, “Nothing from nothing: nothing into nothing,” derives substantially from him.203

His atomic theory, held in conjunction with a conception of “mind-stuff” similar to that of Anaxagoras, may be termed the high-water mark of ancient scientific thought; and it is noteworthy that somewhat earlier in the same age Empedokles of Agrigentum, another product of the freer colonial life, threw out a certain glimmer of the Darwinian conception—perhaps more clearly attained by Anaximandros—that adaptations prevail in nature just because the adaptations fit organisms to survive, and the non-adapted perish.204 In his teaching, too, the doctrine of the indestructibility of matter is clear and firm;205 and the denial of anthropomorphic deity is explicit.206 But Empedokles wrought out no solid system: “half-mystic and half-rationalist, he made no attempt to reconcile the two inconsistent sides of his intellectual character”;207 and his explicit teaching of metempsychosis208 and other Pythagoreanisms gave foothold for more delusion than he ever dispelled.209 On the whole, he is one of the most remarkable personalities of antiquity, moving among men with a pomp and gravity which made them think of him as a God, denouncing their sacrifices, and no less their eating of flesh; and checking his notable self-exaltation by recalling the general littleness of men. But he did little to enlighten them; and Aristotle passed on to the world a fatal misconception of his thought by ascribing to him the notion of automatism where he was asserting a “necessity” in terms of laws which he avowedly could not explain.210 Against such misconception he should have provided. Demokritos, however, shunned dialectic and discussion, and founded no school;211 and although his atomism was later adopted by Epicurus, it was no [159]more developed on a basis of investigation and experiment than was the biology of Empedokles. His ethic, though wholly rationalistic, leant rather to quietism and resignation than to reconstruction,212 and found its application only in the later static message of Epicurus. Greek society failed to set up the conditions needed for progress beyond the point gained by its unguided forces.

Thus when Protagoras ventured to read, at the house of the freethinking Euripides, a treatise of his own, beginning with the avowal that he offered no opinion as to the existence of the Gods, life being too short for the inquiry,213 the remark got wind, and he had to fly for his life, though Euripides and perhaps most of the guests were very much of the same way of thinking.214 In the course of his flight, the tradition goes, the philosopher was drowned;215 and his book was publicly burned, all who possessed copies being ordered by public proclamation to give them up—the earliest known instance of “censorship of the press.”216 Partisan malice was doubtless at work in his case as in that of Anaxagoras; for the philosophic doctrine of Protagoras became common enough. It is not impossible, though the date is doubtful, that the attack on him was one of the results of the great excitement in Athens in the year 415 B.C. over the sacrilegious mutilation of the figures of Hermes, the familial or boundary-God, in the streets by night. It was about that time that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no Gods.217 It has been surmised, with some reason, that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians in 416 B.C.,218 and the Athenian resentment in that case was personal and political rather than religious.219 For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries (resembling the mock Masses of Catholic Europe) were alleged against Alkibiades and others.220 Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the God thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking [160]turnips,221 became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world,222 and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive;223 despite which he seems to have escaped. But no antidote to the bane of fanaticism was found or sought; and the most famous publicist in Athens was the next victim.

The fatality of the Athenian development is seen not only in the direct hostility of the people to rational thought, but in their loss of their hold even on their public polity. For lack of political judgment, moved always by the passions which their literary culture cherished, they so mishandled their affairs in the long and demoralizing Peloponnesian war that they were at one time cowed by their own aristocracy, on essentially absurd pretexts, into abandoning the democratic constitution. Its restoration was followed at the final crisis by another tyranny, also short-lived, but abnormally bloody and iniquitous; and though the people at its overthrow showed a moderation in remarkable contrast to the cruelty and rapacity of the aristocrats, the effect of such extreme vicissitude was to increase the total disposition towards civic violence and coercion. And while the people menaced freethinking in religion, the aristocracies opposed freethinking in politics. Thus under the Thirty Tyrants all intellectual teaching was forbidden; and Kritias, himself accused of having helped Alkibiades to parody the mysteries, sharply interdicted the political rationalism of Sokrates,224 who according to tradition had been one of his own instructors.

It was a result of the general movement of mind throughout the rest of the Hellenic world that freethinkers of culture were still numerous. Archelaos of Miletos, the most important disciple of Anaxagoras; according to a late tradition, the master of Sokrates; and the first systematic teacher of Ionic physical science in Athens, taught the infinity of the universe, grasped the explanation of the nature of sound, and set forth on purely rationalistic lines the social origin and basis of morals, thus giving Sokrates his practical lead.225 [161]Another disciple of Anaxagoras, Metrodoros of Lampsakos (not to be confounded with Metrodoros of Chios, and the other Metrodoros of Lampsakos who was the friend of Epicurus, both also freethinkers), carried out zealously his master’s teaching as to the deities and heroes of Homer, resolving them into mere elemental combinations and physical agencies, and making Zeus stand for mind, and Athenê for art.226 And in the belles lettres of Athens itself, in the dramas of Euripides [480–406 B.C.], who is said to have been the ardent disciple of Anaxagoras,227 to have studied Herakleitos,228 and to have been the friend of Sokrates and Protagoras, there emerge traces enough of a rationalism not to be reconciled with the old belief in the Gods. If Euripides has nowhere ventured on such a terrific paradox as the Prometheus, he has in a score of passages revealed a stress of skepticism which, inasmuch as he too uses all the forms of Hellenic faith,229 deepens our doubt as to the beliefs of Æschylus. Euripides even gave overt proof of his unbelief, beginning his Melanippe with the line: “Zeus, whoever Zeus be, for I know not, save by report,” an audacity which evoked a great uproar. In a later production the passage was prudently altered;230 but he never put much check on his native tendency to analyse and criticize on all issues—a tendency fostered, as we have seen,231 by the constant example of real and poignant dialectic in the Athenian dikastery, and the whole drift of the Athenian stage. In his case the tendency even overbalances the artistic process;232 but it has the advantage of involving a very bold handling of vital problems. Not satisfied with a merely dramatic presentment of lawless Gods, Euripides makes his characters impeach them as such,233 or, again, declare that there can be no truth in the “miserable tales of poets” which so represent them.234 Not content with putting aside as idle such a fable as that of the sun’s swerving from his course in horror at the crime of Atreus,235 and that of the Judgment of Paris,236 he [162]attacks with a stringent scorn the whole apparatus of oracles, divination, and soothsaying.237 And if the Athenian populace cried out at the hardy opening of the Melanippe, he nonetheless gave them again and again his opinion that no man knew anything of the Gods.238 Of orthodox protests against freethinking inquiry he gives a plainly ironical handling.239 As regards his constructive opinions, we have from him many expressions of the pantheism which had by his time permeated the thought of perhaps most of the educated Greeks.240

Here again, as in the case of Æschylus, there arises the problem of contradiction; for Euripides, too, puts often in the mouths of his characters emphatic expressions of customary piety. The conclusion in the two cases must be broadly the same—that whereas an unbelieving dramatist may well make his characters talk in the ordinary way of deity and of religion, it is unintelligible that a believing one should either go beyond the artistic bounds of his task to make them utter an unbelief which must have struck the average listener as strange and noxious, or construct a drama of which the whole effect is to insist on the odiousness of the action of the Supreme God. And the real drift of Euripides is so plain that one modern and Christian scholar has denounced him as an obnoxious and unbelieving sophist who abused his opportunity as a producer of dramas under religious auspices to “shake the ground-works of religion”241 and at the same time of morals;242 while another and a greater scholar, less vehement in his orthodoxy, more restrainedly condemns the dramatist for employing myths in which he did not believe, instead of inventing fresh plots.243 Christian scholars are thus duly unready to give him credit for his many-sided humanity, nobly illustrated in his pleas for the slave and his sympathy with suffering barbarians.244 Latterly the recognition of Euripides’s freethinking has led to the description of him as “Euripides the Rationalist,” in a treatise which represents him as a systematic assailant of the religion of his day. Abating somewhat of that thesis, which imputes more of system to the Euripidean [163]drama than it possesses, we may sum up that the last of the great tragedians of Athens, and the most human and lovable of the three, was assuredly a rationalist in matters of religion. It is noteworthy that he used more frequently than any other ancient dramatist the device of a deus ex machina to end a play.245 It was probably because for him the conception had no serious significance.246 In the Alkestis its [non-mechanical] use is one of the most striking instances of dramatic irony in all literature. The dead Alkestis, who has died to save the life of her husband, is brought back from the Shades by Herakles, who figures as a brawling bully. Only the thinkers of the time could realize the thought that underlay such a tragi-comedy.

But while Euripides must thus have made a special appeal to the reflecting minority even in his own day, it is clear that he was not at first popular with the many; and his efforts, whatever he may have hoped to achieve, could not suffice to enlighten the democracy. The ribald blasphemies of his enemy, the believing Aristophanes,247 could avail more to keep vulgar religion in credit than the tragedian’s serious indictment could effect against it; and they served at the same time to belittle Euripides for the multitude in his own day. Aristophanes is the typical Tory in religion; non-religious himself, like Swift, he hates the honestly anti-religious man; and he has the crowd with him. The Athenian faith, as a Catholic scholar remarks,248 “was more disposed to suffer the buffooneries of a comedian than the serious negation of a philosopher.” The average Greek seemed to think that the grossest comic impiety did no harm, where serious negation might cause divine wrath.249 And so there came no intellectual salvation for Athens from the drama which was her unique achievement. The balance of ignorance and culture was not changed. Evidently there was much rationalism among the studious few. Plato in the Laws250 speaks both of the man-about-town type of freethinker and of those who, while they believe in no Gods, live well and wisely and are in good repute. But with Plato playing the superior mind and encouraging his fellow-townsmen to believe in the personality of the sun, moon, and planets, credulity could easily keep the upper hand.251 The people remained politically unwise and religiously superstitious, the social struggle perpetuating the division between leisure and toil, even apart from the life of the mass of slaves; while the eternal pre-occupation of militarism left even the majority of the upper class at the intellectual level natural to military life in all ages. There came, however, a generation of great intellectual [168]splendour following on that of the supreme development of drama just before the fall of Greek freedom. Athens had at last come into the heritage of Greek philosophic thought; and to the utterance of that crowning generation the human retrospect has turned ever since. This much of renown remains inalienable from the most renowned democracy of the ancient world.

The wide subject of the teaching of Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle must here be noticed briefly, with a view only to our special inquiry. All three must be inscribed in any list of ancient freethinkers; and yet all three furthered freethought only indirectly, the two former being in different degrees supernaturalists, while the last touched on religious questions only as a philosopher, avoiding all question of practical innovation.

1. Sokrates [468–399] was fundamentally and practically a freethinker, insofar as in most things he thought for himself, definitely turning away from the old ideal of mere transmitted authority in morals.252 Starting in all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, he at least repudiated all dogmatics.253 Being, however, preoccupied with public life and conduct, he did not carry [169]his critical thinking far beyond that sphere. In regard to the extension of solid science, one of the prime necessities of Greek intellectual life, he was quite reactionary, drawing a line between the phenomena which he thought intelligible and traceable and those which he thought past finding out. “Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious.”254 Yet at the same time he formulated, apparently of his own motion, the ordinary design argument.255 The sound scientific view led up to by so many previous thinkers was set forth, even in religious phraseology, by his great contemporary Hippokrates,256 and he opposed it. While partially separating himself in practice from the popular worships, he held by the belief in omens, though not in all the ordinary ones; and in one of the Platonic dialogues he is made to say he holds by the ordinary versions of all the myths, on the ground that it is a hopeless task to find rational explanations for them.257 He hoped, in short, to rationalize conduct without seeking to rationalize creed—the dream of Plato and of a thousand religionists since.

He had indeed the excuse that the myth-rationalizers of the time after Hekataios, following the line of least psychic resistance, like those of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, explained away myths by reducing them to hypothetical history, thus asking credence for something no better verified than the myth itself. But the rationalizers were on a path by which men might conceivably have journeyed to a truer science; and Sokrates, by refusing to undertake any such exploration,258 left his countrymen to that darkening belief in tradition which made possible his own execution. There was in his cast of mind, indeed—if we can at all accept Plato’s presentment of him—something unfavourable to steady conviction. He cannot have had any real faith in the current religion; yet he never explicitly dissented. In the Republic he accepts the new festival to the Thracian Goddess Bendis; and there he is made by Plato to inculcate a quite orthodox acceptance of the Delphic oracle as the source of all religious practice. But it is impossible to say how much of the teaching of the Platonic Sokrates is Sokratic. And as to Plato there remains the problem of how far his conformities were prudential, after the execution of Sokrates for blasphemy. [170]

Concerning Sokrates we have Xenophon’s circumstantial account259 of how he reasoned with Aristodemos, “surnamed the Little,” who “neither prayed nor sacrificed to the Gods, nor consulted any oracle, and ridiculed those who did.” Aristodemos was a theist, believing in a “Great Architect” or “Artist,” or a number of such powers—on this he is as vague as the ancient theists in general—but does not think the heavenly powers need his devotions. Sokrates, equally vague as to the unity or plurality of the divine, puts the design argument in the manner familiar throughout the ages,260 and follows it up with the plea, among others, that the States most renowned for wisdom and antiquity have always been the most given to pious practices, and that probably the Gods will be kind to those who show them respect. The whole philosopheme is pure empiricism, on the ordinary plane of polytheistic thought, and may almost be said to exhibit incapacity for the handling of philosophic questions, evading as it does even the elementary challenge of Aristodemos, against whom Sokrates parades pious platitudes without a hint of “Sokratic” analysis. Unless such a performance were regarded as make-believe, it is difficult to conceive how Athenian pietists could honestly arraign Sokrates for irreligion while Aristodemos and others of his way of thinking went unmolested.

Taken as illustrating the state of thought in the Athenian community, the trial and execution of Sokrates for “blasphemy” and “corrupting the minds of the young” go far to prove that there [171]prevailed among the upper class in Athens nearly as much hypocrisy in religious matters as exists in the England of to-day. Doubtless he was liable to death from the traditionally orthodox Greek point of view,261 having practically turned aside from the old civic creed and ideals; but then most educated Athenians had in some degree done the same.262 Euripides, as we have seen, is so frequently critical of the old theology and mythology in his plays that he too could easily have been indicted; and Aristophanes, who attacked Euripides in his comedies as scurrilously as he did Sokrates, would no doubt have been glad to see him prosecuted.263 The psychology of Aristophanes, who freely ridiculed and blasphemed the Gods in his own comedies while reviling all men who did not believe in them, is hardly intelligible save in the light of parts of the English history of our own time, when unbelieving indifferentists on the Conservative side have been seen ready to join in turning the law against a freethinking publicist for purely party ends. In the case of Sokrates the hostility was ostensibly democratic, for, according to Æschines, Sokrates was condemned because he had once given lessons to Kritias,264 one of the most savage and unscrupulous of the Thirty Tyrants. Inasmuch as Kritias had become entirely alienated from Sokrates, and had even put him to silence, such a ground of hostility would only be a fresh illustration of that collective predilection of men to a gregarious iniquity which is no less noteworthy in the psychology of groups than their profession of high moral standards. And such proclivities are always to be reckoned with in such episodes. Anytos, the leading prosecutor, seems to have been a typical bigot, brainless, spiteful, and thoroughly self-satisfied. Not only party malice, however, but the individual dislikes which Sokrates so industriously set up,265 must have counted for much in securing the small majority of the dikastery that pronounced him guilty—281 to 276; and his own clear preference for death over any sort of compromise did the rest.266 He was old, and little [172]hopeful of social betterment; and the temperamental obstinacy which underlay his perpetual and pertinacious debating helped him to choose a death that he could easily have avoided. But the fact remains that he was not popular; that the mass of the voters as well as of the upper class disliked his constant cross-examination of popular opinion,267 which must often have led logical listeners to carry on criticism where he left off; and that after all his ratiocination he left Athens substantially irrational, as well as incapable of justice, on some essential issues. His dialectic method has done more to educate the later world than it did for Greece.

In view of the limitations of Sokrates, and the mental measure of those who voted for putting him to death, it is not surprising that through all Greek history educated men (including Aristotle) continued to believe firmly in the deluge of Deukalion268 and the invasion of the Amazons269 as solid historical facts. Such beliefs, of course, are on all fours with those current in the modern religious world down till the present century: we shall, in fact, best appraise the rationality of Greece by making such comparisons. The residual lesson is that where Greek reason ended, modern social science had better be regarded as only beginning. Thukydides, the greatest of all the ancient historians, and one of the great of all time, treated human affairs in a spirit so strictly rationalistic that he might reasonably be termed an atheist on that score even if he had not earned the name as a pupil of Anaxagoras.270 But his task was to chronicle a war which proved that the Greeks were to the last children of instinct for the main purposes of life, and that the rule of reason which they are credited with establishing271 was only an [174]intermittent pastime. In the days of Demosthenes we still find them politically consulting the Pythian oracle, despite the consciousness among educated men that the oracle is a piece of political machinery. We can best realize the stage of their evolution by first comparing their public religious practice with that of contemporary England. No one now regards the daily prayers of the House of Commons as more than a reverent formality. But Nikias at Syracuse staked the fortunes of war on the creed of omens. We can perhaps finally conceive with fair accuracy the subordination of Greek culture and politics to superstition by likening the thought-levels of pre-Alexandrian Athens to those of England under Cromwell.

2. The decisive measure of Greek accomplishment is found in the career of Plato [429–347]. One of the great prose writers of the world, he has won by his literary genius—that is, by his power of continuous presentation as well as by his style—no less than by his service to supernaturalist philosophy in general, a repute above his deserts as a thinker. In Christian history he is the typical philosopher of Dualism,272 his prevailing conception of the universe being that of an inert Matter acted on or even created by a craftsman-God, the “Divine Artificer,” sometimes conceived as a Logos or divine Reason, separately personalized. Thus he came to be par excellence the philosopher of theism, as against Aristotle and those of the Pythagoreans who affirmed the eternity of the universe.273 In the history of freethought he figures as a man of genius formed by Sokrates and reflecting his limitations, developing the Sokratic dialectic on the one hand and finally emphasizing the Sokratic dogmatism to the point of utter bigotry. If the Athenians are to be condemned for putting Sokrates to death, it must not be forgotten that the spirit, if not the letter, of the Laws drawn up by Plato in his old age fully justified them.274 That code, could it ever have been put in force, would have wrought the death of every honest freethinker as well as most of the ignorant believers within its sphere. Alone among the great serious writers of Greece does he implicate Greek thought in the gospel of intolerance passed on to modern Europe from antiquity. It is recorded of him275 that he wished to [175]burn all the writings of Demokritos that he could collect, and was dissuaded only on the score of the number of copies.

What was best in Plato, considered as a freethinker, was his early love of ratiocination, of “the rendering and receiving of reasons.” Even in his earlier dialogues, however, there are signs enough of an arbitrary temper, as well as of an inability to put science in place of religious prejudice. The obscurantist doctrine which he put in the mouth of Sokrates in the Phædrus was also his own, as we gather from the exposition in the Republic. In that brilliant performance he objects, as so many believers and freethinkers had done before him, to the scandalous tales in the poets concerning the Gods and the sons of Gods; but he does not object to them as being untrue. His position is that they are unedifying.276 For his own part he proposes that his ideal rulers frame new myths which shall edify the young: in his Utopia it is part of the business of the legislator to choose the right fictions;277 and the systematic imposition of an edifying body of pious fable on the general intelligence is part of his scheme for the regeneration of society.278 Honesty is to be built up by fraud, and reason by delusion. What the Hebrew Bible-makers actually did, Plato proposed to do. The one thing to be said in his favour is that by thus telling how the net is to be spread in the sight of the bird he put the decisive obstacle—if any were needed—in the way of his plan. It is, indeed, inconceivable that the author of the Republic and the Laws dreamt that either polity as a whole would ever come into existence. His plans of suppressing all undesirable poetry, arranging community of women, and enabling children to see battles, are the fancy-sketches of a dilettant. He had failed completely as a statesman in practice; as a schemer he does not even posit the first conditions of success.

Nonetheless, the prescription of intolerance in the Laws279 classes Plato finally on the side of fanaticism, and, indeed, ranks him with the most sinister figures on that side, since his earlier writing shows that he would be willing to punish men alike for repeating stories which they believed, and for rejecting what he knew to be untruths.280 By his own late doctrine he vindicated the slayers of his own friend. His psychology is as strange as that of Aristophanes, but strange with a difference. He seems to have practised “the will to believe” till he grew to be a fanatic on the plane of the most ignorant of orthodox Athenians; and after all that science had done to enlighten men on that natural order the misconceiving of which had been the foundation of their creeds, he inveighs furiously in his old age against the impiety of those who dared to doubt that the sun and moon and stars were deities, as every nurse taught her charges.281 And when all is said, his Gods satisfy no need of the intelligence; for he insists that they only partially rule the world, sending the few good things, but not the many evil282—save insofar as evil may be a beneficent penalty and discipline. At the same time, while advising the imprisonment or execution of heretics who did not believe in the Gods, Plato regarded with even greater detestation the man who taught that they could be persuaded or propitiated by individual prayer and sacrifice.283 Thus he would have struck alike at the freethinking few and at the multitude who held by the general religious beliefs of Greece, dealing damnation on all save his own clique, in a way that would have made Torquemada blench.284 In the face of such teaching as this, it may well be said that “Greek philosophy made incomparably greater advances in the earlier polemic period [of the Ionians] than after its friendly return to [177]the poetry of Homer and Hesiod”285—that is, to their polytheistic basis. It is to be said for Plato, finally, that his embitterment at the downward course of things in Athens is a quite intelligible source for his own intellectual decadence: a very similar spectacle being seen in the case of our own great modern Utopist, Sir Thomas More. But Plato’s own writing bears witness that among the unbelievers against whom he declaimed there were wise and blameless citizens;286 while in the act of seeking to lay a religious basis for a good society he admitted the fundamental immorality of the religious basis of the whole of past Greek life.

3. Aristotle [384–322], like Sokrates, albeit in a very different way, rendered rather an indirect than a direct service to Freethought. Where Sokrates gave the critical or dialectic method or habit, “a process of eternal value and of universal application,”287 Aristotle supplied the great inspiration of system, partly correcting the Sokratic dogmatism on the possibilities of science by endless observation and speculation, though himself falling into scientific dogmatism only too often. That he was an unbeliever in the popular and Platonic religion is clear. Apart from the general rationalistic tenor of his works,288 there was a current understanding that the Peripatetic school denied the utility of prayer and sacrifice;289 and though the essentially partisan attempt of the anti-Macedonian party to impeach him for impiety may have turned largely on his hyperbolic hymn to his dead friend Hermeias (who was a eunuch, and as such held peculiarly unworthy of being addressed as on a level with semi-divine heroes),290 it could hardly have been undertaken at all unless he had given solider pretexts. The threatened prosecution he avoided by leaving the city, dying shortly afterwards. Siding as he did with the Macedonian faction, he had put himself out of touch with the democratic instincts of the Athenians, and so doubly failed to affect their thinking. But nonetheless the attack upon him by the democrats was a political stratagem. The prosecution for blasphemy had now become a recognized weapon in politics for all who had more piety than principle, and perhaps for some who had neither. And Aristotle, well aware of the temper of the [178]population around him, had on the whole been so guarded in his utterance that a fantastic pretext had to be fastened on for his undoing.

It is clear, nevertheless, if we can be sure of his writings, that he was a monotheist, but a monotheist with no practical religion. “Excluding such a thing as divine interference with Nature, his theology, of course, excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace.”291 In a passage in the Metaphysics, after elaborating his monistic conception of Nature, he dismisses in one or two terse sentences the whole current religion as a mass of myth framed to persuade the multitude, in the interest of law and order.292 His influence must thus have been to some extent, at least, favourable to rational science, though unhappily his own science is too often a blundering reaction against the surmises of earlier thinkers with a greater gift of intuition than he, who was rather a methodizer than a discoverer.293 What was worst in his thinking was its tendency to [179]apriorism, which made it in a later age so adaptable to the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus his doctrines of the absolute levity of fire and of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum set up a hypnotizing verbalism, and his dictum that the earth is the centre of the universe was fatally helpful to Christian obscurantism. For the rest, while guiltless of Plato’s fanaticism, he had no scheme of reform whatever, and was as far as any other Greek from the thought of raising the mass by instruction. His own science, indeed, was not progressive, save as regards his collation of facts in biology; and his political ideals were rather reactionary; his clear perception of the nature of the population problem leaving him in the earlier attitude of Malthus, and his lack of sympathetic energy making him a defender of slavery when other men had condemned it.294 He was in some aspects the greatest brain of the ancient world; and he left it, at the close of the great Grecian period, without much faith in man, while positing for the modern world its vaguest conception of Deity. Plato and Aristotle between them had reduced the ancient God-idea to a thin abstraction. Plato would not have it that God was the author of evil, thus leaving evil unaccounted for save by sorcery. Aristotle’s God does nothing at all, existing merely as a potentiality of thought. And yet upon those positions were to be founded the theisms of the later world. Plato had not striven, and Aristotle had failed, to create an adequate basis for thought in real science; and the world gravitated back to religion.

The overthrow of the “free” political life of Athens was followed by a certain increase in intellectual activity, the result of throwing back the remaining store of energy on the life of the mind. By this time an almost open unbelief as to the current tales concerning the Gods would seem to have become general among educated people, the withdrawal of the old risk of impeachment by political factions being so far favourable to outspokenness. It is on record that the historian Ephoros (of Cumæ in Æolia: fl. 350 B.C.), who was a pupil of Isocrates, openly hinted in his work at his disbelief in the oracle of Apollo, and in fabulous traditions generally.295 In other directions there were similar signs of freethought. The new schools of philosophy founded by Zeno the Stoic (fl. 280: d. 263 or 259) [181]and Epicurus (341–270), whatever their defects, compare not ill with those of Plato and Aristotle, exhibiting greater ethical sanity and sincerity if less metaphysical subtlety. Of metaphysics there had been enough for the age: what it needed was a rational philosophy of life. But the loss of political freedom, although thus for a time turned to account, was fatal to continuous progress. The first great thinkers had all been free men in a politically free environment: the atmosphere of cowed subjection, especially after the advent of the Romans, could not breed their like; and originative energy of the higher order soon disappeared. Sane as was the moral philosophy of Epicurus, and austere as was that of Zeno, they are alike static or quietist,296 the codes of a society seeking a regulating and sustaining principle rather than hopeful of new achievement or new truth. And the universal skepticism of Pyrrho has the same effect of suggesting that what is wanted is not progress, but balance. It is significant that he, who carried the Sokratic profession of Nescience to the typical extreme of doctrinal Nihilism, was made high-priest of his native town of Elis, and had statues erected in his honour.297

Considered as freethinkers, all three men tell at once of the critical and of the reactionary work done by the previous age. Pyrrho, the universal doubter, appears to have taken for granted, with the whole of his followers, such propositions as that some animals (not insects) are produced by parthenogenesis, that some live in the fire, and that the legend of the Phœnix is true.298 Such credences stood for the arrest of biological science in the Sokratic age, with Aristotle, so often mistakenly, at work; while, on the other hand, the Sokratic skepticism visibly motives the play of systematic doubt on the dogmas men had learned to question. Zeno, again, was substantially a monotheist; Epicurus, adopting but not greatly developing the science of Demokritos,299 turned the Gods into a far-off band of glorious spectres, untroubled by human needs, dwelling for ever in immortal calm, neither ruling nor caring [182]to rule the world of men.300 In coming to this surprising compromise, Epicurus, indeed, probably did not carry with him the whole intelligence even of his own school. His friend, the second Metrodoros of Lampsakos, seems to have been the most stringent of all the censors of Homer, wholly ignoring his namesake’s attempts to clear the bard of impiety. “He even advised men not to be ashamed to confess their utter ignorance of Homer, to the extent of not knowing whether Hector was a Greek or a Trojan.”301 Such austerity towards myths can hardly have been compatible with the acceptance of the residuum of Epicurus. That, however, became the standing creed of the sect, and a fruitful theme of derision to its opponents. Doubtless the comfort of avoiding direct conflict with the popular beliefs had a good deal to do with the acceptance of the doctrine.

This strange retention of the theorem of the existence of anthropomorphic Gods, with a flat denial that they did anything in the universe, might be termed the great peculiarity of average ancient rationalism, were it not that what makes it at all intelligible for us is just the similar practice of modern non-Christian theists. The Gods of antiquity were non-creative, but strivers and meddlers and answerers of prayer; and ancient rationalism relieved them of their striving and meddling, leaving them no active or governing function whatever, but for the most part cherishing their phantasms. The God of modern Christendom had been at once a creator and a governor, ruling, meddling, punishing, rewarding, and hearing prayer; and modern theism, unable to take the atheistic or agnostic plunge, relieves him of all interference in things human or cosmic, but retains him as a creative abstraction who somehow set up “law,” whether or not he made all things out of nothing. The psychological process in the two cases seems to be the same—an erection of æsthetic habit into a philosophic dogma, and an accommodation of phrase to popular prejudice.

Whatever may have been the logical and psychological crudities of Epicureanism, however, it counted for much as a deliverance of men from superstitious fears; and nothing is more remarkable in the history of ancient philosophy than the affectionate reverence paid to the founder’s memory302 on this score through whole centuries. The powerful Lucretius sounds his highest note of praise in telling [183]how this Greek had first of all men freed human life from the crashing load of religion, daring to pass the flaming ramparts of the world, and by his victory putting men on an equality with heaven.303 The laughter-loving Lucian two hundred years later grows gravely eloquent on the same theme.304 And for generations the effect of the Epicurean check on orthodoxy is seen in the whole intellectual life of the Greek world, already predisposed in that direction.305 The new schools of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics had alike shown the influence in their perfect freedom from all religious preoccupation, when they were not flatly dissenting from the popular beliefs. Antisthenes, the founder of the former school (fl. 400 B.C.), though a pupil of Sokrates, had been explicitly anti-polytheistic, and an opponent of anthropomorphism.306 Aristippos of Cyrene, also a pupil of Socrates, who a little later founded the Hedonic or Cyrenaic sect, seems to have put theology entirely aside. One of the later adherents of the school, Theodoros, was like Diagoras labelled “the Atheist”307 by reason of the directness of his opposition to religion; and in the Rome of Cicero he and Diagoras are the notorious atheists of history.308 To Theodoros, who had a large following, is attributed an influence over the thought of Epicurus,309 who, however, took the safer position of a verbal theism. The atheist is said to have been menaced by Athenian law in the time of Demetrius Phalereus, who protected him; and there is even a story that he was condemned to drink hemlock;310 but he was not of the type that meets martyrdom, though he might go far to provoke it.311 Roaming from court to court, he seems never to have stooped to flatter any of his entertainers. “You seem to me,” said the steward of Lysimachos of Thrace to him on one occasion, “to be the only man who ignores both Gods and kings.”312

In the same age the same freethinking temper is seen in Stilpo of Megara (fl. 307), of the school of Euclides, who is said to have [184]been brought before the Areopagus for the offence of saying that the Pheidian statue of Athênê was “not a God,” and to have met the charge with the jest that she was in reality not a God but a Goddess; whereupon he was exiled.313 The stories told of him make it clear that he was an unbeliever, usually careful not to betray himself. Euclides, too, with his optimistic pantheism, was clearly a heretic; though his doctrine that evil is non-ens314 later became the creed of some Christians. Yet another professed atheist was the witty Bion of Borysthenes, pupil of Theodoros, of whom it is told, in a fashion familiar to our own time, that in sickness he grew pious through fear.315 Among his positions was a protest or rather satire against the doctrine that the Gods punished children for the crimes of their fathers.316 In the other schools, Speusippos (fl. 343), the nephew of Plato, leant to monotheism;317 Strato of Lampsakos, the Peripatetic (fl. 290), called “the Naturalist,” taught sheer pantheism, anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action of the Gods to account for the making of the world;318 Dikaiarchos (fl. 326–287), another disciple of Aristotle, denied the existence of separate souls, and the possibility of foretelling the future;319 and Aristo and Cleanthes, disciples of Zeno, varied likewise in the direction of pantheism; the latter’s monotheism, as expressed in his famous hymn, being one of several doctrines ascribed to him.320

Contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno and Pyrrho, too, was Evêmeros (Euhemerus), whose peculiar propaganda against Godism seems to imply theoretic atheism. As an atheist he was vilified in a manner familiar to modern ears, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus labelling him an “arrogant old man vomiting impious books.”321 His lost work, of which only a few extracts remain, undertook to prove that all the Gods had been simply famous men, deified after death; the proof, however, being by way of a fiction about old inscriptions found in an imaginary island.322 As above noted,323 the idea may have been borrowed from skeptical Phoenicians, the principle having already been monotheistically applied by the Bible-making Jews,324 though, on the other hand, it had been [185]artistically and to all appearance uncritically acted on in the Homeric epopees. It may or may not then have been by way of deliberate or reasoning Evêmerism that certain early Greek and Roman deities were transformed, as we have seen, into heroes or hetairai.325 In any case, the principle seems to have had considerable vogue in the later Hellenistic world; but with the effect rather of paving the way for new cults than of setting up scientific rationalism in place of the old ones. Quite a number of writers like Palaiphatos, without going so far as Evêmeros, sought to reduce myths to natural possibilities and events, by way of mediating between the credulous and the incredulous.326 Their method is mostly the naïf one revived by the Abbé Banier in the eighteenth century of reducing marvels to verbal misconceptions. Thus for Palaiphatos the myth of Kerberos came from the facts that the city Trikarenos was commonly spoken of as a beautiful and great dog; and that Geryon, who lived there, had great dogs called Kerberoi; Actæon was “devoured by his dogs” in the sense that he neglected his affairs and wasted his time in hunting; the Amazons were shaved men, clad as were the women in Thrace, and so on.327 Palaiphatos and the Herakleitos who also wrote De Incredibilibus agree that Pasiphae’s bull was a man named Tauros; and the latter writer similarly explains that Scylla was a beautiful hetaira with avaricious hangers-on, and that the harpies were ladies of the same profession. If the method seems childish, it is to be remembered that as regards the explanation of supernatural events it was adhered to by German theologians of a century ago; and that its credulity in incredulity is still to be seen in the current view that every narrative in the sacred books is to be taken as necessarily standing for a fact of some kind.

One of the inferrible effects of the Evêmerist method was to facilitate for the time the adoption of the Egyptian and eastern usage of deifying kings. It has been plausibly argued that this practice stands not so much for superstition as for skepticism, its opponents being precisely the orthodox believers, and its promoters those who had learned to doubt the actuality of the traditional Gods. Evêmerism would clinch such a tendency; and it is noteworthy that Evêmeros lived at the court of Kassander (319–296 B.C.) in a period in which every remaining member of the family of the deified Alexander had perished, mostly by violence; while the contemporary [186]Ptolemy I of Egypt received the title of Sotêr, “Saviour,” from the people of Rhodes.328 It is to be observed, however, that while in the next generation Antiochus I of Syria received the same title, and his successor Antiochus II that of Theos, “God,” the usage passes away; Ptolemy III being named merely Evergetês, “the Benefactor” (of the priests), and even Antiochus III only “the Great.” Superstition was not to be ousted by a political exploitation of its machinery.329

In Athens the democracy, restored in a subordinate form by Kassander’s opponent, Demetrius Poliorkêtes (307 B.C.), actually tried to put down the philosophic schools, all of which, but the Aristotelian in particular, were anti-democratic, and doubtless also comparatively irreligious. Epicurus and some of his antagonists were exiled within a year of his opening his school (306 B.C.); but the law was repealed in the following year.330 Theophrastos, the head of the Aristotelian school, was indicted in the old fashion for impiety, which seems to have consisted in denouncing animal sacrifice.331 These repressive attempts, however, failed; and no others followed at Athens in that era; though in the next century the Epicureans seem to have been expelled from Lythos in Crete and from Messenê in the Peloponnesos, nominally for their atheism, in reality probably on political grounds.332 Thus Zeno was free to publish a treatise in which, besides far out-going Plato in schemes for dragooning the citizens into an ideal life, he proposed a State without temples or statues of the Gods or law courts or gymnasia.333 In the same age there is trace of “an interesting case of rationalism even in the Delphic oracle.”334 The people of the island of Astypalaia, plagued by hares or rabbits, solemnly consulted the oracle, which briefly advised them to keep dogs and take to hunting. About the same time we find Lachares, temporarily despot at Athens, plundering the shrine of Pallas of its gold.335 Even in the general public there must have been a strain of surviving rationalism; for among the fragments of Menander (fl. 300), who, in general, seems to have [187]leant to a well-bred orthodoxy,336 there are some speeches savouring of skepticism and pantheism.337

It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos and the great Carneades (213–129), and later of the Carthaginian Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence called Academic—a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods.

As against the essentially uncritical Stoics, the criticism of Carneades is sane and sound; and he has been termed by judicious moderns “the greatest skeptical mind of antiquity”338 and “the Bayle of Antiquity”;339 though he seems to have written nothing.340 There is such a concurrence of testimony as to the victorious power of his oratory and the invincible skill of his dialectic341 that he must be reckoned one of the great intellectual and rationalizing forces of his day, triumphing as he did in the two diverse arenas of Greece and Rome. His disciple and successor Clitomachos said of him, with Cicero’s assent, that he had achieved a labour of Hercules “in liberating our souls as it were of a fierce monster, credulity, conjecture, rash belief.”342 He was, in short, a mighty antagonist of thoughtless beliefs, clearing the ground for a rational life; and the [188]fact that he was chosen with Diogenes the Peripatetic and Critolaos the Stoic to go to Rome to plead the cause of ruined Athens, mulcted in an enormous fine, proved that he was held in high honour at home. Athens, in short, was not at this stage “too superstitious.” Unreasoning faith was largely discredited by philosophy.

On this basis, in a healthy environment, science and energy might have reared a constructive rationalism; and for a time astronomy, in the hands of Aristarchos of Samos (third century B.C.), Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the second keeper of the great Alexandrian library (2nd cent. B.C.), and above all of Hipparchos of Nikaia, who did most of his work in the island of Rhodes, was carried to a height of mastery which could not be maintained, and was re-attained only in modern times.343 Thus much could be accomplished by “endowment of research” as practised by the Ptolemies at Alexandria; and after science had declined with the decline of their polity, and still further under Roman rule, the new cosmopolitanism of the second century of the empire reverted to the principle of intelligent evocation, producing under the Antonines the “Second” School of Alexandria.

But the social conditions remained fundamentally bad; and the earlier greatness was never recovered. “History records not one astronomer of note in the three centuries between Hipparchos and Ptolemy”; and Ptolemy (fl. 140 C.E.) not only retrograded into astronomical error, but elaborated on oriental lines a baseless fabric of astrology.344 Other science mostly decayed likewise. The Greek world, already led to lower intellectual levels by the sudden ease and wealth opened up to it through the conquests of Alexander and the rule of his successors, was cast still lower by the Roman conquest. Pliny, extolling Hipparchos with little comprehension of his work, must needs pronounce him to have “dared a thing displeasing to God” in numbering the stars for posterity.345 In the air of imperialism, stirred by no other, original thought could not arise; and the mass of the Greek-speaking populations, rich and poor, gravitated to the level of the intellectual346 and emotional life of more or less well-fed slaves. In this society there rapidly [189]multiplied private religious associations—thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones—in which men and women, denied political life, found new bonds of union and grounds of division in cultivating worships, mostly oriental, which stimulated the religious sense and sentiment.347

Such was the soil in which Christianity took root and flourished; while philosophy, after the freethinking epoch following on the fall of Athenian power, gradually reverted to one or other form of mystical theism or theosophy, of which the most successful was the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria.348 When the theosophic Julian rejoiced that Epicureanism had disappeared,349 he was exulting in a symptom of the intellectual decline that made possible the triumph of the faith he most opposed. Christianity furthered a decadence thus begun under the auspices of pagan imperialism; and “the fifth century of the Christian era witnessed an almost total extinction of the sciences in Alexandria”350—an admission which disposes of the dispute as to the guilt of the Arabs in destroying the great library.

Here and there, through the centuries, the old intellectual flame burns whitely enough: the noble figure of Epictetus in the first century of the new era, and that of the brilliant Lucian in the second, in their widely different ways remind us that the evolved faculty was still there if the circumstances had been such as to evoke it. Menippos in the first century B.C. had played a similar part to that of Lucian, in whose freethinking dialogues he so often figures; but with less of subtlety and intellectuality. Lucian’s was indeed a mind of the rarest lucidity; and the argumentation of his dialogue Zeus Tragædos covers every one of the main aspects of the theistic problem. There is no dubiety as to his atheistic conclusion, which is smilingly implicit in the reminder he puts in the mouth of Hermes, that, though a few men may adopt the atheistic view, “there will always be plenty of others who think the contrary—the majority of the Greeks, the ignorant many, the populace, and all the barbarians.” But the moral doctrine of Epictetus is one of endurance and resignation; and the almost unvarying raillery of Lucian, making mere perpetual sport of the now moribund Olympian Gods, was hardly better fitted than the all-round skepticism of the school of Sextus Empiricus to inspire positive and progressive thinking.

This latter school, described by Cicero as dispersed and extinct [190]in his day,351 appears to have been revived in the first century by Ænesidemos, who taught at Alexandria.352 It seems to have been through him in particular that the Pyrrhonic system took the clear-cut form in which it is presented at the close of the second century by the accomplished Sextus “Empiricus”—that is, the empirical (i.e., experiential) physician,353 who lived at Alexandria and Athens (fl. 175–205 C.E.). As a whole, the school continued to discredit dogmatism without promoting knowledge. Sextus, it is true, strikes acutely and systematically at ill-founded beliefs, and so makes for reason;354 but, like the whole Pyrrhonian school, he has no idea of a method which shall reach sounder conclusions. As the Stoics had inculcated the control of the passions as such, so the skeptics undertook to make men rise above the prejudices and presuppositions which swayed them no less blindly than ever did their passions. But Sextus follows a purely skeptical method, never rising from the destruction of false beliefs to the establishment of true. His aim is ataraxia, a philosophic calm of non-belief in any dogmatic affirmation beyond the positing of phenomena as such; and while such an attitude is beneficently exclusive of all fanaticism, it unfortunately never makes any impression on the more intolerant fanatic, who is shaken only by giving him a measure of critical truth in place of his error. And as Sextus addressed himself to the students of philosophy, not to the simple believers in the Gods, he had no wide influence.355 Avowedly accepting the normal view of moral obligations while rejecting dogmatic theories of their basis, the doctrine of the strict skeptics had the effect, from Pyrrho onwards, of giving the same acceptance to the common religion, merely rejecting the philosophic pretence of justifying it. Taken by themselves, the arguments against current theism in the third book of the Hypotyposes356 are unanswerable; but, when bracketed with other arguments against the ordinary belief in causation, they had the effect of leaving theism on a par with that belief. Against religious beliefs in particular, therefore, they had no wide destructive effect.

Lucian, again, thought soundly and sincerely on life; his praise of the men whose memories he respected, as Epicurus and Demonax (if the Life of Demonax attributed to him be really his), is grave and heartfelt; and his ridicule of the discredited Gods was perfectly right [191]so far as it went. It is certain that the unbelievers and the skeptics alike held their own with the believers in the matter of right living.357 In the period of declining pagan belief, the maxim that superstition was a good thing for the people must have wrought a quantity and a kind of corruption that no amount of ridicule of religion could ever approach. Polybius (fl. 150 B.C.) agrees with his complacent Roman masters that their greatness is largely due to the carefully cultivated superstition of their populace, and charges with rashness and folly those who would uproot the growth;358 and Strabo, writing under Tiberius—unless it be a later interpolator of his work—confidently lays down the same principle of governmental deceit,359 though in an apparently quite genuine passage he vehemently protests the incredibility of the traditional tales about Apollo.360 So far had the doctrine evolved since Plato preached it. But to countervail it there needed more than a ridicule which after all reached only the class who had already cast off the beliefs derided, leaving the multitude unenlightened. The lack of the needed machinery of enlightenment was, of course, part of the general failure of the Græco-Roman civilization; and no one man’s efforts could have availed, even if any man of the age could have grasped the whole situation. Rather the principle of esoteric enlightenment, the ideal of secret knowledge, took stronger hold as the mass grew more and more comprehensively superstitious. Even at the beginning of the Christian era the view that Homer’s deities were allegorical beings was freshly propounded in the writings of Herakleides and Cornutus (Phornutus); but it served only as a kind of mystical Gnosis, on all fours with Christian Gnosticism, and was finally taken up by Neo-Platonists, who were no nearer rationalism for adopting it.361

So with the rationalism to which we have so many uneasy or hostile allusions in Plutarch. We find him resenting the scoffs of Epicureans at the doctrine of Providence, and recoiling from the “abyss of impiety”362 opened up by those who say that “Aphrodite is simply desire, and Hermes eloquence, and the Muses the arts and [192]sciences, and Athênê wisdom, and Dionysos merely wine, Hephaistos fire, and Dêmêtêr corn”;363 and in his essay On Superstition he regretfully recognizes the existence of many rational atheists, confessing that their state of mind is better than that of the superstitious who abound around him, with their “impure purifications and unclean cleansings,” their barbaric rites, and their evil Gods. But the unbelievers, with their keen contempt for popular folly, availed as little against it as Plutarch himself, with his doctrine of a just mean. The one effectual cure would have been widened knowledge; and of such an evolution the social conditions did not permit.

To return to a state of admiration for the total outcome of Greek thought, then, it is necessary to pass from the standpoint of simple analysis to that of comparison. It is in contrast with the relatively slight achievement of the other ancient civilizations that the Greek, at its height, still stands out for posterity as a wonderful growth. That which, tried by the test of ideals, is as a whole only one more tragic chapter in the record of human frustration, yet contains within it light and leading as well as warning; and for long ages it was as a lost Paradise to a darkened world. It has been not untruly said that “the Greek spirit is immortal, because it was free”:364 free not as science can now conceive freedom, but in contrast with the spiritual bondage of Jewry and Egypt, the half-barbaric tradition of imperial Babylon, and the short flight of mental life in Rome. Above all, it was ever in virtue of the freedom that the high things were accomplished; and it was ever the falling away from freedom, the tyranny either of common ignorance or of mindless power, that wrought decadence. There is a danger, too, of injustice in comparing Athens with later States. When a high authority pronounces that “the religious views of the Demos were of the narrowest kind,”365 he is not to be gainsaid; but the further verdict that “hardly any people has sinned more heavily against the liberty of science” is unduly lenient to Christian civilization. The heaviest sins of that against science, indeed, lie at the door of the Catholic Church; but to make that an exoneration of the modern “peoples” as against the ancient would be to load the scales. And even apart from the Catholic Church, which practically suppressed all science for a thousand years, the attitude of Protestant leaders and Protestant peoples, from Luther down to the second half of the [193]nineteenth century, has been one of hatred and persecution towards all science that clashed with the sacred books.366 In the Greek world there was more scientific discussion in the three hundred years down to Epicurus than took place in the whole of Christian Europe in thirteen hundred; and the amount of actual violence used towards innovators in the pagan period, though lamentable enough, was trifling in comparison with that recorded in Christian history, to say nothing of the frightful annals of witch-burning, to which there is no parallel in civilized heathen history. The critic, too, goes on to admit that, while “Sokrates, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle fell victims in different degrees to the bigotry of the populace,” “of course their offence was political rather than religious. They were condemned not as heretics, but as innovators in the state religion.” And, as we have seen, all three of the men named taught in freedom for many years till political faction turned popular bigotry against them. The true measure of Athenian narrowness is not to be reached, therefore, without keeping in view the long series of modern outrages and maledictions against the makers and introducers of new machinery, and the multitude of such episodes as the treatment of Priestley in Christian Birmingham, little more than a century ago. On a full comparison the Greeks come out not ill.

It was, in fact, impossible that the Greeks should either stifle or persecute science or freethought as it was either stifled or persecuted by ancient Jews (who had almost no science by reason of their theology) or by modern Christians, simply because the Greeks had no anti-scientific hieratic literature. It remains profoundly significant for science that the ancient civilization which on the smallest area evolved the most admirable life, which most completely transcended all the sources from which it originally drew, and left a record by which men are still charmed and taught, was a civilization as nearly as might be without Sacred Books, without an organized priesthood, and with the largest measure of democratic freedom that the ancient world ever saw. [194]