Atheism in Pagan Antiquity — Background and Themes

n was in reality political; the idea being to hit Pericles through his friend the naturalist. What Anaxagoras was charged with was that he had assumed that the heavenly bodies were natural objects; he had taught that the sun was a red-hot mass, and that the moon was earth and larger than Peloponnese. To base an accusation of impiety on this, it was necessary first to carry a public resolution, giving power to prosecute those who gave natural explanations of heavenly phenomena.

As to Anaxagoras’s attitude to popular belief, we hear next to nothing apart from this. There is a story of a ram’s head being found with one horn in the middle of the forehead; it was brought to Pericles, and the soothsayer Lampon explained the portent to the effect that, of the two men, Pericles and Thucydides, who contended for the leadership of Athens, one should prove victorious. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, had the ram’s head cut open and showed that the brain did not fill up the cranium, but was egg-shaped and lay gathered together at the point where the horn grew out. He evidently thought that abortions also, which otherwise were generally considered as signs from the gods, were due to natural causes. Beyond this, nothing is said of any attack on the popular belief on the part of Anaxagoras, and in his philosophy nothing occurred which logically entailed a denial of the existence of the gods. Add to this that it was necessary to create a new judicial basis for the accusation against Anaxagoras, and it can be taken as certain that neither in his writings nor in any other way did he come forward in public as a denier of the gods.

It is somewhat different when we consider the purely personal point of view of Anaxagoras. The very fact that no expression of his opinion concerning the gods has been transmitted affords food for thought. Presumably there was none; but this very fact is notable when we bear in mind that the earlier naturalists show no such reticence. Add to this that, if there is any place and any time in which we might expect a complete emancipation from popular belief, combined with a decided disinclination to give expression to it, it is Athens under Pericles. Men like Pericles and his friends represent a high level, perhaps the zenith, in Hellenic culture. That they were critical of many of the religious conceptions of their time we may take for granted; as to Pericles himself, this is actually stated as a fact, and the accusations of impiety directed against Aspasia and Pheidias prove that orthodox circles were very well aware of it. But the accusations prove, moreover, that Pericles and those who shared his views were so much in advance of their time that they could not afford to let their free-thinking attitude become a matter of public knowledge without endangering their political position certainly, and possibly even more than that. To be sure, considerations of that kind did not weigh with Anaxagoras; but he was—and that we know on good authority—a quiet scholar whose ideal of life was to devote himself to problems of natural science, and he can hardly have wished to be disturbed in this occupation by affairs in which he took no sort of interest. The question is then only how far men like Pericles and himself may have ventured in their criticism. Though all direct tradition is wanting, we have at any rate circumstantial evidence possessing a certain degree of probability.