1 “ Test Everything ” : Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean

Tim Whitmarsh, Cambridge, UK Were the atheoi atheists? Religious scepticism and Greek polytheism It is a truism that there are few exact ancient equivalents to the modern atheist, who denies all and any possible supernatural power. To reach that position, one has to have both a rigid, identifiable line of differentiation between the natural and the supernatural, and a more or less coherent concept of the divine. Neither of these was fully available in ancient Greek polytheism. Nevertheless, I argue in this paper, the Greeks did have a firm concept of the distinctiveness of the sphere of contact between human and divine, a sphere that they named ta theia (’the divine things’); and once we grasp that point, we can offer a more robust conceptualisation of what ancient Greek ‘atheism’ was, namely a denial not so much of ‘gods’ as of ta theia. Jan N. Bremmer, Groningen, Netherlands Atheism in Greek Tragedy and Its Audience The recent appearance of Tim Whitmarsh’s book Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (2015) and the massive 2017 Ghent dissertation by Alexander Meert, Positive Atheism in Antiquity: A Social and Philosophical Analysis (500 BC – 200 AD = https://biblio. ugent.be/publication/8513548/file/8513552.pdf2016: supervised by Peter Van Nuffelen), invite a new look at the evidence of the fifth century BC in Athens, our most important, albeit perhaps not only source for early scepticism, even perhaps atheism. In my contribution I will first take a fresh look at the problem of belief in ancient Greece. Recent scholarship has advanced several arguments to accept belief as an important aspect of Greek religion, others have distinguished between a low-intensity and a high-intensity belief, and again others have totally rejected the usefulness of the concept of belief for ancient Greece. Second, I will look at various passages in Greek tragedy that suggest an atheistic current in late fifth-century Athens. I will pay attention to these passages and look especially at their place in the tragedy and their speakers. Finally, I will briefly analyse two famous scandals, that of the profanation of the Mysteries and the mutilation of the Herms, which have long been interpreted as signs of irreligiosity in Athens.