Battling the Gods ─ Atheism in the Ancient World

An impassioned and learned account of atheism's origins in antiquity.

Long before the Enlightenment sowed the seeds of disbelief in a deeply Christian Europe, atheism was a matter of serious public debate in the Greek world. But history is written by those who prevail, and the Age of Faith mostly suppressed the lively free-thinking voices of antiquity. Whitmarsh brings to life the fascinating musings of Diagoras of Melos; Democritus, the first materialist; and especially Epicurus and his followers. Whitmarsh also shows how the early Christians both were called atheists (for rejecting the pagan gods) and came to use the rhetoric oppressing atheism to spread their own faith.Battling the Gods reveals how atheism and doubt, far from being modern phenomena, have intrigued the human imagination for millennia.

TIM WHITMARSH is currently the AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on ancient prose fiction, includingNarrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance, and editedThe Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel.