Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh Page B

for a reason! 2
    Finally, in the absence (in the earliest phase of Greek culture) of systematic philosophy, myth was used to explore issues of contemporary relevance. Some myths, in some tellings, could be relatively conservative, embodying the dos and don’ts of popular morality. The Oedipus story, for example, can be taken at its simplest level to express the principle that prophecies always come true. Oedipus believes himself to be the child of Polybus and Merope, the Corinthian royal household. On hearing the oracle that he is destined to marry his mother and kill his father, he leaves home never to return. He ends up at Thebes, unbeknownst to him the city of his biological parents, whom he duly proceeds to dispatch and bed. Thus we can deduce that no one can escape the plans the gods have laid for us. Sophocles’s play
Oedipus the King
is a literary masterpiece of huge complexity, crammed with allusions to other literature and contemporary philosophy. But in its most stripped down form, the myth makes a simple point that can be grasped by anyone.
    Stories are good for articulating ethical truths because they show causal links between actions and their results. In Homer’s
Odyssey,
the suitors’ outrageous behavior provokes Zeus to punish them with a brutal death at Odysseus’s hands. Appropriating others’ property, therefore, is bad and frowned upon by the gods: don’t do it! Complex narratives can offer richer and more ambivalent explorations of moral issues, by multiplying the different actors and their motivations, introducing subplots, and blurring the relationship between cause and effect. In the full version of the
Odyssey,
for example, we learn that Odysseus himself is a far from straightforward character: acquisitive, self-indulgent, and mendacious. The story becomes a way of working through the question of what kinds of self-interested behavior are to be rewarded and what kinds punished. Myth becomes a prompt for ethical reflection.
    Amongst other things, myth offered the chance to explore humanity’s relationship with the gods, in all its varieties. Many of the best known and most enduring stories were of this kind. We have mentioned Prometheus. In Hesiod’s telling, Zeus exacts punishment for the meat trick by withholding fire from mortals. Prometheus goes on to steal it back (in a fennel stalk), for which Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle peck at his liver. Hesiod was a peasant farmer, who scraped a subsistence out of the soil near a small Boeotian village: the story expresses the precariousness of human livelihood and our dependence upon the gods’ favor. A later Athenian tragedy,
Prometheus Bound,
offers a very different analysis. Here, fire is a symbol of human technology: this divine spark, once prized from Zeus’s jealous grasp, raised us from cave-dwelling troglodytes to our current position between the beasts and the gods.
    Stories like this portray, if not open warfare, then at least skirmishing between the divine and the human orders. Mortals are vulnerable and weak, their ephemeral existence under constant threat. Gods are immortal and unaging and live a life of luxurious abundance without toil. But this difference is not imagined as stable and permanent. The gods’ power is constantly challenged. In Hesiod’s creation myth the
Theogony,
Mount Olympus is assailed by monsters and Titans, who yearn to overthrow Zeus’s rule. The battle is close, but the Olympians triumph. There are also numerous smaller skirmishes. Take the fate of another Titan: “Far-seeing Zeus cast the aggressor Menoetius down to Erebos, smiting him with his smoky thunderbolt, because of his arrogance and overweening vigour.” Zeus’s power is repeatedly threatened by opponents of one kind or another. 3
    In myth, the gods seem ever embattled. They face crisis after crisis, war after war. Myth dramatizes not just the gods’ power, but also others’ aspirations to it. The privileges