Quotes from Tim Whitmarsh

Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.

Diogenes's central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.

the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world. This is a dangerous misprision. To the religious, it can suggest that belief is somehow universal, essential to the human condition, and that creeping secularism is an unnatural state. Atheists,

Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for "impiety," on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs.

It was not just Critias, the author of the Sisyphus fragment, who reacted to the atheist revolution. Already, in the 420s, in the glow of the sophistic movement, tragedies and comedies began to explore the question of whether gods exist. The ideas canvassed by Protagoras, Democritus, and Prodicus reached a broad audience thanks to the theater.

But it is important to underline the point that the myth presents battles against the gods as crises of power, not manifestations of sinfulness. Salmoneus

The idea of an essential difference between Greek culture and those of the Ancient Near East is not as widely accepted as it once was, and the idea that any such difference should be defined in terms of "freedom" looks uncomfortably close to Western propagandizing. Greek

Oracles in Thucydides reveal not the gods' plan for the world but humanity's capacity to fool itself that the arbitrary processes of fortune are somehow predestined.