Event

Speaker: Joshua Billings, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Princeton University

Abstract: In this talk, I adopt a phenomenological perspective on atheism in classical Athens. This perspective attempts to shift scholarship from the questions of existence and definition that have long preoccupied intellectual historians (did radical atheists exist? Is ancient atheism comparable to modern atheism?) to questions of appearance and significance (where did Athenians encounter radical theologies? How and why were such ideas impactful?). Atheistic thought mattered in classical Athens, I argue, because it evoked doubts about divine justice and morality, raising questions of theodicy. I then trace such questions more widely in classical culture to show that atheism per se was less radical and less novel than it has sometimes appeared – but also that it was more culturally significant, as part of a wider questioning of the justice of the gods.