Atheism in Pagan Antiquity

This study opens a careful investigation into how the ancient Greeks and Romans understood, and sometimes rejected, their own pantheon. The author begins by clarifying that ‘atheism’ here means the denial of the traditional pagan gods, not the later philosophical abstraction of a universal deity. By tracing the few individuals—mostly elite philosophers—who truly disavowed these deities, the work shows that such outright denial was a rarity in antiquity, contrary to modern assumptions.

Relying on a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and historical sources, the author maps the shifting attitudes of thinkers who either reinterpreted divine figures or accepted some celestial entities while rejecting others. The analysis highlights the difficulty of drawing sharp boundaries between belief, reinterpretation, and outright atheism, revealing a spectrum of views rather than a single doctrine. Listeners will come away with a nuanced picture of how ancient intellectual culture grappled with the existence of the gods, laying groundwork for later developments in Western thought.