The First Atheists: How Ancient Greece Questioned the Gods and Influenced Modern Thought

Long before the Enlightenment, ancient thinkers were already questioning the gods. In the Greek world of the seventh to fifth centuries BCE, medicine, weather and the natural world began to be explained without divine intervention. Philosophers asked whether the gods existed at all, whether ethics could rest on human reason alone, and whether a meaningful life required belief in an afterlife. The answers they gave — Epicurus on the consolations of mortality, Protagoras on the limits of knowledge, Lucretius on a universe of atoms — would echo through European thought for the next two thousand years, surface again in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and shape the British humanist movement in ways that are often forgotten. This episode goes back to the ancient world to recover the first humanists, and traces how their ideas reached the radicals, ethical societies, and classical scholars who built modern British humanism.

Guests:

Professor Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689–1939 and Aristotle's Way. /edithhall.co.uk

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and author of Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. classics.cam.ac.uk

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/join

Discover more Humanist Heritage: heritage.humanists.uk

Send us your questions or feedback: Unholy@Humanise.Live

Unholy Histories is produced by Humanise Live a production agency creating values-led podcast content. Start podcasting today at humanise.live

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

Transcript

Why ancient atheism matters

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Cobson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeline Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life. Millennia before the so-called Age of Reason, classical thinkers were questioning the gods and suggesting how ethics and meaning could rest on human reason alone. So, what did this look like in antiquity? How are these ancient ideas picked up by much later thinkers, and how did they help shape a humanist tradition grounded not in revelation, but in reason and ethics? To explore what ancient humanists can teach us today, we're joined by Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of many books across Greek and Roman history, including A People's History of Classics, Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939, and Aristotle's Way. And Tim Whitmarsh, Regis Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and author of many titles on the literature, culture, and religion of ancient Greece, including Battling the Gods, Atheism in the Ancient World. And of course, I'm joined by my regular co-host, Andrew Cobson.

How a classicist becomes a classicist

Andrew Copson 1:44

Let's start by hearing a bit about how each of you came first to study the ancient world. What was it that drew you to it? Edith, maybe we'll start with you.

Edith Hall 1:52

It was the Gospel of St. John.

Andrew Copson 1:56

Very appetite.

Edith Hall 1:57

My father was a priest, and the house was full of books in squiggy writing, and I was the kind of kid who was interested in weird alphabets. And I forced him to teach me the Greek alphabet. And I read the first sentence I construed was in beginning was the word. And remember him telling me why it didn't have a definite article because it's beginning, you know. And uh unfortunately that led shortly after to me disavowing the Christian faith altogether.

Andrew Copson 2:26

Which was not what he expected, probably when he inducted into New Testament Greek.

Tim Whitmarsh 2:33

Tim I grew up in a small village in the countryside which had a pre-Norman castle in it, and that was where I used to go for a walk and as a teenager occasionally have a cigarette. And so it was really that was the beginning of my sort of romantic attachment to ruins that was the beginning of my journey into classics.

Andrew Copson 2:54

Interesting.

When Greek thought began to explain the world without gods

Andrew Copson 2:55

Well, this is mainly a podcast about humanism in Britain, and so we do want to talk mostly, I think, today, about the way that classics has been treated and encountered and received by humanists in Britain, how it's led to various humanistic developments, how it's been used and interpreted. But I think we should start a little bit with going back in time to the ancient world itself, because Tim, you wrote a fascinating book that was very well received and well reviewed by everyone, called Battling the Gods, which was really an attempt to make it clear that there were atheistically inclined and humanistically inclined thinkers in the pre-Christian world that were quite important and that it's useful now and interesting to learn about. Tell us a little bit about how humanist ideas in particular are manifested in the sources that we have left to us.

Tim Whitmarsh 3:44

Yeah, well, I would start with a preface that I clearly am a classist. I uh ancient Greece is my heartland, if you like. But it's not just the ancient Greek world that has its humanists, its secularists, its atheists. We have evidence also for similar sorts of trends in China and India as well. So it's a global phenomenon. And my position in the book was really that every society has manifestations of resistance to dominant religious belief, and that sometimes they're better attested, sometimes they're less well attested, but that this is a universal human phenomenon. But when it comes to ancient Greece itself, I think the key moment really was the period from about the 7th to the 5th centuries BCE, when you begin to get an uncoupling of what we might call scientific rationalist medical thought from divine forms of explanation. And of course, this story has been told a million times in a million different ways, and one has to simplify to tell the story. But it goes something like this. The earliest texts that we have from the Greek world are the mythological poems of Homer and Hesiod. They represent anthropomorphic gods intervening, for example, on battlefields and the like. Over the next two centuries, from the seventh to the fifth centuries, we see more and more signs of thinkers refusing that idea of direct divine intervention and a greater move towards more material and physiological explanations for the way that the world is. So, for example, there is a text that is attributed to Hippocrates in the 5th century BC that discusses epilepsy, which is called the sacred disease. And the speaker says that people have traditionally attributed this to divine intervention, but in fact, we should understand it as part of nature, and nature which is being invented in this time as a sphere that excludes supernature, if you like, that the natural world is defined in opposition to the supernatural world.

Epicurus and the meaningful life without an afterlife

Andrew Copson 5:52

And it's not just the materialist elements of a humanist worldview that you talk about, it's all brilliant. But my favorite chapter is the one that focused on Epicurus, because you said even now Epicurus can quicken the pulse of any humanist. And I agree, I think that's right. It's the approach to life, the way to live, the good life and the meaningful life that's as as much present in many of these ancient thinkers as the materialistic side of modern humanism.

Tim Whitmarsh 6:14

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. When it comes to philosophy, is um I mean, where's the invention of philosophy? That's a different kind of question. But if we think about from Plato onwards, the focus of philosophy is to join up all aspects coherently. So one's view of the world, one's cosmological view of the way that the world works is aligned with one's ethical stance. So, yes, as philosophy develops a, if you like, a stronger sense of understanding the world as nature as opposed to supernature, there are also more focuses on responsibility, on ethical responsibility, and also simultaneously on forms of happiness that don't depend on, if you like, belief in the afterlife. And that's where Epicurus comes in, that idea that it is a great consolation to us to believe that there are that gods don't have a direct impact on our life and that we won't be punished in the afterlife. I should just add one footnote though, that all of these people, including the Epicureans, do have a version of God in their worldview. The Epicureans are very slippery, I think, in what they think a God is and where gods live, and how you can have a materialist conception of gods and how you can reconcile the idea of divinity with the Epicurean core belief that nothing is permanent and things always slide away into different configurations of atmosphere. But they are, in a way, theists. It's just that they're theist completely unlike any other conventional Greek form of belief in gods.

Andrew Copson 7:47

So I think most of the people you discuss in your book will reject, mostly reject ideas of ongoing intervention by supernatural entities, but think that maybe there might be some sort of designer. That is that isn't all we can see in the ancient sources.

Protagoras, Democritus and Aristotle's quiet humanism

Andrew Copson 8:03

There is, I mean, Edith, when Twitter was still fun, I remember you once posting on World Humanist Day, in honor of World Humanist Day, a nice picture of Democritus and some nice observations about his sort of humanistic approach. And that's there too, isn't it, in the ancient world, somewhat like Democritus.

Edith Hall 8:20

Yes, you've got different strands. Tim's already talked about the crucial moment that medicine was secularized, which I think was epoch-making for all of natural science and physical science, that we're going to do medicine without God in it, and we're going to do the weather without God in it. And I think that there are certain very particular circumstances that led to that in the 7th century. I would like to put in a word in though for Aristotle, if I may. Aristotle, I've just read his physics, actually. I've been working on his physics with a research project I'm doing. And he's he is the one who actually preserves for us most of the atheistic ideas of the fifth century. So we have Protagoras is a key figure in all of this. He's the one who says, he's an agnostic. He says, I don't know whether a god exists or not. I've got no evidence of it. So why don't we do life, make all our ethical decisions, assuming there isn't it? Man is the measure of all things. You've got Democritus saying that the world is just full of all these little atoms that fly around. And of course, he's be brave and right, and that they recycle in different forms. And there's the kernel of the idea that we needn't be afraid of death. But we've also got more cynical people. We've got a particular tragic fragment that Tim knows all about by someone who's probably not Euripides, it's probably somebody contemporary with him. But where we have a speaker talking about the invention of religion by bad people to oppress people. These are incredibly radical ideas, and these are the sort of ideas that are preserved by Plato and especially Aristotle. Aristotle is, of course, not an atheist. He thinks that there are weird divine stars and things. They're sort of way out there beyond our planet. And he believes in an unmoved mover. This is the crucial thing, that there is something, it might be equivalent to Noose's mind, which takes us back to some of the other sophists who is just absolutely indifferent to what goes on in the human sphere. Therefore, we have to do our empirical science and our ethical science and political science as if there is no retribution, there is no afterlife, there is no kind of theodicy that's going to get us if we're bad. And it's unbelievably refreshing to read all of this. And he, of course, as somebody who worked both in science, natural science, zoology, biology, and in ethics and politics and rhetoric, has actually had more, I think, quantifiable influence than any other single thinker in history. His zoology, in particular, he's really the first person ever to say man is just an animal. He's an advanced animal. And we will find out what it is to be human by seeing what we can do that even the highest ape can't. And that lies what is essentially humanity. And he thinks it's things like humour, the ability to deliberate, the ability to reminisce consciously, dig up memories consciously as opposed to being a Pavlovian dog. So I would like to get Aristotle in because there could have been no Epicureanism. He anti-dates Epicureanism. His shift away from Platonic idealism to materialism is crucial for Epicurus' garden.

Andrew Copson 11:45

Blair's accent. Oh, Epicurus' garden. I think that's the image that quickens the pulse of humanist more than any other. Imagine being a resident of the garden of Epicurus, what a wonderful place it would have been to live. So much better than our own world today.

Tim Whitmarsh 11:58

Epicurus' garden was actually found along the road to Plato's Academy. And I like to think of it as a sort of interruption of that Platonic narrative. Plato's got this sort of metaphysical sense of higher beings above him, even though they're not quite gods. And I love the idea that Epicurus was sort of hijacking that and sort of pulling people off the road as they're walking towards the academy.

Edith Hall 12:20

And of course, that means that he is halfway between Aristotle's Lyceum. Aristotle very carefully, I think, founded his Lyceum the other side of the Acropolis from the Academy.

Andrew Copson 12:31

Well, it's beautiful imagery. I think we will come on now to in a moment to think about the influence of these figures and others on moderns.

Why these ideas arise across cultures

Andrew Copson 12:39

But before we leave completely the ancient world itself, I think this really does matter, doesn't it? Because there is now a sort of myth, maybe it's always been the case, that today's humanism, today's humanistic thought is somehow modern. And in recently, some people have also claimed sort of Christianity dependent. But when we look, just as we look at classical India or ancient China, as you say, Tim, when we look at the ancient pre-Christian world in Europe and the Middle East, we can see that these ideas are, if anything, perennial, and possibly even that there is a tradition to be discerned here, and that does matter, I think.

Tim Whitmarsh 13:16

Yes, I think that you're right. That's to say, there are two aspects of our connection to the ancient world. One is linear and genealogical. It is absolutely clear that in the period that we call the Renaissance and later, people are reading and rediscovering Greek and Roman ideas and therefore being influenced by them, and forms of pre thinking that emerge in the early modern period are often inspired by and rooted in and legitimized by reference to classical antiquity. But I think you're also right about this point about, if you like, what people call polygenesis, that there is a limited number of ways in which you can be religious and a limited number of ways in which you can be non-religious. And a lot of the arguments do seem to pop up all over the place. I mean, there are versions in antiquity of, for example, the problem of evil. How is it that a good god or who is also omnipotent can permit evil in the world? That's something that people were thinking about in classical antiquity. People come up with that independently now as well. I should say, just finally on this though, that there are also some extremely wacky forms of argumentation against the existence of gods that we have in antiquity that have no parallel in the modern era. So my favourite one of these is an argument that because Greeks have many different types of gods, including river gods, there is a kind of scalar argument, which is called the Cerites argument for various reasons I won't go into now. But the question is really: if let's say the river Achilous is a god, how much water do you need to make a god? In other words, you know, is a stream, a god, maybe, then is you know, a drip from a tap a god. So you can always ask that you can attack the basic concept of something like a god by this sort of scaling of it and to try and work out how much of it you need in order to make a god. And as I say, that kind of argument we just don't really have.

Edith Hall 15:09

Can I just add something to the polygenesis though? So it is actually interesting that the first evidence, for example, for the denial of God or the question of the existence of God in Vedic literature is at approximately the same date as it starts happening in Greece. So the polygenesis is also synchronic. And I think that we have, I know we're going to go get to Karl Marx later, but we have to ask what it is about the mode of production, the relations of production, the material base, the power hierarchies that allows people to start asking these questions. And in Greece, it's absolutely clearly to do with independent small city-states and tyrants. Sorry, the ancient Greek word tyrant means somebody who's coming on a wave of popular support against hereditary kingship. Right? This is all happening. This is the background. Once you challenge the divine right of kings, the genealogical thing that we have in Homer, you know, Agamemnon gets his scepter descended through seven generations from Zeus, once you get that, that incredibly brave thing that you say, actually, God didn't make you king, we can have a different kind of political constitution. We might have a democracy, and there are democracies all over the place, it's not just in Athens. That is a crucial step in people saying, well, if they're wrong that they've been appointed by God, then maybe there's something wrong with the way we think about God.

Tim Whitmarsh 16:38

You get classicists on, they just natter natter natter about the ancient world. But I I think Edith is absolutely right about the political and economic and social circumstances. Just to add a couple of things in there. One is that clearly it's a moment when Greece is getting enriched rapidly as a result of its position in the centre of the Mediterranean because it's in the middle of all the shipping lanes that are going from east to west. It's also being heavily influenced by Near Eastern ideas, ideas of astrology and astronomy, for example, that are giving more material, more predictable bases for observation of the stars and the like. And I think the final thing that's really super important is that Greece re-in rediscovers writing. It doesn't discover writing, but it rediscovers writing in around the eighth century. But it doesn't have a clerical class at that point, it doesn't have a priestly class, it doesn't have a group of people who are controlling the use of writing. So therefore, writing is kind of deregulated in this period. So it's that beautiful combination of all these different elements that goes to creating the specific historical circumstances for the celebration of these radical ideas.

Andrew Copson 17:44

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting as well to have a in comparative historical terms to think about how they're the same, very similar to the engines of the rise of humanist thought in the modern period, the colonial encounter, the printing press, political change, and all those other same factors. Enrichment as well, of course. I think everyone knows the story of the Renaissance, or most people do, so let's skip the Renaissance and

The Reformation - Lucretius returns

Andrew Copson 18:07

let's get straight up to something more modern, but staying with Edith's theme, because Edith's theme is a very interesting one. The idea that political change and especially democratising political change or the end of hereditary theocratic principle, maybe, is something that not only took place in the ancient world, but that schaues from the ancient world and thinkers from the ancient world inspired in our own modern world too. And Edith, in your book, People's History of the Classics, you talked about quite a number of the figures who were inspired or who used classical symbolism or texts in their own political campaigning. And there was quite an overlap there. I noticed when I was reading that excellent book, which everyone should read, and which you've just pointed out before we came on areas, available free from Routledge website, so it can be read very easily. Quite a lot of crossover between those political activists inspired by classics who were also very involved in humanist thought and the humanist movement, especially in the 19th century.

Edith Hall 19:05

Hugely so. I'm happy to skip the Renaissance, but we cannot skip the Reformation. We just can't skip the Reformation. The origins of almost all the questioning of conventional Christianity can't come around with Protestant shaking to the core of everything to do with medieval scholasticism, which was bizarre a very weird Catholic Thomas Aquinas version of Aristotle. They had managed to turn Aristotle into a devout Roman Catholic in the medieval era. But the reformers and the history of the Reformation across Europe is just one of the most intellectually riveting things that you can possibly study. So there are unbelievable fights between Martin Luther and other radical Protestant reformers and people like Zwingli. They are debating the nature of the Protestant God and whether or not actually the kingdom of earth needs to be built on earth in our lifetimes, which leads eventually in Britain to the levellers, the diggers, and early and mid-17th century Protestants who would probably not say they were atheists, but who had absolutely abandoned any practice of religion or need for it. That is a crucial background, as is the rediscovery of Lucretius, not the rediscovery, but the embrace by Protestants, especially Puritans, of the De Rerum Natura on the nature of things. There's a wonderful woman who's called Lucy Hutchinson, who's the wife of a Puritan, sitting in Nottingham Castle. I know about this because I was brought up in Nottingham, translating De Rerum Natura and asking herself what was the nature of her Puritan Christianity, as the cannonballs are flying at Nottingham Castle during the Civil War. So you've got this absolute turmoil going on before you get to the 18th century and people who would actually say, No, I don't believe in God.

Andrew Copson 21:15

That was a great roller coaster. I'm glad we got Lucretius, and I'm going to tick him off the list for later.

Edith Hall 21:20

You've got to, because Sandy, in particular, there's this incredibly influential French Lucretian whose works are totally embraced in Britain.

British rediscovery of ancient atheism

Andrew Copson 21:28

On another episode of the podcast, when we were talking about early modern humanists, we actually had some examples of people being arrested for quoting Lucretius and for being inspired by Lucretius in different countries. Really interesting period.

Edith Hall 21:38

Having him in your pocket was an incredibly dangerous thing to admit to, which is why I think Lucy Hutchinson never published her translation and in fact later apologized for having read Lucretius to sort of her Puritan circle. Absolutely. But we get to the 18th century, and of course we get a huge influence from France. French Revolutionary thinking that it started with Voltaire and so on in the 18th century. This is not an indigenous British thing. It would be distorting to say so, but we get some extraordinarily exciting persons. I mean, my first great favourite is a man called Julian Hibbert, extraordinary man. He's actually an aristocrat who completely aligns with all the British radical Republicans from Thomas Paine onwards. And it's a really quite rabid atheist, good and proper, wants to consign all religion to the dustbin. He pays for the defense of all the radicals caught up in the Peterloo terrible trials, and gives them things to say from antiquity about criticisms of God. And in 1828, he published this wonderful book on superstition, which contains Theophrastus' superstitious man, which is a wonderful text, which Tim will certainly know. Where it's an ancient ordinary kind of guy laughing, the sort of authorial voice, laughing at people who were worried about all the taboos of everyday life. This is the sort of man who won't go and see his wife for 10 days after she's given birth, implying that actually everybody went to see their wife while she was giving birth. It's only the superstitious one who believes in the divine pollution thing. So Hibbert publishes that and Plutarch, amazing treatise on superstition, in a book together with huge extra appendices about everything is wrong with the Anglican establishment. So he's my first favourite guy, and I love the fact he's a rich man funding the trials of the British radicals. And my second is Frederick Gould, who is uh a British schoolmaster who hated the fact that he'd fallen out of love with religion. He was like me, it cost him a lot of pain. He lost his morality, his ethical core, and found his salvation in the ancient world, in particular in Plutarch's lives of all the great heroes like Spartacus and well, Spartacus hasn't got a life, but we hear his life through the life of Crassus. And he actually managed to get into the administration of primary education, because most people didn't have any secondary education. He managed to get a secular course on virtue introduced in the London school area, which and in Leicester, where he he then went, which was an amazing course on you went through all the virtues that secular virtues, how to be a good person, got illustrations from antiquity. And this published was published all over the world, millions and millions of translations into numerous languages. There was a huge secular education movement. Very interestingly, it was particularly embraced in India, where there were a lot of educationalists who who hated the whole sort of Sanskrit theocratic things and were fighting against things like the caste system. So those are just two examples of people who would be inspiring today. And I believe Frederick Gould was involved. He certainly lectured at Conway Hall. I believed he was involved with humanists.

Andrew Copson 25:15

Yes, he was one of the founders of today, Humanist UK. He's quite a he's quite a favourite of yours, isn't he, Maddie FJ Gould?

Plutarch, virtues, and the ethical Sunday school

Madeleine Goodall 25:21

Yeah, well, I was just thinking as you were speaking, but that I've never really made the connection with the ancient inspiration that he then took forward with moral education and with his influence, as you say, in various curriculums in London and in Leicester.

Edith Hall 25:40

His Children's Plutarch is the most beautiful book and with fantastic illustrations that they're very popular. They constantly reappear online, and nobody says that it's from this particular book. Yes, you'll see pictures of all the people in the lives of the Plutarch. And it was an international bestseller, and in fact, I believe is still in print in some languages.

Madeleine Goodall 26:03

He tested a lot of his ideas out. He was a founder of the East London Ethical Society, which is one of the founding groups of what became Humanist UK. And obviously, there he had they had their ethical Sunday school and things like that. So he tested out lots of these ideas, and people like George Lansbury's kids came to that ethical Sunday school and all of this. So you've got, yeah, I find it really fascinating to think. And like I say, I'm quite ashamed actually that I've never made that connection before. That of course he was taking directly that learning, those ideas of virtues, that all of that, and then translating it into or bringing it to the school system and also into the system of kind of not just secular morality, but also ways of living that were being explored and expressed in the ethical societies. Because he was also a celebrant. We've got some, we had this glorious thing given to us or shared with us recently, which is a ceremony he put together and delivered a marriage ceremony at South Place Chapel, which is his handwritten kind of script for his ceremony that he's using all these literary references and things all throughout. And they also shared a picture of him in not sadly doing the ceremony, but teaching in a classroom. And it's I think it's one of the first, maybe the only one I've really seen of him properly in action. And so you saying that about the the inspiration of the classics is it all it all comes together.

Edith Hall 27:31

We should have a confab about that, Maddie. I can send you. I've written an article about this, it hasn't yet come out, but it's entirely about the children's Plutarch. But that is also, of course, because it's about it's sent the index is virtues. You go to it's like you get patience, civility, courage, right? You go to the heroes and and and see it. And he um was actually deeply Aristotelian in that because the virtue ethics he picks the virtues out of Aristotle's Nica McKeon and Eudemian ethics and applies them to Plutarch's lives. That's more implicit, but it's it's there. I love the fact that those ethical society guys as well, they used to have in their chapels, used to have big pictures of Prometheus and the torch, didn't they? And that, of course, goes all the way back to somebody that we mentioned earlier in this podcast, Protagoras, because for Protagoras, Prometheus is the man, the philanthropic god who gave man fire, so he could start to tame nature, it is very typical symbolism, but he's also typical symbolism for radical political causes like trade unions and abolitionism.

Tim Whitmarsh 28:39

There are also Christian versions of Prometheus as well, of course. You know, that's the interesting thing. He's such a mobile character. But yes, this figure that was sort of strung up on a rock and tortured and so forth and quasi-crucified or whatever, there's a Christian version of that as well.

Gilbert Murray and classics for the people

Andrew Copson 28:54

That's interesting, isn't it? It was often the place when the humanist movement started organizing, as it were, congregationally in the 19th century and had these ethical meeting houses and ethical chapels, they were on the lookout for imagery like this. Prometheus was extremely common. Busts of Athene were very common too. The bust of Athene was a really central part of their the internal architecture of these.

Edith Hall 29:15

She's education. There's many engravings of Athena giving a book to a working class person. She's intellect. Prometheus gives them fire so they can build their factories. Athena gives them mettis and access to a library.

Andrew Copson 29:29

And this is a whole vocabulary, isn't it? It's a vocabulary of it's a secular vocabulary for the people who are using it and a secular aesthetic.

Edith Hall 29:37

It's so exciting. And it just Frederick James Gould, I've researched the history of classical civilization and ancient history qualifications in Britain. And this was all in terms of classics. None of this was acknowledged. Lloyd George had a big inquest into the state of classics education. It is entirely about Latin and Greek in elite schools. And it put the kibosh on classical civilization and ancient history. That is studying the ancient world in English in a way that time poor kids can do who can't stay at school long enough to learn Latin and Greek. It went underground all the way through to the 1960s.

Madeleine Goodall 30:16

That's interesting too, isn't it? Because I was just thinking that in terms of somebody like Gilbert Murray, who said very much that studying Greek in his case at the university level, of course, but wasn't about the language as much as it was about the society and all of the stuff that you could take from that and the inspiration and the excitement and the joy. So it's again, it's fascinating that you say that because, yeah, in terms of that access to it and what people can take on a very human level, if they don't read Greek.

Edith Hall 30:49

And Gilbert Murray was actually a deep admirer of Gould. There's an account of him going to see Gould, who was apparently the most charismatic lecturer. He was incredible. I don't think Gilbert Murray was a charismatic lecturer. He ought to have been because he loved the theatre, but I don't think he was. He was also very committed to teetotalism, which Frederick James Gould wasn't. I think there was a sort of ascetic aspect to him. But he is crucial from the point of view of the history of classical scholarship in Britain. He's an Australian, he's an outsider, and he comes in and he supports women's suffrage. And yet he gets appointed Regis Chair of Greek at Oxford, which looking back on it was really extraordinary that that should have happened. They then regretted it because he spent all his time in London putting on plays and setting up the proto-UN. You know, he never went to Oxford, and when he did go to Oxford, he refused to go to Christchurch. He spent all his time at Somerville. He liked the ladies' company because he was a suffragist. So they regretted appointing him. But he indeed said exactly that, Maddy, in a very famous essay. And well, so did Matthew Arnold actually when he was inspecting schools and things. I was for about a decade chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, of which Polly Toynboy is now chair because she's a sort of descendant.

Andrew Copson 32:11

Yes. Polly is the only president of Humanist UK to have been the direct descendant of another president of Humanist UK, Gilbert Murray. So they have that apostolic, well-known genetic lineage, I suppose.

Edith Hall 32:23

My great achievement there was when I joined the Gilbert Murray Trust, all the money went to private schools for Greek and Latin reading competitions. And by the time I left, all the money was going to buy textbooks for comprehensive schools. So I did something.

Andrew Copson 32:38

Tim, as a registration professor successor of Gilbert Murray's. I'm at the other university, of course. Well, yes, and you spent and you do actually spend some time there rather than going around on in on missions. I'm at the league now. I mean, what do you do you have a particular affection for Gilbert Murray as well, Tim?

Tim Whitmarsh 32:56

I so the kind of classics that I do is not the kind of classics that Gilbert Murray does or did. He's best known, I think, these days, for these very florid translations of Greek tragedy. It's not my world at all. He was also, I think, one other thing to pick up with Gilbert Murray is that he was connected to these groups of people who are sort of broadly associated with the uncoupling of the classical past from modern European civilization. And he was one of these people who there wasn't a direct genetic link, cultural genetic link, if you like, between past and present. So he was important for that 20th century movement of, if you like, turning the Greeks and the Romans into a society who we have to analyse, we have to be very careful to think about their differences as well as their similarities to modern Europeans. So as a, if you like, a sort of figure for the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist version of classics that developed in the 20th century, I think he's a really important figure, yeah.

Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Heretics

Madeleine Goodall 33:54

What about Jane Harrison?

Tim Whitmarsh 33:56

Yes, well, Jane Harrison, yeah.

Andrew Copson 33:58

Harrison's really good at art. She was a member of Human Shakare, of course, as well.

Tim Whitmarsh 34:01

Yeah, and it's extraordinary if you go back and you look. I mean, Jane Harrison was one of the early academics of Newman College, which was founded in the, I think it was the 1880s, wasn't it? The late 19th century in Cambridge for women. And Harrison was a specialist in Greek religion, and she in particular used the methodologies of the emergent sides of anthropology to illuminate Greek uh antiquities. So she was rather than saying, rather than intuiting what was happening with Greek religion, she was actually saying, Well, let's do something comparative, let's see what we can learn from other parts of the world. And this was seen as, in some quarters, as absolutely heretical, because basically it was saying that the Greeks and the Romans were, in a way, primitive, which, as I say, cut right to the heart of that 19th-century Eurocentric imperialist narrative that said something like, Our right to rule the world is grounded in the inherent superiority of the Greeks and the Romans and the link between the two, if you like. So she was really attacking that directly. Not only was she a pioneering woman, of course, in all the ways that are obvious, but she was also very clearly involved in that, as I say, that process of trying to alienate the Greeks and the Romans from modern Europeans. And people, reviewers at the time picked up on this, and you can see them some of the most ghastly racist language that I've ever seen in academic journals is in the reviews of Jane Harrison's books.

Edith Hall 35:34

And that's all in the Fraser, the Golden Bough, and Nietzsche. And I think the invention of anthropology is modern anthropology is crucial here in objectifying religion as just a sort of social institution that humans do. Isn't it interesting that humans have always done this? And sort of why have they done it? I think that is the crucial thing. They call them the Cambridge ritualists, which implies that they're going around doing funny rituals. It's misleading. They're actually the Cambridge anthropologists.

Andrew Copson 36:04

I think one of the reasons probably why Maddy has brought Jane Harrison up, who by the way Gilbert Murray called the greatest living champion of free thought. I think Gilbert Murray called Jane Harrison that, when she was giving the Conway Memorial Lecture in London at Humanist Conway Hall. Gilbert Murray was actually in the chair for it when Jane Harrison gave the Conway Memorial Lecture at Conway Hall and called her the greatest one of the greatest living champions of free thought. But I know why Maddy has brought her up. It's because of Maddy's passion for the Cambridge heretics.

Madeleine Goodall 36:31

Yeah, so Jane Harrison gave the inaugural lecture to the Cambridge Heretics founded in 1909, and they were largely, or principally, I suppose, formed in in opposition to compulsory worship, which was still in place at the time. But one of the things that really that I just love about that inaugural lecture she gave, which was called Heresy in Humanity, was that she rooted it in this interpretation of heresy and its roots in Greek of choice, of reaching out to grasp. I think she talks about something, and about how vital that is to being human and to being human in a community. And then she adds to that this idea about the humanity as well as the heresy. So, yes, we need to question to make choices for ourselves, sometimes unpopular choices, but we need to do that in the context of our human qualities of being with other people, living with other people, living in communities, which just when I first read it, it was just one of those things where it just blew me away in terms of how closely it aligned with all the things we talk about with humanism now. And yeah, her giving that lecture. Not only that, but also then the Cambridge heretics go on to welcome all of the all the great and good of lecturers and also members, then people like Dora Russell were hugely influenced by their time in the heretics and going down and discussing everything, everything thrown open to discussion, and nothing off the table in terms of religion or politics or whatever it may be. And I do, in fact, it draws actually on everything that's been been said so far, I think, in the sense of really humanizes that that idea of how these ideas and these pieces of literature and these philosophical concepts were really being used and and lived by these people. It's not just, and we always say this with kind of humanist history in general, but it's not just this dry, dusty kind of intellectual academic history that's all incredibly cerebral and inaccessible. And it's actually these people living these ideas, exploring them. I love that image you you gave Edith earlier of sitting in a castle translating Lucretius while the cannonballs are flying, and you're really it's really embodied what these ideas meant.

Hypatia: freethought martyr

Edith Hall 38:52

Can I just say, because you mentioned Dora Russell, there is another totemic figure for atheists, atheists, and humanists, who is Hypatia of Alexandria. And Dora Russell actually wrote a book about Hypatia, and this was very important because the big book on Hypatia had been by Kingsley, who'd written this thing where she was actually converted to Christianity at the end, but she was basically converted to Anglicanism because he's he was using her to beat up Cardinal Newman and the fact that Catholics were now smiled upon a bit more. So she is really the first woman to say actually Hypatia should be our heroine because she died fighting for science, mass, Euclidean mass, and neoplatonism, but was torn to pieces at the hands of a particularly barbaric strand in African Christianity. So she becomes a martyr who is in a sort of atheist figurehead as well as a feminist one. And that's why Rachel Weiss wanted to make that wonderful movie. Rachel Weiss did this movie called Agora, and she told the world that this was at the time because she had been so enraged by books of Genesis being put up on the walls of Southern fundamentalist schools in the USA and all accounts of evolutionary race. She says that's that was what made her decide to do that movie. So that's a people should go and watch that movie. You were going to ask us about our the book we would recommend, but I would recommend that.

Madeleine Goodall 40:29

Among other Hypatia's, because I think that's something, again, that you know, these connections that are just like firing off on all cylinders now. But the the Dora Russell connection, but earlier on in the in the 19th century, people like Charles Bradlaugh, various free thinkers anyway, were naming their daughters Hypatia for that very reason. So Hypatia Bradlaw Bonner, who herself became a an activist for peace and a champion of free thought and secularism and a vice president of ours and all of those things, that it very consciously named in in honour of Hypatia.

Edith Hall 41:03

And when Yanis Varoufakis did Great Lives, the series on Radio 4, he picked Hypatia.

Must read texts and favourite Humanists

Andrew Copson 41:10

I think we've proved, if anything, we could speak for hours about each of these individuals, let alone the wider theme, which I think just goes to show how deep and profound and lasting the connection of classics and classical imagery and classical thought has been on the development of humanism. But we don't have ours and hours, unfortunately. And so we do now have to come to a close. Everyone that we've interviewed in this podcast, we've asked them right at the end who their favourite humanist is. So we will gonna we're gonna prepare for that question now. But before we ask you that, because of the theme of this podcast, we thought we would ask you, not film, because we've already done film recommendations, but book recommendations. Which single classical text would you put into the hands of a modern humanist and why? Let's start with you, Tim.

Tim Whitmarsh 41:52

Well, it's not a single classical text, but the works of Lucian, Lucian of Famous Ata in the second century CE, a satirist, absolutely merciless, nobody escaped his pen. Was he a humanist? I think he probably was, actually, to be honest. I think he has no real space in his worldview, which is, as I say, relentlessly cynical, has no space for divinity, has no space for any kind of elevation of even human beings. Anyone who sets themselves up as higher than basically walking meat is um a target for Lucian. So yeah, I would go for Lucian of Samoseta.

Edith Hall 42:29

What's the one where which was used by the Monty Python crew for the life of Brian? The one about the false prophet?

Tim Whitmarsh 42:35

I'm not absolutely sure, but there are two. There's um Peregrinus, which was one of the few ancient texts that was on the Catholic Church's index of prohibited books for hundreds of years, and there's also Alexander the False Prophet.

Edith Hall 42:48

I recommend one of those two for people to start with with leadership.

Tim Whitmarsh 42:52

He was also one of the key figures who was sort of rediscovered in the 18th century and the 19th century. Voltaire loved him and the like. So he was he's important as part of that story as well.

Andrew Copson 43:03

We didn't even go into the Enlightenment, really. There you go. Gotta have another just as well.

Edith Hall 43:08

I would go for just because it's an unbelievably aesthetically beautiful thing, as well as intellectually inspirational, which is Lucretius' on the nature of things, which is the sum total of Epicurean wisdom in the most his uh pleas with people not to fear death, and it's descriptions of atoms turning into things, is just an amazing poem, especially if you read it in the Penguin translation, verse translation by the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alicia Stalings.

Andrew Copson 43:42

Oh, yes, that's a really good translation. Yeah.

Edith Hall 43:45

It's the only ancient text my atheistical, uninterested in classics husband has read, and he loved it.

Andrew Copson 43:52

So these are both recommendations that are perfect, actually, because they're not only good in themselves, they've got enormous power in understanding the modern world. Because of their reception. So that's been ideal. It's almost as if you're experts. Thank you very much for that. And then your favorite humanist. We've been asking people this question. It's amazing what people come up with. So no pressure. But Tim.

Tim Whitmarsh 44:13

I'm going to go for, as before, qualification, humanist as a term doesn't really directly apply to classical antiquity. But I'm going to go anyway with a certain amount of flexibility for Diogenes the Cynic, who was a founder of the movement of cynicism. And there's a lovely story about him walking along the shore and somebody pointing out to him all the religious dedications set up by people who'd been saved by the gods. And Diogenes replied, it would be a lot more if the drowned had also set up their curses of the gods.

Andrew Copson 44:46

We quoted this. This just goes to show how ongoing the relevance is for all these thinkers for modern humanist organizations. We quoted that very recently because I don't know whether you've seen there's a big monument to answered prayers that's being built just outside Birmingham. These Christians have raised tens of millions of pounds. And each brick in this monument, which is like a ribbon, is going to be an answered prayer. And you can scan it with your phone, it's there to, you know, try to revive Christianity in Britain. Tens of millions. And we said very similar, we said, well, thank goodness it isn't the monument to unanswered prayer because we couldn't, they could never have afforded to build all that monument thing. However much fundraising they done. Okay, excellent. And Edith, who would be your favourite scouring game?

Edith Hall 45:28

I'm gonna dig up a classicist called Geoffrey DeSanteco, who was not a wonderful, not a particularly nice man, but he was very brilliant and very funny. So he'd be great at my dinner party. I met him. He wrote the class struggle in the ancient Greek world. He was a Marxist to the core. And when asked after a big lecture on slavery at London University, mid-career, what why he hadn't addressed the terrible sufferings of Christian martyrs in the um arena. What about the terrible things that happened to Christians? He said too little, too late.

Andrew Copson 46:04

My favourite would be the playwright Euripides, because it's really in his plays that we start to see a focus on the human causes of events and tragedies. It's not the gods that cause the characters, or not the gods alone, or even the gods primarily, that caused the characters in his plays like Medea or Hippolytus to do the things they do, but the uncontrollable force of human emotion, anger, jealousy, pride. And I think that focus on psychology, the skepticism that goes with it, the way the gods are treated quite often, um, quite uh dismissively, the elevation of marginalized people, the focus on humanity in his plays, that really makes him a proto-humanist for me, and someone who definitely inspired, especially in the 20th century, a lot of classicists to take a humanist view.

Madeleine Goodall 46:51

I think for me it has to be Jane Ellen Harrison. I know we've spoken about her already in this episode, but I'd like to throw a last push out for her. The heretics, as I said when I first read about them, it just one blew me away how many people they drew, very much rooted in this self-conscious harking back to this idea of heresy and seizing and retaking that, adopting that word to mean something that was not just about rebellion but also about striving for a better world, a world in which you could hold humanist ideas, debate humanist ideas, where nothing was kind of off the table in that sense. So something that grew out of a protest against the requirements of religious observance at the university became something which was about so much more and drew so many people. And Jane Harrison herself, in her life, so embodied that. I mean, it was this fearless excitement about pursuing the classics, especially when they were seen, or certainly the way she was approaching them, were seen as something that weren't women's domain, you know, the the bloody side of classics. And I think that in and of itself, as well as how apparently dramatic and amazing she was when she was lecturing on these things. I just think she she's a fascinating character.

Andrew Copson 48:12

Brilliant. All right. Thank you, Tim, and thank you, Edith. A fascinating episode and one that could really just run and run and run. We'll have to come back to this topic. Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanists UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanist UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at humanists.uk. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.live.

Madeleine Goodall 48:45

You can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the humanist heritage website at heritage.humanist.uk.