Atheism In Pagan Antiquity By A. B. Drachmann Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Copenhagen Gyldendal 11 Hanover Square, London, W.1 Copenhagen Christiania 1922 CONTENTS Preface Introduction Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Notes Index Footnotes PREFACE The present treatise originally appeared in Danish as a University publication (_Kjœbenhavns Universitets Festskrift_, November 1919). In submitting it to the English public, I wish to acknowledge my profound indebtedness to Mr. G. F. Hill of the British Museum, who not only suggested the English edition, but also with untiring kindness has subjected the translation, as originally made by Miss Ingeborg Andersen, M.A. of Copenhagen, to a painstaking and most valuable revision. For an account of the previous treatments of the subject, as well as of the method employed in my investigation, the reader is referred to the introductory remarks which precede the Notes. A. B. DRACHMANN. CHARLOTTENLUND, _July 1922_. INTRODUCTION The present inquiry is the outcome of a request to write an article on “Atheism” for a projected dictionary of the religious history of classical antiquity. On going through the sources I found that the subject might well deserve a more comprehensive treatment than the scope of a dictionary would allow. It is such a treatment that I have attempted in the following pages. A difficulty that occurred at the very beginning of the inquiry was how to define the notion of atheism. Nowadays the term is taken to designate the attitude which denies every idea of God. Even antiquity sometimes referred to atheism in this sense; but an inquiry dealing with the history of religion could not start from a definition of that kind. It would have to keep in view, not the philosophical notion of God, but the conceptions of the gods as they appear in the religion of antiquity. Hence I came to define atheism in Pagan antiquity as the point of view which _denies the existence of the ancient gods_. It is in this sense that the word will be used in the following inquiry.