Atheism as a philosophic doctrine was relatively rare. Diagoras of Melos, a contemporary of Socrates, and Theodore of Cyrene,[211] a contemporary of the first Ptolemy, were said to have held that doctrine, and the former was known from it as “the Atheist.” However, even in this case we cannot be quite sure of our ground. Some of the poems of Diagoras seem to have a distinct, even a strong, religious feeling. Josephus asserts that Diagoras’ offense in Athenian eyes was scoffing at the mysteries.[212] If that is true, he received his sobriquet less from atheism, as we understand it, than from the same facts that brought Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates himself within the ban of the Athenian police. That is, he was charged rather with contempt of the actually constituted deities of the Athenian state than with a general negation of a divinity. The term itself, ἄθεος, is not necessarily negative. In fact, Greek had very few purely negative ideas. In Plato’s Euthyphro[213] the only alternatives that are admitted are θεοφιλές and θεομισές, _i.e._ what the gods hate and what the gods love. So the various Greek adjectives compounded with “α privative,” ανωφελής, “useless,” ἄβουλος, “thoughtless,” are really used in a positive sense contrary to that of the positive adjective. So ανωφελής is rather “harmful” than merely “useless”; ἄβουλος is “ill-advised”; etc. The word ἄθεος would, by that analogy, rather denote one that opposed certain gods than one who denied them. A man might be ἄθεος in one community and not in another. Indeed his “atheism” might be an especial devotion to a divine principle which was not that recognized by the state. In ordinary literary usage ἄθεος is denuded even of this significance. It means little more than “wicked.” It is used so by Pindar, by Sophocles, and in general by the orators. Often it runs in pairs with other adjectives of the same character. Xenophon calls Tissaphernes (An. II. v. 29) ἀθεότατος καὶ πανουργότατος, “most godless and wicked,” in which the superlative is especially noteworthy. As a matter of fact it is often used of a man whom the gods would have none of, rather than one who rejects the gods. Ἄθεος, ἄφιλος ὀλοίμαν, cries the chorus in Oedipus Rex, “May I die abandoned by gods and men.”[214] When it is first used of the Jews by Molo, it is as part of just such a group; ἄθεοι καὶ μισάνθρωποι, he calls the Jews, “hateful to gods and men,” and other rhetoricians follow suit. As a term of abuse, ἄθεος was as good as any other.