Battling the gods : atheism in the ancient world

Summary: "How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities,"--Amazon.com.

Item details

ISBN: 9780307958327 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 0307958329 (alk. paper)
Physical Description: print
viii, 290 pages ; 24 cm
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Contents / Notes

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [245]-277) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Preface -- A Dialogue -- Part One Archaic Greece New Horizons -- 1 Polytheistic Greece -- 2 Good Books -- 3 Battling the Gods -- 4 The Material Cosmos -- Part Two Classical Athens : Atheism and Oppression -- 5 Cause and Effect -- 6 "Concerning the Gods, I Cannot Know" -- 7 Playing the Gods -- 8 Atheism on Trial -- 9 Plato and the Atheists -- Part Three The Hellenistic Era : Godlike Kings and Gosless Philosophers -- 10 Gods and Kings -- 11 Philosophical Atheism -- 12 Epicurus Theomakhos -- Part Four Rome : The New World Order -- 13 With Gods on Our Side -- 14 Virtual Networks -- 15 Imagine -- 16 Christians, Heretics, and Other Atheists -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.