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This is a good question, and one that it will be difficult to answer categorically. Certainly, levels of literal "belief" (or even what that may have meant for them) would have varied then as now, likely according to socioeconomic status, degree of education,* and personal predilection.
(*Note that I am speaking only of antiquity, and do not mean in any way to imply that highly educated moderns may not truly—and thoughtfully—"believe" in their god.)
When we read, e.g., the Homeric epics (*Iliad* and *Odyssey*) or many of the tragedies of the fifth century BCE, it is easy to conclude that "the Greeks" "believed" in their gods in the way that a modern Christian, e.g., might proclaim that she or he "believes" in god. Did the audiences of the early epics really believe that a god might come down on a battlefield and drag a hero away by his hair? Possibly (but really: I doubt it). Did the majority of the audience of the fifth century tragic festivals believe in the gods represented on stage *as such*? Possibly (but again: I doubt it).
It is important to remember a few things. First, our accounts of the ancient gods and their hijinx do not come from proscriptive religious texts (such as the Torah, the Christian Bible, or the Qu'ran). They come from poems meant to entertain, share cultural values, and—in the case of tragedies—to win a prize. These are not descriptions meant to explain or describe a belief system, and it is naive to view them as such. To endeavor to reconstruct a culture-wide belief system from a fairly small selection of highly aristocratic texts just doesn't work.
Second, there is no ancient Greek verb for "to believe" that is ever used in the context of "to believe [in a god]." Indeed, they never talk about believing in their gods. They talk about respecting them, angering them, appeasing them, sacrificing to them, and so on—but not *believing in* them. The idea of belief—in the modern sense—hinges upon a stick-and-carrot (hell or heaven; damnation or eternal salvation) bargain that they did not have with their gods. As they had nothing to gain from "belief," such belief is never an issue (or, I would argue, a concept).
Third, consider Xenophanes—a presocratic philosopher (and poet)—writing in the late 6th and early 5th cc BCE.
Xenophanes soundly ridiculed the images of the gods presented in the Homeric epics, and was perhaps one of the first individuals recorded to have recognized that mortals create their gods in their own image:
"But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.
...
Ethiopians say that their gods are snubnosed and black
Thracians that they are pale and red-haired."
—So, belief. I often wonder how an ancient might respond to the simple question "so, do you really *believe* in these gods?" I suspect that the answer would, more often than not, be something along the lines of "What in the hell do you mean by that?"
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What if you were to ask this person, instead, "Do they exist?"?
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Ancient Greek doesn't have a verb for "to exist," exactly—not, at least, in the modern sense of the word.
There is a "to be" verb (*einai*), so you could ask "are there gods?" But "to be" is not the same thing, semantically, as "to exist," right? I mean I could ask you "are there salmon?" and you'd say, I'd guess, "yes, of course." But if I asked you "do salmon exist?" you might wonder what the freak I meant. "Existence" implies, philosophically and religiously, something rather different than just "being"—it implies something more lasting and eternal (thus we would rarely ask if a friend "exists," right?).
If one could press this ancient interlocutor, and try to explain what one meant by "existence" (I think Aristotle comes close with some technical language, but he is not writing about gods), I suspect the ancient would still be befuddled.
In the end, I'd guess that the lower, less-educated classes (whose voices we have lost) may have had a kind of "never question it, make offerings at shrines, attend the festivals, that's what's important" sort of answer. Yeah, of course they "exist," so what?
If you were to ask a highly educated individual the same, they'd probably laugh a bit and explain to you that you are asking the wrong questions.
We don't have this from the Greek side of things so much, but we do have Roman authors who write very cynically about the role in the gods in civic life and the ways in which politicians manipulate as much.
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It seems that you're tending to stretch the definition of words like "exist" and "believe" specifically so that they equate with concepts that would have been unfamiliar to classical civilizations.
Clearly the ancients had a concept of fiction, and much of Socrates' ideal state is predicated on the notion that fanciful descriptions, while not true in any empirical or essential sense, can help people understand their roles. Moreover, he argues that bad fictions can mislead people about their role, or convince people to act waywardly. Clearly, there is at the very least a philosophical concept that addresses the idea that people can think something is true even when it is not, in fact, true.
It's laudable that you emphasize the dangers of hastily superimposing modern concepts onto ancient cultures, but I feel that the way that "belief" is used in the question is actually a rather basic concept that no language could do without: it is asking whether or not the listener of a story is convinced of the story's veracity. To imagine a culture without this concept would be to imagine a culture without lying and without embellishment, and I don't "believe" that is true of the Greeks.
As for asking whether whether a friend "exists," that's another great example: if you suspected that someone's friend was imaginary, you most certainly would wonder if that friend existed.
So, the larger picture answer that you gave -- we don't have a lot of evidence either way, and it probably would have depended on who you asked anyway -- I'll buy.
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Quite wrong. I am precisely saying that the ancients did not have concepts of these words that could parallel modern concepts. That's why when people say "what about belief?" "What about exist?" I respond "those are modern concepts that can't really be applied accurately to any ancient concepts I can identify."
Of course ancients had a concept of fiction: fiction writing was invented in antiquity. Plato was far from the first to write about such (cf. Xenophanes, supra) but he is a fine example. And yet recognizing that individuals could believe in something that wasn't true begs the question of individuals believing in the existence of a divine being.
You may believe that no language could do without a basic concept of belief, but the ancient languages lack, until the Christian era, a verb for "to believe" that can encompass the modern use of belief in the existence of a divine being.
In short, to believe that a statement is a truth or a lie is entirely different from believing in the existence of a god. Of the former, the ancients a great deal to say: of the latter, not so much.
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I understand the word "belief" has a lot of specific meaning in the context of Christian theology and history that would have made no sense to anyone whose culture was never touched by those histories: that's a given. But the question really was "did they believe the stories were true?"
Insisting that there is no discrete word for that exact concept in ancient Greek is unconvincing at best. The French use "l'histoire" to mean both history and story, but they know the difference between une histoire by Edgar Allan Poe and one by Howard Zinn, e.g. By the same token, we English speakers use "to be" where the Spanish use "ser" and "estar" to distinguish between very different senses of that verb. Where they would distinguish meanings by alternatig these verbs -- "el es mal", "el esta mal" -- we would use different adjectives: "he is evil," "he is ill." We have no trouble expressing the same concepts, though we do it very differently.
So, while we can acknowledge the more or less obvious point that translations never have identical meaning to the original, I don't think we need to postulate a Greek concept that is identical to our concept of belief before we can ask if they thought the stories about the gods were fictional or not.
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It may be "unconvincing," but it is in fact what the ancient languages show. I am sorry if this does not convince you. I cannot remake classical languages in the image of modern thought.
And of course you may ask whether or not "they" thought these stories were fictional, but that was not the original question. I answered the original question. As to whether "they" thought the stories were fictional, let me restate: most educated ancients in the Greek world surely did; some perhaps did not. We do not have the voices of the uneducated, as the uneducated did not write.
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I think "ask[ing] if they thought the stories about the gods were fictional or not" is a pretty accurate restatement of the original question: "Like deeply religious people today who think the Bible is 'true' did the Greeks think their Gods were real people and their stories had actually happened? Or did they think of it as entertaining stories?"
I understand your answer and I am convinced by your reasoning about the availability and reliability of evidence in terms of the larger culture, as well as the fact that concepts from devotional monotheistic religions play a huge role in our modern languages that they would not have in ancient Greek. I just don't buy the claims you're making about English: I don't think "I [don't] believe in god" necessarily implies more than a claim about the truth-status of a story about a deity, nor that "existing" implies a state that is more eternal or essential or mystical than "being."
In any event, I do apologize for coming across as asking you to remake classical languages in the image of modern thought. I largely enjoyed and learned from your answer, but had a bone to pick with the one aspect of it.
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I can't even begin to understand why you're ignoring wide swaths of archaeological evidence of classical Greek religious belief. Not all the evidence is present in texts composed by the ancient Greek elite. What about altars? What about evidence of animal sacrifice? Household gods? Depictions of gods and mythology on pottery?
What is the purpose of sacrificing animals if individuals in ancient Greece didn't "believe" in the gods they were sacrificing to?
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keshmeshi:
I'm an archaeologist, so I assure you I am not "ignoring" archaeological evidence. Archaeology, however, can give evidence only of praxis (what people did) and not doxis (what people thought or believed).
Much of modern Christianity is orthodoctical, but much—if not all—ancient religion appears to have been heavily orthopractical: that is, what matters is not what you believe (and indeed, as above, such is not discussed), but what you do, and when you do it, and whether or not you do it "right" (and they write a *great deal* about this).
I understand that this is a very difficult concept, so greatly is modern western culture entrenched in a Christian sense of orthodoxy and the necessity of belief. But the fact is that even in modern cultures, people engage in a great deal of ritualized behavior that has absolutely nothing to do with belief in any higher power.
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Sorry: that should have been "orthodoxical."
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Don't we have altars with evidence of offerings on them?
Why would you offer something, watch it rot, clean it up, and then offer again unless you believed some magical being was going to give you the homey hook up?
People do stupid things like throw salt over their shoulder or cross their fingers for good luck nowadays.
Would the belief in Greek Gods be more analogous to superstitious behavior than religious belief?
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Little evidence of the sort you suggest survives, but we don't need it. Of course such offerings were made (though usually burnt: you don't let an offering rot, because that results in ritual pollution).
This is super complicated. Yes, there is a kind of a belief in a formula whereby if mortals did X, they might—if they did it correctly—receive (or avoid) Y. The belief in the formula—to whatever extent such a belief existed (again, we have early authors ridiculing such, so we might suspect widespread skepticism)—is, however, different from the belief in such deities as "real" (myths as true stories, etc.) or the belief "in" such deities as a whole.
Your examples of throwing salt, knocking wood, no hats on the bed, and so on are good ones. You do them—that's "orthopraxy"—because... well, because you do them.
As above, what *appears* to be behavior based on what we think of as "belief *in* a god" is not necessarily that. It is also very very difficult (if not impossible) to reconstruct belief from archaeological remains. If you tried to reconstruct Catholic belief based on the remains of Rome—let's say you're an archaeologist 2,000 years in the future—you'd likely conclude that this was a polytheistic religion with a blue-shrouded woman as the primary mother goddess.
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It's instructive that when the philosophers started reaching for explanations that didn't rely on the gods, they still peppered their conversation with references to the gods, with no apparent cognitive dissonance. Their conclusion never seems to be "And therefore, the gods don't exist!" so much as "So now we have an explanation that seems more complete and doesn't rely on things we can't know. May the gods smile on our efforts."
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"So now we have an explanation that seems more complete and doesn't rely on things we can't know. May the gods smile on our efforts."
I am sorry: to which philosophical text to you mean to refer?
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The Socratic dialogues, in particular, I remember as being scattered with casual references to the gods. Euthyphro, not surprisingly, has plenty, but perhaps not so casual, since it's explicitly about piety. But while skimming after seeing your question, I chanced upon the Apologia and remembered that one of the charges against Socrates was atheism:
"But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such inquirers do not believe in the existence of the gods."
The translation is by Benjamin Jowett. I don't have any Attic Greek, so I can't speak to the quality of the translation, but it seems that Jowett presents this as a modern-style question about the existence or non-existence of the gods, or at least Socrates' opinion of the question.
Then again, Meletos' feeble prosecution of his accusation of atheism is perhaps evidence that what was meant by atheism in that context is a long shot from what we mean in today's discussions.
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And yet it is good to remember that references to the gods are not tantamount to what we would consider *belief* in the *existence* of gods. That's what's so tricky here. Orthopraxy is very difficult for the modern mind to grasp, but it is what best explains ancient religious thought.
So maybe what's best to say is that although we don't have written evidence of widespread belief (esp among the literate classes), we *do* have reasonable evidence—literary and material—of very widespread religious *practice*. The point seems to be that *belief* was simply not very important—it is not anything people discuss or argue about in the writings we have—but the way in which one interacted with what were essentially state religious *was.*
Ok, the passage you quote is...
Oy. Ok, seriously making me bust out my Plato, huh?
Ok. Your passage occurs at 18b-18c.
The translation is horrible. Good lord! That's why. The Jowett translation dates from the late 19th century! Ok. Well, that explains quite a lot.
So anyway. It is not a very good translation, but it comes from Ap. 18b-18c. The first bit is of course a reference to Aristophanes' humorous depiction of Sokrates in *Clouds*. What Jowett translates as "do not believe in the existence of" is not that in Greek at all.
Will this work? Let's try it:
οἱ γὰρ ἀκούοντες ἡγοῦνται τοὺς ταῦτα ζητοῦντας οὐδὲ θεοὺς νομίζειν.
Ok. This reads "for those hearing [M's charge] suppose that those searching after such things [scientific knowledge] do not "nomizein" the gods."
So the verb—it's an accusative—"nomizein" is what J translates as "believe in the existence of." This is highly problematic, because that's not what the verb means at all. The verb is related to the noun "nomos," which can mean "law" or "custom" or such.
As such, "nomizein" can mean a lot of things: it can mean: to practice, to use customarily, to hold as a custom, to be used to, to be accustomed to, to hold in honor (in one's actions), and so on. Do you see the emphasis on *action* and not belief? That's because "belief" is not a primary meaning of this word, because it is not a primary concern of the Athenians.
Now, there is one use of "nomizein," when it takes an accusative and an infinitive, which may mean "to believe THAT." But you'd need a second infinitive, and it's not there. It is true that you needn't use an infinitive of the "to be" verb if the meaning is obvious, but it's also true that "nomizein," when it means "to believe THAT" never (that I could find) appears with an implied or expressed "to be" verb, because that sense of "believe that s.t. is" is not a Greek one. You can believe that you are being ruled; you can believe that the army is advancing; you can believe that the sky is falling. In Greek, the sentiment "to believe that the gods are" is nonsensical. You can write it, grammatically speaking, but it makes no sense in an Attic context.
The idea that this is a charge of atheism, or a refusal to "believe in" the gods is one inspired wholly by a Christian mindset, I fear. Lots to do with what Sokrates DID, but nothing about what he did or did not "believe."
Meletos' charge was trumped up and ridiculous anyway. No one cared about the "strange gods" (physics and science) Sokrates recognized; they were pissed off because he was privately educating a bunch of young aristocrats.
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Thanks for the translation and explanation! That sort of depth of understanding of Greek is just beyond me.
"And yet it is good to remember that references to the gods are not tantamount to what we would consider *belief* in the *existence* of gods."
That's what I was getting at with my first comment. Socrates saw no apparent contradiction in finding explanations for things that didn't rely on the divine and yet invoking the divine on a casual basis amidst the search for those explanations. To me that says that it's not an issue of belief or non-belief, but rather something that's not really considered at all. As you said, it's just what people do.
"Meletos' charge was trumped up and ridiculous anyway."
Oh, no doubt. But when looking back you can still learn something from a trumped up charge, the same way that Suetonius' faithful reproductions of tabloid-style sensationalism tells us something about ideas that were at least in commerce, if not necessarily widely accepted or even plausible. Just because a statement isn't true doesn't mean it can't teach us about the people who discuss it. Or, looked at another way, if Jowett's translation had jived better with yours, it would've been a challenge to your "praxis over doxis" explanation regardless of whether Meletos was arguing in good faith or not. For what little it's worth, I find your explanation compelling, but once I ran across that passage I couldn't resist throwing it at you - I was bound to learn something interesting one way or the other.
Thanks again for busting out the Plato! ;-)
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"if Jowett's translation had jived better with yours, it would've been a challenge to your "praxis over doxis" explanation"
If Jowett's translation had been correct, neither I nor anyone else would make a orthopraxy / orthodoxy argument. It's not like it's an argument we secretly like, because it's so obscure and difficult to grasp (and teach), so we are manipulating the ancient texts in order to promote it. It's that that's what the freaking ancient texts seem to indicate, and it's weird, but if we move away from a Christian- (and here it's more "Christian" than the Judeo- bit) inspired naturalization and prioritization of belief... well, then we just don't really see quite that—certainly not the emphasis on it—in antiquity.
But it's this Christian-influenced thinking that must have led Jowett to render "nomizein" as "believe in the existence of." It goes entirely against the Greek, but jibes perfectly with a late 19th c Christian-influenced worldview. To Jowett, it didn't likely matter that nomizein sort of *never* means that, and is never used that way grammatically. What mattered (I am hypothesizing) is that he *knew* this was a charge of atheism, and atheism is about "not believing" in the gods, so that's what this word must mean here.
Translations (and much theoretical scholarship, for that matter) often tell us a great deal about the translators (and their times). It's a blasted difficult task to render a really sharp translation, however, and I don't want to bully old Jowett.
Anyway, all of this stuff—orthopraxy v orthodoxy— is *really* hard to explain, and even hard to understand (I am speaking personally). I'm actually totally used to the utter disbelief and argumentation I've received here (I sometimes get it from my students, a few of whom apparently lose all confidence in my authority when I challenge their worldview). But once you can kind of get it, once you can wrap your head around how this could be possible (and then start recognizing a lot of modern orthopraxy, and how strange it is that orthodoxy, or "proper belief" has been so naturalized in modern times), it explains a lot.
So anyway. I don't make things up, I don't argue things just to be churlish, and I certainly don't argue things I cannot fully argue, in the original, and with enough years of research and piles of hardcore scholarship to make anyone ... well, lose interest before I am done explaining it. My specialty is language—words, how they are used, wordplay, subtle intertextual references, etc.—and so I sure as hell never make an argument about word usage unless I've spent a great deal of time researching it (not that you claimed as much, but when people question the "belief" thing, I'm always like "What? Do you think I just made that up for fun?").
"To me that says that it's not an issue of belief or non-belief, but rather something that's not really considered at all. "
Yes. As almost incomprehensible as this may sound to a modern reader—one inevitably saturated by "believer / infidel / go to heaven / to go hell" rhetoric, I would agree exactly with how you formulated this.
And it is *always* a pleasure to bust out the Plato!
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