Free Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh

particular are left nursing their resentment. 10
    In its most extreme form, theomachy expresses a kind of atheism, through the narrative medium of myth. To confront the gods was to deny their potency, what made them gods. For stories along these lines we must turn to an epic poem called the
Catalogue of Women,
written in the sixth century BC. It does not survive in its entirety: what we know of it is pieced together from fragments of papyri found in Egypt. Luckily, these are extensive: it must have been a best seller in the Roman period. At first sight, its contents do not look particularly riveting: it is in effect a family tree for the Greeks, dividing them ethnically between various descendants of Hellen, the first Greek. It is called the “
Catalogue of Women
” because it is structured around a list of women who have been impregnated by gods. But despite these unpromising signs, it seems to have been in fact a whirligig compendium of baroque myths, by turns gruesome and erotic—which no doubt explains why later readers were so keen to get their hands on it.
    One particular family catches the eye, the house of Aeolus. With their heartlands in Thessaly, a notoriously wild place toward the north of Greece, the Aeolians were always easy to associate with uncivilized behavior. A surviving fragment of the
Catalogue
introduces Aeolus’s sons grandly as “kings, ministers of justice,” but this billing is at best ironic in view of what follows: “Cretheus, Athamas and Sisyphus with his shimmering wiles, and lawless Salmoneus, and arrogant Perieres…” “Shimmering” is
aiolos,
an obvious pun on their progenitor’s name. So far as we can judge, Cretheus and Athamas did not do much wrong, by the permissive standards of myth, but the rest were a reprobate lot who carried wrongdoing in their very DNA. And what is interesting for our purposes is that their crimes were of a piece: they all, in their different ways, engaged in theomachy.
    In the first generation of descendants of Aeolus we meet Sisyphus, he of the “shimmering wiles.” The founder of the city of Corinth, Sisyphus is best known now (thanks to Albert Camus) for his punishment in the underworld: he was condemned to roll a rock up a hill, a rock that would tumble down each time he had almost reached the peak. There are different traditions relating to the crime that prompted this punishment; it is impossible now to tell for sure which version the now-fragmentary
Catalogue
contained, but the following is the likeliest. Zeus abducts Aegina, the daughter of Asopus; Sisyphus then angers Zeus by telling Asopus where she is. When Zeus sends Death to punish him, Sisyphus captures Death in chains, with the result that humans can no longer die. In time the god Ares releases Death and hands Sisyphus over to him, but once in the underworld he tricks his way out and lives until old age catches up with him. The fantasy of tricking death is a motif found in folklores across the world. What is distinctive about the Sisyphus myth, however, is that the wily king actually succeeds, not once but twice. He is punished in the end, of course, but here is a human who has come close to erasing the line between mortals and immortals, by defeating mortality itself. 11
    Then there was Alcyone, another of Aeolus’s offspring. A scrappy papyrus fragment summarizes the
Catalogue
’s version of the story: “Ceyx the son of the star Phosphorus [“Bringer of Light”] married Alcyone the daughter of Aeolus. The two of them were arrogant. They loved each other; she […] called him Zeus, he named her Hera. Zeus was angered at this and metamorphosed them into birds.” Their names, indeed, reflect their birdiness:
k
ē
ux
means “tern,” and
alkuon
ē “kingfisher.” The crucial point for us, however, is that they attempt to make themselves into gods. A later encyclopedia adds the detail that Ceyx “wanted to be worshipped as a god.” This husband and wife team seem to have offended