War on Mount Olympus

It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word derives from Epicurus, who set up shop as a philosopher in Athens around 306 BC, but it became so domesticated in Hebrew that the medieval thinker Moses Maimonides, till he found out better, thought it was of home-grown Aramaic origin. In ancient Jewish usage, however, I think apikoros meant someone who denied that God takes care of the world, which was indeed the claim of Epicurus. Though Whitmarsh sets out to show that atheism was quite normal in ancient (Greek) history, atheism turns out to be a slippery notion.

Epicurus declared that the whole boundless world was made up of an infinite number of indestructible atoms in unpredictable motion. Our souls too were made of atoms, a tinier kind, like those that constituted wind and fire. And as Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek culture at Cambridge, explains it, Epicurus did teach that the gods existed, but were seen not by our senses, only by our minds.