ike anybody else; and towards the monotheist, to whom the
whole of the Pagan worship was an abomination, which one should abstain
from at any cost, and which one should prevail on others to give up for
the sake of their own good in this life or the next.

In the literature of antiquity we meet with sporadic statements to the
effect that certain philosophers bore the epithet _atheos_ as a sort of
surname; and in a few of the later authors of antiquity we even find lists
of men--almost all of them philosophers--who denied the existence of the
gods. Furthermore, we possess information about certain persons--these
also, if Jews and Christians are excluded, are nearly all of them
philosophers--having been accused of, and eventually convicted of, denial
of the gods; some of these are not in our lists. Information of this kind
will, as remarked above, be taken as the point of departure for an
investigation of atheism in antiquity. For practical reasons, however, it
is reasonable to include some philosophers whom antiquity did not
designate as atheists, and who did not come into conflict with official
religion, but of whom it has been maintained in later times that they did
not believe in the existence of the gods of popular belief. Thus we arrive
at the following list, in which those who were denoted as _atheoi_ are
italicised and those who were accused of impiety are marked with an
asterisk:

Xenophanes.
*Anaxagoras.
_ Diogenes of Apollonia._
_ Hippo of Rhegium._
*_Protagoras._
_ Prodicus._
_ Critias._
*_Diagoras of Melos._
*Socrates.
Antisthenes.
Plato.
*Aristotle.
Theophrastus.
*Stilpo.
*_Theodorus._
*_Bion._
_ Epicurus._
_ Euhemerus._

The persons are put down in chronological order. This order will in some
measure be preserved in the following survey; but regard for the
continuity of the tradition of the doctrine will entail certain
deviations. It will, that is to say, be natural to divide the material
into four groups: the pre-Socratic philosophy; the Sophists; Socrates and
the Socratics; Hellenistic philosophy. Each of these groups has a
philosophical character of its own, and it will be seen that this
character also makes itself felt in the relation to the gods of the
popular belief, even though we here meet with phenomena of more isolated
occurrence. The four groups must be supplemented by a fifth, a sur