t contemporary
witness, that there must have been some foundation for the accusation of
"atheism." For in _The Clouds_, where Aristophanes wants to represent
Socrates as an atheist, he puts in his mouth scraps of the naturalism of
Diogenes; that he would hardly have done, if Diogenes had not already been
decried as an atheist.

It is of course impossible to base any statement of the relation of the
two philosophers to popular belief on such a foundation. But it is,
nevertheless, worth noticing that while not a single one of the earlier
naturalists acquired the designation atheist, it was applied to two of the
latest and otherwise little-known representatives of the school. Take this
in combination with what has been said above of Anaxagoras, and we get at
any rate a suspicion that Greek naturalism gradually led its adherents
beyond the naive stage where many individual phenomena were indeed
ascribed to natural causes, even if they had formerly been regarded as
caused by divine intervention, but where the foundations of the popular
belief were left untouched. Once this path has been entered on, a point
will be arrived at where the final conclusion is drawn and the existence
of the supernatural completely denied. It is probable that this happened
towards the close of the naturalistic period. If so early a philosopher as
Anaxagoras took this point of view, his personal contribution as a member
of the Periclean circle may have been more significant in the religious
field than one would conjecture from the character of his work.

Before we proceed to mention the sophists, there is one person on our list
who must be examined though the result will be negative, namely, Diagoras
of Melos. As he appears in our records, he falls outside the
classification adopted here; but as he must have lived, at any rate, about
the middle of the fifth century (he is said to have "flourished" in 464)
he may most fitly be placed on the boundary line between the Ionian
philosophy and Sophistic.

For later antiquity Diagoras is the typical atheist; he heads our lists of
atheists, and round his person a whole series of myths have been formed.
He is said to have been a poet and a pious man like others; but then a
colleague once stole an ode from him, escaped by taking an oath that he
was innocent, and afterwards made a hit with the stolen work. So Diagoras
lost his faith in the gods and wrote a treatise under the title of
_apopyrgizontes logoi_ (l