Diagoras of Melos

[4] In his Clouds, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes alludes to Diagoras as a well-known figure of the time,[5] whose second, extant version probably falls around 419–17 BC.

Diodorus informs us[6] that a few years later, c. 415 BC, he was accused of impiety, and he thought it best to escape Athens to avoid prosecution, and classical sources speak of a reward for either catching or killing him.

In 416 BC, Melos had been conquered and cruelly treated by the Athenians, and it is not at all impossible that Diagoras, indignant at such treatment, may have taken part in the party-strife at Athens, and thus have drawn upon himself the suspicion of the democratic party.

And Cicero goes on to give another example, where Diagoras was on a ship in hard weather, and the crew thought that they had brought it on themselves by taking this ungodly man on board.

That he maintained his own position with great firmness, and perhaps with more freedom, wit, and boldness than was advisable, seems to be attested by the fact that he in particular obtained the epithet of atheist in antiquity.

The Christian writer Athenagoras of Athens (2nd century AD) writes about Diagoras: With reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there was no God at all.

[11]To return to the accusation against Diagoras which obliged him to quit Athens, the time was one in which scepticism was beginning to undermine the foundations of the ancient popular belief.

The trial of those who had broken down the statues of Hermes, the profanation of the mysteries, and the accusation of Alcibiades, are symptoms which show that the unbelief, nourished by the speculations of philosophers and the sophists, began to appear very dangerous to the conservative party at Athens.

For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries were alleged against Alkibiades and others.

Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the god thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips, became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world, and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive; despite which he seems to have escaped.

[14]The relation of Diagoras to the popular religion and theology of his age can not be explained without going back to the opinions of the Natural philosophers, and the intellectual movement of the time.