Note 190 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

Whatever may have been the private vogue of freethinking at Athens in the Periklean period, it was always a popular thing to attack it. Some years before or after the death of Perikles there came to Athens the alien Hippo, the first specifically named atheist190 of Greek antiquity. The dubious tradition runs that his tomb bore the epitaph: “This is the grave of Hippo, whom destiny, in destroying him, has made the equal of the immortal Gods.”191 If, as seems likely, he was the Hippo of Rhegion mentioned by Hippolytos,192 he speculated as to physical origins in the manner of Thales, making water generate fire, and that in turn produce the world.193 But this is uncertain. Upon him the comic muse of Athens turned its attacks very much as it did upon Socrates. The old comic poet Kratinos, a notorious wine-bibber, produced a comedy called The Panoptai (the “all-seers” or “all eyes”), in which it would appear that the chorus were made to represent the disciples of Hippo, and to wear a mask covered with eyes.194 Drunkenness was a venial fault in comparison with the presumption to speculate on physics and to doubt the sacred lore of the populace. The end of the rule of ignorance was that a theistic philosopher who himself discouraged scientific inquiry was to pay a heavier penalty than did the atheist Hippo.