An Archaeology of Disbelief: The Origin of Secular Philosophy, by Edward Jayne. Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2018. xx & 198 pages. 978-0-7618-6966-5 (cloth); 978-0-7618-6967-2 (electronic).

Edward Jayne, an English professor emeritus in his eighty-third year at the time of publication of this book, offers in eight chapters a compact survey of skeptics and (more rarely) outright atheists from Archaic Greece to the late Roman Republic. The chapters are 1) Pre-Socratics (fifteen individuals and groups between Thales and Democritus); 2) Plato and the Age of Pericles; 3) Early Aristotle; 4) Late Aristotle; 5) The Lyceum after Aristotle; 6) The Epicureans; 7) Skepticism; and 8) Cicero. That list alone shows an impressive range of coverage, and there are detailed footnote references—always focused on translations, as is appropriate for a book aimed at a non-scholarly audience.

Much of this ground is also covered in Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, issued in 2015 by Tim Whitmarsh, Leventis Professor at Cambridge. Whitmarsh provides, at three hundred pages, a deeper and broader survey for professional practitioners, but Jayne has his own perspective on the often fascinating, sometimes depressing story of the first documented emergence of nonreligious thought—a story with significant resonance today, when so many people still live in a mental world that preserves intact virtually prehistoric superstitions.

After general introductory background, both books begin, inevitably, with that large group of thinkers lumped together as “Pre-Socratics”—a term that would annoy them all with its implied subordination to someone who was never even published. Interestingly, Jayne includes several important, if mostly now lost, figures (for example, Melissus of Samos, Pherecydes of Syros, and Diogenes of Apollonia), who receive little or no attention in Whitmarsh, a clear sign of Jayne’s independent reading.

It’s not easy to write about the Pre-Socratics: there’s a host of unpronounceable names and a fog of abstract terms mixed with attempts at “scientific” understanding of phenomena that to us can seem obtuse or misguided. In dealing with this awkward mass of material, Jayne’s expository style is actually less engaging than that of the Cambridge scholar, but anyone serious enough to pick up either book will surely be captivated at encountering the excitement, still palpable after twenty-five centuries, of humanity’s discovery of ideas and the beginnings of critical (and skeptical) thought.

Plato receives a brief treatment, as might be expected, considering that his support for philosophical monotheism puts him on the opposite side of the fence. Then things start to go off the rails: in two lengthy chapters on Aristotle, Jayne emphasizes (perhaps over-emphasizes) statements that seem to endorse a secular worldview, but he also claims to detect Christian interpolations, although no recent editor or commentator on the original texts has suspected this. More awkwardly, he cites translations that (misleadingly) use “capital-G God,” apparently unaware that classical scripts did not distinguish what we call upper and lower case, and he reveals complete innocence of the Hellenic language, taking (and misspelling) the word anthropoeidês (human-like) to mean “multitude” (polloi in the original).

Nonetheless, the next chapter, on the Lyceum after Aristotle, makes some worthwhile points by emphasizing the secularist views of Theophrastus and especially Strato; as Jayne notes, neither Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt nor Whitmarsh’s Battling even mentions the latter, although he may have been the first serious scientific (and materialist) experimenter in European history. Jayne’s discussion of Epicurus and Lucretius, two of antiquity’s most outspoken deniers of any divine significance for human life, offers a generally reliable summary of their views, but he treats Jerome’s dubious biographical details as factual—a glance at the Oxford Classical Dictionary would have helped here. And he says twice that Epicurus survived the plague in Athens (430–426 BCE), ignoring his own subchapter heading with Epicurus’s well-established dates, 341–270!

The penultimate section on skepticism draws attention to two figures (once again) omitted by Whitmarsh, Pyrrho and Arcesilaus, who continued the by-then-longstanding tradition of doubting. Even if they disagreed on what a “correct” opinion might be, the important thing, as Jayne observes, is the value placed on critical inquiry—which was suppressed once Christianity achieved domination and came back to prominence only in the Renaissance. The final chapter focuses exclusively on two dialogues written in the last years of Cicero’s life, the Academica and De Natura Deorum. They contain an impressive survey of arguments for and against the gods—one of the few surviving witnesses to the surprisingly well-populated anti-theistic element in classical civilization.

There is a light sprinkling of typos and infelicities throughout the book, none of which will matter to lay readers—though, given the current inaccessibility of libraries, I have not been able to test the accuracy of his numerous references. However, I can’t resist mentioning two: (1) on page 51, he gives Socrates’s dates as “469–339 BC” [399], which would be a world record; (2) a footnote gives the correct information for Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer-winning book, but the bibliography has “The Swerve: How the World Became. Modern New York”—where else indeed?

I wasn’t surprised that Whitmarsh’s book is more scholarly than Jayne’s, but I didn’t expect to find that it’s also far more readable and enjoyable. If you’re interested in the origins of secular thought and have time for only one book, Battling the Gods is the better choice; you can always skip the endnotes. But reading both will make you even more convinced that the development of rational, nonreligious thinking is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.