notion of atheism. Nowadays the term is taken to designate the
attitude which denies every idea of God. Even antiquity sometimes referred
to atheism in this sense; but an inquiry dealing with the history of
religion could not start from a definition of that kind. It would have to
keep in view, not the philosophical notion of God, but the conceptions of
the gods as they appear in the religion of antiquity. Hence I came to
define atheism in Pagan antiquity as the point of view which _denies the
existence of the ancient gods_. It is in this sense that the word will be
used in the following inquiry.

Even though we disregard philosophical atheism, the definition is somewhat
narrow; for in antiquity mere denial of the existence of the gods of
popular belief was not the only attitude which was designated as atheism.
But it has the advantage of starting from the conception of the ancient
gods that may be said to have finally prevailed. In the sense in which the
word is used here we are nowadays all of us atheists. We do not believe
that the gods whom the Greeks and the Romans worshipped and believed in
exist or have ever existed; we hold them to be productions of the human
imagination to which nothing real corresponds. This view has nowadays
become so ingrained in us and appears so self-evident, that we find it
difficult to imagine that it has not been prevalent through long ages;
nay, it is perhaps a widely diffused assumption that even in antiquity
educated and unbiased persons held the same view of the religion of their
people as we do. In reality both assumptions are erroneous: our "atheism"
in regard to ancient paganism is of recent date, and in antiquity itself
downright denial of the existence of the gods was a comparatively rare
phenomenon. The demonstration of this fact, rather than a consideration of
the various intermediate positions taken up by the thinkers of antiquity
in their desire to avoid a complete rupture with the traditional ideas of
the gods, has been one of the chief purposes of this inquiry.

Though the definition of atheism set down here might seem to be clear and
unequivocal, and though I have tried to adhere strictly to it, cases have
unavoidably occurred that were difficult to classify. The most
embarrassing are those which involve a reinterpretation of the conception
of the gods, _i.e._ which, while acknowledging that there is some reality
corresponding to the conception, yet define this reality as