the existence of Demeter, Dionysus and Hephaestus, much less the divinity
of the sun and the moon. And if we consider his theory more closely it
points in quite a different direction from that of atheism. To Prodicus it
was evidently the conception of utility that mattered: if these objects
came to be regarded as gods it was because they "benefited humanity." This
too is a genuinely sophistic view, characteristically deviating from that
of the naturalist Democritus in its limitation to the human and social
aspect of the question. Such a point of view, if confronted with the
question of the existence of the gods, may very well, according to
sophistic methods of reasoning, lead to the conclusion that primitive man
was right in so far as the useful, _i.e._ that which "benefits humanity,"
really is an essential feature of the gods, and wrong only in so far as he
identified the individual useful objects with the gods. Whether Prodicus
adopted this point of view, we cannot possibly tell; but the general body
of tradition concerning the man, which does not in any way suggest
religious radicalism, indicates as most probable that he did not connect
the question of the origin of the conceptions of the gods with that of the
existence of the gods, which to him was taken for granted, and that it was
only later philosophers who, in their researches into the ideas of earlier
philosophers about the gods, inferred his atheism from his speculations on
the history of religion.

Critias, the well-known reactionary politician, the chief of the Thirty
Tyrants, is placed amongst the atheists on the strength of a passage in a
satyric drama, _Sisyphus_. The drama is lost, but our authority quotes the
objectionable passage _in extenso_; it is a piece of no less than forty
lines. The passage argues that human life in its origins knew no social
order, that might ruled supreme. Then men conceived the idea of making
laws in order that right might rule instead of might. The result of this
was, it is true, that wrong was not done openly; but it was done secretly
instead. Then a wise man bethought himself of making men believe that
there existed gods who saw and heard everything which men did, nay even
knew their innermost thoughts. And, in order that men might stand in
proper awe of the gods, he said that they lived in the sky, out of which
comes that which makes men afraid, such as lightning and thunder, but also
that which benefits them, sunshine and