So too in ancient Rome, says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, book 7, when atmospheric signs and portents appeared after the banishment of Coriolanus: People were variously affected. Some said these were God’s just judgments for the execution of that good man; some attributed everything to natural causes, some to the stars. Some thought the signs came by chance, others by a necessity decreed from the beginning, which could not be altered. The last two opinions, those of necessity and chance, seem to have had more prominence than the rest.

Some now put everything down to fortune’s chances, And believe the world moves with no ruler, As nature rolls through its changes, and so on.

As for chance, Sallust likewise tells us that the ancient Romans generally accepted it. They supposed that fortune alone bestowed kingdoms, empires, wealth, honours and offices, for two reasons. First, every wicked, low, unworthy wretch was advanced, rich and powerful. Second, these advantages were uncertain: however good they were, scarcely anyone enjoyed them long. Later, on wiser reflection, they began to think differently: that each person made his own fortune.

The last opinion, that of necessity, was Seneca’s doctrine: God was bound to secondary causes, so tied to them and to that inexorable necessity that he could change nothing once decreed. So it stood in the fates: it cannot be altered. God commanded once; he always obeys. No force breaks it, no prayers, not even the thunderbolt. God has spoken once, and it must stand forever: no prayers, threats, power or thunder itself can alter it.

Zeno, Chrysippus and the other Stoics maintained as much, as you may read in Cicero’s On Divination, book 2, and Gellius, book 6, chapter 2, among others. In every age there have been people who deny God wholly or in part. Some ridicule him, claiming they could have made a better world and governed it more orderly themselves; they blaspheme him and diminish him as they please.

It was so in Plato’s time: Some say there are no gods; others, that they do not care for human beings; a middle group grants both. If there is no God, where does good come from? If there is a God, where does evil come from? So Cotta argues in Cicero: why did God not make everyone good, or at least look after the welfare of those who are good?

As the woman told Alexander: if he has no time to hear cases and remedy grievances, why does he reign? Sextus Empiricus has many such arguments. Thus perverse people quibble. It will always be so: some of every sort—good, bad, indifferent, true, false, zealous, double-dealers, neutrals, lukewarm believers, libertines, atheists and the rest.

They insist on seeing these religious sectarians agree and become entirely reconciled before they will join or believe any of them. Meanwhile they think—as Celsus objects, and Origen refutes him—that we Christians worship a person put to death with no more reason than the barbarian Getae worshipped Zalmoxis, the Cilicians Mopsus, the Thebans Amphiaraus, and the people of Lebadea Trophonius.

One religion is as true as another: new inventions, all serving human interests. To them, the works of the brilliant Aristotle carry as much authority as Scripture; subtle Seneca’s letters are as canonical as Saint Paul’s; Pindar’s odes are as good as the prophet David’s psalms; Epictetus’s Handbook equals wise Solomon’s proverbs. Some of them say this and more openly and boldly, in every place and company.

The emperor Claudius was angry with heaven because it thundered and challenged Jupiter to battle. What madness! says Seneca. He thought Jupiter could not hurt him, but he could hurt Jupiter.

Diagoras, Demonax, Epicurus, Pliny, Lucian and Lucretius,

—— and Mezentius, despiser of the gods,

all professed atheists in their times—though not outright atheists either, as Cicogna demonstrates in book 1, chapter 1: they mocked only the pagan gods, their multitude, and their base, invented functions. Gilbert Cousin and Erasmus work hard to clear Lucian’s reputation, and some defend Epicurus. But all in vain: Lucian mocks everything, Epicurus denies everything, and his follower Lucretius defends him in it.

When human life lay foully before our eyes, On earth oppressed under heavy religion, Which showed its head from the regions of heaven, Looming over mortals with a terrifying face, and so on.

When humankind was steeped in superstition, With ghastly looks above that frightened mortal men, and so on.

He alone, like another Hercules, freed the world from that monster. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, book 2, chapter 7, and book 7, chapter 55, expressly denies the immortality of the soul. Seneca does little less—or rather more—in book 7, letter 55 to Lucilius and his Consolation to Marcia.

Some Greek commentators would impute as much to Job, making him deny resurrection and the rest; Pineda refutes them at length on Job 7:9. Aristotle is harshly judged by some theologians and philosophers: Saint Justin in the Exhortation to the Greeks; Gregory Nazianzen in the Disputation against Eunomius; Theodoret in book 5 of the Cure of Greek Maladies; Origen in On First Principles.

Pomponazzi upholds it in his treatise entitled—at least so it is styled—On the Immortality of the Soul; Scaliger, who, Patrizi says, would perjure himself at any time in defence of his great master Aristotle, and Dandini, in book 3 On the Soul, acknowledge as much.

Averroes attacks all spirits and supreme powers. More recently Bruno—unfortunate Bruno, as Kepler calls him—Machiavelli, Giulio Cesare Vanini, lately burned at Toulouse in France, and Pietro Aretino have publicly maintained such atheistical paradoxes.

So too the Italian Boccaccio, with his fable of the three rings, from which he infers that one cannot distinguish which religion is truer—Judaism, Islam or Christianity—because they have the same signs, and so on.