Don’t Blame “Paganism” for the United States’ Problems

On December 25th, 2023, The Atlantic published an op-ed by David Wolpe, a prominent American rabbi, titled “The Return of the Pagans.” In the op-ed, Wolpe asserts that both the political left and right in the United States have embraced fundamentally “pagan” ideas about the world (by which he means ideas derived from and characteristic of the traditional non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Rome) and that this supposed “pagan” influence is the cause of many of the problems that the United States faces today.

For those who don’t know, I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and my main research focus is ancient Greek religion. Given this interest, I was quite intrigued to see an article published in a major news outlet with a title proclaiming that “paganism” has returned. Sadly, I soon found that Wolpe’s idea of “paganism” is a wildly inaccurate caricature that has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies than with the non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The op-ed got under my skin, so I decided to let it furnish an opportunity to educate interested readers about what ancient polytheistic religions were like—and, just as importantly, what they weren’t like.

Why “pagan” is a misnomer

Let me make one fact clear from the beginning: no one in ancient times ever identified themself as a “pagan.” In the first place, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a word for or concept of “religion” as a distinct domain of human thought and activity. For them, dealing with the gods and other supernatural powers was simply an intrinsic part of life. They certainly had no name for the specific “religion” that they themselves practiced or a name for a practitioner of that religion distinct from a practitioner of a different religion.

Without going into too much detail, the concept of “religion” as a distinct category of human activity is not a natural or universal one. On the contrary, it first arose in the specific historical and cultural context of early modern Europe as the result of specific cultural and social forces. No one in the ancient Mediterranean world shared this concept.

From very early on, Christian authors writing in the Latin language described themselves metaphorically as milites Christi, which means “soldiers of Christ.” In Roman military slang, paganus was a pejorative word for “civilian,” which connoted inferiority and lack of discipline. By around the middle of the fourth century CE, following the metaphor of Christians as “soldiers of Christ,” Christian authors writing in the Latin language adopted the word paganus as a pejorative label for anyone who was not Christian. The word paganus, in turn, has given us the contemporary English word pagan.

For most of its history, the term pagan has been a pejorative, an insult, or a slur. It is only in modern times that people who identify in association with the ancient pre-Christian religious traditions of Europe and the Mediterranean have begun to reclaim it as one of self-identification.

Using the term “pagan” to describe people who practiced non-monotheistic religious traditions in ancient times before Christianity became the dominant religion of the Mediterranean world is inherently misleading because it implicitly affirms the Christian perspective, which sees all religions other than Christianity as fundamentally the same. In reality, these religious traditions were quite disparate in many ways; the only essential feature they all have in common is that Christianity ultimately supplanted all of them as the dominant religion in the lands where they were practiced.

On top of this, for many modern readers, the term pagan is loaded with all kinds of negative stereotypes. For many people, the term immediately evokes connotations of falseness, backwardness, primitiveness, and savagery that less explicitly ideologically loaded, more descriptive terms like “ancient Greek religion” generally do not.

Despite this, because Wolpe uses the term pagan extensively throughout his essay, I will reluctantly use the term in this response. I want to be absolutely clear, though, that, when I use it, I do so recognizing that it is a deeply problematic and not particularly useful term for understanding religions of the ancient world.

“Paganism” and the role of the gods in human morality

One of the central claims of Wolpe’s op-ed is that “pagan belief systems” center around the self and are not concerned with human morality. He writes in his second paragraph:

“Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result. They centered the self. The revolutionary contribution of monotheism was its insistence that the principal concern of God is, instead, how people treat one another.”

This description is partly correct as it applies to the polytheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, but it includes a dire misunderstanding that leads Wolpe astray throughout the rest of his piece. I will start with what it gets right and then address where it goes horribly wrong.

It is true that most people in the ancient Mediterranean world did not regard their gods as morally perfect, nor did they see them as role models of moral behavior whom humans should strive to emulate. They did not regard their gods as all-loving or all-benevolent.

They did not worship the deities because they loved the deities or even necessarily because they believed that the deities were morally deserving of worship, but rather because they believed that the deities were extremely powerful and that it was in their own best interest to appease them, which they believed they could accomplish through worship.

The foundational principle on which ancient Greek and Roman religions—and most religions of the ancient Mediterranean region in general—operated was that of reciprocity. People believed that, if they did something to please a particular deity or group of deities, then that deity or group of deities might give them something that they asked for in exchange. This principle is often summarized with the Latin phrase “Do ut des,” which means “I give so that you may give.”

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating between c. 510 and c. 500 BCE, depicting two men sacrificing a pig to Demeter

It is true that, in general, most Greeks and Romans at least did not believe that the deities were concerned with policing ordinary humans’ everyday thoughts and behavior. As far as they were concerned, the deities were above that stuff; they didn’t believe that the gods care whether someone looks at another person with lust in their heart or masturbates. Wolpe, however, makes a dire mistake in assuming that this means that “pagan” belief systems are fundamentally selfish and do not regard “how people treat one another” as important.

Contrary to Wolpe’s assertions, the Greeks and Romans did very much believe that the gods would directly punish humans who committed certain kinds of particularly heinous crimes. In fact, Greek myths and literature are full of stories in which deities punish humans for various crimes and even punish entire cities and nations for tolerating such crimes.

For instance, the Greeks knew that a deity was sure to punish anyone who mistreated one of their own priests or other earthly representatives. This idea occurs already in one of the oldest surviving works of ancient Greek literature: the Iliad, an epic poem set during the Trojan War which developed from oral tradition and probably came to exist in something resembling the form we know today sometime around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE or thereabouts.

In the opening scene of the epic, Chryses, the Trojan priest of the god Apollon, begs the Achaian (i.e., Greek) commander Agamemnon to return his daughter Chryseïs, whom the Achaians have captured and whom Agamemnon has taken as his own sex slave, and offers to pay a ransom for her return. Agamemnon scornfully rejects Chryses’s plea, so Chryses prays to Apollon to punish the Achaians. In response, Apollon rains down arrows of plague upon the Achaian army. Thus, the very opening chapter of Greek literature is one of divine punishment.

Similarly, the Greeks knew that a deity was bound to punish anyone who wronged a person who sought protection at the deity’s altar or cult statue. Famously, myth holds that, during the Achaian sack of Troy, the Trojan princess Kassandra embraced the cult statue in the temple of Athena on the Trojan akropolis and explicitly invoked the right of sanctuary. The Achaian warrior Aias the Lesser, however, forcibly dragged her away from the cult statue and raped her in Athena’s temple.

In response to this atrocious crime and act of sacrilege, Athena ordered the Achaians through the seer Kalchas to put Aias the Lesser to death. When the Achaians left without killing him, she convinced her father Zeus to send a storm upon their fleet, which scattered their ships and sank many of them.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Kodros Painter, dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting Aias the Lesser dragging the Trojan princess Kassandra away from Athena’s cult statue

One of the most sacred principles in Greek religion was ξενία (xenía), which refers to the sacred and divinely protected relationship between a host and a guest. The Greeks and Romans believed that it was against sacred law for a host to mistreat a guest or a guest to mistreat a host and that the gods were certain to punish any host or guest who did so.

Xenía is a central theme in the Odyssey, another early Greek epic poem, which probably came to exist in something resembling the form in which we know it today sometime around the middle of the seventh century BCE. In the poem, Odysseus, the king of the island of Ithaka, has been gone from his home for twenty years and, in his absence, a whole host of suitors seeking the hand of his wife Penelope have taken over his house; they never leave, they torment Penelope, plot to murder Odysseus’s son Telemachos, abuse his slaves, and are eating up all his livestock.

In Book 22 of the epic, the climax of the poem, the goddess Athena helps Odysseus, Telemachos, and two loyal slaves (the swineherd Eumaios and the cowherd Philoitios) to massacre the suitors in a brutal mass slaughter. This massacre of the suitors comes as a divinely ordained punishment for their lack of xenía.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing Side A of a Campanian red-figure bell-krater by the Ixion Painter dating to around 330 BCE depicting Odysseus, Telemachos, and Eumaios slaughtering the suitors of Penelope

Another kind of crime that the Greeks believed the gods were certain to punish was ὕβρις (hýbris), which is a term that can refer to basically any extreme or unwarranted act of insolence, aggression, violence, or sacrilege that a person commits out of pride or an inflated sense of self-importance and that is degrading to its victim. Acts that could conceivably be described as hýbris include everything from boasting that one is superior to the gods, to slapping a man across the face in front of a large crowd to humiliate him, to abusing a corpse, to committing mass genocide.

The ancient Greeks also believed that the gods were certain to punish anyone who killed one of their own blood relatives. In Aischylos’s tragedy The Libation Bearers, first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 458 BCE, Apollon commands the protagonist Orestes to kill his mother Klytaimnestra as retribution for her having murdered her husband (Orestes’s father) Agamemnon. In The Eumenides, performed as part of the same trilogy, the Erinyes, chthonic goddesses who torment those who have killed their own blood relatives, torment Orestes for having killed his mother, so Apollon and Athena arrange a trial for Orestes.

Sophokles’s tragedy Oidipous Tyrannos, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens around 429 BCE, begins with the god Apollon sending a plague upon the city of Thebes, which he will only lift when the city finds and punishes the man who murdered Laios, the previous king.

By the end of the play, it turns out that the murderer is none other than Oidipous, the current king, that Laios was Oidipous’s own father, and that Oidipous has also unknowingly married his own mother Iokaste and fathered children by her. Iokaste hangs herself and Oidipous gouges out his own eyes with her dress pins and is exiled from the city forever.

ABOVE: Oidipous and Antigone, painted in 1842 by the French Academic painter Charles Jalabert

This, however, brings us to the second problem with Wolpe’s notion that “paganism” is not concerned with “how people treat each other,” which is that, quite simply, for at least some ancient Greeks, it was not the gods’ place to dictate what is moral or immoral, but rather the place of humans to discover using reason.

In the Athenian philosopher Plato’s dialogue Euthyphron, which he wrote sometime in the first half of the fourth century BCE, Socrates meets a prophet named Euthyphron who is prosecuting his own father in court for the murder of a hired servant because he believes that the gods demand it. Socrates then proceeds to question Euthyphron, pointing out that saying that a god commands something does not bring one closer to understanding whether it is morally good, since this simply raises the question of whether a thing is good because it pleases the deity or it pleases the deity because it is good.

If one says that a thing is pious because it pleases a deity, then one lacks a consistent definition of piety, because different deities could disagree about whether an act is pious or about the extent to which it is. If, on the other hand, one says that a thing pleases a deity because it is pious in itself, then one is still left with the question of what actually makes the action pious. In other words, Socrates shows that one cannot define moral goodness simply by its relation to the gods.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble head of the Athenian philosopher Socrates on display in the Naples Archaeological Museum

“Paganism” and class

Another central claim of Wolpe’s op-ed that the true ultimate object of worship in “paganism” is power and that “paganism” therefore encourages humans to pursue the relentless acquisition of power, wealth, and status. The op-ed begins with this paragraph:

“Take a close look at Donald Trump—the lavishness of his homes, the buildings emblazoned with his name and adorned with gold accoutrements, his insistent ego, even the degree of obeisance he evokes among his followers—and, despite the fervent support he receives from many evangelical Christians, it’s hard to avoid concluding that there’s something a little pagan about the man. Or consider Elon Musk. With his drive to conquer space to expand the human empire, his flirtation with anti-Semitic tropes, his 10 children with three different women, Musk embodies the wealth worship and ideological imperialism of ego that are more than a little pagan too.”

It becomes clear from Wolpe’s statements later in the article that he derives this notion of “wealth worship” as a “pagan” value from his reading of the German existential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (lived 1844 – 1900), who based his ideas about “pagan” values on his reading of ancient Greek and Roman literary texts.

ABOVE: Photograph of the nineteenth-century German existential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom Wolpe derives many of his notions about “paganism”

Nietzsche rightly observed that the surviving ancient literary texts written in the Greek and Latin languages by followers of traditional polytheistic religions frequently glorify wealth and power, while Jewish and early Christian texts are more frequently critical of these attributes. This, however, is not due to a fundamental difference between “pagan” and monotheistic attitudes toward wealth and power, but rather due to the nature of the texts that have survived, the specific social situations of the authors who wrote them, and the audiences whom they originally addressed.

The vast majority of the surviving ancient literary texts in the Greek and Latin languages were produced by educated, upper-class Greek and Roman men whose privileged backgrounds fundamentally shaped their worldviews and who regarded educated, upper-class Greek and Roman men like themselves as their primary audience. These authors, however, represent only of a small, highly privileged subset of all the people who practiced traditional polytheistic religions in antiquity.

The vast majority of people in the ancient Mediterranean who worshipped “pagan” gods were not upper-class Greek and Roman men. We can be quite certain that enslaved people, non-elite free people, women, and people who were not ethnically Greek or Roman had ideas about religion and the social order that differed from those of the elite men who produced most of the surviving literary texts. The perspectives of these groups, however, are obscured by the fact that very little writing from them has survived.

Even some of the surviving literary texts produced by elite men, however, critique the aristocratic ideology. Notably, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) incorporates explicit critiques of this ideology into some of his tragedies. For instance, in his tragedy Elektra, which was first performed in Athens in the mid-410s BCE, Euripides portrays Elektra, the daughter of King Agamemnon of Argos, as having been forced against her will to marry a destitute peasant of undistinguished lineage, who treats her with great honor, even though she resents his poverty.

When Elektra’s brother Orestes arrives in return from a long exile, he initially mistakes his own sister for an enslaved woman (El. 107–111) and she, in turn, mistakes him for a criminal (El. 216–219). These misidentifications undermine the traditional Greek aristocratic notion that it is possible to tell whether someone is of noble birth by their physical beauty.

When Orestes meets his sister’s husband, the revelation that he is honorable, but poor, prompts Orestes to give the following speech (El. 367–385) about how wealth, poverty, and skill in battle are all useless metrics for assessing whether a person is really good or bad, since the wealthy are just as likely to be wicked as the poor:

“φεῦ:
οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἀκριβὲς οὐδὲν εἰς εὐανδρίαν:
ἔχουσι γὰρ ταραγμὸν αἱ φύσεις βροτῶν.
ἤδη γὰρ εἶδον ἄνδρα γενναίου πατρὸς
τὸ μηδὲν ὄντα, χρηστά τ᾽ ἐκ κακῶν τέκνα,
λιμόν τ᾽ ἐν ἀνδρὸς πλουσίου φρονήματι,
γνώμην τε μεγάλην ἐν πένητι σώματι.
πῶς οὖν τις αὐτὰ διαλαβὼν ὀρθῶς κρινεῖ;
πλούτῳ; πονηρῷ τἄρα χρήσεται κριτῇ.
ἢ τοῖς ἔχουσι μηδέν; ἀλλ᾽ ἔχει νόσον
πενία, διδάσκει δ᾽ ἄνδρα τῇ χρείᾳ κακόν.
ἀλλ᾽ εἰς ὅπλ᾽ ἔλθω; τίς δὲ πρὸς λόγχην βλέπων
μάρτυς γένοιτ᾽ ἂν ὅστις ἐστὶν ἁγαθός;
κράτιστον εἰκῇ ταῦτ᾽ ἐᾶν ἀφειμένα.
οὗτος γὰρ ἁνὴρ οὔτ᾽ ἐν Ἀργείοις μέγας
οὔτ᾽ αὖ δοκήσει δωμάτων ὠγκωμένος,
ἐν τοῖς δὲ πολλοῖς ὤν, ἄριστος ηὑρέθη.
οὐ μὴ ἀφρονήσεθ᾽, οἳ κενῶν δοξασμάτων
πλήρεις πλανᾶσθε, τῇ δ᾽ ὁμιλίᾳ βροτοὺς
κρινεῖτε καὶ τοῖς ἤθεσιν τοὺς εὐγενεῖς;”

This means, in my own translation directly from the Greek:

“Alas!
There is no exactitude regarding goodness in men;
for the natures of mortals hold haphazardness.
For already I’ve seen a man of a worthy father
who was nothing and good sons of bad fathers,
hunger in the mind of a wealthy man,
great wisdom in the body of a pauper.
How, then, distinguishing these things, does one judge correctly?
By wealth? That’s a useless and evil judge.
Or by those who have nothing? But poverty holds sickness
and it teaches a man to be wicked through need.
Should I go to skill with weapons? But who, looking down a spearpoint,
could be a witness of the sort who is good?
It is better to give up these things in vain.
For this man is a neither great among the Argives
nor is he puffed up about his house;
even though he’s one of the masses, he’s found to be the best.
Don’t be foolish; men wander around full
of worthless notions. Judge mortals by their company
and the well-born by their characters.”

Although Orestes does not realize it, his own actions later in the play become a perfect example of how those of noble birth can behave wickedly. In Euripides’s portrayal, Elektra and Orestes both come across as classist, bloodthirsty, merciless, and greedy to regain the wealth, power, and status that they feel is their right by birth. First, Orestes brutally murders Aigisthos. Then, together, the two siblings brutally murder their own mother Klytaimnestra, whom Euripides portrays much more sympathetically than Aischylos or Sophokles; in this version, she acts kindly toward Elektra and desperately pleads her children to spare her, but they refuse to show any mercy.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing Side A of a Lucanian red-figure pelike by the Choephoroi Painter dating to between c. 380 and c. 370 BCE depicting a scene of Elektra and Orestes at the tomb of Agamemnon

In contrast to most Greek and Roman literary texts, which were written by elite men of the dominant culture for a primary audience of other elite men of the same culture, many of the later texts of the Hebrew Bible, all the texts of the New Testament, and all the texts of early Rabbinic Judaism (including the Mishnah and Gemara) were produced by people of marginalized ethnic and religious backgrounds living under foreign occupation.

The Christian gospels describe Jesus—their primary subject, whose reported words make up a large portion of their content—as a Jewish itinerant preacher who came from a family of craftsmen in the tiny village of Nazareth in Galilee (which, for most of his lifetime, was ruled by Herodes Antipas, a client king for Rome) and who preached primarily to poor and working-class Jews.

The apostle Paul, although privileged in the sense that he was an educated man who was literate in Greek and held Roman citizenship, was nonetheless marginalized as a Jew and follower of the Jesus movement under Roman rule. The authors of the gospels themselves were at the very least followers of the Jesus movement and may have considered themselves Jewish.

In the first three centuries CE, Christianity saw its greatest spread among the non-elite (i.e., working and middle) classes in cities in the Roman Empire. Thus, the majority of Christians who used the texts that became the New Testament were not upper-class.

This situation changed in the fourth century CE after Constantine I and his successors began to support and sponsor Christianity. Although some aristocrats held out against Christianity and remained staunch pagans even into the fifth century CE, imperial sponsorship of Christianity made many aristocrats feel that it was more to their advantage to adopt the new religion than to resist it.

As soon as powerful and wealthy people began to be Christians, they devised strategies for rationalizing and explaining away the New Testament’s critiques of power and wealth. As the church itself became wealthy under imperial sponsorship in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries CE, it came to employ such strategies as well. (For those who are interested to learn more, the most authoritative academic study of Christianity’s complicated relationship with wealth in late antiquity is Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.)

Over the past millennium and a half at least, Christian churches and individuals have extracted and hoarded immense material wealth. The Roman Catholic Church is one of the single wealthiest institutions on the face of the planet and has been so for centuries. When one visits Vatican City, all one sees is the church’s unfathomable wealth on full, ostentatious display.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing St. Peter’s Baldachin inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, with the walls and ceiling encrusted with gold

Thus, Wolpe misunderstands a difference in the nature of our sources as a fundamental difference between “paganism” and monotheism. Unfortunately, these misunderstandings grow even worse; he also fundamentally misunderstands even the Greek and Roman aristocratic ideology that he takes as representative of “pagan” morality.

Most societies of the ancient Mediterranean world were agrarian and pre-capitalist. In any given society, the majority of the population was primarily occupied with agriculture. The primary source of wealth was the ownership of agriculturally viable land and the resources needed to cultivate that land. Although some degree of social mobility certainly existed in ancient societies and it existed to a greater degree in some societies during certain historical periods than others, in general, social hierarchies tended to be fairly rigid.

Most wealthy ancient Greeks and Romans were not capitalist entrepreneurs who actively sought to increase their wealth, but rather old-money aristocrats who derived their wealth from the fact that their parents owned and passed down to them large properties of agriculturally viable land, along with large numbers of enslaved people who worked that land.

In general, these aristocrats were strongly conservative in the sense that they generally opposed any change to the status quo of the society in which they lived and they disdained anyone who actively sought to acquire significantly greater capital than what they had inherited by birth. This disdain extended not only to people born of the lower classes who sought to climb the social ladder, but even to fellow aristocrats who sought to become richer than they already were by birth. Thus, ancient Greek and Roman aristocratic ideologies vehemently opposed the kind of profit-minded entrepreneurship that modern capitalism glorifies.

Class in ancient Mediterranean world was, of course, tied to material wealth, but it often had a lot more to do with who a person’s ancestors and relatives were, what kind of upbringing and education they possessed, what kinds of political and religious offices they held or had connection to, and what public services they or other members of their family had performed.

Thus, the aristocrats of ancient Greece and Rome were far more like the landed gentry of early modern Britain or (perhaps even more) the plantation-owning aristocrats of the Antebellum South than Donald Trump or Elon Musk. In fact, in many ways, Trump and Musk represent everything that ancient Greek and Roman aristocrats looked down on and opposed.

One of the most important values in ancient Greek society and among the Greek aristocracy in particular was σωφροσύνη (sōphrosýnē), which means “moderation” or self-restraint. This meant restraining one’s natural desires, including desires for sex, wealth, food, and alcohol. Greek normative morality held that such pleasures were good in moderation, but seeking or using them in excess was wrong and potentially even dangerous.

The Greeks summarized this principle using the maxim “μηδὲν ἄγαν,” which means “Nothing in excess.” This maxim was of such great importance in Greek religious thought that it was inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollon at Delphoi, which was one of the most important temples in the Greek world.

I have already argued in this blog post I wrote in April 2020 that many ancient Greeks would most likely regard Trump’s lavish and excessive lifestyle as evidence that he lacks sōphrosýnē. I suspect that they would have a very similar opinion of Musk. Indeed, one could even make a compelling case that some of Trump and Musk’s acts of self-aggrandizement qualify as outright hýbris by an ancient Greek definition.

In fact, there is a certain irony in the fact that Trump’s gold-encrusted apartments draw inspiration from the Baroque ornamentation of Christian churches. If you want to know where Trump derives his love of all things that glitter, the answer lies at least as much with the Vatican as it does with anything pagan.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in Trump’s gold-encrusted penthouse at Trump Tower

Trump and Musk, however, are not the only people whom Wolpe criticizes for wealth worship. Later in the op-ed, he writes:

“The current worship of wealth is a pagan excrescence. I am spending this year at Harvard, and it is not easy to find an undergraduate who isn’t interested in ‘finance.’ The poets want to go into finance. The history students are studying investment.”

What Wolpe describes in this paragraph is a shift in upper-class ideology that has nothing to do with religion and is, ironically, actually a turn away from the ideology of ancient Greek and Roman aristocrats.

To a significant extent, higher education, particularly at an elite institution like Harvard, has always been about wealth and status. From roughly the Classical Period onward, παιδεία (paideía)—which refers to education in Greek culture, including Greek language, literature, history, art, and philosophy—was considered the defining feature of a well-heeled Greek gentleman that set him apart from those of inferior classes. The Romans likewise considered what we would now call a humanities education the defining feature of a true noble.

For them, a key part of the value of an education in languages, literature, history, art, and philosophy lay precisely in the fact that only a man who was wealthy enough that he had lots of spare time to study, who could afford to buy lots of expensive scrolls, and who could afford to pay expensive tuition for a teacher or private tutor could afford to study them. Thus, for elite ancient Greeks and Romans, education itself was a way of showing off one’s inherited wealth and status.

For the majority, if not the entirety, of Harvard’s existence, the primary value of a Harvard diploma has been as a marker of status and prestige. At least at the undergraduate level, the quality of education at Harvard is not vastly superior to the quality at many state flagship universities, which offer mostly the same subjects and have many talented and dedicated professors. Whether someone learned how to conduct experiments, do calculus, or read Ancient Greek at Harvard or at a public university, they’ve learned essentially the same skill.

Nonetheless, a degree from Harvard confers a boasting privilege on its holder that a degree from, say, IU Bloomington (my own alma mater and a perfectly respectable state university) does not. This boasting privilege rests not on the education one has received itself, but rather on the Harvard name and its associations. Having a degree from Harvard signals to everyone that one is a member of the elite class, which automatically makes most people take them more seriously, regardless of whether they actually deserve to be taken more seriously.

Now, though, capitalism has effected a shift in how people think about education. In reality, under twenty-first-century capitalism, it is nearly or absolutely impossible for a person who was actually born in poverty to attain great wealth, most people who are wealthy now were born to great privilege, and attaining wealth frequently has more to do with having access to necessary resources when starting out and being ruthlessly willing to exploit others than actual talent and hard work. Even so, capitalism justifies the perpetuation of its own existence through the lie that people become wealthy through “merit.”

Thus, capitalism encourages people to see education not as a way of signaling one’s inherited wealth and status in the manner of ancient Greek aristocrats, but rather as training for how to make money and become rich. This leads to a shift in the kind of education that status-minded young people seek out. Specifically, it encourages students to pursue majors that they perceive as oriented toward the future acquisition of greater wealth.

Thus, when Wolpe complains about poets studying finance and history students studying investment, he fails to recognize that studying any subject at Harvard or another elite private university is always to some degree about money and power—either showcasing the money and power that one already has or seeking ways to make more of it.

ABOVE: Photo I took of Memorial Hall at Harvard University when I visited Harvard’s campus on October 8th, 2023

“Paganism” and beauty

Wolpe goes on to claim that “paganism” venerates the beauty of the physical body just as it venerates wealth, writing:

In addition, the fifth-century CE Greek anthologist Ioannes Stobaios preserves a list of 147 maxims that were allegedly inscribed somewhere at Delphoi in addition to the more famous ones that were inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollon. Multiple maxims included on this list emphasize the importance of recognizing one’s status as human and, with it, one’s own fallibility and mortality: “φρόνει θνητά” (“Remember you are mortal”) and “εὖ πάσχε ὡς θνητός” (“Fare well as a mortal”).

I would actually argue that the ancient Greek notion of the importance of accurately knowing oneself, including one’s weaknesses and faults, holds greater nuance and is more valuable for life in the modern world than the Christian notion of humility as an inherent virtue.

Quite simply, holding a persistent, inaccurately low opinion of oneself is just as mentally unhealthy as holding an unduly inflated one, and underestimating one’s own abilities or importance can lead to just as serious problems for a person as overestimating them. If someone has the ability to do something, but they do not believe that they do, then they usually will not try to do it and will consequently miss out on opportunities that they otherwise could have taken. It is better to try to hold an accurate awareness of oneself that recognizes both one’s flaws and one’s strengths than it is to be always humble.

ABOVE: Photo I took myself in summer 2023 of the ruined Temple of Apollon at Delphoi from the front, where the maxim “γνῶθι σεαυτόν” (“Know yourself”) is said to have been inscribed

“Paganism” and the place of humans in the cosmos

Wolpe concludes his op-ed by claiming that “paganism” differs from the monotheistic traditions of Judaism and Christianity because monotheism sees humans as God’s special creations made in his own image and subject to his supreme authority, whereas “paganism” sees humans as either virtual gods or mere base animals and, in either case, does not recognize humans as being bound by any moral authority. He writes:

“Should we see human beings as virtual supermen, free to flout any convention, to pursue power at any cost, to accumulate wealth without regard for consequence or its use? Are gold toilets and private rocket ships our final statement of significance? Or is it a system of belief that considers human beings all synapse and no soul, an outgrowth of the animal world and in no way able to rise above the evolutionary mosaic of which everything from the salmon to sage is a piece?”

This is all complete nonsense with absolutely no basis in any ancient evidence. Contrary to Wolpe’s assertions, one of the most central ideas in ancient Greek religious thought was the unique position of humans in the cosmos as neither deities nor animals. I will address both of the positions Wolpe attacks in turn, beginning with the first.

Humans as “virtual supermen”

As I have already touched on above, ancient Greek religion was quite emphatic that humans must remember that we are not gods, that we are mortal, and that we are all doomed to die. The Greeks considered hýbris not just a vice, but an appalling crime that threatened the entire social order.

It is true that, in some cases, ancient Greek religion did allow somewhat more permeable boundaries between humans and gods than monotheistic religions do today. In particular, the Greeks did believe that a very tiny number of humans with extraordinarily great abilities who performed deeds of exceptionally great impact while they were alive could, after their deaths, become a kind of supernatural being known as a ἥρως (hḗrōs; plural: ἥρωες [hḗrōes]), who retained the ability to influence the affairs of the living for better or worse.

The Greeks sought to bargain with and appease these hḗrōes through local hero cults, which in many ways resembled cults of the major deities, only they were more limited in scope and confined to a particular locale.

For the ancient Greeks, whether someone became a hḗrōs after their death had nothing to do with the moral quality of their actions and everything to do with the scale or impact of those actions. This does not, however, mean that the Greeks didn’t care about morality or that they believed it was acceptable for someone to go on a killing spree in order to win the chance to become a hḗrōs; it is simply a case of them regarding cultic practices and morality as independent matters. The Greek veneration of hḗrōes stood in tension with the recognition that hḗrōes sometimes behaved contrary to moral norms that humans were generally expected to follow.

In exceptionally rare cases, the Greeks did believe that some human beings (almost always those who had at least one major deity as their parent) could actually become full, Panhellenic deities, as Herakles and the Dioskouroi (i.e., Kastor and Polydeukes, the brothers of Helene of Sparta) are said to have become. The Greeks, however, very much regarded such cases as extremely rare exceptions to the norm.

The notion of humans as “virtual supermen, free to flout any convention, to pursue power at any cost, to accumulate wealth without regard for consequence or its use” is exactly as antithetic to mainstream ancient Greek religious principles as it is to mainstream contemporary Christian or Jewish principles.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the northwest heroön, or shrine to a hḗrōs, at the site of Sagalassos in the region of Pisidia in Asia Minor

Some readers may wonder where Wolpe is getting this idea from if not from the ancient Greeks. The answer is that, once again, he is getting it from Friedrich Nietzsche. For background, Nietzsche lived at a time in the nineteenth century when the influence of Christianity seemed to be waning and he saw the threat that nihilism (i.e., the belief that existence has no meaning or purpose and that all values are baseless) posed to his contemporaries.

As a solution to the threat of nihilism, Nietzsche proposed that every man should seek to become what he called an Übermensch, which is often translated as “Superman” or “Overman,” who would reject both nihilism and the value systems of others, including what Nietzsche considered the “slave morality” of Christianity and Judaism.

Wolpe, however, fundamentally either misunderstands or misrepresents even Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. Nietzsche did not envision the Übermensch merely as a greedy human who will pursue wealth and power at all costs. Instead, he saw him as an artist-tyrant who will possess such creativity, will, and power that he can create, sustain, and enforce his own system of values.

Although Nietzsche vehemently maintained that the Übermensch is a kind of being who will come in the future and that no human who has lived so far has ever been one or even come close, in his Will to Power 2.380, he does list the names of those whom he considers to be among the greatest humans who have lived so far, selecting them specifically on the basis of traits that he elsewhere predicts will be characteristic of the Übermensch. The list is: “Caesar, also Homer, Aristophanes, Leonardo, Goethe.” Each of these figures is someone who is known in some capacity as a great writer, poet, or artist. Nietzsche, who was trained as a classicist, had a classicist’s idea of greatness.

Nietzsche would most likely regard men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk as utterly banal and the pettiest kind of human. Although both men are certainly powerful, neither of them has ever displayed anything close to the kind of unbridled humanistic creativity that Nietzsche predicts the Übermensch will wield. Instead of being artist-tyrants, they’re all tyrant and no artist.

Additionally, although one could say that Trump and Musk are driven in certain ways, Nietzsche imagined the Übermensch as someone who will be willing to endure great suffering and discomfort to promulgate his own ideals and vision and it is frankly hard to imagine either Trump or Musk being willing to endure any kind of genuine hardship for sake of any ideal, even their own.

Thus, Wolpe takes his own twenty-first-century misunderstanding of a concept from a nineteenth-century German existential philosopher and falsely attributes it to ancient “pagans,” to whom the concept as he understands it would be quite foreign.

ABOVE: Gallery of men whom Nietzsche considered among the greatest ever to have lived (from top left): Julius Caesar, Homer, Aristophanes, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Humans as nothing but base animals?

Now let us address that other position that Wolpe attributes to the deleterious influence of “pagan” thought: the idea that humans are no better than or different from non-human animals. In a section of the essay leading to the conclusion, Wolpe maintains that the modern left has embraced this idea and specifically cites the arguments of the moral philosophers Christine M. Korsgaard and Peter Singer as examples.

The problem with this whole section of the essay is that it has absolutely nothing to do with any ancient non-monotheistic religious tradition. Even Wolpe himself doesn’t try to explain how he thinks it is related to anything ancient; he simply asserts that it is “pagan” and leaves the matter to rest.

In reality, the Greeks at least were quite emphatic in their belief that humans are distinct from non-human animals and that it is important for humans to act better than animals. Despite Wolpe’s suppositions to the contrary, most ancient Greeks did in fact believe that a deity made humans as a special and unique creation.

According to the best-known Greek myth for the origin of humans, which is attested in several ancient sources (e.g., Sappho fr. 207, Plato’s Protagoras 320c–322a, and Pseudo-Hyginus’s Fabulae 142), the Titan Prometheus fashioned the first humans from clay and brought them to life. As I previously discussed in this post I wrote four years ago in 2020, this myth closely parallels multiple ancient Near Eastern creation stories, including the ones recorded in the Book of Genesis.

The main influence behind Singer and Korsgaard’s philosophies is not ancient “paganism,” but rather the scientific and philosophical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea that humans are fundamentally animals is an outgrowth Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which he proposed in his book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Meanwhile, Singer’s moral philosophy is rooted in utilitarianism, an ethical theory that first developed in the late eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain.

ABOVE: Roman marble relief dating to the third century CE, currently held in the Louvre Museum, depicting the Titan Prometheus molding the first human beings from clay while the goddess Athena watches

Closing thoughts on Greek ideas about the nature of humanity

The brightest of ancient Greek thinkers were fully conscious of both humanity’s brilliance and inner darkness. Of these thinkers, the ancient Athenian tragic playwright Sophokles is among those who reflect most thoughtfully on what it means to be human. In his tragedy Antigone, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 441 BCE, the chorus sings (Ant. 334):

“πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.”

This means:

“There are many formidable things, but nothing exists more formidable than a human being.”

This line has a double meaning that makes it difficult to translate. As I discuss in this blog post I wrote back in August 2022, the adjective δεινός (deinós) in Greek bears both positive and negative implications. It describes a thing that is awe-inspiring, wonderful, and majestic, but also frightening and at least potentially dangerous. I have chosen to translate it here as “formidable,” because I believe this captures the deliberate ambiguity of Sophokles’s line.

In this passage, the chorus simultaneously reflects on both the genuinely impressive extent of human achievement and the frightening human capacity for destruction, cruelty, and degradation of nature (an issue which Sophokles specifically dwells on later in the same choral ode).

Meanwhile, one of Sophokles’s speakers also declares in a famous fragment (fr. 13):

“ἄνθρωπός ἐστι πνεῦμα καὶ σκιὰ μόνον.”

This means:

“A human being is only a breath and a shadow.”

At first, this fragment may seem to affirm the idea of humans as “all synapse and no soul,” but to take such an interpretation would be to misunderstand the fragment; the word πνεῦμα (pneûma) in Greek means both “breath” and “soul,” so the fragment actually affirms the existence of a soul. It is instead a reflection on the profound fragility and fleetingness of human existence.