The Sisyphus fragment is a fragment from Classical Attic drama which is thought to contain an early argument for atheism, claiming that a clever man invented "the fear of the gods" in order to frighten people into behaving morally.
The fragment was preserved in the works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus. In antiquity, its authorship was disputed and is attributed in one tradition to Euripides, in another Critias, but the fragment indicates clear intellectual influences that are less under dispute. This includes the thought of Democritus, as Charles H. Kahn has argued.[1] Like the Sisyphus fragment, Democritus wrote that early humans believed in the gods through fear of natural celestial phenomena:
And there are some who have supposed that we have arrived at the conception of Gods from those events in the world which are marvelous; which opinion seems to have been held by Democritus, who says—“For when the men of old time beheld the disasters in the heavens, such as thunderings and lightnings, and thunderbolts and collisions between stars, and eclipses of sun and moon, they were affrighted, imagining the Gods to be the causes of these things.”[2]
^Kahn 1997, p. 259.
^Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists Book 1, Section 24
The Sisyphusfragment is a fragment from Classical Attic drama which is thought to contain an early argument for atheism, claiming that a clever man invented...
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