Creating One’s Own Religion 379exotic cults, astrology, archaizing Augustan inventions, and emperor worship to more
traditional forms of public religion.New Ways Toward a Scientific Religion:
The Democritean Way
As an empirical classificatory means one can distinguish between two main forms
of a rational reflection on religion: a Democritean and, on the other hand, a
Pythagorean, Chaldean, and Stoic one. The first form was moving from the
Democritean and Epicurean approach to the study of nature. In Cicero’s De natura
deorum1.18ff. the Epicurean religious attitude is exposed by the senator C.
Velleius: the mere existence of the gods is accepted because it is a belief of every
human mind, a natural concept (a prolepsis, according to Epicurus), and therefore a
well-founded belief. The gods are free from any passion and have to be venerated
by mankind but not feared. Diseases and every other accident in life are provoked
by movements of atoms, not by gods, demons, or divine providence. Cultivated
people such as the poet Lucretius or Lucianus’s friend Celsus, rich families such
as the Pisones of the villa at Herculaneum, were attracted by Epicureanism. Many
funerary inscriptions of the imperial age testify the spread of Epicurean beliefs also
among the common people. Formulae such as non fui, fui, non sum, non desidero
(“I was not, I have been, I am not, I do not want”: CIL8.3463) were so frequently
used that they were abbreviated. For instance NF NS NCsignifies non fui, non sum,
non curo(“I was not, I am not, I do not care”: Cagnat 1886: 291). A Latin inscrip-
tion from Rome reports a Greek text in which is unveiled the truth about the after-
life: “Do not go forth nor pass along without reading me; but stop, listen to me
and do not leave before you have been instructed: there is no crossing ferry to Hades,
nor Charon the ferryman, nor Aeacus holding the keys, nor the dog Cerberus” (CIL
6.14672 =IG14.1746). Such skeptical ideas were supported by Epicureanism.
Epicurus had been following the path which Democritus, in the fifth centurybc,
had opened with his theory on atoms. Epicurus was not interested in divination,
whereas Democritus was, as Cicero states in his De divinatione, and this fact could
have been a starting point for creating a tradition of Democritus as an ancient teacher
of divination in a scientific form.
In the second or first centurybcsome writings were published under the name
of Democritus, but they had been written by the Pythagorean Bolos of Mendes, in
Egypt (Stephanus Byzantius, s.v. Apsynthos; Suda, s.v. Bôlos). Not all of Democritus’
apocrypha were the work of Bolos; for instance, the “sphaera of Democritus”
quoted in a magical papyrus (PGM12.352ff.) could have been the work of an astrologer
aimed at forecasting good or ill; the alleged Democritean book Physika kai mystika
could be a work of the imperial age (Wellmann 1928: vii). The seminal writings
of Bolos merged the Greek scientific tradition of Democritus and Theophrastus (an
ancient leader of the Aristotelian school) with the oriental tradition of the Magi
and Chaldeans, which had been interested for many centuries in the study of occult
properties of stones, plants, and animals and their relations with the stars. According