Presocratic philosophy and the origins of religion

Abstract

Even though there is a large body of scholarly articles devoted to individual Presocratic philosophers and their reflections on the nature of Olympic gods and Greek religion, as well as some good general monographs mapping the "theology" of Greek philosophers (e.g., Jaeger's Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers or, more recently, Drozdek's Greek Philosophers as Theologians), Presocratic hypotheses focused on the origin of religion have received comparatively minor attention. This paper examines the thoughts of Xenophanes, Democritus, Prodicus and the author of the Sisyphus-fragment (traditionally identified as Critias but also more recently as Euripides) in regard to the origin of religious belief while attempting to sketch some connections and similarities between ancient hypotheses and modern theories developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.