Sisyphus fragment
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. Like the Sisyphus fragment, Democritus wrote that early humans believed in the gods through fear of natural celestial phenomena:
Text
The Greek text is conserved in Sextus Empiricus Against the Physicists Book 1 Section 54Several English versions exist. That by R. G. Bury runs:-
And, after proceeding a little further, he adds—
Authorship
The authorship of the fragment, which survives in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, is vigorously debated. Modern classical scholarship accepted the attribution to Critias on the basis of a hypothesis first advanced by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in 1875, and thereafter Hermann Diels, Johann August Nauck, and Bruno Snell, endorsed this ascription for which there is but one source in antiquity. In 1977, Albrecht Dihle in a major paper challenged this ascription and assigned the work to Euripides, arguing that the fragment comes from the latter's satyr play of this name, produced in 415 BCE. Since Dihle published his article, the authorship of the fragment has divided modern scholars. Scholars that advocate Euripidean authorship include Charles H. Kahn, Ruth Scodel, Martin Ostwald, Jan Bremmer and Harvey Yunis. However, Critias authorship was argued by Walter Burkert, and other scholars that advocate for the same authorship include Dana Sutton, Marek Winiarczyk, Malcolm Davies, Dirk Obbink, Tim Whitmarsh and Martin Cropp.One source in antiquity ascribed the passage to Critias, one of the thirty oligarchs who ruled Athens in the immediate aftermath of the city-state's defeat in the Peloponesian War: two attribute it, or lines in it, to Euripides. Sextus Empiricus assigned these verses to Critias without however indicating which of his works. Both the Stoic logician Chrysippus and the doxographer Aëtius cited Euripides as the author, specifying that it was taken from that author's lost play Sisyphus. In modern times, Wilamowitz came down strongly for the view that it was written by Critias, a disciple of Socrates, and dated it, as forming the coda of a tetralogy, following three tragedies by Critias -Peirithous, Rhadumunthus and Tennes -, which he argued was written sometime after his return from exile in 411. The view that it was written by Euripides frequently identifies it as belonging to the Sisyphus, the satyr play capping his 415 trilogy: Alexandros, Palamedes and The Trojan Women, though Jan N. Bremmer suggests another lost play by Euripides; his Autolykos would be a more attractive candidate as the original source.
A major issue in discussing authorship of the passage hinges on the question whether the speaker's views reflect those of a historic atheist, or whether the lines are simply a dramatic mise en scène of an atheistic outlook, and therefore not one entertained by its author. Dihle argued that there was no evidence in the surviving fragments of Kritias that he was an atheist, except for the testimony of Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch, a point Burkert challenged in the revised English version of his book on Greek Religion by citing the testimony of a fragment of Epicurus from Bk.11 of his work On Nature.