Every religion, if examined closely enough, eventually betrays its own absurdity. The religions of ancient Greece and Rome were no exception. They rested on two mutually incompatible beliefs: that Fate and Destiny governed every event, and that prayers and sacrifices could persuade the gods to alter those very events. Lucian of Samosata, the great second-century satirist, was more than happy to point out the contradiction. 

Lucian was a hugely popular satirist and critic of religion and superstition in the second century. His surviving corpus contains around 80 works, making him one of the best-preserved prose authors of the period. He made brilliant use of the satirical dialogue—a comic parody of Plato’s Socratic dialogues—in which gods, philosophers, tyrants, and ordinary people unwittingly expose their own absurdity in the course of discussion. He thus forged for the skeptic a powerful new weapon: mockery. 

“Ridicule,” Thomas Jefferson would later write, “is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.” Lucian was among the first to make a career out of it. He recognized that ideas impervious to logical criticism could still be weakened by revealing their absurdity, and that humor could accomplish what argument alone could not. Fifteen centuries later, Voltaire would wield the same weapon, declaring, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” 

God granted the same prayer to Lucian. The Olympian gods—and all who believed in them—were easy targets. From the failed prophecies of Apollo to the endless sexual escapades of Zeus, Lucian exposed the gods as petty, jealous, vain, lustful, and foolish—essentially as ordinary humans endowed with supernatural powers, yet with inferior morals. 

No figure escaped Lucian’s satire—not even Zeus himself. In Zeus Cross-Examined, Lucian sets the stage by having the philosopher Cyniscus interrogate the King of the Gods with a series of deceptively simple questions: 

I am not going to trouble you with requests for a fortune or a throne; you get prayers enough of that sort from other people, and from your habit of convenient deafness I gather that you experience a difficulty in answering them. But there is one thing I should like, which would cost you no trouble to grant.

What Cyniscus is after is knowledge. Specifically, he wants to know if Fate is in any sense changeable, or if events and outcomes are strictly predetermined. Zeus answers unequivocally: Fate, he declares, is unalterable—not even the gods can escape its unbending laws. Nor is this some fringe theory; Zeus is simply articulating the orthodox religious views that most people in the ancient world would readily accept.

But with Zeus now committed to a fully deterministic position, Cyniscus asks him this:

If the case stands thus, if the Fates are mistresses of all, and their decisions unalterable, then why do men sacrifice to you, and bring hecatombs, and pray for good at your hands? If our prayers can neither save us from evil nor procure us any boon from Heaven, I fail to see what we get for our trouble.

Fate and Destiny—or, in modern Christian parlance, predestination—stand in awkward opposition to the idea that salvation comes from acts of free will, in the form of either faith or works. Stated another way: how can salvation be under personal control when our fates have already been decided by forces larger than ourselves? 

Modern believers are baffled by the same dilemma. They also struggle to reconcile prayer—which is, in effect, asking God to change his mind—with the idea that God is omniscient and all-powerful and ensures that “everything happens for a reason.” Prayer, on closer inspection, both gives humans too much credit and fails to recognize the supposed perfect foresight of God.

But Zeus is not ready to surrender just yet. He informs Cyniscus that people do not “sacrifice to us from ulterior motives,” but merely as a “disinterested testimony to our superior merit.” It’s a plausible defense, but not a persuasive one. The gods’ superiority itself can be called into question. 

“If the Fates are our mistresses, they are also yours,” Cyniscus counters. “Your immortality will not serve you; that only makes things worse. We mortals, after all, are liberated by death: but for you there is no end to the evil; that long thread of yours means eternal servitude.”

Zeus, now flustered, resorts to a series of ad hominem attacks and threats, to which Cyniscus remains unfazed. “Spare your threats,” Cyniscus says, “you know that nothing can happen to me, except what Fate has settled first.” There is no point, after all, in worrying about predetermined outcomes. 

But the problems for Zeus do not end there. Fate itself is exposed as arbitrary and unjust. Cyniscus notes how “even temple-robbers do not always get punished; most of them, indeed, slip through your hands. Not destined to be caught, I suppose.” The gods, upon further examination, are exposed not merely as powerless—but as instruments of injustice.

And injustice is everywhere: the wicked routinely escape punishment—and are sometimes even rewarded—while the virtuous suffer. Even Zeus’s thunderbolts seem incapable of delivering justice, more often striking “an oak-tree or a stone or a harmless mast, or even an honest, God-fearing traveller” rather than the guilty themselves. 

If Fate had any sense of justice, Cyniscus notes, Meletus, rather than Socrates, would have been forced to drink the hemlock. Instead, Fate stands idly by while “villains and money-grubbers prosper, and honest men are oppressed with want and sickness and a thousand distresses, and can hardly call their souls their own.” If justice is what you’re after, you won’t find it on Mount Olympus—or in the hands of Destiny, Fate, or Providence. 

But Cyniscus has one final objection. If no god—let alone any human being—can alter the decrees of Fate, then how can anyone be blamed or praised, rewarded or punished, for actions they had no choice but to perform? Zeus himself concedes that accidental crimes and involuntary good deeds deserve neither punishment nor reward. But if every action is equally fated and unavoidable, then on what grounds can anyone be justly consigned to Hades? In a fully deterministic world, moral responsibility simply disappears. And with it, the necessity of the gods themselves. 

Zeus has no answers left to give. He is reduced to an unwitting pawn in an irrational game controlled by Fate, itself an impersonal force producing arbitrary and unjust outcomes. Once the unquestioned ruler of the gods of Olympus, Zeus is now exposed as redundant, ignorant, naive, combative, and cruel. It’s no wonder that the last words Zeus can muster to Cyniscus are this: “I am not going to speak to you any more. You are an unscrupulous man; a sophist. I shall go away and leave you to yourself.”

If only that were the end of the story. Zeus may be gone, but the impulse that created him lives on. Every generation elevates new gods and shields them from criticism with the same unquestioning devotion once reserved for Olympus. 

But that’s why Lucian’s satire endures. It reminds us that the greatest threat to any god is not disbelief but questioning. And while the names of the gods may change from age to age, the verdict of reason does not. Every god, sooner or later, must answer to the court of evidence. 

References & Further Reading

Lucian of Samosata. The Works of Lucian of Samosata. JollyJoy Books Pvt Ltd, 2024.