Diagoras of Melos (lyric poet, 5th c. B.C.) has received special attention for some time now because he was regarded as a radical atheist and the author of a prose work on atheism in antiquity. He was notorious for revealing and ridiculing the Eleusinian Mysteries and was condemned for impiety at Athens. The present book evaluates Diagoras' biography and shows that he cannot be considered to have been an atheist in the modern sense.

In his utopian novel Hiera Anagraphe (Sacred History) Euhemerus of Messene (ca. 300 B.C.) describes his travel to the island Panchaia in the Indian Ocean where he discovered an inscribed stele in the temple of Zeus Triphylius. It turned out that the Olympian gods (Uranos, Kronos, Zeus) were deified kings. The travels of Zeus allowed to describe peoples and places all over the world. Winiarczyk investigates the sources of the theological views of Euhemerus. He proves that Euhemerus' religious views were rooted in old Greek tradition (the worship of heroes, gods as founders of their own cult, tombs of gods, euergetism, rationalistic interpretation of myths, the explanations of the origin of religion by the sophists, the ruler cult). The description of the Panchaian society is intended to suggest an archaic and closed culture, in which the stele recording res gestae of the deified kings might have been preserved. The translation of Ennius' Euhemerus sive Sacra historia (ca. 200 - ca. 194) is a free prose rendering, which Lactantius knew only indirectly. The book is concluded by a short history of Euhemerism in the pagan, Christian and Jewish literature.

Die in der hellenistischen Zeit entstandenen utopischen Romane fristen in der Forschung eher eine Randexistenz, obwohl sie sich in der Antike grosser Beliebtheit erfreut und auch in der Neuzeit viele Autoren (Th. Morus, T. Campanella) inspiriert haben. Diese fachliterarische Lucke will die Studie schliessen: Der Verfasser beschaftigt sich mit verschiedenen utopischen Schriften im Detail; jedoch beschrankt sich die Untersuchung keineswegs allein auf deren Analyse, sondern eroertert daruber hinaus ihren philosophischen, religionswissenschaftlichen, historischen, ethnografischen und geografischen Kontext.