Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus famously begins with disaster having struck Thebes: the crops are failing, women and cattle are unable to give birth, and a plague is spreading among the population. The city is suffering from a disease {noses) for which no remedy can be found. Like the doctors during the Athenian plague of 430 BC, the Theban king Oedipus is at a loss as to the cause of the loimos that has struck his city. The king sends his brother-in-law to inquire of the Delphic oracle about the reason for these afflictions and about the correct procedures to ensure deliverance from them. In due course, Creon returns with an oracular response from Delphi: Phoebus Apollo commands that they drive out a pollution {miasma) which has been nourished in the city. Which pollution, Oedipus asks, and how can purification {katharmos) be procured? The answer that Creon has received from the oracle points to a causal chain of past events that the protagonists on the dramatic stage believe they can resolve: the murderer of the previous king Laius, and not an aerial pollution as suggested by the Hippocratic writers in the case of epidemics, is the miasma. Miasma is a result of homicide, or rather, the killer is the miasma, just as he is the cause of the city’s sufferings and {as we shall see momentarily) a potential source of contamination to others. He must be hunted down and physically removed, that is, exiled or killed. Only then will Phoebus Apollo deign to deliver the Thebans and their city from their sufferings {Oedipus Tyrannus 82-125, 151-215). The god is using the affliction to remind the Thebans of their past negligence, namely their failure to seek revenge from the killer{s) of their once rightful king - a vengeance that Oedipus is going to seek on behalf of both the city and the god {126-41). It may be too strong a statement to say that the pollution is caused by ‘‘guilt’’ on the Thebans’ part, but human responsibility for some past transgression {the failure of all to give proper care to their murdered king) cannot be denied.
A similar differentiation between pollution as the potential cause and its discernible negative effects is made elsewhere: The Dodonaeans inquire of their local Zeus: ‘‘Is it because of some mortal’s pollution that we are suffering this storm?’’ {SEG 19.427). The Athenians, in the aftermath and because of a second outbreak of the plague in 427 {Thucydides 3.87), seek purification {katharsis) ‘‘in accordance with some oracle’’ in the winter of 426/5. Although the concrete political circumstances of this move remain disputed {Brock 1996), the purificatory ritual seems designed to propitiate: all graves on the {sacred) island of Delos are removed and neither birth nor death, as prime causes of ritual pollution, will be permitted on it in the future. In addition, the Athenians {re-)establish a penteteric festival for Delian Apollo {Thucydides 1.8.1, 3.104; Diodorus 12.58.6). Before, people had lived and died on the sacred island, and the categorical boundaries between the ‘‘pure’’ and normality had been violated; yet it is only after disaster has struck that the cause and its circumstances are investigated by the Athenians. Pertinent to the Sophoclean link between homicide and pollution is the example of Epimenides, a legendary ‘‘purifier’’ {kathartes) from Crete, who is said to have purified Athens from the Cylonian agos {‘‘polluting curse’’), the murder of Cylon and his supporters, around 600 BC {[Aristotle] AthenaiOn Politeia 1). The purification ritual proper follows the removal of the homicides, both those dead and those still alive, from Athens. Others make that ‘‘polluting curse’’ the cause of an epidemic {loimos) which is brought to a halt only when two young Athenians die a substitute death for their city {FGrH 457 T1 = Diogenes Laertius 1.110).
Modern discussions tend to portray pollution as the inevitable result of murder, not only affecting and haunting the culprit himself but also causing the immediate pollution of his fellow-citizens and the political community at large. If that were the case, why should the Thebans take the risk of displaying such negligence and fail to deal with their own polluted status, and why should they need reminding from Phoebus Apollo of what exactly the miasma is? Did they not know that Laius had died without revenge? Yet the textual basis for assuming a necessary and immediate causal link between homicide and pollution is meager. The so-called Tetralogies ascribed to Antiphon {late fifth century) may play with the idea that the homicide’s polluted state is also polluting the city until the culprit is prosecuted and condemned {Parker 1983:103-7). But use of that idea in these courtroom exercises serves as an emotional frame and hence as a rhetorical means intended to manipulate - through exaggeration, as we shall see in a moment - the feelings and sentiments of the {hypothetical) Athenian jury. The idea must not be interpreted as directly reflecting Athenian legal practices and norms. Book 9 of Plato’s Laws contains a discussion as to how different types of homicide necessitate different grades of pollution on the culprit’s part. The Platonic ideal law-code differentiates between deliberate but justifiable homicide, in which case no state of pollution applies, accidental homicide, carrying no penalty but requiring some purification, other forms of involuntary homicide, for which only exile can serve as an adequate cathartic procedure, and parricide, when the only feasible measure is death followed by the subsequent mutilation of the unburied corpse {Laws 865a-869e). But the close link that Plato’s law-code establishes between homicide and pollution should be read as the supplementary theological interpretation of the legal dimension of murder. His law-code becomes a morally loaded and thus distorted reflection of common legal norms and rules. By way of contrast, no strong notion regarding the polluting consequences of homicide can be found in the extant Attic Orators. And it is striking how any notion of pollution appears to be entirely absent from the extant Athenian legislation as preserved in Draco’s law of homicide republished in 409/8 BC, which seems to be concerned largely with mitigating the legal consequences of involuntary or accidental homicide {IG i2 115 = i3 104 = M-L 86). Athens in the late fifth century seems not particularly preoccupied with identifying a polluting stain on the citizen body as the result of murder in the city. The penalty that the law prescribes, namely exile, can be avoided; nor does it carry the connotation of a cathartic measure as in the case of Plato’s homicide ‘‘law’’ or in Sophocles’ play.
In the case of homicide, pollution has to be made public in order to come into existence. The killer is not by default polluted, and hence not automatically a source of pollution to others, but rather free from it as long as he has not been declared a murderer. In the Athenian legal procedure, this happens by means of what is called the prorrhe:sis: the public announcement of the murderer’s identity is accompanied by a solemn proclamation made by private citizens related to the victim, and hence entitled to vengeance (IGi3 20-33; Demosthenes 42.57), and by the Archon Basileus. It is from this moment and throughout the period before the murder trial proper that the culprit is excluded from the lustral water distributed to wash one’s hands before a sacrifice, from the libations and the mixing bowls, from the city’s sacred shrines and its agora - in other words: from the community’s religious, social, and political life (Demosthenes 20.158; Arnaoutoglou 1993:114-31). That this legal ritual of social isolation carries the connotation of being polluting - with regard to both the person accused of homicide and those coming into contact with him - finds its reflection in the Oedipus Tyrannus. The king’s exhortation of his fellow-citizens to reveal to him the identity of Laius’ murderer is followed by a quasi-formal prorrhesis: no one in Thebes must give shelter to the homicide or address him, admit him to prayers to the gods and sacrifices or share the lustral water with him, for he is ‘‘our pollution’’ (23642). Again, there is no immediate and necessary link between murder and pollution: the prorrheesis makes the homicide an outcast and a potential source of pollution for the community. Social and religious marginalization and pollution are only quasijuridical procedures, the social function of which must have been to make the accused seek resolution of his status and deter potential homicides by dramatizing the social as well as religious consequences of their wrong behavior.
In order to achieve resolution, the accused can stand trial, the result of which may be conviction or acquittal. He can attempt to negotiate a financial compensation with the victim’s relatives. Or he can flee the country - though at the price of taking his pollution with him. In another city that homicide has to find a host willing to receive the polluted into his house and act as agent in the process of ritual purification. The Greek custom of receiving the murderer as a suppliant (hikesios) is attested as early as the Iliad (24.480-3). Herodotus narrates the story of Adrestus, who requests and receives purification from the Lydian king Croesus ‘‘according to the local customs,’’ which is just as well since Greek and Lydian cathartic procedures are said to differ little in that respect (1.35). At Athens there seems to have existed a nomos - whether the word here denotes an actual statutory law or simply entails the existence of a ‘‘custom’’ is not entirely clear - that permitted the involuntary or accidental murderer to return home after a settlement had been reached with the victim’s relatives; but his return was contingent upon prescribed rules of conduct, which included ritual purification and a sacrifice (Demosthenes 23.72). The available epigraphic evidence, though notoriously difficult to interpret, offers a window onto the various local cathartic procedures. The cathartic law from Cyrene demands that the local host present the foreign homicide to the community and announce his status as a suppliant. It is only then that the latter is entitled to undergo ritual purification. The host has the homicide sit on the threshold on a white fleece, and washes and anoints him. They go outside into the public road, observing silence while they proceed in the company of a herald to a place, probably a local public shrine, where the concluding sacrifice - itself no longer, it seems, part of the purificatory ritual proper - must be performed (LSS 115 B 50-9). In a law from Selinus, dating to the fifth century, a formal proclamation quite like the ruling in the Cyrene law is required before the cathartic procedures can begin. The host has the homicide wash himself with water and offers food and salt. Here, as in the Cyrene law, the purificatory ritual proper seems to be followed by a concluding sacrifice: a piglet is offered to Zeus, possibly again on an altar belonging to a public temple, the possible implication being that the purified and others share in the subsequent consumption of the sacrificial meat.
The literary texts agree with these laws on the issue of silence which must be kept but introduce another variant: the suppliant is purified with the blood of a slaughtered piglet (Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.693-4, 703-9, 720-3, 730). The ritual logic of this additional detail is explicable by the idea that bloodshed has to be purified with blood. It seems as though the literary texts further dramatize what must be a ritual procedure already out of the ordinary. In Aeschylus, it is the matricide Orestes, hunted by the Erinyes and in a state of manic frenzy, whom Apollo himself purifies with blood (Aeschylus, Eumenides 280-3, 448-50; Sidwell 1996). We have seen how the exclusion of the homicide from the customary religious rituals of the community contingent upon the prorrhlsis not only signified his separation from society but also entailed his pollution. The rituals described here dramatize his subsequent reintegration. The purificatory ritual proper employs various symbolic elements connoting marginalization and its eventual resolution. It is followed by a sacrificial ritual which dramatizes the very fact that the homicide’s marginalization within society has successfully been overcome. After the sacrifice of a piglet has been concluded, ‘‘he shall go away from his host, and turn around, and he shall be spoken to, and take food, and sleep wherever he wishes’’ (SEG 43.630 = NGSL 27, col. B 1-7). He is back to normality.
In real life, the homicide can be purified and possibly even return home; on the Sophoclean stage, purification of the city amounts to the homicide’s banishment or death. The homicide, or rather parricide, is none other than Oedipus himself, who, in a vain attempt to escape from the oracle’s earlier prediction, namely that he would slay his father and marry his mother, has inadvertently fulfilled that divine pronouncement. The king, by vowing to take revenge on the murderer and pronouncing the prorrhesis, has sealed his own fate: as parricide, Oedipus’ prolonged presence among his fellow-citizens does indeed pollute the city. The eventual self-inflicted exile formally fulfills the criteria set for purification by the Delphic oracle. In the purification of the Cylonian pollution at the hands of Epimenides, the removal of the culprit is also a prerequisite of successful ritual purificatory measures.
Epimenides also recommended that two Athenians commit suicide on behalf of the citizen body in order to end the epidemic. The incident, though probably a historiographical fiction, represents a case of what is sometimes, and rather misleadingly, called a ‘‘scapegoat ritual.’’ The Greek word is pharmakos, from pharmakon, ‘‘healing remedy’’ or ‘‘medicine’’: pharmakoi, mainly attested in Ionia and in Athens, are expelled from the city as part of routinely recurring ritual procedures. Plutarch, when serving as archon in Chaironeia, performed such a routine ritual in person (693e-694b). At Athens, two men were annually driven out of the city during the festival of the Thargelia. Some literary sources claim that the pharmakos was expelled from cities not only during such annual festivities but in moments of crisis as well, in particular during epidemics (Hughes 1991:139-65). No historically verifiable instance of such a non-recurring application of the ritual pattern can be found in Greek culture; but several of the texts implicitly suggest that such an interpretation would have been entirely plausible to an ancient Greek audience. In Plutarch’s
Chaironeia, a slave is driven out through the city gates while the crowd is chanting ‘‘out with boulimos, in with wealth and health,’’ and the learned participants at one of Plutarch’s table-talks agree that the word boulimos, which they do not quite understand, has the meaning of ‘‘great famine.’’ While many of the details of the ritual remain unclear, there is a consensus about its basic meaning in the ancient texts. The ritual is cathartic: the sources interpret the expulsion measures as ‘‘purifications’’ of the respective cities and their citizens. Pollution may always accrue, and its cause often cannot be identified. The substitution of a ‘‘scapegoat’’ thus becomes a convenient ritual solution. If the occasion of the ritual is indeed an epidemic or a famine, its effect may be immediately apparent. But even if the ritual is celebrated as a routinely recurring event year after year, it does not matter: pollution may always lie hidden somewhere, waiting to be activated or purified. The Oedipus Tyrannus too has been interpreted in the light of such cathartic rituals. But Oedipus is not a pharmakos in the traditional sense. In the pharmakos ritual, the human purifications are selected to take the pollution on behalf of the citizens outside the city walls and thus restore the community to a state of post-pollution normality. Oedipus is no substitute but himself the miasma and the source of disaster.
World History
