By modern hygienic standards, ancient Greek cities, like all other pre-modern urban centers, were very dirty places indeed. Overcrowding and its many insalubrious effects, urban pollution, and an insufficient understanding of the necessity of waste disposal made the ancient city particularly disease-ridden. If the ancient Greek medical writers developed a rudimentary understanding of the relation between living conditions and urban pollution on the one hand and the impact of an epidemic on the other, they lacked the means to implement their pathological solutions; more importantly, they also lacked a deeper understanding of the causes of epidemic diseases. That is to say that they were perfectly able to develop naturalistic diagnoses of the circumstances under which an epidemic might possibly strike, the varied courses it would normally take, and the different effects it could have with regard to different people. But neither the authors of the Hippocratic treatise Epidemics nor, for that matter, Thucydides’ account of the Athenian plague of 430 BC (2.47-54) significantly advance beyond the realm of diagnosis. Interestingly, however, the authors of the Hippocratic Corpus, when they do proffer a medical explanation, see the cause in pathogenic pollutions (nosera miasmata) of the humid air carrying the disease from abroad (Hoessly 2001:274-8).
It might be tempting to suppose a causal link between the ancient experience of filthy urban environments and epidemic diseases, on the one hand, and the Greek insistence on maintaining ritual purity on the other. Undoubtedly, there is more than just a grain of truth in such a supposition. When the authors in the Hippocratic Corpus explain the cause of an epidemic as a form of aerial pollution (miasma), they implicitly fall back, as we shall see in a moment, upon a traditional religious interpretative model, namely the notion that epidemic diseases are caused by a human miasma and may be perceived as something sent by the gods. Supposing a causal link between environmental pollution and ritual purity, however, would entail applying to the ancient Greeks our hygienic standards and our notions of what ought to count as polluting. For instance, while death and the dead are across the ancient Mediterranean routinely treated as ritually polluting, there appears to exist only isolated evidence concerning their being regarded as physically (or pathogenically) polluting. Even though undertaking is seen as a marginalized and ‘‘dirty’’ profession throughout Greco-Roman antiquity (Derda 1991), it would be rash to suppose that the religious categorization of death as a ritual pollution is exclusively reflective of more general Greek societal notions of death. Quite the contrary: when the Greek funerary regulations detail both the ritual pollution affecting the house of the dead and the different means as well as conditions of subsequent purification (Frisone 2000:30, 57), they categorize the family as only temporarily ‘‘polluted’’ and limit the state of pollution to the immediate household and those entering the house; these may attain post-pollution normality through purification.
The modern ethnographic fascination with all things impure and polluted disregards the simple fact that the actual impact of purity regulations in any given society may be quite limited. Social life, to become tolerable, admits employment of different interpretative models to make different sense of the world in different situations. The superstitious man in Theophrastus’ Characters (16) does not understand this principle: he begins his day with the ritual washing of his hands and the besprinkling of his body, and puts a piece of laurel wreath in his mouth. He purifies the house on a regular basis, fearing that the goddess Hecate may have taken possession of it by means of some hostile spell. He avoids contact with women in childbed and with death, and avoids even the sight of a tombstone so as not to contract a pollution. When he encounters someone else chewing garlic, he purifies himself and summons priestesses to circle him with a cathartic squill or puppy. As if all this were not enough, he participates in the Orphic Mysteries once a month, entailing further purificatory measures. The superstitious man whose life is dedicated to the desperate attempt to avoid any kind of ritual pollution is a caricature, meant as a criticism of unreasonable ‘‘superstitious’’ and improper social behavior. This example may serve to illustrate the point made at the beginning of this chapter, namely that ‘‘purity’’ and ‘‘pollution’’ ought to be understood as categories constructed in order to establish temporary differentiation - be it with regard to a biological condition, or a dietary or social practice. The object of that differentiation - be it the corpse, childbirth, or the chewing of garlic - may be classified as either ‘‘physically not polluted’’ or ‘‘ritually not pure.’’ The classificatory model one is applying must depend (something the superstitious man has clearly misunderstood) on the respective situation and context. The separation between the two categories of ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘polluted,’’ maintained only within a given (ritual) situation, can and must be abandoned afterwards, if we wish to return to a normal life. For if only a situation prevailed in which every single exposure to a corpse, to childbirth, or to someone chewing garlic entails ritual pollution, everyday life in the Greek world would be passed with constant religious scruple and ritual purifications, and hence become unbearable.
The conceptualization of boundaries - both real and imagined - between the sacred and the secular realms - between purity and normality - is a matter of serious attention in Greek religion. Purity is associated with the sacred realm, whereas pollution occurs in the social world beyond its boundaries. Truth to tell, Greek mythology does not portray the gods as particularly pure beings; the shortcomings of their anthropomorphism are criticized already by Xenophanes of Colophon (frr. 166-72 Kirk/Raven/Schofield) in the sixth century BC. But the cult statues of gods are attended by temple personnel, who clean and wash them as part of the temple’s ritual routine. Greek purity regulations need not concern the ‘‘pure’’ gods who inhabit the sacred realm. The author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease, written in the late fifth or early fourth century BC, expresses a widely shared sentiment about the separation of that realm from the world around it:
The gods we ourselves build boundaries for their sanctuaries and sacred precincts in order that no one may transgress them unless he is pure [hagneuein], and, upon entering, besprinkle ourselves with water [perirrainesthai] not as people who defile [ miainesthai] but who purify themselves [aphagnieisthai] from any pollution [musos] that we have contracted in the past. (Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease 6, 364 Littre)
The very activities that characterize everyday life - birth, death, sexual intercourse, defecation, commerce, and others - are excluded from the sanctuary. The rite de separation becomes a ritual necessity: purification by water upon entering a sanctuary is the most economical and hence routine rite de passage; we have already seen how the superstitious man uses that device to excess. In some cases, as in some mystery initiations or the Epidaurian incubation ritual, access becomes contingent upon a particular state of purity (hagneia), attained through a period of ritual fasting, and the abstention from certain animal foods and sexual intercourse. The actual religious event is marked by symbolically charged dress codes: white clothing, for instance, and the absence of the color black. But attaining such hagneia is intended to prepare for exceptional religious experiences; it is not necessarily part of religious routine in the Greek world.
In Greek purity regulations, however, purification on entering, as a ritual of demarcating the sacred realm, is only one prerequisite of access to the divine. The literary sources claim that general notions about the sources of pollution - such as childbirth, death, or homicide - were shared among many. But the details of purity regulations may differ from region to region or from city to city, and sometimes display differences in one and the same polis. The Greek leges sacrae or ‘‘sacred laws’’ preserve numerous instances which specify the, or some, common sources of ritual pollution, the time which has to pass before the polluted person may enter the sanctuary, and the required purificatory ritual. These sources can include childbirth or contact therewith, miscarriage or contact therewith, abortion, menstruation, sexual intercourse, either with one's own spouse or with the spouse of another person, the consumption of certain animal foods, contact with a corpse, or bloodshed. These prohibitions relate to ordinary worshipers; they display considerable variation with regard to the number of days that need to pass between the pollution and the purification ritual, the nature of that ritual, and the persons concerned. One might expect temple personnel, priests, and priestesses to obey requirements which go beyond these purity regulations; but that seems to hold true only in a minority of cases.
Several of these leges sacrae date to the hellenistic and Roman periods. In a significant number of these post-classical texts the prohibitions are related to immigrant cults such as Isis, Sarapis, Men, or the Syrian deities. Therefore, it must prima facie remain doubtful whether they are fully representative of Greek notions of purity and pollution, particularly in the archaic and classical periods. It would be misguided, however, to regard them as foreign to Greek religious thought, simply because they do not belong to the cult of a ‘‘Greek’’ deity. For the view that these immigrant cults can be interpreted as ‘‘non-Greek’’ is no longer tenable: they are fully integrated into the infrastructure of Greek religion, and cult reality is often just as Greek as in the more traditional cults. There does exist, however, evidence which we can relate to a traditional deity of the Greek pantheon. A cathartic law from Cyrene, in its preserved form dating to the fourth century BC (and probably slightly older than that) and allegedly given by the god Apollo himself, deals with instances of ritual pollution similar to those in later cult regulations (LSS 115; Parker 1983:332-51). These instances include childbirth and contact therewith (the woman in childbed pollutes the entire household as well as those entering, but the pollution does not leave the house), miscarriage, sexual intercourse conducted by a male during the day, the choice of an inappropriate sacrificial victim, obligations related to a tithe, improper behavior of girls, of brides, and of wives during pregnancy, and finally homicide.
How can we come to an understanding of the social relevance of these purity regulations? In the anthropological literature on the topic, one can sense a tendency to naturalize the boundaries between the ‘‘pure,’’ pollution and social normality. Or there is a tendency simply to reify native classifications. Representative of these approaches is Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, which interprets purity regulations as symbolic classifications reflective of the social classifications which prevail in society at large. Her definition of dirt as ‘‘matter out of place’’ and as ‘‘disorder’’ interprets ritual pollution - a property of the ‘‘betwixt and between’’ in Douglas’ famous formulation - as the dialectical opposite of the orderly world of purity regulations (1966:2-6, 42, passim). Her definition relates these purity regulations to the larger realm of those categories that govern orderly behavior in the social world. In a structuralist tradition fascinated with the dichotomy of the ‘‘pure’’ and the ‘‘impure,’’ this hypothesis proposes that social control is maintained through purity regulations, and that the latter are a natural extension of the former. Yet if that were true, one would need to assume that the purity regulations are regarded as natural categorizations by most and under all circumstances; otherwise they would not make a sufficiently valid contribution to the maintenance of social control. But is that really the case? Undoubtedly, the approach of Purity and Danger is not without heuristic value. For instance, the structuralist approach may appear helpful when it comes to the interpretation of childbirth or death in the family and the household: here, purity regulations might be seen as structuring, and thereby possibly releasing the stress exerted by, natural physical processes of the life-cycle such as childbed and death. And the notion of social control can highlight the fact that Greek purity regulations are far from innocent with regard to their addressing gender imbalances. The focus of the leges sacrae on childbirth, miscarriage, or abortion - from the fourth century, menstruation is also interpreted as a source of female pollution - entails that the male regulators of cult practice regarded the female body as particularly susceptible to pollution and hence in need of ritual regulation. Incidentally, this sentiment is shared by the Hippocratic writers. It must remain debatable whether the emphasis on childbirth, abortion, and menstruation reflects male concerns about increasing female emancipation in the social realm, in particular in the hellenistic and Roman periods (Dean-Jones 1995:225-53). It seems reasonable, however, to infer from these texts that the religious notion of a particular female ritual impurity reflects - and ritually reifies - male conceptions about the role of women in Greek culture at large (Carson 1999; Cole 1992; Von Staden 1992).
The various kinds of pollution which the leges sacrae postulate as ritual pollutions are contracted beyond the boundaries of the sacred precinct. It is the sacred realm’s perspective, not that of everyday life, which renders ordinary biological processes and social activities as pollutions, necessitating purification if one wishes to cross the line of constructed separation. How can that be? And how can we know whether these lines of constructed separation might have been regarded as natural categories? Surely, in their daily lives people would wish to have sexual intercourse, taste and consume different foods, and not want to incur the wrath of a vengeful god for transgressing purity rules on entering a sacred precinct. And they would by necessity give birth, menstruate, abort or miscarry, kill or otherwise come into contact with death, and not want to face the dire religious consequences of such activity.
An answer to our question may be found in several texts from western Asia Minor, dating to the Roman period. They dramatize the conflict between the requirements of the normality of everyday life and local purity regulations. A woman named Eutychis twice goes into the village in a state of ritual impurity before the god takes note and punishes her (SEG 6.250). In another incident, a person claims to have entered a shrine in a state of impurity, being unaware of the locally prevailing purity regulations (MAMA IV.288). A man with the name of Sosandros commits perjury and, thus polluted, nevertheless visits the temple (Journal of Hellenic Studies 10 [1889] 217 no. 1). A man called Aurelius Soterichos has sexual intercourse with a woman in the sacred precinct (SEG 6.251). All three are duly punished by the gods. A slave owned by the sanctuary of some local deities even manages to have sexual intercourse with three different women on three different occasions before the gods stop him (SEG 38.1237). These texts must not be read as claiming that no one ever obeys purity rules. Although very few may have equaled Theophrastus’ superstitious man in his ritual punctiliousness, most must have had at least a rudimentary awareness of the various sources of ritual pollution that prevailed among them. But it is impossible to tell how many observed the time of seclusion which had to pass before they could again engage with others or even enter a sanctuary, if they had been affected by a ritual pollution. And it is untenable to assume that purity regulations were taken into account simply because they existed. To some, a simple purificatory ritual like besprinkling with water may have sufficed. Others, as the instances from Asia Minor suggest, may not have cared all that much or could always pretend not to know, until convicted by the gods.
These instances further suggest that, even if people generally may have wished to obey purity regulations, they seemed nonetheless prepared to contract a pollution seemingly without much religious scruple, if the situation demanded it. Sometimes, or so Aurelius Soterichos must have reckoned, the opportunity was simply too good to let it pass. It is only when misfortune strikes that our current misery is causally related to a past transgression; it then becomes ‘‘punishment by a god.’’ The cause of one’s present misfortune can always be explained as a pollution which one contracted in the past - there are many opportunities to overstep the constructed boundaries between the ‘‘pure’’ and the ‘‘polluted’’ - but which had lain dormant until now. It is in situations such as these that the religious category of ritual pollution can be used as a singularly satisfactory interpretative model. For if ‘‘pollution’’ is the answer to our questions as to why we are suffering from the gods, it also entails the prospect of a solution to our misery: ritual purification and the return to a state of post-pollution normality. To the role of pollution and ritual purification in extraordinary situations we must now turn.
World History
