Ajax the Lesser, a native of Lokris, attacked the Trojan maiden Kassandra who had sought refuge beside the statue of Athena, and as he dragged her away he toppled the sacred image. The goddess’ wrath was directed at all the Greeks for this sacrilege but especially at Ajax, who in the Homeric account was shipwrecked and drowned before reaching home (Od. 4.499-511). In the third year, a plague fell upon Lokris, and the people consulted Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. They were told that their penance for Ajax’s crime would last a thousand years. They must choose two of their girls by lot and deliver them to the shores of Troy as temple servants of Athena. These girls must be led to the goddess secretly by night, while the Trojan men hunted them down. Maidens killed attempting to reach the safety of the temple were to be burned with wood that bore no fruit, and their ashes cast in the sea; those who arrived unharmed had to remain in the sanctuary for life, barefoot and wearing only a simple shift, sweeping out the temple and performing other menial duties like slaves. They grew old as virgins, and when one died, another must be brought to take her place.
This tribute of maidens, reported most fully by Lycophron (Alex. 1141-73 with schol.) and mentioned by a number of late authors, has no exact parallels in Greek practice.26 Maiden sacrifices are common enough in myth, but rarely if ever did they occur in the ritual of historical times. The Lokrians of Italy, according to some dubious sources, devoted their daughters as sacred prostitutes to the service of Aphrodite, but in these accounts the girls’ lives were not threatened, nor were they forced to leave their homes forever. A ritual requirement of lifelong virginity is extremely unusual: the Greeks had no Vestal Virgins. Therefore, the amazing account of the Lokrian Maidens would likely be dismissed today as a fantasy, but for a third-century inscription (IG IX 12 3.706), which establishes the journey of the maidens as historical fact. It declares that the Aianteioi, or descendants of Ajax, and their city of Naryx in Opuntian Lokris, shall receive significant privileges (such as tax relief and priority access to courts) in return for sending the two maidens to Ilion. The girls are to have their expenses paid, including the cost of their wardrobes (kosmos). The inscription makes it clear, however, that the girls served for a limited period, not for life; that they wore new garments, not rags; and that they were chosen from elite families, not by lot. It is reasonable to assume that the “hunting” of the maidens, though an important part of the ritual, was innocuous. The custom probably began in response to a civic crisis, not after the Trojan War when the site of Troy was abandoned, but in the sixth century and with the cooperation of the Greek colonists at New Ilion, who were eager to play the role of “Trojans.” There is evidence that it lapsed in the fourth century and was revived with due ceremony, perhaps about the time of our inscription.
The journey of the Lokrian Maidens has been interpreted as a ritual counterpart of the many myths in which adolescent girls give up their lives to save their cities; it has also been called an “exemplary initiation,” by which a few members of an age cohort stand in for the whole group in performing acts symbolic of that group’s passage to adulthood. Finally, the putative humiliation of the maidens and the casting of their ashes in the sea are characteristic of the scapegoat or pharmakos rite, in which a city wards off harm from itself by expelling individuals who are treated as carriers of pollution.27
World History
