Miasma: Old and New Problems
p. 23-33
Note de l’auteur
I thank Mat Carbon and Saskia Peels warmly for acute comments which substantially improved this article.
Texte intégral
1. Pollution’s elusive core
1My contribution will be in three parts. I start with something familiar, the inscription that since its publication in 1927 has been central to any study of Greek ideas of pollution, the Cyrene cathartic law.1 I do so not in order to fight old battles anew but as a reminder of the range of phenomena that are in play. The heading tells us that the law deals with purifications, καθαρμοί, abstinences, ἁγνείαι, and one other word now lost: some think supplications, ἱκετείαι, some think δεκατείαι, tithings. Some of the topics that follow fall easily into what we would understand under the headings of καθαρμοί and ἁγνείαι. The commonest pollutions mentioned in sacred laws are sexual intercourse, birth and death: the law treats the first two (§ 3 and 4) and alludes to the pollution of death in dealing with a special form of death, the miscarriage of an unborn child (§ 16); it also seems to assume in section 5 the death-pollution attaching to tombs.2 But even the treatment of these familiar topics has some unusual focuses and many puzzling elements. The section on the woman who has given birth (§ 4) apparently explains that she pollutes persons within the house but not outside it, and that even those within the house, though polluted themselves for three days, do not pass their pollution on further. No other text gives such precise casuistry on the point. It also appears that the simple rules about pollution from a birth that are known from many other sacred regulations are far from reflecting the full range of ritual requirements that a woman undergoing marriage and childbirth was subject to in Cyrene. The difficult sections 13-15 lay down not just restrictions—she must not go under the same roof as her husband in certain circumstances—but also requirements—she must go down to the bride-room before marriage (?); she must go to the bride-room before giving birth. There are also the extraordinary sections 7-11 on tithes and associated pollutions, among the most remarkable passages in any Greek inscription: every word of them can be translated but the institutions and practices referred to have never been satisfactorily explained.
2Yet in all these sections we are at least dealing with things that are described in the vocabulary of purity and pollution—words from the καθαρ- and μια- roots appear frequently—and we are for the most part dealing with conditions of the human body (though even that is not clear in parts of the section on tithes). But sections 1 and 2 are quite different. In section 1, a sacrifice to prevent the onset of an epidemic or other deadly phenomenon is prescribed; so here pollution seems to take the form of a collective affliction, and is to be countered by sacrifice, not purification. Section 2 states that wood growing in a sacred area can be used for any purpose, even an impure one (precise casuistry again), provided that the proper fee is paid. The point of saying this in a law concerning purifications is presumably that any misuse of a god’s property is a sacrilege and so a pollution: this particular use is permitted, but would have been a pollution without that permission. So here we encounter by implication the possibility of a pollution that derives from sacrilege. In section 6 an improper sacrifice pollutes both the shrine and the sacrificer: this again is a pollution that has nothing to do with a human bodily condition but with respect for sacred places and sacred regulations (though it still has a physical centre, the remains of the illicit offering that must be cleansed from the altar).
3Then there are sections 17-19, on the ‘suppliants’. Strictly speaking, it is not certain that these sections come under the heading ‘purifications and abstinences’ because the lost third noun in the heading may have been ‘supplications’. But section 19 certainly deals with purification from the greatest source of pollution, that of killing. The fine details of section 17 are controversial but it is widely agreed nowadays that what is at issue is a magical or demonic attack of some kind against a house, and resistance to such a magical attack is certainly treated in other texts as a form of purification.3 So, to sum up, some pollutions in this text arise from bodily processes, but other things too are treated as pollutions: epidemic disease, sacrilege, demonic attack, bloodshed, to say nothing of whatever underlies the section on tithing. And the effects of these pollutions and the ways of treating them are different from case to case.
4The largest question relating to the subject is what holds all these disparate things together, or whether it is right to look for any such unifying factor.4 The most influential theory in my lifetime has been the one advanced by Mary Douglas in her celebrated Purity and Danger of 1966. To summarize in all brevity a subtly developed account, pollution beliefs according to Douglas are a product of how we think, of cognitive necessity as one might say: we create our world by dividing things into categories but some things do not fit; these things we declare polluted. In her famous phrase, pollution resides in the “betwixt and between”. As for ‘dirt’, nothing is intrinsically dirty: dirt is merely “matter out of place”.5 A prime exhibit in her argument was the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, where the language of categories and classification is indeed used to explain why certain animals are an abomination: the pig is an abomination because it is the only animal which has a divided hoof like a cow, but unlike a cow does not ruminate; and so on for many other classes. But it was soon pointed out that this theory does not even cover all the cases in Leviticus; and it would probably now be widely agreed that when Leviticus explains an abomination in terms of a classificatory anomaly, this is a priestly rationalisation, not the actual motivation for a particular regulation. The whole idea of cognitive necessity has also been attacked; it is not clear that peoples do feel the need to divide the things of the world into sharply defined classes without borderline cases.6 And it was never very easy to explain the pollution of a murderer, say, in cognitive terms as due to the violation of a category distinction.
5Douglas’ approach was very intellectualist: pollution on this view is not a product of objects at all, but a creation of the mind. Very different things have been said of late by scholars seeking to explain the function of religious practices in evolutionary terms. They note that a concern for purity is a very general characteristic of religions;7 animals too in different degrees and different ways are concerned to keep themselves and their habitat clean. Humans have what one might call hygienic instincts, and above all a strong potential for feeling disgust. What people find disgusting is culturally variable,8 though there are some constants, disgust for corpses and excrement for instance being apparently universal. What is certainly universal is the emotion of disgust, the disgust response. Interesting work has been done that shows the power of the disgust response: if you make a piece of chocolate that looks like excrement, no-one will want to eat it even though they know very well that it is in fact a safe and delicious substance. Disgust, scholars in this tradition argue, is a valuable protective mechanism: it is a protection, imperfect but still useful, against infection and against parasites; religious laws derive from these proto-hygienic instincts.9 Conversely, cleansing and a sense of purity have psychological correlates: it is said to have been experimentally established that washing can remove feelings of guilt.10
6All this is genuinely enlightening up to a point. It helps above all to understand why the ideas of purity and pollution are so appealing in human terms, why we respond to them so readily. But the old arguments against reducing laws of purity to disguised laws of hygiene still apply: to take a Greek example, why on hygienic grounds does contact with a corpse pollute relatives of the corpse more than outsiders? Why are relatives sometimes actually required to undergo pollution from the corpse?11 And the question of excrement is interesting: excrement in a hygienist perspective is generally seen as the primary pollution, the thing we are most programmed to find disgusting; but excrement is almost never mentioned in Greek religious laws, it is of no interest or concern.12 Purity rules are not just instincts; they also come from the mind and from the structures a particular society imposes on itself.
7A recent attempt to give a general account of Greek pollution beliefs has been made by Robin Osborne in his History Written on the Classical Body. Osborne writes: “Notions of pollution in the classical Greek world serve to reach parts, types of behavior, which formal law cannot reach, and where the society is not sufficiently small and close knit for shame, which is entirely without threat of sanction, to be relied on.”13 The idea of pollution as a supplement to law is plausible in relation to killing, where issues of social control obviously arise, but not in relation to pollutions deriving from bodily processes. On this point Osborne argues that ancient states had no procedures for formally registering births and deaths or for certifying the mad, and continues, “The classification of birth, marriage, death and delirium as polluting served a publicity function comparable in effect to official registration: all these are events of which a community needs to know, if it is to remain a community”.14 So (though I must stress that, as with Douglas, I drastically over-simplify a more complicated argument), the first function of pollution beliefs is social control, the second a kind of social publicity. But was not the function of socially signalling crucial events, which Osborne here claims for pollution rules, adequately performed by elaborate funerals, by phratry registration, and by gossip? Even were an extra signal needed, the theory does not explain why the idiom of pollution was employed in order to give it. A convincing unifying account of Greek pollution remains elusive, and my inclination remains to think that one cannot be found, since pollution is an immensely flexible metaphor that could be applied in many different spheres. The distinguished anthropologist Valerio Valeri concludes the best discussion of these problems in a broader perspective by saying, “I prefer for my part to acknowledge that phenomena of great variety can go under the headings of ‘taboo’ and ‘pollution’.… If taboo is seen as an idiom, it must stand to reason that it can say a lot of different things”.15 I must in candour also quote the sentence that follows immediately “Nevertheless, it is also necessary to stress that if taboo has no rigid essence, it also has a basic focus… This focus is provided by the embodied subject”. But that sentence relates to taboo, a phenomenon pervasive among Valeri’s Huaulu of the Moluccas with no Greek equivalent; the phenomena of taboo and pollution, which so many discussions run together, surely need to be disentangled.
2. The Status of ‘Sacred Laws’
8I turn to my second topic. In Miasma, I often talked about rules of purity but never made plain what the status of these rules was; and this was a serious omission. I tried to make it good in a later article, but I return to the topic now because the debate has continued and because it leads to a further question.16 I argued in that article that so-called ‘sacred laws’ are broadly of two types: some are real laws passed by the citizen assembly and carrying punishments and sanctions if they are broken; the others give advice about how to behave in a sanctuary, how to approach the gods in ways that will please them, and do not carry secular sanctions. The first class are typically concerned to prevent harm to sacred property or disorderly conduct at a festival; the second deal with such matters as what sacrifices to bring, proper clothing, and questions of purity. I argued that this second class of laws is addressed to worshippers who want to do the right thing vis-à-vis the gods but need to be told what it is: I compared them to instructions on invitations about what to wear, ‘black ties will be worn’. There are clear similarities between this second class of topics and those on which, in certain states, advice was sought from exegetes; we know that exegetes specialised in giving advice on questions of purification. On this account, rules of purity are not laws; you will not be punished if you violate them, though you may experience religious unease. The Cyrene law discussed above should belong to this second class, since it nowhere specifies legal procedures threatening those who violate its recommendations. The state of religious unease caused by breaking a religious rule is expressed in Greek in several ways: you will have the offence on your mind (LSCG 130) or you will have yourself to blame for any bad consequences or the offence will be an ἐνθύμιον or an ἐνθυμιστόν for you.17 What this means is not that you will have a bad conscience in the modern sense, rather that you will be afraid that some evil will come on you as a consequence of breaking the rule. The best illustration comes from the so-called confession inscriptions of eastern Lydia and Phrygia, where people who have fallen ill or suffered in some other way regularly confess to a past ritual offence, entering a sanctuary in dirty clothes or after having sex or while menstruating or something of that kind; offences against purity rules are the commonest topic in these texts.18 So, according to my argument, rules of purity except those relating to homicide are enforced perhaps by gods but not by men.
9F. Naiden has since suggested a different explanation for the distinction between sacred laws that do and do not carry sanctions.19 On his account, the distinction is not between categories of law or offence but between issuing bodies: cities enforce their laws because they can, lesser bodies and individuals don’t because they cannot. But the difference between rules with and without sanctions cannot depend simply on the authority of the issuing body, though this may be a factor: there are rules issued by the same body which treat different offences in different ways. LSAM 12 is a Pergamene inscription relating to the cult of Athena Nikephoros which deals with questions of purity and also with fees payable to the cult and the priestess. The part treating purity comes just on the authority of an individual serving as hieronomos; the part treating cult fees consists of a pair of reinscribed decrees of the council and people of Pergamum. A law from the cult of Alectrona in Ialysos (LSCG 136) appears to distinguish between offences that require purification of the shrine and another type of offence that is subject to a fine; unless the formulation is careless, there are two distinct categories here. But I would now concede that power to enforce may be relevant,20 though not quite in the way supposed by Naiden. For Naiden enforceability depends on the power of the issuing body; I would rather stress the character of the offence. It will never be easy and usually impossible to prove that an individual has entered a sanctuary in a state of impurity; these were not offences it would make sense to legislate against.21 The more visible an offence is, the more likely it is to be subject to sanction of some kind: a woman who wears the wrong clothes in the sanctuary of Demeter Thesmophoros in fifth-century Arcadia is required to dedicate the offending item;22 a man who makes an improper sacrifice in Cyrene is required to be purified and to make a further sacrifice (though in this and several similar cases the problem remains of what will happen to him if he declines to do so). A very visible form of transgression is an intrusion into forbidden space. Plutarch claims (Mor. 300a-d) that anyone who knowingly entered the abaton of Zeus on Mt Lykaion was stoned to death—though whether we can trust anything told about that much mythologised cult may be doubtful.23 In the clear light of history we hear of two Acarnanian youths who inadvertently entered the sanctuary at Eleusis without being initiated and were executed on the spot (Livy 31.14.6-9); admittedly this summary action provoked an international incident. Less drastically, an early text from Kallion in Aetolia imposes a fine for entry into a forbidden sacred place (LSS 128). So perhaps my original argument about ‘black tie’ rules made the Greeks out to be more easygoing about these matters than they were; they may have been more inclined to punish offences, even against purity rules, when they could detect them.
10A different question is worth posing about the invisible pollutions, and about how rules concerning them were publicised and made known. A familiar type of sacred law was displayed at the entry to a sanctuary and stated the purity requirements for entering that sanctuary: the worshipper must ἁγνεύειν ἀπό, be pure from or avoid contact with or abstain from, a series of conditions for a fixed number of days. The conditions concerned are typically contact with a corpse, with a woman in childbirth, and sexual encounters, though there are some others (such as being a woman in childbirth). Inscriptions of this type are quite numerous, but the only inscribed example known to me which claims to date before the second century BC is LSAM 29 (I.Ephesos 3401), a text from Metropolis near Ephesus. (The Cyrene law of the late fourth century with which I began was probably also displayed in a sanctuary, that of Apollo, but is a text of different type from the familiar later entrance rules, though their concerns overlap.) From its content one would cheerfully date this text quite late, as it distinguishes in point of purity between sexual intercourse with one’s wife and with a prostitute, but from its letter forms the first editors Keil and von Premerstein put it in the fourth century; and their facsimile, which is apparently all the evidence that we have, supports that dating. However that may be, texts of this type did not become common until later and in some regions barely exist at all; among the eighty-one Attic sacred laws found in the collections of Sokolowski and Lupu there is just one of this type, from the first or second century AD, in the private cult of Men Tyrannos set up by a slave (LSCG 55). Even where such inscriptions are found, they are very variable: lengths of exclusion vary, one of the basic pollutions may be omitted, one or two merely tell the worshipper to enter pure but fail to define what purity means (cf. n. 25 below). This does not mean that rules of this kind were unknown in most places before the second century BC: we have noted evidence in the Cyrene sacred law and there is much more, but as we have seen, inscriptions of this type with one puzzling exception emerged late and spasmodically. How then was the worshipper supposed to know the rules? Before a festival there may have been proclamations, but one sometimes entered a shrine on occasions other than a festival. If the same rules applied for every sanctuary in a given region, as is perhaps implied in the case of the Cyrene law, it is possible that one just learnt them from one’s elders. But when the sanctuary entry laws emerge, they sound as if they are sanctuary-specific, not general: from the area of Pergamum we have two laws of roughly the same period, one for Athena Nikephoros, one for a small Asklepieion serving a garrison, and though similar they are not identical.24 So my question remains, how did one know? One could ask the relevant priest if he or she was present and one was not too embarrassed; or an exegete if there was one. Possibly rules were posted on perishable materials. But it may be that, though everybody will have known that ἁγνεία from certain conditions was or might be needed, they will often have had to guess exactly what intervals needed to be observed in relation to particular shrines. It is a familiar and puzzling experience in the study of pollution: in some contexts it seems hugely important, in others it vanishes from view; we have a small number of texts such as the Cyrene law which treat the fine details of pollution rules with elaborate casuistry, whereas others merely require purity from those entering the shrine without explaining what is meant by purity.25
3. New Documents
11I turn to my final topic. New documents have emerged in the last thirty years, of varying degrees of importance.26 Of extraordinary interest is a long text from near Larisa said to be of the second century BC, governing a mystery cult that honours a mixture of Syrian (?), Anatolian and Greek deities. It deals with general purification of the shrine before a festival, periods of exclusion for women (but not in the surviving portion men) in impure conditions, purifications to be performed in several circumstances, particularly if uninitiated persons enter regions from which they are debarred, and, most interesting but at the moment very obscure, purifications preparatory to initiation: most notable among these is a requirement (for men only?) to shave the head.27 Another very recent discovery is an inscription of the 360s BC from Dikaia in Thrace which records a reconciliation agreement among the citizens after a period of what seems to have been bloody stasis.28 All participants in the reconciliation are required to swear a remarkable oath which includes the clause καὶ ἁγνιῶ καὶ ἁγνιοῦμαι καθότι ἂν τάξ[ηι] [τ]ὸ κοινόν (75-77). There seems no alternative but to translate it “I will purify and be purified”, even though the choice of the verb ἁγνίζω is surprising where one might expect καθαίρω, as is the middle form ἁγνιοῦμαι where the sense suggests a passive.29 Several clauses in the oath (74-80) have the same structure as this one, an active verb or expression followed by a passive or comparable expression reversing the force of the active: the rhetorical purpose is to stress the idea of absolute reciprocity between all parties to the oath. Everybody must swear to purify and be purified; so the fiction seems to be that every citizen has been polluted by the stasis, even though it cannot be true that everybody was involved in the bloodshed. Several collective rituals designed to efface the consequences of collective bloodshed (one’s own or a neighboring community’s) are attested,30 but none clearly fits what the oath implies, and we are left to guess the details. What is clear and striking is the way in which a ritual of collective purification is being used, perhaps being invented, in order to signify a new start for a community which has undergone trauma.
12The other really dramatic text discovered in the last thirty years is the extraordinary and much-discussed law from Selinus.31 Unfortunately it is a supremely tantalising as well as supremely interesting text. If one asks what has emerged from it (in relation to pollution) that is all but certain, that almost no-one has contested, the answer turns out to be ‘rather little’. It is absolutely certain, first, that the text distinguishes between two classes of Tritopatores, the polluted and the pure, and gives rich details about how to sacrifice to both classes; these details about forms of sacrifice are among the clearest gains from the text. It is also certain that (2) side B gives instructions for purification from spirits known as ἐλαστέροι, “drivers” or “pursuers”; (3) that in at least one case elaborate proclamations (but of doubtful import) precede the purification; (4) that one recipient of such purification is described as an αὐτορρέκτας, “self-doer”; (5) that the purified person may now “be spoken to and take bread and sleep wherever he wishes”, having previously (we assume) been restricted in these respects; and (6) that ἐλαστέροι can be of several different types: there are those that afflict the αὐτορρέκτας, but there are also “foreign or ancestral”, “heard or seen” ἐλαστέροι. “Foreign or ancestral” is still obscure, but it has been attractively suggested that “heard or seen” refers to attackers seen or heard by people in deluded conditions.32 This widens our conception of what, in the tragedian’s phrase (S.Tr. 1235), “being sick from ἀλάστορες” might mean, even if we still cannot grasp it in very concrete terms. We also learn something else about ἐλαστέροι:33 an ἐλάστερος is both a being from which one frees oneself by purification, and also one to which one makes sacrifice (having been brought under control?) in a curiously mixed way: “as to the immortals”, but pouring the blood into the ground as if for a hero (B 12-13). Above all, the reference to sacrifice “on the public altar” in B 10 proves that the document, whatever body issued it, claimed public authority and legitimacy; this is not the work of a backstreet purifier.34
13There are also several conclusions about the rituals of side B that can count as at least probable: that the αὐτορρέκτας of side B line 9 is a homicide;35 that lines 1-7 describe a purification ceremony in which a further agent, a “receiver”, provides water, a meal and salt to the person undergoing purification;36 that the recipient of this purification is identical with the αὐτορρέκτας of line 937 (but note that, if so, the rite is not the same as that attested for purification from homicide in other sources).38 Unfortunately, central uncertainties remain. Plausible though it is that we have on side B 1-7 a description of how to purify a homicide, we do not know what kind of homicide is envisaged (voluntary? involuntary? of an outsider, or of a kinsman?), nor where the purification is happening: is he being received back into the community that he originally belonged to after a period of exile,39 or is he taking up a new life abroad? We do not understand the relation between the two groups of Tritopatores on side A: do the impure Tritopatores sometimes turn into the pure, or are they permanently distinct? We do not know why the issue of purity arises especially in relation to the Tritopatores at all; and without being able to answer those questions it is hard to integrate the new information into any more general schema. Above all we are in the dark about the relation of the two sides of the text and thus about the character and motivation of the whole inscription: is it concerned as a whole with problems of purity, or was the real focus of side A something quite different?40 But let us end on a more positive note: it remains a spectacular discovery that issues of purification from ἐλαστέροι were a matter of public concern in Selinus in the fifth century BC, whether or not they were the text’s central concern.
14Pollution mattered to them, and so in a different way still matters to us.
Notes de bas de page
1 Now to be read in the edition of Dobias-Lalou (2000), p. 297-309 (reproduced as SEG 50, 1638 and by Rhodes – Osborne [2003], no. 97, with helpful corrections); I follow her numbering of the sub-sections (Rhodes – Osborne [2003] follow the earlier sub-division of § 6 and so have figures one higher from there on).
2 On the difficult Akamantia of this section see Dobias-lalou in Dobias-Lalou – Dubois (2007).
3 Parker [1996] (1983), p. 222-224, and now the Selinus law. Dobias-Lalou (1997) explains Ἱκέσιος ἐπακτός as “ « dirigé contre (la maison) », car envoyé par l’esprit d’un mort, résultant donc d’une epagoge”. This, if I understand it, makes the suppliant a human, not a demonic force, but retains the idea of magical attack.
4 For full discussion and documentation of the matters briefly discussed in the next three paragraphs I refer to the highly intelligent (if also difficult) monograph of Valeri (2000) (a work warmly recommended by Mary Douglas herself in a lecture in Oxford in autumn 2002).
5 On the origins of that formulation see Fardon (2013).
6 See e.g. the famous study of Rosch (1975).
7 “There is a general template of polluting substance that seems to work in the same way in most places”, Boyer (2001), p. 44; cf. 119-120, 212-215 (corpse pollution); 237-240 (purification rituals and obsessive compulsive behaviour).
8 Smith (2012), p. 45 uses the example of the different responses to rotting whale meat of Siberian hunters and western observers. Stolpe (2012) is a study of the struggles of the ‘cultural campaigns’ of the Mongolian People’s Republic to persuade Mongolians to purify themselves with water rather than with fire.
9 See most recently Curtis (2013); cf. Smith (2012), p. 45: “no one now doubts that the sense of disgust is not only socially, but also biologically controlled; and that it is a fundamental survival mechanism.” On the same page she makes the valid point that we ought also in this context to pay attention to “the parallel nervous physiology of attraction”, and the role of purity as a source of delight and desire.
10 See the summary of such research in Smith (2012), p. 4, citing in n. 10 the claim that “in the context of morality, purity is not just a metaphor”; also Strejcek – Zhong (2012), p. 62-66, on “physical cleanliness and moral purity”. Cf. also Peels in this volume.
11 Parker [1996] (1983), p. 39-41, 57-8; for touching the corpse as a mark of devotion see A. Chaniotis, EBRG (2006), no. 26 (from funerary epigrams).
12 Even though, if we believe Aristophanes (Pl. 1184), passers-by quite often defiled sanctuaries in this way.
13 Osborne (2011), p. 180.
14 Osborne (2011), p. 177.
15 Valeri (2000), p. 113. Cf. Smith (2012), p. 53: “purification is, simultaneously, a biological instinct, a psychology, a medical necessity, a technical process, an aesthetic, and a moral belief; and… these mental and physical categories overlap most of the time—within our living bodies and brains.” The bewildering diversity of topics discussed in the collective volume Rösch – Simon (2012) well illustrates such claims.
16 Parker (2004a). On the classification of sacred laws see further Chaniotis (2009a), Carbon – Pirenne-Delforge (2012); my position is criticised in Harris (2015a).
17 Cf. Parker (1996) [1983], p. 253 n. 105. SEG 56, 1017 (Thasos) gives two new attestations of ἐνθυμιστόν, a word that needs to be interpreted via the much commoner ἐνθύμιον.
18 Petzl (1994), p. xii; the examples grow year by year.
19 Naiden (2009).
20 And also that there are crossovers between the categories: in SEG 56, 1017, l. 15-26 (Thasos, 4th c.) an offence against sacred property which could well have been subject to a fine is merely to be ἐνθυμιστόν to the offender.
21 The editors of the volume point out to me that entering a temple shortly after contact with birth or death might well have been observable in a small community where everybody knew everybody else’s business. But was e.g. Cyrene such a place? Certainly, rumour might attach to a killer: the Samothracian authorities warned king Perseus, suspected of murder, that they had iudicia… more maiorum comparata de iis, qui incestas manus intulisse intra terminus sacratos temple dicantur (Liv. 45.5). On Perseus, see Salvo in this volume.
22 LSS 32; similarly in LSCG 68. Purification is required in LSS 33.
23 Jost (1985), p. 257 cites S. OC 121—the chorus’ supposed threat to stone Oedipus for intruding on a sacred grove—to prove the Lykaion rule to be “presque banal”; but λεύσατε in that passage, through admittedly the reading of the manuscripts, is rejected by almost all recent editors (see the discussion in Lloyd-Jones – Wilson [1990], p. 219).
24 LSAM 12 and Müller (2010), p. 440. On ‘purity ἀπό’ rules, see also A. and I. Petrovic in this volume.
25 LSCG 130, LSS 82, LSAM 35. There is also the famous Epidaurian couplet which re-defines ἁγνεία in moral terms, as φρονεῖν ὅσια (ap. Porph. Abst. 2.19). But purity laws from other Asklepieia (AvP VIII.3, p. 168, l. 11-14, and now Müller [2010], p. 440) confirm that this was a supplementary requirement, not a replacement for the more usual rules, which still applied in Asklepieia (cf. Syll.3 1168.5, Paus. 2.27.1) and regularly accompany the requirement for moral purity elsewhere (LSS 59, 91, 108, and, with an explicit distinction between ‘inner’ and outer’ purity, LSCG 139; contrast LSS 82 and SEG 43, 710 [Euromos], which lack the physical details). Bremmer (2002) was right in my view to favour a late dating for the famous couplet (for a different view, see Chaniotis in this volume); the supposed earlier echoes that have been detected do not convince me.
26 In addition to those mentioned here and in nn. 25 (Euromos) and 24 (Pergamon), note e.g. Lupu, NGSL 8 (Lykosoura, 2nd c. BC), a sanctuary entry regulation probably from the cult of Despoina; SEG 36, 1221 (Xanthos, 3rd/2nd c. BC), restrictions on what may be brought into the sanctuary; KAh (2012) (Priene), a public fountain with a ban on καθαρμὸν καθαίρειν at it; SEG 61, 1026, with Carbon (2014) (Kyzikos), a unique epigraphic reference to purification of, or by, a polis.
27 Decourt and Tziafalias (2015); cf. Parker and Scullion (2016), p. 256-260.
28 Voutiras and Sismanidis (2007) (SEG 57, 576).
29 One could perhaps try a middle sense, “get myself purified”, as the editor of the inscription, Professor Voutiras, suggested to me in Liège.
30 Parker (1996) [1983], p. 21-23. The Maya sacred site of Iximche in Guatemala apparently had to be purified after the visit of George Bush to dispel the ‘bad spirits’ of his Iraq and immigration policies: http://www.guatelinda.com/noticias/2007/03/rito-para-limpiar-iximch.html (accessed 8/10/2013).
31 Conveniently accessible with reference to discussions since the editio princeps (Jameson – Jordan – Kotansky [1993]) as Lupu, NGSL 27. The ever-growing bibliography cannot be tackled adequately here.
32 Giuliani (1998), who compares Hp. Morb. Sacr. 14.5 (Budé numeration).
33 Cf. North (1996), p. 299-300.
34 Cf. North (1996), p. 300-301.
35 But see Lupu, NGSL, p. 382 n. 103, for some who doubt that translation.
36 So Clinton (1996), p. 175-176, against the first editors. If so, the subject changes back to the purifiand at the start of B 5, since he is clearly the subject of the verbs in 6 which are linked to those of 5 by καί; Clinton (1996), p. 176 must be right on this point against Dubois (2003), p. 119.
37 This is certain if the αὐτορρέκτας is introduced by supplement in line 1 or 4; the case for 4 was influentially put by Clinton (1996), p. 175-6, which might or might not, if known to North, have removed his doubts (North [1996], p. 295-297) about the relevance of homicide to the text.
38 For nothing suggests a similarity between the piglet sacrifice of B 5 and the “washing away of blood with blood (of a pig)” of the familiar murder purification ritual. What the Selinus ritual shares with the familiar homicide purification ritual (as also with paragraph 17, mutatis mutandis, and perhaps 19 of the Cyrene law [n. 1 above]) is the role of a ‘receiver’.
39 As is supposed by Dubois in Dobias-Lalou – Dubois (2007).
40 For this view see Clinton (1996), p. 162-163, arguing again the editors.
Auteur
robert.parker@new.ox.ac.uk
Wykeham Professor of Ancient History Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Fellow of New College. His most recent book, Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures, and Transformations, is the publication of his Sather Classical Lectures (University of California Press, 2017).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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