sacrifice, offer votives, or just ‘‘share in the beauty and awe of the sacred place.’’ The
best-documented sanctuaries, although not necessarily the most typical, are the big
healing sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius and his avatars. This is not simply a
function of their importance but also of the fact that they had to devote so much
attention to the supervision of their visitors and the management of their needs.
A significant record of the most important aspect of the ‘‘daily life’’ that unfolded in
the healing sanctuaries is afforded by the many surviving votives, which were dis-
played either in the temple, in its treasury, or in the open. These most typically
consisted of models of the body-part healed, but reliefs and verbal accounts, both
of which can be highly vivid, are also found. Inscribed regulations make it clear that
sanctuaries could often become embarrassingly cluttered with the votives, which,
once given, could not leave the sanctuary. Sometimes their accumulation could
even obscure the cult image from view. Older ones could be buried, and metal ones
melted down for reuse. The priests had the ultimate say over the organization of the
displays of votives, and sometimes liked to group together those given in their own
term of office. The experience of being a visitor to one of these sanctuaries is perhaps
most immediately conveyed by Herodas’ poetic description of a visit to an Asclepieion
by two women. We hear how they progress through the sanctuary, which is seemingly
open to all visitors, make their offering, admire the displayed votives, and have a
friendly chat with the caretaker. Some larger sanctuaries could be the principal source
of employment, direct or indirect, in their local community, as Pausanias observed.
Sick people and their attendants, who might lodge in the sanctuaries for an extended
period, would need all the provisions of the market, and these would come to them,
with some sanctuaries even leasing out shops within their precincts.
Andreas Bendlin(Chapter 11) investigates the – for us – slippery notions of purity
and pollution in ancient Greece. Purity and pollution were not simple opposites of
each other, but rather they were both alike opposites of a condition of normality.
Purity was a quality of the sacred realm. Pollution occurred beyond its boundaries in
the realm of men. Ancient ideas ofritualpollution only coincided with ancient ideas
ofpathogenicpollution to a very limited degree. The usual sources of ritual pollution
included childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, menstruation, sex (licit or illicit), the
eating of some animal products, corpses, and killing. It resulted, accordingly, from
abnormal human actions and normal, unavoidable ones alike. The regulations for
managing such pollution varied widely from region to region and city to city. The old
structuralist belief that ideas of purity and pollution acted as a mechanism of social
control leaves much unexplained: it does not, for example, account particularly well
for the management of relations between the sexes. It may account rather better for
the management of killing: it is obviously desirable that murderers be excluded from
their communities. And since the concept of pollution happily entailed also the
concept of purification, it offered the possibility of the making of amends and the
sometimes useful prospect of the killer’s eventual reintegration into his community.
One of the most challenging aspects of ancient ideas of pollution for us to come to
terms with is the seemingly casual, arbitrary, and unsystematic fashion in which this
kind of thinking could be invoked and then abandoned. Few ancients are likely to
have gone about their business in a constant state of dread about incurring pollution.
More often, a source of pollution, perhaps indirect, would be identified after the fact –
after, that is, something had gone awry. A murderer was not ipso facto polluted by the
Introduction 7