The Greek language possesses an elaborate range of words to express the notions of
ritual purity, pollution, and purification. In the large majority of our texts, these
notions are expressed by Greekhagnosorkatharos, and sometimes by both, or by
their many respective cognates. Ritual pollution, as opposed to an accidental contact
with mere dirt, is normally calledmiasmaormusos. Butagosandenage ̄s, semantically
related to the *hag-root, and meaning ‘‘consecrated’’ or ‘‘sacred to a god,’’ may
be used in relation to a divine vengeance or curse and thus attain the connotation
of a pollution of some sort (Moulinier 1952; Parker 1983:3–14). The implicit
juxtaposition inagosof the sacred with something which seems ambivalently impure
has understandably fascinated the modern scholarly imagination. It resulted in the
application of the modern anthropological concept of ‘‘taboo’’ to Greek notions of
purity and pollution. But the juxtaposition of the sacred and the impure is never given
serious attention in the Greek texts because the divine is regarded as pure. In this
discussion, the idea of ancient taboo will therefore be disregarded.
Ritual Purity
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 treatiseEpidemicsnor,
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 inter-
pretative model, namely the notion that epidemic diseases are caused by a human
miasmaand 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 rituallypolluting, there appears to exist only
Purity and Pollution 179