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.
Pollution and Purification
Sophocles’Oedipus Tyrannusfamously begins with disaster having struck Thebes: the
crops are failing, women and cattle are unable to give birth, and a plague is spreading
among the population. The city is suffering from a disease (nosos) for which no
remedy can be found. Like the doctors during the Athenian plague of 430 BC, the
Theban king Oedipus is at a loss as to the cause of theloimosthat has struck his city.
The king sends his brother-in-law to inquire of the Delphic oracle about the reason
for these afflictions and about the correct procedures to ensure deliverance from
them. In due course, Creon returns with an oracular response from Delphi: Phoebus
Apollo commands that they drive out a pollution (miasma) which has been nourished
in the city. Which pollution, Oedipus asks, and how can purification (katharmos)be
procured? The answer that Creon has received from the oracle points to a causal chain
of past events that the protagonists on the dramatic stage believe they can resolve: the
murderer of the previous king Laius, and not an aerial pollution as suggested by the
Hippocratic writers in the case of epidemics, is themiasma.Miasmais a result of
homicide, or rather, the killer is themiasma, just as he is the cause of the city’s
sufferings and (as we shall see momentarily) a potential source of contamination to
others. He must be hunted down and physically removed, that is, exiled or killed.
Only then will Phoebus Apollo deign to deliver the Thebans and their city from their
sufferings (Oedipus Tyrannus82–125, 151–215). The god is using the affliction to
remind the Thebans of their past negligence, namely their failure to seek revenge
from the killer(s) of their once rightful king – a vengeance that Oedipus is going to
seek on behalf of both the city and the god (126–41). It may be too strong a
statement to say that the pollution is caused by ‘‘guilt’’ on the Thebans’ part, but
human responsibility for some past transgression (the failure of all to give proper care
to their murdered king) cannot be denied.
A similar differentiation between pollution as the potential cause and its discernible
negative effects is made elsewhere: The Dodonaeans inquire of their local Zeus: ‘‘Is it
because of some mortal’s pollution that we are suffering this storm?’’ (SEG19.427).
The Athenians, in the aftermath and because of a second outbreak of the plague in 427
(Thucydides 3.87), seek purification (katharsis) ‘‘in accordance with some oracle’’ in
the winter of 426/5. Although the concrete political circumstances of this move
remain disputed (Brock 1996), the purificatory ritual seems designed to propitiate:
all graves on the (sacred) island of Delos are removed and neither birth nor death, as
prime causes of ritual pollution, will be permitted on it in the future. In addition, the
Athenians (re-)establish a penteteric festival for Delian Apollo (Thucydides 1.8.1,
3.104; Diodorus 12.58.6). Before, people had lived and died on the sacred island,
and the categorical boundaries between the ‘‘pure’’ and normality had been violated;
yet it is only after disaster has struck that the cause and its circumstances are
investigated by the Athenians. Pertinent to the Sophoclean link between homicide
184 Andreas Bendlin