proper seems to be followed by a concluding sacrifice: a piglet is offered to Zeus,
possibly again on an altar belonging to a public temple, the possible implication being
that the purified and others share in the subsequent consumption of the sacrificial
meat.
The literary texts agree with these laws on the issue of silence which must be kept
but introduce another variant: the suppliant is purified with the blood of a slaugh-
tered piglet (Apollonius Rhodius,Argonautica4.693–4, 703–9, 720–3, 730). The
ritual logic of this additional detail is explicable by the idea that bloodshed has to be
purified with blood. It seems as though the literary texts further dramatize what must
be a ritual procedure already out of the ordinary. In Aeschylus, it is the matricide
Orestes, hunted by the Erinyes and in a state of manic frenzy, whom Apollo himself
purifies with blood (Aeschylus,Eumenides280–3, 448–50; Sidwell 1996). We have
seen how the exclusion of the homicide from the customary religious rituals of the
community contingent upon theprorrhe ̄sisnot only signified his separation from
society but also entailed his pollution. The rituals described here dramatize his
subsequent reintegration. The purificatory ritual proper employs various symbolic
elements connoting marginalization and its eventual resolution. It is followed by a
sacrificial ritual which dramatizes the very fact that the homicide’s marginalization
within society has successfully been overcome. After the sacrifice of a piglet has been
concluded, ‘‘he shall go away from his host, and turn around, and he shall be spoken to,
and take food, and sleep wherever he wishes’’ (SEG43.630¼NGSL27, col. B 1–7).
He is back to normality.
In real life, the homicide can be purified and possibly even return home; on the
Sophoclean stage, purification of the city amounts to the homicide’s banishment or
death. The homicide, or rather parricide, is none other than Oedipus himself, who, in
a vain attempt to escape from the oracle’s earlier prediction, namely that he would slay
his father and marry his mother, has inadvertently fulfilled that divine pronounce-
ment. The king, by vowing to take revenge on the murderer and pronouncing the
prorrhe ̄sis, has sealed his own fate: as parricide, Oedipus’ prolonged presence among
his fellow-citizens does indeed pollute the city. The eventual self-inflicted exile
formally fulfills the criteria set for purification by the Delphic oracle. In the purifica-
tion of the Cylonian pollution at the hands of Epimenides, the removal of the culprit
is also a prerequisite of successful ritual purificatory measures.
Epimenides also recommended that two Athenians commit suicide on behalf of the
citizen body in order to end the epidemic. The incident, though probably a historio-
graphical fiction, represents a case of what is sometimes, and rather misleadingly,
called a ‘‘scapegoat ritual.’’ The Greek word ispharmakos, frompharmakon, ‘‘healing
remedy’’ or ‘‘medicine’’:pharmakoi, mainly attested in Ionia and in Athens, are
expelled from the city as part of routinely recurring ritual procedures. Plutarch,
when serving as archon in Chaironeia, performed such a routine ritual in person
(693e–694b). At Athens, two men were annually driven out of the city during the
festival of the Thargelia. Some literary sources claim that thepharmako ́swas expelled
from cities not only during such annual festivities but in moments of crisis as well,
in particular during epidemics (Hughes 1991:139–65). No historically verifiable
instance of such a non-recurring application of the ritual pattern can be found in
Greek culture; but several of the texts implicitly suggest that such an interpretation
would have been entirely plausible to an ancient Greek audience. In Plutarch’s
Purity and Pollution 187