Chaironeia, a slave is driven out through the city gates while the crowd is chanting
‘‘out withboulimos, in with wealth and health,’’ and the learned participants at one of
Plutarch’s table-talks agree that the wordboulimos, which they do not quite under-
stand, has the meaning of ‘‘great famine.’’ While many of the details of the ritual
remain unclear, there is a consensus about its basic meaning in the ancient texts. The
ritual is cathartic: the sources interpret the expulsion measures as ‘‘purifications’’ of
the respective cities and their citizens. Pollution may always accrue, and its cause often
cannot be identified. The substitution of a ‘‘scapegoat’’ thus becomes a convenient
ritual solution. If the occasion of the ritual is indeed an epidemic or a famine, its effect
may be immediately apparent. But even if the ritual is celebrated as a routinely
recurring event year after year, it does not matter: pollution may always lie hidden
somewhere, waiting to be activated or purified. TheOedipus Tyrannustoo has been
interpreted in the light of such cathartic rituals. But Oedipus is not apharmakosin the
traditional sense. In thepharmakosritual, the human purifications are selected to take
the pollution on behalf of the citizens outside the city walls and thus restore the
community to a state of post-pollution normality. Oedipus is no substitute but
himself themiasmaand the source of disaster.
Epilogue: Beyond Ritual Purity
Theophrastus’ superstitious man summons the ‘‘priestesses’’ to purify him. With
Epimenides from Crete we have encountered one professional ‘‘purifier’’ (katharte ̄s).
The author ofOn the Sacred Diseaseintroduces a related, though socially perhaps
inferior, group of religious providers: the mages (magoi), ‘‘purifiers’’ (kathartai),
charlatans and quacks who use purifications (katharmoi) and incantations to heal the
‘‘sacred disease,’’ namely epileptic fits. The Hippocratic author imputes to them the
ritual of purification by blood, ‘‘as if their patients carry amiasma, are haunted by
vengeful spirits [alastores] or are under some spell’’; yet they also advise ritual chastity
and purity as means towards the desired medical cure (354–60 Littre ́). These ‘‘puri-
fiers’’ find their counterpart in the so calledOrpheotelestai, Orphic purifiers who
purify injustices committed by the living and by their ancestors. According to Plato’s
hostile account, these purifications are theteletaiwhich they promise will deliver us
from all evil once we are in Hades (Republic364b5–365a3). What this entails may be
elucidated by the gold lamellae of Orphic-Bacchic origin, which purport to give the
soul of the initiated privileged treatment in the underworld: ‘‘from the pure I come,
pure myself....’’ With theOrphic (or Orphic-Bacchic)kathartai and the new
religious trends of the later fifth century and the fourth century, we reach a realm
where purity and pollution no longer simply refer to the ritual exclusion of amiasma
from a community. The concern about pollution appears here inexplicably linked to a
mental, psychological, and spiritual dimension of bodily purity. This concern reaches
its first culmination in Empedocles’Katharmoiand, later, in Plato’s theological
juxtaposition of morality and purity (McPherran 2002, 2004). This notion may
at first seem a minority view. But the ‘‘purity of the mind,’’ and not just of the
body, can be found, from the later fifth century BC, in literary texts and theleges
sacrae(Chaniotis 1997:152–72). TheOedipus Tyrannustoo, which begins as a
story aboutmiasmaas external defilement, develops into a drama of pollution as
188 Andreas Bendlin