The Ancient Greek Pharmakos Rituals

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the role of mistrust – especially in constructions of purity, impurity, and purification – in ancient Greek religion. It begins by examining so-called scapegoat or pharmakos rituals, in which an individual was expelled from the city, apparently as a purificatory offering to the gods. Recent analyses have argued that these rituals were outlets for community aggression, and/or were resonant with myths of self-sacrifice. This article will suggest a different analysis of the evidence. I offer an alternative way of interpreting these rituals that sets them in a wider context of Greek ritual and belief: it suggests that the ritual of the pharmakos arose in a context of social and spiritual insecurity. This created, I argue, a prevailing dynamic of social and spiritual mistrust, within which the pharmakos ritual emerged – and which it exacerbated.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.