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Abstract
Anyone who has sampled a few of the most commonly read Greek texts will have encountered pollution. In tragedy, the plague at the opening of the Oedipus Tyrannus is caused by it, it precipitates Creon’s repentance in the Antigone, while Orestes in the Oresteia, although he is driven to the matricide by the fear of one pollution, is seized by another after performing it. In history, it plays, perhaps, a larger part than any other religious motif in the austere Thucydides. A Greek state in the fifth century, we learn from him, might attribute a natural disaster to a pollution it had incurred, and he shows us the Athenians expelling the Delians from their island to ensure the purity of this religious centre. In the fourth century, Aeschines could envisage Demosthenes as the ‘demon who pollutes all Greece’, and brings it to misfortune. A glance at evidence of a different kind, inscriptions regulating cult, shows how the concern for purity affected the individual in his everyday religious practice. The threat of pollution is, it seems, the dominating concern of the Superstitious Man of Theophrastus.
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