We typically think of Greeks as Apollonian and rational.  We don’t think of Greeks as people concerned with pollution and purity.  Like all ancient peoples, though, they were, as Robert Parker details in his wonderful Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Clarendon Paperbacks) .

Early on, Parker cites from Hippocrates (the physician), who wrote a book On the Sacred Disease , and said this about Greek religion: “we mark out the boundaries of the temples and the groves of the gods, so that no one may pass them unless he be pure, and when we enter them we are sprinkled with holy water, not as being polluted, but as laying aside any other pollution which we formerly had.”  Greeks, in other words, mapped out the world into sacred and profane, permitted only the pure to cross into sacred territory, and used washing rites to cleanse pollution.

Since the Greek city was a religious as well as a civic order, purity and sanctity rules also governed the approach to the sacred city center.  Parker writes:

“It is very revealing for Greek conceptions of the sacred that in Athens the agora, civic and political center of the city, was marked off by similar lustral stoups.  Whether the normal Athenian would actually have purified himself before entering is not known, but certainly this was the barrier beyond which those deprived of civil rights might not pass, on threat of prosecution.  A kind of ring of purity excluded the disgraced from communal life.”

At times, sacred civic space was marked out by sacrifice.  Parker again: “Before every meeting of the council and assembly in Athens, a young pig was killed and its corpse carried round the circumference of the meeting-place by special officials known as peristiarchoi .  Though quite different in form from any washing process, this was still a ‘purification.’  Its function in creating a division was so clearly felt that Aristophanes, no doubt echoing popular usage, could speak of taking a seat on the Pnyx as ‘coming inside the purification.’  Temples too were sometimes cleansed before festivals, and some lexicographical sources tell of the theatre, public buildings, ‘the city,’ and meeting-places in general being treated in the same way.”

Epimenides wrote a (now lost) book on sacrifice and purification, and he served as a sacrificial consultant during an Athenian plague.  According to the “Life of Epimenides” of Diogenes Laertius, “when the Athenians were attacked by pestilence, and the Pythian priestess bade them purify the city, they sent a ship commanded by Nicias, son of Niceratus, to Crete to ask the help of Epimenides. And he came in the 46th Olympiad, purified their city, and stopped the pestilence in the following way. He took sheep, some black and others white, and brought them to the Areopagus; and there he let them go whither they pleased, instructing those who followed them to mark the spot where each sheep lay down and offer a sacrifice to the local divinity. And thus, it is said, the plague was stayed. Hence even to this day altars may be found in different parts of Attica with no name inscribed upon them, which are memorials of this atonement. According to some writers he declared the plague to have been caused by the pollution which Cylon brought on the city and showed them how to remove it. In consequence two young men, Cratinus and Ctesibius, were put to death and the city was delivered from the scourge.”

At times, the Greeks used scapegoat rites ( pharmakos ) to remove threatening impurities.  The ritual described by a 12 ^th century Byzantine scholar, Johannes Tzetzes, who draws his information from the sixth century BC poet, Hipponax: “The phramakos , the katharma , in ancient times, was as follows: if misfortune laid hold of a city through divine wrath, whether famine or plague or any other ill, the most ugly man of all they would lead as to a sacrifice, for the cleansing and cure of the ailing city.  And, having set up the sacrifice at the suitable place and having given in his hand cheese, cake, and dried figs, and having whipped him seven times on the penis with squills, wild figs, and other wild plants, in the end on a pyre they would burn him on wild wood, and into the sea they would scatter the ash to the winds, for the cleansing, as I said, of the ailing city.”

Purity concerns appear, in a different register and context, in Greek philosophy.  In The Sophist , Plato explains the Theatetus that the science of division and discrimination is the science of “purification,” and goes on to describe the work of philosophy as a purification of the soul.   Refutation of falsehood is the purging agent: “the purifier of the soul is conscious that his patient will receive no benefit from the application of knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty; he must be purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.”

Again, “refutation is the greatest and chiefest of purifications, and he who has not been refuted, though he be the Great King himself, is in an awful state of impurity; he is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he who would be truly blessed ought to be fairest and purest.”