The ancient Greeks were also familiar with the use of the human scapegoat. At Plutarch’s native town of Chaeronea in Boeotia, there was a ceremony of this kind performed by the chief magistrate at the Town Hall, and each householder at his own home. It was called the “expulsion of hunger.” A slave was beaten with the rods of the agnus castus, and turned out of doors with the words, “Out with hunger, and in with wealth and health.” When Plutarch held office of the chief magistrate of his native town he performed this ceremony at the Town Hall, and he recorded the discussion to which the custom always gave rise. The ceremony closely resembles the Japanese, Hindoo, and Highland customs ….
But in civilized Greece the custom of the
scapegoat took darker forms than the innocent rite over which the amiable and
pious Plutarch presided. Whenever Marseilles,
one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a
plague, a man of the poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole year he was maintained at the
public expense, being fed on choice and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in
sacred garment, checked with holy branches, and led through the whole city,
while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might fall on his
head. He was then cast out of the
city. The Athenians regularly maintained
a number of degraded and useless beings at public expense; and when any
calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine befell the city, they sacrificed
two of these outcasts as scapegoats. One
of the victims was sacrificed for the men and the other for the women. The former wore round his neck a string of
black, the latter a string of white figs.
Sometimes, it seems, the victim slain on behalf of the women was a
woman. They were led about the city and
then sacrificed, apparently by being stoned to death outside the city. But such sacrifices were not confined to
extraordinary occasions of public calamity; it appears that every year, at the
festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the men and ne for the
women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death.
From the Lover’s Leap, a white bluff at the
southern end of their island, the Leucadians used annually to hurl a criminal
into the sea as a scapegoat. But to
lighten his fall they fastened live birds and feathers to him, and a flotilla
of small boats waited below to catch him and convey him beyond the
boundary. Doubtless these humane
precautions were a mitigation of an earlier custom of flinging the scapegoat
into the sea to drown. The custom of the
scapegoat as practiced by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century B.C.
was as follows. When a city suffered
from plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or deformed person was
chosen to take upon himself all the evils by which the city was afflicted. He was brought to a suitable place where
dried figs, a barley loaf, and cheese were put into his hand. These he ate.
Then he was beaten seven times upon his genital organs with squills and
branches of the wild fig and other trees.
Afterwards he was burned on a pyre constructed of the wood of forest
trees; and his ashes were cast into the sea.
A similar custom appears to have been annually celebrated by the Asiatic
Greeks at the harvest festival of the Thargelia.[1]
James
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
[1] James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and
Folklore. Vol II (New York: Avenel Books, 1981), pp. 210-213..
