Section 2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece.
THE ANCIENT Greeks were also familiar with the use of a human
scapegoat. In Plutarch's native town of Chaeronea a ceremony of this kind
was performed by the chief magistrate at the Town Hall, and by each
householder at his own home. It was called the "expulsion of hunger." A
slave was beaten with 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 the office of chief magistrate of his native town he performed
this ceremony at the Town Hall, and he has recorded the discussion to
which the custom afterwards gave rise. 1
But in civilised 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 garments, decked 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 or
stoned to death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians regularly
maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public
expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine,
befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast 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 one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death.
The city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a year, and one
of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was stoned to death as a
scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life of all the others; six days
before his execution he was excommunicated, "in order that he alone
might bear the sins of all the people." 2
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. Probably these humane precautions were a
mitigation of an earlier custom of flinging the scapegoat into the sea to
drown. The Leucadian ceremony took place at the time of a sacrifice to
Apollo, who had a temple or sanctuary on the spot. Elsewhere it was
customary to cast a young man every year into the sea, with the prayer,
"Be thou our offscouring." This ceremony was supposed to rid the people
of the evils by which they were beset, or according to a somewhat
different interpretation it redeemed them by paying the debt they owed to
the sea-god. As practised by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century
before our era, the custom of the scapegoat 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 which afflicted the
community. 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 wild trees, while the flutes played a particular tune.
Afterwards he was burned on a pyre built 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. 3
In the ritual just described the scourging of the victim with squills,
branches of the wild fig, and so forth, cannot have been intended to
aggravate his sufferings, otherwise any stick would have been good
enough to beat him with. The true meaning of this part of the ceremony has
been explained by W. Mannhardt. He points out that the ancients attributed
to squills a magical power of averting evil influences, and that accordingly
they hung them up at the doors of their houses and made use of them in
purificatory rites. Hence the Arcadian custom of whipping the image of Pan
with squills at a festival, or whenever the hunters returned empty-handed,
must have been meant, not to punish the god, but to purify him from the
harmful influences which were impeding him in the exercise of his divine
functions as a god who should supply the hunter with game. Similarly the
object of beating the human scapegoat on the genital organs with squills
and so on, must have been to release his reproductive energies from any
restraint or spell under which they might be laid by demoniacal or other
malignant agency; and as the Thargelia at which he was annually
sacrificed was an early harvest festival celebrated in May, we must
recognise in him a representative of the creative and fertilising god of
vegetation. The representative of the god was annually slain for the
purpose I have indicated, that of maintaining the divine life in perpetual
vigour, untainted by the weakness of age; and before he was put to death
it was not unnatural to stimulate his reproductive powers in order that these
might be transmitted in full activity to his successor, the new god or new
embodiment of the old god, who was doubtless supposed immediately to
take the place of the one slain. Similar reasoning would lead to a similar
treatment of the scapegoat on special occasions, such as drought or
famine. If the crops did not answer to the expectation of the husbandman,
this would be attributed to some failure in the generative powers of the god
whose function it was to produce the fruits of the earth. It might be thought
that he was under a spell or was growing old and feeble. Accordingly he
was slain in the person of his representative, with all the ceremonies
already described, in order that, born young again, he might infuse his
own youthful vigour into the stagnant energies of nature. On the same
principle we can understand why Mamurius Veturius was beaten with
rods, why the slave at the Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the
agnus castus (a tree to which magical properties were ascribed), why the
effigy of Death in some parts of Europe is assailed with sticks and stones,
and why at Babylon the criminal who played the god scourged before he
was crucified. The purpose of the scourging was not to intensify the agony
of the divine sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any malignant
influences by which at the supreme moment he might conceivably be
beset. 4
Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia
represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been well
remarked by Mr. W. R. Paton that these poor wretches seem to have
masqueraded as the spirits of fig-trees in particular. He points out that the
process of caprification, as it is called, that is, the artificial fertilisation of
the cultivated fig-trees by hanging strings of wild figs among the boughs,
takes place in Greece and Asia Minor in June about a month after the date
of the Thargelia, and he suggests that the hanging of the black and white
figs round the necks of the two human victims, one of whom represented
the men and the other the women, may have been a direct imitation of the
process of caprification designed, on the principle of imitative magic, to
assist the fertilisation of the fig-trees. And since caprification is in fact a
marriage of the male fig-tree with the female fig-tree, Mr. Paton further
supposes that the loves of the trees may, on the same principle of imitative
magic, have been simulated by a mock or even a real marriage between
the two human victims, one of whom appears sometimes to have been a
woman. On this view the practice of beating the human victims on their
genitals with branches of wild fig-trees and with squills was a charm
intended to stimulate the generative powers of the man and woman who for
the time being personated the male and the female fig-trees respectively,
and who by their union in marriage, whether real or pretended, were
believed to help the trees to bear fruit. 5
The interpretation which I have adopted of the custom of beating the
human scapegoat with certain plants is supported by many analogies.
Thus among the Kai of German New Guinea, when a man wishes to make
his banana shoots bear fruit quickly, he beats them with a stick cut from a
banana-tree which has already borne fruit. Here it is obvious that
fruitfulness is believed to inhere in a stick cut from a fruitful tree and to be
imparted by contact to the young banana plants. Similarly in New
Caledonia a man will beat his taro plants lightly with a branch, saying as
he does so, "I beat this taro that it may grow," after which he plants the
branch in the ground at the end of the field. Among the Indians of Brazil at
the mouth of the Amazon, when a man wishes to increase the size of his
generative organ, he strikes it with the fruit of a white aquatic plant called
aninga, which grows luxuriantly on the banks of the river. The fruit, which
is inedible, resembles a banana, and is clearly chosen for this purpose on
account of its shape. The ceremony should be performed three days
before or after the new moon. In the county of Bekes, in Hungary, barren
women are fertilised by being struck with a stick which has first been used
to separate pairing dogs. Here a fertilising virtue is clearly supposed to be
inherent in the stick and to be conveyed by contact to the women. The
Toradjas of Central Celebes think that the plant Dracaena terminalis has a
strong soul, because when it is lopped, it soon grows up again. Hence
when a man is ill, his friends will sometimes beat him on the crown of the
head with Dracaena leaves in order to strengthen his weak soul with the
strong soul of the plant. 6
These analogies, accordingly, support the interpretation which, following
my predecessors W. Mannhardt and Mr. W. R. Paton, I have given of the
beating inflicted on the human victims at the Greek harvest festival of the
Thargelia. That beating, being administered to the generative organs of the
victims by fresh green plants and branches, is most naturally explained as
a charm to increase the reproductive energies of the men or women either
by communicating to them the fruitfulness of the plants and branches, or by
ridding them of the maleficent influences; and this interpretation is
confirmed by the observation that the two victims represented the two
sexes, one of them standing for the men in general and the other for the
women. The season of the year when the ceremony was performed,
namely the time of the corn harvest, tallies well with the theory that the rite
had an agricultural significance. Further, that it was above all intended to
fertilise the fig-trees is strongly suggested by the strings of black and white
figs which were hung round the necks of the victims, as well as by the
blows which were given their genital organs with the branches of a wild
fig-tree; since this procedure closely resembles the procedure which
ancient and modern husbandmen in Greek lands have regularly resorted to
for the purpose of actually fertilising their fig-trees. When we remember
what an important part the artificial fertilisation of the date palm-tree
appears to have played of old not only in the husbandry but in the religion
of Mesopotamia, there seems no reason to doubt that the artificial
fertilisation of the fig-tree may in like manner have vindicated for itself a
place in the solemn ritual of Greek religion. 7
If these considerations are just, we must apparently conclude that while
the human victims at the Thargelia certainly appear in later classical times
to have figured chiefly as public scapegoats, who carried away with them
the sins, misfortunes, and sorrows of the whole people, at an earlier time
they may have been looked on as embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of
the corn but particularly of the fig-trees; and that the beating which they
received and the death which they died were intended primarily to brace
and refresh the powers of vegetation then beginning to droop and languish
under the torrid heat of the Greek summer. 8
The view here taken of the Greek scapegoat, if it is correct, obviates an
objection which might otherwise be brought against the main argument of
this book. To the theory that the priest of Aricia was slain as a
representative of the spirit of the grove, it might have been objected that
such a custom has no analogy in classical antiquity. But reasons have
now been given for believing that the human being periodically and
occasionally slain by the Asiatic Greeks was regularly treated as an
embodiment of a divinity of vegetation. Probably the persons whom the
Athenians kept to be sacrificed were similarly treated as divine. That they
were social outcasts did not matter. On the primitive view a man is not
chosen to be the mouth-piece or embodiment of a god on account of his
high moral qualities or social rank. The divine afflatus descends equally on
the good and the bad, the lofty and the lowly. If then the civilised Greeks
of Asia and Athens habitually sacrificed men whom they regarded as
incarnate gods, there can be no inherent improbability in the supposition
that at the dawn of history a similar custom was observed by the
semibarbarous Latins in the Arician Grove. 9
But to clinch the argument, it is clearly desirable to prove that the custom
of putting to death a human representative of a god was known and
practised in ancient Italy elsewhere than in the Arician Grove. This proof I
now propose to adduce. 10
