Figen Geerts (New York University)
Villainizing an unknown other as guilty of spreading or causing contagious disease has a long, odious history. In antiquity, it was often the marginalized who fell victim to the ritual dynamics of scapegoating. The poor, the enslaved, the disabled––those who lived at the margins of society suddenly became the focal point of cathartic expulsion in times of plague. Scholars have mainly focused on the purificatory aspects of the scapegoat ritual (Parker 1983, Burkert 1985, Vernant 1988) and its role in periodic festivals of renewal (Deubner 1932, Graf 2008). Scapegoating has, moreover, been understood as a mechanism for reaffirming interpersonal bonds of belonging among the ritual’s remaining participants (Scott 2017). The scapegoat itself, however, and its position in the social fabric of the ancient community has received considerably less attention.
This paper examines the minority groups and individuals who were scapegoated during epidemic crises in antiquity. In its first part, I review some of the legendary accounts of plague. In the fragmentary verses of Hipponax, for example, we read that the ugliest man in town was selected for sacrifice in order to cure an infected citizen body (fr. 5-11 West). Philostratos’ Life of Apollonius recounts that when a plague began to rage in Ephesos the only remedy was found in the stoning of a blind stranger (4.10). Similarly, when goddess Athena hit the Lokrians with a feverish pestilence, they sent off two virgins to be burned at the stakes (Callimachus, Aetia fr. 35). Drawing, then, on the anthropological theory of René Girard (1974; 1977), I argue that particularly societal outsiders became subject to scapegoating because they were considered to be of no value for the vitality and health of the community. Slaves, women and other minorities stood at the bottom of ancient society, so that, when plague struck, they were dispensable for the community’s survival. Finally, I argue that the low-class scapegoat usually constituted a socially invisible subject, but that under the tense conditions of a disruptive epidemic this subject was exposed and identified as an enemy of the state. Since the ancients did not have a conception of germ theory and did not know the so-called ‘seeds’ of disease (Nutton 1983), anxieties about what caused a plague increased the willingness to scapegoat already suppressed minorities for the purpose of orienting blame––thus producing new outbreaks of stigmatization, marginalization and xenophobia.