As also discussed in the previous section, the Greek aore, like many other demonic figures, had normative functions. There, I focused primarily on the fact that, by making Gello a virgin and Lamia and Morino mothers who had lost their children, myth reiterated the message that a Greek woman's life was defined by successful reproduction and that women who failed to live up to this goal belonged in the dark and marginal world of the restless dead rather than in the human world. By assigning the figure of the aore to the demonic realm, Greek tradition was also normative in that it censured the real acts of killing a child or impeding reproduction. By going further, however, and describing these ghosts as envious-by virtually making them personifications of envytradition also censured the envy itself. "This is where reproductive envy leads," the myths seem to say, "to exclusion from humanity and an eternity spent in restless wandering." The second technique of control was inherent in the first: if the demonic world was used as an inverted mir ror for the human world-if ghosts evolved so as to display behavior and traits that were the opposite of those encouraged among humansthen there could be no better "outsider" on whom to pin blame for misfortune, no safer outlet for the suspicion, anger, and retaliation that otherwise would have sought an object within the victim's own group.
This second function would be particularly important with regard to reproductive failure, for if a childless woman began to suspect that someone else were responsible for causing her problem by magical means, it is likely that her eye would fall first on those with whom she interacted every day. As E. Evans-Pritchard classically demonstrated, accusations of envy-driven magic arise most often within a household or other small group of people, and seldom travel outside of an immediate social circle of acquaintances-or to use Philip Mayer's apt definition, "Witches are people who ought to like each other but do not." 93 In the case of ancient Greek women, this means that accusations would have arisen amongst members of a single oikos or members of oikoi that had close connections to each other. For, although Greek women did not live in "oriental seclusion," their social contacts did center on their own oikoi and oikoi that were linked to theirs through either familial or social ties.94 This would particularly have been the case in many places during the classical period, when marriages within extended family groups were common because of laws governing heiresses.95 If the sort of personal enmity that leads to such suspicions were to arise, then it would arise between women who shared an oikos or at least dwelt within the same network of oikoi. Within these groups, suspicions and accusations would be devastating. Before the rise of the polis, whatever security, wealth, and honor an individual possessed depended not on him alone but on his oikos. A strong oikos was also the building block of larger, informal confederations of oikoi, established by means of marriages and xenia. More formal units such as the phratry, phyle, thiasos, and deme were also built upon the oikos, or at least in the image of the oikos. The importance to these groups, and to the polis itself, once it had developed, of the survival and integrity of individual oikoi is shown by the laws and guidelines that they enacted or upheld.96 The smooth survival of Greek society depended upon, and therefore encouraged, both the integrity of the individual oikos and the cohesiveness amongst oikoi within larger groups.
To come back full circle to the beginning of this discussion, however, the survival of the oikos depended not only upon such laws and customs as the polis and other groups could uphold, but also upon the steady production of children generation after generation. To attack the reproductive capabilities of the oikos would be to attack its very heart. Given the importance both of the oikos to society and of children to the oikos, it makes sense, then, that the Greeks would have embraced an explanation for reproductive failure that displaced blame from the other mortals on whom suspicion would be likeliest to fall-the members of the oikos that those children were to sustain. Peter Brown has suggested that a displacement of blame onto demons occurred within the growing community of Christians during the later Roman Empire for the same reason.
[as] . . . a newly established group committed to mutual love, its leaders acutely sensitive to the "worldly smoke" of rivalry, [Christianity] could hardly survive the interplay of blame and envy that accompanied a belief in human agents of misfortune. What we find instead is a "humanizing" of the suprahuman agents of evil. In all Christian literature, the ambivalent and somewhat faceless daemones of pagan belief are invested with the precise, unambiguous negative attributes and motives that Libanius still saw in a professional rival who resorted to sorcery.... if there is misfortune, it is divorced from a human reference and the blame is pinned firmly on the "spiritual powers of evil." Men joined the new community to be delivered from the demons and the new community, in turn, resolved its tensions by projecting them in the form of an even greater demonic menace from outside.97
In contrast, some societies blame witches for misfortune because they cannot afford to blame spiritual powers. Mayer notes that among the African Gusii, belief in witchcraft as a predominant cause of misfortune helped to maintain the picture of a moral universe, in which all suprahuman entities were beneficent, that underlay other Gusii beliefs. The Gusii worldview was less threatened by ascribing evil motives and behavior to neighbors than it would be by ascribing them to the spirits who sustain the ongoing processes of the cosmos.98 As any student of Greek myth knows, the Greeks, in sharp contrast to the Gusii, held no such expectations of their cosmos or gods.
Another point, already made earlier, should be reiterated here: the Greek aore was able to fulfill this second function of displacing blame from other mortals so well because she was, in a sense, quite real. Not only did she personify the envy that was pervasive within Greek culture, and the fear that the envious, if not controlled or averted, would rob the successful of their rewards, but she began as a real, living woman, fully normal except insofar as she was childless. As demons must be within any living, responsive religion, the Greek aore was an eloquent combination of fantasy and reality.
One more method of explaining reproductive failure must be examined briefly before we leave our analysis of the aore: the Evil Eye. This is the best-known manifestation of a broader belief, according to which the envious can emanate destructive forces in any number of ways-by breathing or speaking as well as by looking, for example.99 As I noted earlier, there are two types of Evil Eye attack: intentional and unintentional (similarly, other envious emanations also can occur either intentionally or unintentionally).
Each of these types of Evil Eye attacks functions more or less in the same way as one of the other explanations that already have been examined. The first-intentional-is really a subset of the explanation that blames reproductive failures on magical attacks by other mortals. Among the Greeks and Romans, it is connected only with "outsiders" such as the Thibii; thus, the same normative message is sent by stories concerning intentional use of the Evil Eye as is sent by associating childkillers with the demonic realm in general and specifically with such marginalizing traits as theriomorphism, hermaphrodism, or Libyan ancestry: on the one hand, there is the world of the normal or the civilized, and on the other hand, the world of the abnormal or the barbaric; intentional users of the Evil Eye belong strictly in the latter.
Assuming that those within one's group send forth destructive envy only unintentionally implies that the harm is, in such cases, beyond the control of those who cause it. Such envy is like aorai in the sense that it acts independently, without the desire or direction of any mortal. Indeed, the final statement in Plutarch's dialogue on the topic suggests that some people believed such emanations could actually become independently acting entities of malicious intent. When Gaius asks why Plutarch has not discussed Democritus's theory of eidola that lodge within people, causing damage to their bodies and minds, Plutarch responds that, because the hour was late, he did not want to "frighten his audience with mormones" (mormoluttesthai) and terrify them (diatarattein) by introducing into the discussion phantasmata and eidola that had life an
d intelligence of their own. It is hard to say whether Democritus actually attributed such life and intelligence to his eidola. It may be that Plutarch here is drawing on some other, popular, belief that was familiar to his audience, playfully equating it with that of Democritus in order to reject Gaius's attempt to prolong the dialogue, or that he is exaggerating a real Democritean precept for the same reason.10° But either way, Plutarch's remark implies that his audience would understand the concept of envious emanations taking on lives and malicious motivations of their own.101
Because the envious were, to a large degree, unable to avoid emitting these injurious, demonic emanations, there would have been little point in identifying and punishing them; efforts would be better spent on averting the effects of the emanations themselves. There were many avertive techniques: the potentially destructive force of an admiring gaze could be counteracted by spit rubbed upon a baby's forehead, for ex- ample,102 and amulets against envy could be worn on one's person or hung in the house.103
The explanation that blamed reproductive failures and other misfortunes upon unintentionally emitted streams of envy would have been desirable for several complementary reasons. On the one hand, it removed responsibility not only from the victim of misfortune but also from her immediate family and neighbors, at least insofar as specific persons could not easily be identified and accused, or, if accused, would not be punished. In this sense, it was like the demonic explanation. On the other hand, it was psychologically satisfying because it reflected reality; again, here it aligned with the demonic explanation. In fact, the "envious emanation" explanation reflected reality more accurately than the demonic, because it did not detach reproductive envy from one's neighbors so completely; anyone and everyone within a society might, upon occasion, send forth streams of destructive envy. For this very reason, however, the normative functions of this explanation were weaker than those performed by the ghost. The unintentional deployment of the Evil Eye and other envious emanations could not be connected emphatically with "outsiders," ghosts, or misfits, as intentional envious attacks were. Which explanation was more effective, more satisfying? It is hard to say. By the fourth century, Saint Basil had combined the two, arguing that that demons implanted malicious envy in unsuspecting people and then directed it out through their eyes toward others. In this scenario, maleficence comes from both within and without.104 In this sense, Basil's model carries an eerie echo of the notion that the angry dead and their agents work from the outside to infect the living with madness, but that once inside the victim, it festers and ferments into its own disaster.
A review of the ways in which the Greeks explained reproductive failure has shown that the more popular explanations-bodily imbalances, the ghosts of the restless dead, and unintentional envy-all deflected blame from members of the society who might otherwise have fallen under suspicion of having attacked a child or parturient woman. This was important, I have suggested, because the continuing integrity of the oikos in its extended sense, of such groups as the phratry and of the polis as a whole would have been significantly threatened if the alternative explanation-surreptitious attacks by the living-had arisen between members of the smaller groups. The aore played important normative roles as well, first by sending a strong message that the active envy of others' reproductive success was intolerable within civilized society, and second by intimating that a woman's failure to reproduce successfully was tantamount to destroying children or the women who produced them.
In his study of contemporary Greek beliefs, Stewart describes the creation of demons as follows: "Incomprehensible phenomena [such as birth and death] are rendered intelligible through a recasting that could be said to humanize them; the moral foundations of the society are projected onto the unknown." 105 Conversely, once we have recognized that this is the origin of demons or ghosts that play demonic roles, they can be used to chart the fears and values of those who believe in them, as I have tried to show here by examining a single type, the Greek aore. In chapter 6, we shall use what we have learned about the aore to discover more about one particular class of people whom she persecuted-the virgin on the brink of marriage-and how her existence led to the emergence of a new sort of goddess for the Greeks and new rituals directed toward the dead.
As recorded and translated by Kligman, 233-34, reprinted here with the kind permission of the University of California Press.
My God, where they'll put you, Beauty, so you can't speak. You, Mari, beautiful bride, Like a flower in the window: First you see that it is blossoming; All of a sudden, it has withered. Oh, little beauty, my beautyYour face is like a carnation And will blacken like the earth. Your face is like whey And will blacken like mud.
From a contemporary Transylvanian lament for a girl who died unmarried, quoted by Gail Kligman in The Wedding of the Dead (x988)
No figure is more closely associated with the returning souls of the dead than Hecate. Her role as their leader was well enough established by the fifth century for the tragedians to allude to it without further explanation. In an unassigned tragic fragment, one person asks another, "Do you fear that you will see a phantom in your sleep? Do you expect to be attacked by the band of chthonic Hecate?" and in Euripides' Helen, Hecate is credited with the ability to send phantoms against the living even when they are awake.' As time went on, leadership of the ghosts became one of her best-known traits. The fourth-century Hippocratic treatise on the sacred disease connects Hecate-Enodia with nocturnal ghostly attacks. By the imperial period, she could be described as psychais nekuon meta bakcheuousa-"raging among the souls of the dead." z It was this dominion over restless souls that led to Hecate's familiar role as a magicians' goddess as well, for control of a soul was essential to most ancient magical procedures. Our first hints of this idea come from a fragment of Sophocles, where Hecate is asked for help in preparing a spell, and from Euripides, whose Medea refers to Hecate as the goddess who dwells close to her hearth. Later, Horace's dreadful witches demand that Hecate help them to invoke the souls of the dead, and she frequently is asked by magicians of the imperial age to help them gain control of aoroi and biaiothanatoi-the souls of those who have died before their time or violently. This is the side of her personality that persisted even after classical antiquity was over; in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hecate urges on the chorus of three witches.'
And yet, none of the earliest evidence for Hecate presents her as anything but a normal-indeed rather benign-goddess. The first archaeological artifacts attesting to her worship are two pieces dated to the late sixth century B.C.E. One is an altar found in the precinct of Apollo Delphinios in Miletus, inscribed, boustrophedon-style, to Hecate.4 The inscription itself does not give us much information, but the fact that it was found in front of the prytanneum underscores the fact that Hecate had a part in official cult there-she was no marginalized goddess, associated only with ghosts. The other piece is a terra-cotta statuette of a seated woman wearing a crown, also inscribed to Hecate, which was found in Athens.' The dedicator was a man, which suggests that the statue was meant to portray Hecate herself. If so, then at this period she was imagined to look like any other goddess.
Hecate's entry into Greek literature is the famous "Hymn to Hecate" from Hesiod's Theogony, where far from displaying any frightening traits, she is highly praised as a goddess who can bring a variety of bene fits to different people-fishermen, kings, and children, to mention just a few.6 Even after she begins to be associated with restless souls, the beneficent side of her personality does not disappear. Pindar describes her as a kindly messenger who announces to the Abderites that they will be victorious.' She is shown (with name) on an Attic crater from the mid fifth century in the guise of a typical Greek maiden, wearing a peplos and carrying torches at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She is probably shown in wedding scenes on two other fifth-century vases as well; none of the figures in these scenes are labeled, but in both cases, the iconography of a female holding two torches is so close to that of the figure labeled "
Hecate" on the Peleus and Thetis vase that it is hard to imagine who else it could be.8 The vases provide a visual illustration of what Cassandra says in the Troades, when she invokes Hecate to bring light to celebrate her wedding.'
Let us go back further, to Hecate's place of origin. There is general agreement that this was Carla, in southwestern Asia Minor, which is supported in particular by the fact that by the Hellenistic period her precinct in Lagina was the largest of all the precincts there (in contrast, in all of Greece, only Aegina seems to have had any significant sanctuary devoted wholly to Hecate) and by the large number of theophoric names from this area that are built on the Hekatroot.10 Theodor Kraus is probably right to assume that she had always been one of the most im portant Carian deities, and that the titles attached to her there by at least Hellenistic times (such as "greatest" [megiste], "most manifest goddess" [epiphanestate thea] and "savior" [soteira]), as well as her portrayal on the friezes of her temple in Lagina (to be discussed below) suggest that she played somewhat the same roles for Carla as Cybele played for Phrygia: city goddess, mother goddess, and all-around benefactress." Laginetan Hecate was closely associated with the Zeus of nearby Panamara, which would support the idea that she was the leading goddess of her own city.12 The "procession of the key" (kleidos ag(5ge) held annually in Lagina in her honor must have been important, considering the frequency with which inscriptions refer to its officers.13 None of our sources explain what it was supposed to accomplish, but if it took its name from a key that was carried, then that key must have been of central importance-it must have been used to lock or unlock something significant. We know that the Laginetans erected a statue of Hecate when they built new gates behind their City; 14 the key may have been for these or other city gates over which she was expected to watch. Perhaps the procession of the key culminated in an actual opening and shutting of the gates, or perhaps these acts were only symbolically performed. Either way, the key would have signified Hecate's ability to "close" the city against all dangers or "open" it to benign influences.
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