Chapter 2. Aesop: Satirist as Pharmakos in Archaic Greece

Aesop is the Greek satirist, by broad definition a poet, [1] who is most clearly and richly assimilated to the pharmakos. The myth of Aesop’s death at Delphi under a false accusation was generally known by the time of Herodotus, according to whom the Delphians, commanded by the Delphic oracle, offered compensation for the life of Aesop, who had been a slave (2:134). [2] Aristophanes, Wasps 1446–1449, shows a knowledge of Aesop being falsely charged with stealing a temple cup. [3] A fifth-century Attic vase portrays him as ugly and deformed. [4] Thus, according to M. L. West, in “the latter part of the fifth century something like a coherent Aesop legend appears.” [5] If one accepts that there was a coherent Aesop legend that had probably existed for some time before Herodotus wrote (he treats it as a given, not a novelty), we should date it even further back. And, by Aristophanes’ time, there may be a book of some sort on Aesop’s life and wisdom. [6]

The story of Aesop’s death, with other incidents in the life of the fabulist, is retold in a remarkable Hellenistic prose novelette. This Vita, drawing on earlier written and oral traditions, was written down perhaps in the first century AD. It is extant in two main versions, G (the fullest) and W (somewhat abbreviated, but with some unique passages). [7] This novellette was for centuries treated with open contempt, as unhistorical, unsophisticated, and late. However, in our generation a number a scholars, such as Wiechers, Nagy, and Holzberg, have begun to evaluate and interpret this Aesop “novel” with new respect. [8] Holzberg’s work has been particularly important in its narratological focus, interpreting the Vita as a carefully structured, cohesive whole in the picaresque tradition of the ancient novel. Holzberg is also significant for his emphasis on how the early parts of the Vita thematically prepare for and support the final episode, Aesop’s death at Delphi. [9]

The following details are from Vita G, manuscript 397 of the Pierpont Morgan library, unless I note otherwise. [10]

Aesop was the worst of mankind. He was a slave (doulos, 1, and passim), [11] and furthermore, “worthless as a servant [eis hupēresian sapros, 1]”; and the ugliest of men: “loathsome to look at … potbellied, with a deformed head, flat-nosed, mute, dark-skinned, stunted, splay-footed, weasel-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous blasphemy” (1). [12] An overseer, instructed to sell the poet, laughs: “‘Are you joking, master? Don’t you know about his deformity? Who will want to buy him and have a doghead instead of a man?’” (11). [13]

References to Aesop’s ugliness are found virtually throughout his biography. He is called “refuse” (perikatharma, 14), “a completely misshapen pot” (holos hamartēma khuseōn, 21), “this awful thing” (to … kakon touto, 21), an “unearthly portent” (teras, 24, Vita W 98, G), “deformed” (sapros, 26, 27, 37), “trash” (katharma, 30, 31, 69, 77b [Vita W]), “riddle” (ainigma, 98), and “a temple thief and a blasphemer” (hierosulon kai blasphēmon, 132). The Samians, upon seeing the fabulist, exclaim, “Let another portent-interpreter be brought so that he may interpret this omen [to sēmeion]. How monstrous is his appearance! He’s a frog, or a hedgehog, or a jar with a hump, or a captain of monkeys, or a little flask, or a cook’s chest, or a dog in a bread-basket!” (87). [14] His name, etymologically, may mean ‘uneven face’. [15] His subhuman, deformed nature is emphasized by his being dumb in the early episodes of the Vita. Our earliest visual evidence, the fifth-century vase portrayal of Aesop, shows him with a crutch.

However, Aesop was also the best of mankind: he is “the great benefactor of mankind” (ho panta biōphelestatos, 1), and his life presents frequent examples of his intelligence and courage. For instance, even though he is mute, he proves he is innocent of eating his master’s figs by vomiting, and causing his master to make all the other slaves vomit (2–3). He also courageously stands up against an unjust and violent overseer (9). Later he fearlessly condemns the Delphians at Delphi (124–126).

He is also pious and holy (ton eusebē, 5): he receives his voice because of his hospitality and kindness to a priestess of Isis who had lost her way. Afterward the priestess, given a meal and redirected to her road, prays to Isis for Aesop, that she will pity “this workman, this sufferer, this pious one, because he was reverent, not to me, mistress, but to your majesty.” [16]

As a result, Aesop, while sleeping in the woods, receives a theophany of Isis and the nine Muses. [17] Isis speaks to the Muses: Then, the Muses confer on him “each something of her own endowment,” and “with a prayer that he might achieve fame, the goddess went her way, and the Muses, when each had conferred her own gift, ascended to Mount Helicon.” [18]

The parallels offered by the lives of Archilochus and Hesiod argue that Aesop’s poetic consecration is an ancient tradition—heroizing legends of the poets tend to accumulate around the their consecrations and deaths. [19] If we accept that probability, we are left to assess which Greek deity was replaced by the Egyptian Isis in the late Aesop novel. There are two clear choices, both almost equally attractive. First, Nagy argues that the original deity was Apollo, called “the leader of the Muses” a number of times in the Vita. [20] This is an ancient association, [21] and would fit well with the traditions of Apollo as inspirer, rival, persecutor, and deifier of Aesop.

However, the second possibility is Mnemosyne ‘Memory’, known since Hesiod as the mother of the Muses (Theogony 53–62, 915–917). This would tie in nicely with G 100 (Perry text), where Aesop honors her with a statue. “Memory” would be especially important to a travelling performer, such as Aesop will become. Robertson, who accepts that Mnemosyne was the original inspirer in the Aesop legend, notes that in G, Isis refers to the Muses as her daughters. [22] The substitution of Isis for Mnemosyne would have been an easy transition. [23]

While Aesop was thus on good terms with the Muses (at Delphi he takes refuge in the shrine of the Muses, 134),he became an enemy of Apollo. At Samos, after the Samians honor the fabulist, dedicating an Aesopeum to him, “when he had sacrificed to the Muses, he then constructed a shrine for them, placing a Mnemosyne statue in their midst, not one of Apollo. Therefore, Apollo was enraged with him as he had been with Marsyas” (100, 127). [24] Earlier, Aesop had told a story that was uncomplimentary to Apollo: “Because the leader of the Muses [prostatēs tōn Mousōn, i.e. Apollo] asked, Zeus gave him the gift of prophecy so that he excelled everyone who practiced mantic arts. But the leader of the Muses, as he was marveled at by all men, thought it right to despise everyone else, and was too boastful in everything” (33). [25]

The awarding of the Samian shrine to Aesop took place as follows: when King Croesus required tribute from the citizens of Samos if they would stave off invasion, Aesop advised them not to give in. Croesus prepared to invade, but a counselor advised him that he would never be able to take the city while Aesop lived, so that he should require the inhabitants of the city to surrender Aesop in order to prevent their own destruction. He followed the advice, sent the adviser to Samos, and the adviser told the Samians that they had to give up Aesop to keep the friendship of the king. “At first the people shouted, ‘Take him. Let the king have Aesop.’” [26] Though Aesop changed their minds through a fable, he then willingly returned to Croesus with the ambassador. He charmed Croesus, who granted him his life and any request. Aesop requested peace for the Samians and the king granted it. When Aesop returned to Samos, the Samians “named the place where he had been turned over the Aesopeum.” (92–100). [27]

Here we have many typical scapegoat themes: the crisis (military threat); the offering of Aesop as propitiation by the voice of the people; the self-sacrificial offering of Aesop; his obtaining salvation for the city; the hero cult offered to the poet at the very place where he had been expelled by the people.

Later, at Babylon, Aesop became a great favorite of the king, Lukoros, who appointed him chamberlain. “After giving an exposition of his philosophy, he was acclaimed as a great man” (101). [28] Because Aesop could outdo anyone in any kingdom in riddle contests (problēmata philosophias), Lukoros’ kingdom continually expanded, with Aesop acting as his intellectual warrior. “In those times, kings had the custom of collecting tribute from one another by means of valiant battle. They did not face one another in wars and military battles. For they wrote philosophical riddles in letters, and the one who couldn’t solve a riddle paid tribute to the one who had sent it” (102). [29] Through Aesop, Babylon conquers most of the known world, by ancient standards (barbarian nations, most lands up to Greece). [30]

Aesop was certainly the best at this odd form of warfare, which relates to his identity as poet, for there was a close connection between the archaic riddle contest and poetry. Huizinga writes, “Archaic poetry is barely distinguishable from the ancient riddle-contest.” For the purposes of this discussion, it is valuable to see the riddle poem as contest/combat, thus demanding aggressive competition. [31] In fact, in archaic legend, these poetic riddle contests were deadly serious affairs, in which the loser often lost his head.

After Aesop “conquers” Egypt (112–123), Lukoros “ordered the erection of a golden statue of Aesop with the Muses, and he held a great celebration in honor of Aesop’s wisdom.” [32] Hence, both at Samos and at Babylon, cult was instituted in honor of Aesop and his preeminence among men, and because he had helped to save both Samos and Babylon (just as he had earlier saved his master Xanthus on the point of committing suicide because he could not interpret an omen to the Samians; this was particularly noble on Aesop’s part because Xanthus had recently cheated Aesop of his freedom and a large sum of money [78–91]).

While at Babylon, Aesop adopted a son, named Ainos in Vita W (103-110); when his son almost succeeded in having him killed through a palace intrigue, Aesop sternly rebuked him, and the young man, stricken by guilt “at being tongue-lashed by” Aesop (dia logōn memastigōsthai), committed suicide. [33] In Vita W, Ainos jumped off a cliff, a standard pharmakos death. Thus the blame poet has power to cause the death of his own unjust son, who is made a pharmakos by the just man who is later to be made a pharmakos himself. [34] It is the poet’s power to create victims that makes him a victim.

Finally, Aesop visited Delphi. [35] There he gave an exhibition, [36] as he had successfully at other cities, but at Delphi “the people enjoyed hearing him at first but gave him nothing.” [37] He started to “jibe” at them: “When I was far off from your city, I was extremely impressed with you as men who were rich and generous, but now that I see you are less than other men in your ancestry and in your city, I know that I was wrong” (125). [38] After referring to them as “slaves of all the Greeks” (Hellēnōn ), he prepared to leave. But the city officials, “seeing how abusive he was,” felt they could not allow him to leave—“If we let him go away,” they said, “he’ll go around to other cities and damage our reputation” (127). [39] Aesop, as blame poet, is about to commit the unforgivable crime in a culture in which shame is a prominent component. [40] The thought of being shamed publicly in all of Greece is not tolerable for the Delphians. So “because Apollo was angry at how Aesop had dishonored him on Samos, when he had not set up his statue along with those of the Muses, the Delphians … devised a villainy.” (127) [41]

They placed a golden temple cup in his baggage, then arrested him outside the city the next day, and told him, “You have stolen treasure from the temple.” Aesop, whose conscience was clear, said with tears in his eyes, “I am ready to die if I am found guilty of such a thing” (128). [42] However, they brought Aesop back to the city and imprisoned him.

Temple thievery was among the most weighty of accusations in ancient Greece. Barkan, after describing the seriousness of general charges of impiety in Athens, which often brought a capital punishment, writes, “Sacrilege in the form of temple-robbery (hierosulia) was a most flagrant act of asebeia. The Athenian legislators of the fifth century placed temple-robbing in juxtaposition with high treason. And the penalty in both cases was death, denial of interment on Attic soil, and confiscation of property.” [43] The torture applied to an apprehended temple thief was so feared that, according to Plutarch, the thief would sometimes take hemlock before the robbery so he could die quickly if caught; if he was successful, he would take the antidote (wine). [44]

Having thus prepared at least an accusation that merited death, “The Delphians came in to Aesop and said, ‘You must be thrown from the cliff today, for thus we voted [epsēphisamen] to execute you—since you have earned it as a temple thief and a blasphemer [blasphēmon]—so that you would not merit burial. Prepare yourself’” (132). [45]

After Aesop recounts a fable in which a mouse is murdered by a frog, but in turn causes the death of the frog, he told them, “If I die, I will be your doom. The Lydians, the Babylonians, and practically the whole of Greece will reap the harvest of my death” (133). [46] As the Delphians led the poet to the cliff, he managed to take refuge in “the shrine of the Muses [en tōi hierōi tōn Mousōn]” (134). Though Aesop warned them not to dishonor the small shrine and told them they should “reverence Zeus, the god of strangers and Olympus,” [47] they dragged him away. Paradoxically (or so it would seem), in Vita W (134), Aesop takes refuge in the shrine of Apollo.

On the brink of the cliff Aesop managed to tell two last fables, both extremely insulting to the Delphians. Then Thus Aesop, whose unjust death had been engineered by Apollo, calls on “the leader [prostatēs] of the Muses” at the moment of his death to witness its injustice. But, as the Vita tells us earlier (33), Apollo is prostatēs tōn Mousōn. [48] As a further complication, another reference to Aesop cult hints at his identification with Apollo. Apollo had been angry when he, the leader of the Muses, had not been awarded a statue along with the Muses in the Samian Aesopeum; in Babylon, Lukoros erects a statue of Aesop with the Muses and institutes a great festival (heortēn megalēn) in honor of Aesop’s wisdom (123). As in the case of Marsyas, Apollo is antagonistic to Aesop because he is so much like himself in his mantic wisdom. It is striking that Aesop warns the Delphians to honor Apollo in Vita W. [49] Libanius speaks of Apollo raging because of the death of Aesop. [50] According to Zenobius, it is Apollo’s prophetess, the Pythia, who commands the Delphians to make recompense for the pollution of Aesop’s death. [51]

Other manuscripts of the Vita add important details. In some versions of the Life, Aesop is stoned to death. [52] In Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1800 (Perry test. 25), “They stoned him and pushed him off a cliff.” Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1800 also tells us of hero cult established for Aesop at Delphi, and gives another reason for Aesop’s satire: This attests to the paradox of hero cult for Aesop at Delphi, also found in W 142, the last paragraph of the Vita : In G and W, Aesop’s death caused a war directed against the Delphians. Wiechers suggests that Aesop’s labeling the Delphians as slaves (G, W 126) provides a context for linking his death to the First Sacred War. In the Vita tradition, Aesop’s death causes the war, which the gods (especially, perhaps, Apollo, in G) send to the Delphians as punishment. But the result of the war was favorable for the Delphians, adding Cirrha/Crisa to their territory, making “all Delphi … sacred to Apollo.” [55] And the institutions that Aesop mocks—sending tithes of slaves and other things to Delphi, and priests eating all sacrificial meat, leaving none for the provider of the animal—came into being after the First Sacred War. Thus, Aesop’s mocking of ritual customs serves as an aition for their existence, and his death serves to further the holiness of Delphi—in fact, “an entire conglomeration of institutions sacred to Apollo—the very essence of Delphi after the First Sacred War.” [56] The ambiguity of Aesop’s relationship with Apollo has taken its last turn, bringing us into a complex interface between ritual, history, and story. Aesop, critic of Delphic practice and killed at inhospitable Delphi because of Apollo’s enmity, is sacred to Apollo, is Apollo’s servant, and is an aition for Delphic practice. [57]

Wiechers shows convincingly that the Aesop story is closely connected to the pharmakos complex:

1. The pharmakoi are the most worthless people, they are aēdes-tatoi, akhrēstoi, eutelestatoi, agenneis, and phauloi—Aesop comes from the lowliest class of society, the slave class; he is repulsively ugly and entirely misshapen, and he is designated in the Vita as a katharma, a word that is commonly used as a synonym for pharmakos.
2. The pharmakoi were led through the city before execution, then led out of it, so that they could meet their end at a designated, well-known place—Aesop experiences the same thing. He is also dragged for a long way to the place of execution, after he is fetched from prison; he also thereupon is led out of the city, so that he can finally be executed at the designated place of execution.
3. The pharmakoi meet their death by stoning, or by being thrown over a cliff—Aesop is executed in just this way; either he is thrown down from cliffs, or he is killed by being thrown over a cliff linked with stoning.
4. The pharmakoi were killed following a decision of the people (boulēi dēmosiēi, Hipponax 128W) by a crowd representing the whole people—Aesop comes up against a similar decision among the Delphians (ebouleusanto … anelein, G 127; they explain: … se epsēphisamen anelein, G 132) and is therefore killed by the entire people.
5. The Pharmakos named by Istros has stolen a golden cup out of the temple treasure—Aesop is reproached for the same fault.
6. The pharmakoi were offered in the Thargelia, performed for the service of Apollo; the pharmakos named by Istros commits an offense against this god and is destroyed by him. In the case of Aesop, Apollo also plays an important role; he also helps in the plot directed against Aesop. So the pharmakoi, as also Aesop, lose their lives because of Apollo. [58]

Wiechers also adduces Androgeus as an important parallel to the story of Aesop (the unjust murder of a stranger-guest, followed by the wrath of god, plague, and ritual purification). [59] Robertson compares Aesop’s execution by the Delphians to the archaic festival of Charila at Delphi, in which an effigy (of a poor orphan girl, begging, who has been kicked and excluded by the Basileus, then hangs herself in legend, resulting in the standard plague, oracle, and cult) is kicked, then taken away, strangled, and buried. [60]

The traditions of Aesop’s life parallel the following list of pharmakos themes:

1. Ritual pollution. Aesop’s supposed theft of temple treasure causes a supposed pollution that his death must expiate. In actuality, the unjust death of Aesop causes a ritual pollution at Delphi.

1a1. Criminal impiety.

1a2. Theft of sacred things. Here the parallel of pharmakos and Aesop is exact: The theme of the theft of a golden cup is found in both stories. Aesop is accused of being a “temple-thief” (hierosulon, Vita W 132). Yet the Delphians are actually guilty of desecrating a temple as they drag Aesop away from a shrine of the Muses, or shrine of Apollo in Vita W (134), where he has taken refuge, on the way to his execution.

1b1. Inhospitality. Aesop is a visitor at Delphi, as was Androgeus at Athens.

1b2. Murder. Aesop is killed.

1b3. Deceit. Aesop is killed deceitfully (ebouleusanto … anelein dolōi, G 127; dolophonēsantes, “killing by ruse,” Vita W 142).

2. Communal disaster. In the case of the Delphians, both plague [61] and invasion. [62]

3. Oracle. As in the myth of Androgeus, an oracle (here the Delphic oracle) instructs the plague-ridden Delphians to expiate the death of Aesop. It is significant that the scene of Aesop’s death is laid at Delphi, the most holy oracle of Greece.

4. The Worst. Aesop is the worst of men, the most valueless of slaves (at two points in the Vita, his seller almost has to give him away to be rid of him [G 15, 27—here, his owner sells him at cost]), ugly, completely deformed.

5. The Best. Aesop is the best of men, courageous, surpassing all men in wisdom and cleverness, conquering the world for Lukoros through his “intellectual warfare.” He is moreover sacral: holy, pious, given special gifts from the Muses; while living, he is offered cult by the Samians and Lukoros. Moreover, he has a salvific aspect, saving his unworthy master Xanthus from death, saving the Samians from Croesus, and saving Lykoros from being defeated by Egypt. [63]

6. Peripety. Aesop, after having conquered most of the known world through his superior wit, suffers a peripety at Delphi, where he is killed as an accursed temple thief.

7. Trial, unjust. Selection by public meeting. Aesop receives his death sentence by legal decree of the people of Delphi.

8. Voluntary (exile or death). At first sight, Aesop seems an utterly involuntary scapegoat, like most pharmakoi (apparently); in fact, he dies cursing the Delphians for killing him unjustly. However, he has certain unmistakable voluntary traits: in Vita G, after he is taken to the place of execution, he finally throws himself off the cliff. Earlier, at Samos, when the Samians decide not to deliver him to Croesus, Aesop unexpectedly leaves Samos voluntarily with Croesus’ ambassador.

9. [Procession?] Wiechers interprets this theme in the Aesop novel. [65] However, though Aesop is made a source of public display, he is not explicitly led in a procession. After the cup is found in Aesop’s luggage, and before he is imprisoned, the Delphians “loudly and violently made a spectacle [paradeigmatizontes] of him.” [66] Nevertheless, there was an implicit collective movement of Delphians and Aesop to the cliff.

10. Expulsion. Aesop is expelled because of the inhospitality of the Delphians. They only arrest and imprison him in order to kill him, which is a more final expulsion. At that time, Aesop is taken from the prison to the cliff of execution outside the city. As was noted earlier, the ejection from the cliff is usually an expulsion from land to sea, into another element. Though in Delphi an expulsion into the sea is not possible, [67] in the death of Aesop, he does have the experience of being pushed from cliff to air, a liminal experience marking boundaries between land and nothingness, life and death.

11. Death. Aesop is executed.

12. Sacrifice imagery. Though Aesop’s death isn’t referred to as a sacrifice, in P. Oxy. 1800, his blame poetry, death, and hero cult are connected with sacrifice. Aesop mocks the Delphians for how they practice sacrificial ritual at Delphi (the Delphians, with concealed knives, get pieces of meat while the one who initiates the sacrifice often goes without); this makes the Delphians angry, and they stone him and push him over a cliff; after they are afflicted by a plague, they set up an altar at the place where he fell “and sacrificed to him as a hero.”

13. Hero cult. Aesop thus is given hero cult.

16. Evil eye. Aesop’s ugliness is so great that his fellow slaves think it will attract the evil eye (G 16). The master bought the deformed man “to use him as a horror to protect the market from the evil eye.” [68]

18. Divine persecutor/patron. Aesop is persecuted by Apollo, who later orders his hero cult. Aesop insults Apollo, is killed because Apollo motivates the Delphians to kill him; Aesop rebukes the Delphians, telling them to honor Apollo, and calls on Apollo to witness his unjust death; then Apollo (presumably) sends the plague to Delphi, and tells the Delphians they must expiate it through setting up hero cult to Aesop. Aesop’s death causes a war that avenges his death and extends Delphi’s sacred boundaries. Aesop’s mocking of Delphic institutions serves as a charter for their continuance. Though this relationship is paradoxical, it is typical of Greek myth, as the relationship of Hera and Heracles shows. [69]

21. Imprisonment.

23. Hero is sacred, superhuman.

So, in the Aesop Vita, there is a full, complex story that is closely identified with the pharmakos pattern. But more importantly for our purposes, this pharmakos is a satirist, a verbal artist, a blame poet in the archaic tradition delineated by Donald Ward, Nagy, and others, and his blame poetry has been a crucial element that places him into the scapegoat situation. In Vita G, Aesop blames the Delphians for their inhospitality and lack of generosity, a typical archaic occasion for blame. Ward, for example, writes, of the target of the typical Indo-European satirist, “Not until the intended victim had become guilty of some shameful deed, such as greed, inhospitality, or above all, the refusal to make a gift of any treasured object to a friend, guest, or relative who admired it, could he be attacked in song.” [71] Nagy, in an analysis of the diction of epic blame poetry, finds that generosity or lack of it is a central theme. [72] In the Odyssey, “When a man is blameless himself, and his thoughts are blameless, the friends [xeinoi] he has entertained carry his fame [kleos] widely to all mankind, and many are they who call him excellent.” [73] It is the xeinoi, the guest-friends, who spread the praise of the blameless man; it is presumably they who will spread the blame of the ungenerous man. In Pindar, the poet is the guest-friend of his patron, whom he praises. “I am a guest-friend [xeinos]; keeping away dark blame [psogon], leading true fame [kleos] to a dear man like waves of water, I will praise him [ainesō].” [74] It is significant that Aesop is a stranger, a foreigner at Delphi; there he should have been able to rely on the values of hospitality to protect him.

This criticism of the Delphians brings about Aesop’s arrest, imprisonment, and execution. The Delphians fear that his blame of them will spread throughout Greece if he is allowed to depart and live, which would create a situation intolerable for them. This is the plague of shame that Aesop’s death must prevent. Aesop is not just a poet, but he is a very powerful poet—in fact, “the best” man living with regard to his wits, powers of intellectual warfare, and supernatural insight. It is the poet’s power to broadcast blame throughout society that is feared, that causes his assimilation to the pharmakos theme. Furthermore, it is Aesop’s very mobility that makes the Delphians fear him—he travels through Greece like a rhapsode, performing for his survival, dependant on hospitality. [75] It is significant that in Vita G (139), Aesop, after telling the pointed fable of the tumblebug, hare, and eagle, warns the Delphians to reverence Zeus Xenios, Zeus of strangers, guest-friends. [76]

In Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1800, again Aesop blames and mocks the greed of the Delphians (onid[i]zōn epeskōpsen) as they carry out the ritual of sacrifice. This provokes them to anger, and they execute him. This incident is particularly noteworthy because it seems to be an aition for ritual practice.

Though I have concentrated mostly on Aesop at Delphi to show his satiric speech, his use of blame is evident throughout his biography. For example, immediately after the pastoral and moving scene in which Aesop receives poetic inspiration from Isis and the Muses, as well as his voice, the first time he uses his voice to communicate with his fellow man, he verbally attacks his overseer for mistreating and beating another slave unjustly (G 9). The overseer immediately runs to his master, accuses Aesop of saying “monstrously slanderous things” (μεγάλως βλασφημεῖ) against the master, so the master quickly directs the overseer to sell the deformed slave (G 10).

The Aesop biography allows us to add some important themes to our list:

22. Blame poet as scapegoat hero.

23. Poet is sacred.

24. Conflict with political leader(s). It is the Delphian “officials” (hoi … arkhontes) who first decide that Aesop cannot be allowed to leave Delphi alive (G 127).

So the blame poet is assimilated completely and richly to the Greek socio-religious scapegoat pattern, [78] a phenomenon that raises many questions. To answer these questions, we must explore the ambiguous place of the poet in archaic Greek culture. The poet is, like the pharmakos, the worst and the best in his society—the filth, katharma, and yet so holy as to be the object of sacrifice after death. [79] Poets in a culture where shame is a dominant component are especially powerful, focal points for broadcasting shame and honor, and so especially vulnerable to punitive action when they offend a community and its political leader(s) (as they often do). A culture informed by shame values would be a culture in which public loss of reputation and honor would count for more than inner guilt. Ruth Benedict writes that “shame cultures” “rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed … by being openly ridiculed.” [80]

Archaic Greece cannot be interpreted as a “pure” shame culture (if such ever existed); H. Lloyd-Jones, Dover, and Douglas L. Cairns, rejecting the evolutionary view of E. R. Dodds, note that shame and guilt are found in both archaic and later Greek culture. [81] However, this still leaves the question of whether one or the other is predominant, and how the balance may shift through time. Cairns tends to flatly reject the concepts of shame and guilt cultures, but writes, “This is not to say that there are not significant differences between our society and that of ancient Greece which may be usefully explained in terms of tendencies to emphasize shame rather than guilt.” [82] Striking characteristics of extraordinary emphasis on shame can be found in Greek legend and history, and in many archaic cultures. [83]

Leaders in such a culture, even kings, inevitably must use force to combat powerful blame poets’ psychological power. In fact, if kings do not do so, they sometimes have no choice but to abdicate. But if the inimical blame poet is intolerable to the king, the friendly praise poet is indispensable to him (though the blame poet and praise poet often cannot be strictly separated). [84]

In addition, the poet is, in archaic Greek society, hieros anēr [85] —sacred man, and so he shares in all the ambiguity of the essential concept of the sacred in archaic culture. The sacred man or woman is both accursed and blessed, polluted and pure, polluting and cleansing, despised pharmakos and revered hero receiving cult. The blameless Aesop is killed because the Delphians are inhospitable; as a skillful satirist, his presence cannot be tolerated. The weapon of the poet’s verbal aggression has great power in a culture based on reputation. (Aesop is a warrior, on a verbal level, conquering territory for a king; the poet embodies verbal violence.) Because of this weapon, the poet will be feared, despised, and revered.