Law in stateless societies: scapegoats, curses and punishers in Greek literature

ABSTRACT Rene Girard, influential theorist of sacrifice and victimage, casts Oedipus as a scapegoat, who absorbs the ‘free-floating’ guilt that has plagued Thebes. But is he? Girard’s definitions of the scapegoat and reciprocal violence are established, and then differentiated from the administration of punishment in the stateless societies of ancient Greek myths, using the laws of Zeus and the story cycle of the Oresteia. Practices and attitudes surrounding man-boy sexual and pederastic relationships are reconstructed as they evolved from mythic into historic times in Greece. The larger story of Laius, Pelops, Chrysippus, Oedipus and Jocasta is investigated using scholarship on lost but attested plays as well as mythographic materials. By establishing Laius’s illicit abduction of Chrysippus as the source of guilt, and its treatment in tragedy in historic Athens, Oedipus emerges instead as an unwitting and unwilling agent of punishment in a stateless but not lawless society.