I

The crime of ἀσέβεια, or literally, a ‘failure to do reverence’, mainly concerned worship in shrines, especially ceremonial errors punished by polis regulations. Ἀσέβεια also included neglect of worship, which was not a crime in private contexts. Ἀσέβεια as a religious wrong was somewhat different, for it was a violation of customs in which the gods took an interest, such as oath-breaking or the mistreatment of suppliants. If regulations did not deal with these wrongs, the community expected the gods to punish them. These complications have prompted scholarly debate about the balance to be struck between ἀσέβεια as a crime and ἀσέβεια as an extrajudicial wrong, and between communal sanctions and divine punishments, including those invoked in curses.Footnote ⁷

Μίασμα, literally meaning a ‘stain’ or ‘taint’, was neither a crime nor a wrong; instead, it was often a physical condition. In general, μίασμα was more a matter of custom, and less a matter of regulation; it is commonly described as a kind of social control, not as a legal phenomenon.Footnote ⁸ Pollution related to homicide was, of course, a legal phenomenon, but how important the law was in the Greek response to homicidal pollution is controversial.Footnote ⁹ Ἀσέβεια, in contrast, has not been recently or thoroughly discussed in connection with Greek homicide.Footnote ¹⁰ In Greek literature as a whole, accusations that a man was both ‘stained’ or polluted (μιαρóς) and impious (ἀσεβής) were rare.Footnote ¹¹

Yet ἀσέβεια and pollution share an important feature, which is concern for the viability of shrines. This feature appears in a number of the early reliable reports of ἀσέβεια trials or procedures.Footnote ¹² Seventeen cases in literary sources begin with the condemnation of Megacles and his associates in perhaps 632 b.c.e., reported by Thucydides in the words ‘they were called ἐναγεῖς’.Footnote ¹³ This trial and twelve others appear in Appendix A, where they are listed in approximate chronological order. Another literary case involves a procedure, but not a trial. Three more cases do not feature the term ἀσέβεια or similar terms, but a trial for ἀσέβεια is likely.Footnote ¹⁴ These appear in Appendix B.

Eight of the defendants in these trials are known to have been convicted, and all of them were punished at least partly by being barred from shrines.Footnote ¹⁵ The impious Halicarnassians in Herodotus were forbidden to use the Panionium, and Andocides was alleged to be guilty of ἀσέβεια because he entered a communal shrine.Footnote ¹⁶ Banishment from shrines is also implied by the sentence of outlawry imposed on Megacles, his associates and his descendants, and on Diagoras, and by the capital punishment inflicted on the violators of the Herms and the Mysteries and also on Socrates. Banishment appears again in the one literary source, Against Neaera, which does not report a trial, but does report a procedure. This procedure is to remove adulteresses from shrines by means of a kind of citizen's arrest.Footnote ¹⁷ Even in the case of a fine, as perhaps with Archias, the defendant may have been banned from shrines until he paid it.Footnote ¹⁸

Μίασμα kept worshippers out of shrines, too. There was, however, a cardinal difference between many or most people who brought μίασμα into a shrine and those banned for ἀσέβεια. The former gave offence because of contact with sex, or with death and violence, and could enter after performing a ritual, or waiting some period of time.Footnote ¹⁹ The latter gave offence for other reasons, and could not perform a compensatory ritual or wait a prescribed period. Μίασμα was probably temporary, whereas ἀσέβεια was permanent. (If μίασμα involved homicide, the two conditions somewhat resembled one another. Besides the shared sanction of being barred from shrines, there was the shared risk of exile or capital punishment.Footnote ²⁰ )

The polluted person and the perpetrator of ἀσέβεια were alike in another, negative way. Neither of them was contagious in a medical sense. The common term for disease, νóσος, was not used of the polluted or the impious. Contagion, in fact, was thought to have little to do with disease; the only diseases sometimes thought to be contagious were plagues.Footnote ²¹ The Hippocratics attributed plagues to μιάσματα in the air (as opposed to the singular, not plural, μίασμα of a religious kind).Footnote ²² Popular opinion, however, held that gods caused plagues, and so the disease would spread by divine intervention, rather than by contagion. Two diseases that were never deemed contagious, epilepsy and madness, were commonly blamed on divine anger.Footnote ²³ The likely response to such an illness was an elaborate programme of sacrifices and other rites.Footnote ²⁴ After the plague broke out in Athens a second time, in 427 b.c.e., the Athenians responded not by taking any action in their own city, where the disease had struck, but by appeasing the anger of Apollo through a purification of the sacred island of Delos.Footnote ²⁵

So far, we have been speaking of ἀσέβεια, but when we turn to two related terms, ἄγος and οὐ θέμις, we must allow for some semantic and legal differences. As Thucydides indicates, those who were ἐναγεῖς were sometimes liable not only to be driven from shrines but also to be exiled. Ἄγος thus corresponded to severe ἀσέβεια. Both crimes would be offensive in the eyes of the gods as well as in the judgement of the community, but, as Louis Moulinier said in his 1952 work on pollution, ἄγος more likely implied divine vengeance.Footnote ²⁶ There is also an obvious difference with respect to literary genre. Lysias calls denying proper burial to Polynices an act of ἀσέβεια, but Sophocles calls it ἄγος. In Thucydides again, wrongdoing that involves supplication is ἄγος, but in On the Mysteries it is ἀσέβεια.Footnote ²⁷

The phrase οὐ θέμις or the like resembles ἄγος. In Homer, it refers to norms protected by Zeus, such as supplication and xenia. Footnote ²⁸ Later it was used in regulations to keep certain kinds of persons out of shrines, but any sanction for violating these regulations might come from either the gods or the community.Footnote ²⁹ Like ἀσέβεια and ἄγος, οὐ θέμις overlapped with μίασμα. In Plato, for example, it is οὐ θέμις for the polluted to have contact with the unpolluted.Footnote ³⁰

The next question to consider is how this overlap occurred. Sometimes ἀσέβεια was present, and μίασμα was too. At other times, μίασμα was absent, but ἀσέβεια (or ἄγος) was present and was still contagious.

II

The well-attested instances of contagious ἀσέβεια are seven in number. One comes from an inscription—a kind of evidence sometimes overlooked—and six from literary sources. Two of the latter occur in Demosthenes, and two more occur in On the Mysteries and Against Neaera. One occurs in Andocides. The remaining case, against Socrates, is the most complicated, and will be discussed later.

The epigraphical example is one of eight ἀσέβεια trials recorded in inscriptions. Two of these inscriptions come from Athens in 414 b.c.e. One is vague, but the other concerns violation of the Mysteries.Footnote ³¹ Two more inscriptions publish declarations of war by Thebes and by Apollonia on the Danube against violators of shrines, the former being Classical, the latter Hellenistic.Footnote ³² The remaining four are diverse, but all date from the Classical period. A Delian inscription deals with assault in a shrine; an Ephesian inscription with an attack on θεωροί and a Samothracian inscription praises King Lysimachus for prosecuting the guilty, but gives no particulars.Footnote ³³ The other is the so-called ‘Judgement of Mantinea’. In spite of their relevance, no scholar has mentioned all or even most of them until very recently. Unsurprisingly, the nineteenth-century scholar Caillemer mentions only one of them, the Delian inscription. Parker too mentions only the Delian inscription, whereas Cohen mentions none.Footnote ³⁴ These cases appear in Appendix C.

‘The Judgement of Mantinea’ provides the link between ἀσέβεια and contagion. This text deals with murderers who should not enter the temple of Athena Alea:

The inscription now turns to one man who may or may not be guilty of the murder:

Kurt Latte thought that the impious persons would be convicted in court, and interpreted the text as a curse that depended on this condition.Footnote ³⁶ Whether or not the text is a conditional curse, it responds to sacrilege as well as to murder, for the killing took place in the shrine. The impiety that spreads from the guilty is so contagious that it reaches their descendants, as in the case of Megacles and his coadjutors.Footnote ³⁷

The next two cases deal with ἀσέβεια that is less potent than this, but that still involves murder. Two speeches of Demosthenes, Against Timarchus and Against Androtion, refer to Androtion's attempt to besmirch a political opponent, Diodorus, by filing charges of impiety against him or his relatives. In Against Timarchus, Androtion is said to have accused Diodorus of parricide, and of impiety as well.Footnote ³⁸ If the parricide charge is true, the charge of ἀσέβεια may seem superfluous, but for the theme of contagion the noteworthy point is not that the accuser has a weak case (and thus failed to obtain a conviction), but that the ἀσέβεια charge seemed winnable. Like the murderers in Mantinea, Diodorus should be regarded as impious. Or, if Diodorus is fabricating this story in order to discredit Androtion, the pair of charges ought to seem credible to the jury that Diodorus is addressing.Footnote ³⁹

In Against Androtion, Diodorus returns to this subject. This time he does not report that Androtion accused him of parricide or ἀσέβεια either, but instead implies that Androtion took the killing of Diodorus' father for granted, and even took the guilt of Diodorus for granted. Androtion wished to find other enemies to sue, and fixed on Diodorus' paternal uncle, accusing him of ἀσέβεια.Footnote ⁴⁰ Androtion explained that the uncle was guilty of associating with Diodorus. Once again, the case of the accuser is weak (and the jurors rejected the charge), but the theme of contagion has a new twist.Footnote ⁴¹ Previously, contagion spread because the guilty came to holy ground. Now, it spreads because the innocent consort with the guilty in daily intercourse.

That parricide should be the occasion for this kind of contagion, whereas other serious crimes were not, suggests a Greek preoccupation with this kind of killing. In his Comparison of Lycurgus and Numa, Plutarch says: ‘Greek historians tend to write up who was first to do murder against his own tribe, or make war on his brothers, or kill his own mother or father.’Footnote ⁴² Romans, he goes on to say, write less about this subject. In the Laws, Plato shows that he was one of the ‘Greek historians' interested in parricide: ‘And if the parricide is not [forgiven by the victim before the victim's death], he should be liable to the ultimate charges, even ἀσέβεια, plus theft of holy things, since he has stolen the life of his parent.’Footnote ⁴³ The charges that Androtion brought against Diodorus and Diodorus' uncle echo a preoccupation that led Plutarch to generalize about Greek literature and led Plato to enlarge the crime of ἀσέβεια.

A particularly Athenian preoccupation, which was the Mysteries at Eleusis, affects another example of contagious ἀσέβεια, the trial of Andocides. Found guilty of profaning the Mysteries in 415, Andocides had gone into exile, and then returned after the end of the Peloponnesian War. He might have hoped, since he was not a murderer, and was not in the company of murderers, that he would not be charged with ἀσέβεια, but the prosecutor nevertheless accused him of entering a communal shrine, and so he put him on a par with the murderers banned from the shrine of Athena Alea. Since the jurors were all initiates into the Mysteries, the prosecutor could expect that they would regard profaning these rites as comparable to murder.Footnote ⁴⁴ (Of the eight inscriptional records of ἀσέβεια, prosecutions, one of two Athenian cases concerns the Mysteries.) The prosecutor might also expect that the passage of time would make no difference, just as it made no difference in the case of Megacles, or would make no difference for a parricide or other murderer.Footnote ⁴⁵

This case was more complicated than those of Diodorus and his uncle. Andocides says he was charged under the decree of Isotomides, which banned from shrines those guilty of ἀσέβεια. He then argues that this decree, passed in 415, had been invalidated by the time of his trial. This argument is plausible: to remain valid after 403, such a decree would have to be reinscribed in the Athenian law-code, something that is unlikely in the face of Andocides' assertion to the contrary.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, this argument is not decisive, for Andocides was vulnerable for another reason. Barring the impious from shrines was a tradition known since the days of Megacles—a matter of long-standing nomos, not any recent decree.Footnote ⁴⁷

A distinctive feature of this case, compared to the previous three, was that the defendant committed ἀσέβεια in a shrine because he had committed ἀσέβεια previously.Footnote ⁴⁸ Rather than have a contagious kind of ἀσέβεια because of an act of murder, or because of the company he kept, he had this contagion merely because he was impious. As a consequence, the link between ἀσέβεια and pollution disappeared. It is impossible to say whether this feature of the case contributed to the verdict of acquittal. This feature evidently did not trouble the prosecutor. In his peroration, he refers to it.Footnote ⁴⁹

Another offence that justified charges of ἀσέβεια, and consequent banishment from shrines, was sexual impropriety. In the course of his speech charging the defendant with an unlawful marriage, the prosecutor in Against Neaera, Apollodorus, pauses to paraphrase a law concerning adulteresses:

An adulteress, Apollodorus claims, brings ἀσέβεια into any shrine she enters, and should be summarily removed. Instead of being removed by magistrates, as is surely contemplated in the Mantinea judgement, or removed upon conviction, as is contemplated for Andocides, she may be removed by ὁ βουλóμενος.

This statement of the prosecutor is somewhat misleading. Adultery—that is, adultery committed by a citizen's wife—did not cause pollution. The ground for removal is thus ἀσέβεια alone. The defendant, however, was accused not of ἀσέβεια, but of being unlawfully married. The charge of ἀσέβεια thus had no basis.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, as a summary of the law, Apollodorus' statement is credible: besides paraphrasing the law, he asks to have it read aloud.Footnote ⁵² The reference to miasma is gratuitous, just as it is in two other forensic speeches.Footnote ⁵³

Like Diodorus and his uncle, Andocides was acquitted, but none of these defendants argued against the concept of contagion. Diodorus says that he and his uncle were innocent, not that the charge was impermissible. Andocides argued against the validity of a decree. Contagion and impiety formed part of the Athenian legal system, just as they formed part of the law of murder in Mantinea. Other than murder, the crimes that were impious and contagious were mostly leitmotifs of Greek and Athenian morality and religion—first parricide, and then the Eleusinian Mysteries. These circumstances suggest that there was some general cultural foundation for the crime of contagious ἀσέβεια.

III

Besides being a legal phenomenon, contagious ἀσέβεια was an extralegal one. It appeared when legal action was not available, or was not used, and it had an extralegal parallel, which was contagious bad luck.

As in the preceding section of this essay, murder is the place to begin. The impious murderer presented a threat not just in a shrine, but aboard a boat, a situation in which there was no immediate legal recourse.Footnote ⁵⁴ The speaker in Antiphon's first Tetralogy explains that this kind of threat came from the murderer's ‘unclean hands'.Footnote ⁵⁵ The speaker's aim, of course, is to draw a contrast between murderers and himself: ‘The opposite happened when I was around. I sailed with people who made splendid voyages.’Footnote ⁵⁶ In Plato, Euthyphro wonders whether a killer would be a threat in another enclosed place, a home. If no legal proceeding was used, he reasons, the killer would pollute the other residents.Footnote ⁵⁷ Antiphon agrees: a murderer at a dinner table, he says, is objectionable because he is ἄναγνος as well as μιαρóς, or wicked as well as polluted, and he immediately adds that the murderer is objectionable in a shrine for the same reasons.Footnote ⁵⁸ The difference was that the authorities would not eject a dinner guest.

Antiphon, however, is not confining himself to passengers or dinner guests. He is thinking of ‘many people’, including those with ‘some other pollution’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Other sources go even farther, and speak of those who suffer some misfortune but not pollution. These sources report that those who feared catching bad luck from others would ward them off. The unlucky might have suffered financially, like the lender who loses his money in Aristophanes' Clouds. Strepsiades warns him, ‘Keep your distance’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the Acharnians, Dicaeopolis speaks the same words to a blind man.Footnote ⁶¹ Euripides' Suppliants explains the reasoning behind this common, if not proverbial, phrase. When Theseus lectures Adrastus on the mistake of marrying his daughters to bellicose foreigners, the Athenian king generalizes, and says that girls should not be given bad husbands for the following reason:

Contagious misfortune must be avoided. Here lay the foundation for contagious ἀσέβεια, which was a misfortune owing to contact with serious crimes. This kind of misfortune was an example of collective responsibility for the wrongs or mishaps of individuals. There were many other examples. Without speaking of ‘fortune’ or impiety either, Hesiod says that a bad man can cause storms, earthquakes and infertility.Footnote ⁶³ This was a commonplace of Greek religion, and other ancient Mediterranean religions as well.Footnote ⁶⁴

It bears repeating that many instances of ἀσέβεια were not of this kind. To return to the two dozen reports in literary and epigraphical sources, most do not involve contagion, or the related features of murder, parricide and sexual misconduct. A group of seven involves rituals. Two of these involve the Mysteries, and four more involve misconduct during acts of sacrifice.Footnote ⁶⁵ A group of eight involves shrines. Three of these involve violence, if not murder, in shrines.Footnote ⁶⁶ Two involve plunder, but are described as ἀσέβεια, not ἱεροσυλία, and two more involve desecration of sacred objects.Footnote ⁶⁷ The last one involves misuse of dedications.Footnote ⁶⁸ The remaining four cases lack specifics.Footnote ⁶⁹

Without any identifiable exception, these ἀσέβεια trials safeguarded the performance of rituals and the integrity of shrines. Numerous inscriptions that prohibit ἀσέβεια, but do not report trials, give the same impression of practicality. Save for some mention of impiety, these inscriptions do not differ from countless others, for example, those that prohibit certain sacrificial victims.Footnote ⁷⁰ The great majority warn the public to respect graves. Some provide for fines, some for divine vengeance, and some for both.Footnote ⁷¹ Some mention neither, but fines may have been taken for granted. Divine vengeance was often taken for granted.Footnote ⁷² Because these inscriptions alternate between fines and vengeance, they illustrate the similarity between ἀσέβεια in court and ἀσέβεια outside it, in the larger world of Greek religion, but they do not involve any kind of contagion.

The meeting point between these workaday documents and the handful of instances of contagious ἀσέβεια is the use of impiety charges for extraneous purposes. One such purpose was to encourage obedience to the law or respect for customs. If the community feared the desecration of graves, but guilty parties were undeterred, a warning against ἀσέβεια would discourage them, just as ἀσέβεια charges would discourage parricide or adultery. Ἀσέβεια penalties, or penalties for similar offences, thus applied to sundry other crimes. Fragmentary regulations on Cos made some unknown offences subject to ἀσέβεια penalties.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, an Athenian regulation made those who broke rules about weights and measures subject to penalties provided by a law on κακουργία.Footnote ⁷⁴ Regulations in Iasos made those who defaced public notices subject to penalties provided by the law on ἱεροσυλία.Footnote ⁷⁵ In these cases, the community wanted some offences taken more seriously, and invoked ἀσέβεια or other crimes of moral turpitude.

Another such purpose was maintaining high standards in shrines. If priests or magistrates failed in this respect, they would face ἀσέβεια charges. A law of Lindos required priests to comply with precedent, or otherwise commit ἀσέβεια.Footnote ⁷⁶ Miletus had a similar law about πάτρια ἔθη and imposed a fine of five hundred staters.Footnote ⁷⁷ Another general rule, from Stratonicea, warned archons and public slaves to preserve traditions for singing sacrificial hymns. Otherwise they would commit ἀσέβεια.Footnote ⁷⁸ In these examples, ἀσέβεια was not contagious, but it was potentially epidemic. Wherever there was a shrine, it might arise.

A third purpose, much noticed by scholars, was to besmirch defendants, not by charging them with ἀσέβεια, but by making informal or incidental accusations of impiety while charging them with something else. If Diodorus fabricated the parricide and ἀσέβεια charges described in Against Androtion and Against Timarchus, he made accusations of this kind. Many other prosecutors did, too—Apollodorus in Against Neaera, Demosthenes in Against Meidias and Lycurgus in Against Leocrates.Footnote ⁷⁹

In sum, charges or accusations of ἀσέβεια were easy to make, not because there was much of it, or because, as scholars have said, it had many meanings, but because these charges were useful as a way of expressing disapproval of crime and of casting doubts on the accused. Besides being contagious, ἀσέβεια was sometimes convenient, not to say tempting, for both communities and prosecutors. They could transmit it, not in the sense of communicating it, but in the sense of attributing it to those who were guilty of something else. Socrates would fall victim to this aspect of ἀσέβεια.

IV

Of the charges against Socrates, one had nothing to do with contagion. In Xenophon's words, it was ‘not accepting the gods the community does'. To rebut this charge, Socrates needed to show that he obeyed the customs and regulations that were the practical manifestation of ‘acceptance’—for example, the manifold regulations on sacrifice—and Xenophon claims that he did. Had Socrates not followed these regulations, he would not have ironically said that he should be ‘punished’ by being given sacrificial meals at the Prytanium for the rest of his life. In regard to sacrifice, he was a paragon, not an offender.Footnote ⁸⁰

Another charge, ‘corrupting the young’, was a matter of contagion. In Plato, Socrates asks what this phrase means, and answers his own question by saying that ‘corrupting’ means ‘teaching’, and, in particular, teaching that ‘one should not accept the gods the city does'.Footnote ⁸¹ The defendant was rendering his own misconduct contagious. In Xenophon's Memorabilia (but not his Apology) the contagion was even more serious, for Meletus charged that Socrates taught his associates κακουργία, even though this crime, legally speaking, consisted of enslavement, theft or assault.Footnote ⁸² Meletus also charged that Socrates taught tyranny, which is to say, κακουργία in a moral or social, and not legal, sense of the word. Accusations of this kind came not only from Meletus but also from Critias, one of Socrates' pupils, who disapproved of his teaching, just as Meletus did, and drafted a law to prohibit it.Footnote ⁸³ According to Aeschines, the court convicted Socrates because he had taught tyranny to Critias.Footnote ⁸⁴

If Aeschines was right, Socrates was guilty not because of what he thought, but because of what he spread, and he was guilty even though the result, the tyranny of Critias, emerged years later. Meanwhile, the contagion was latent—an unprecedented aspect of the case. Also unprecedented was the general charge of failing to honour the gods of the community, as opposed to some specific charge, such as Andocides' entering a shrine. Besides believing Socrates guilty of a contagious sort of ἀσέβεια, the jury was willing to take these two liberties concerning the offence—to let itself be tempted, as others had been tempted.

As Dover showed, the conviction of Socrates influenced later reports of Athenian trials, and one way in which it did so was by setting a precedent for contagious ἀσέβεια. Protagoras' supposed trial, reported only in Josephus, may arise from Plato's statement that this philosopher corrupted his associates.Footnote ⁸⁵ Prodicus is another philosopher accused of ἀσέβεια and corruption by late sources.Footnote ⁸⁶ After reporting that Anaxagoras was charged with ἀσέβεια, Diodorus Siculus says that Pericles, a pupil, was caught up in the charge, as though the contagion were not genuine.Footnote ⁸⁷

The case of Aspasia is the only one that involves contagious sexual wrongdoing. Paraphrasing the comic dramatist Hermippus, Plutarch says that Aspasia procured free women for Pericles.Footnote ⁸⁸ The obscure Theoris of Lemnos, reputed to be a poisoner and a mantis, inspired the only late report of ἀσέβεια that did community-wide harm, the same as the teaching of Socrates. She taught slaves to deceive their masters.Footnote ⁸⁹

Some statements in later writers echo the trial of Socrates by taking liberties with the definition of ἀσέβεια. Plato's Laws link ἀσέβεια and κακουργία and so does Demosthenes.Footnote ⁹⁰ A passage in Demosthenes' Against Androtion ends in a crescendo of these and other offences:

A person accused of ἀσέβεια might seem guilty by association—not by the association with any fellow criminal but by the association of some crimes with others, a kind of association of ideas. If some ‘teaching’ was ‘corrupting’, some ‘theft’ was ‘impiety’ and ‘every other horror’.

This same thinking also appears in Aristotle, who says ἀσέβεια is disharmony with the gods, spirits or the dead; with parents; or with the fatherland.Footnote ⁹² In the first two categories, ἀσέβεια is partly violation of the spirit of religious regulations, and in the second and third it is κακουργία in the broad sense meant by Meletus, Plato and Demosthenes. Thanks to this conjunction of categories, a socially or morally discordant defendant could be likened to a law-breaker or a κακοῦργος. Aristophanes attacks Euripides from this angle in the Frogs. Some of the tragedian's characters encourage themselves or others to commit κακουργία, if not ἀσέβεια.Footnote ⁹³

Perhaps the most striking example of this thinking appears in a passage in Against Aristocrates. Here Demosthenes argues that convicting the innocent of murder and acquitting the guilty are both acts of impiety.Footnote ⁹⁴ He reasons that mistaken verdicts of guilty are tantamount to imitating the crime, one sort of impiety, and that mistaken verdicts of innocent are tantamount to encouraging the crime, another sort. (Only Apollodorus says anything similar, which is that it would be impious to acquit Neaera.)Footnote ⁹⁵ If Demosthenes were right, the Athenians would have had to try whole panels of fellow-citizens for ἀσέβεια. They evidently did not. Belief in invisible immaterial contagion was powerful enough to move the courts to entertain charges of ἀσέβεια, but not powerful enough to undermine the legal system.

Ἀσέβεια played a peculiar role in this system. On the one hand, it sometimes was a criminal kind of μίασμα. For that reason, it was the only crime that could be committed simply by entering a shrine. On the other hand, it was not merely a religious offence, for it served to fortify secular laws on subjects such as tyranny. It illustrated the interdependence of religious norms and the legal system.

An imperfect modern parallel for contagious ἀσέβεια is guilt by association, but guilt of a different kind from that in Demosthenes. If a notorious person enters a church, the worshippers may wish to be rid of him or her, and two of the leading reasons for the unwelcome person to be notorious may be murder and adultery. The same person would be unwelcome at dinner as well, even if he would not be noticed aboard an ocean liner or a ferry. The motive for rejecting him would be partly disgust at his crimes, and partly a wish to preserve the good reputation of others. Besides these moral and social considerations, there would be fear lest the offender bring bad luck. The difference between such situations and ἀσέβεια is that the modern community lacks legal power to act. The offender in church might be guilty of trespassing, but not of a crime of impiety, and so the congregation would have no power to sue him for this reason, still less to eject him.

In the modern case, unlike the ancient one, there is no legal rubric of impiety under which the unwanted person would fall. There never has been, for the law of the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries, never included a crime of impiety as opposed to blasphemy. (Apostasy and heresy were crimes, but almost always under ecclesiastical law as opposed to common law.)Footnote ⁹⁶ Blasphemy was a crime of wrongful speech, not a crime of misconduct; in its long history, it never involved parricide, adultery or treason.Footnote ⁹⁷ It sprang from the Mosaic injunction not to revile god, and passed into the law of Christian countries.Footnote ⁹⁸ Historically speaking, the modern English-speaking scholar of ἀσέβεια stands on the Hebrew and Christian side of a divide between two ancient concepts of religious wrongdoing, a Hebrew one concerning speech, and a Greek one concerning conduct. In the Hebrew concept, god is always listening. In the Greek concept, people are always watching.