“The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.”

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 58, Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity.

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James Frazer50

Scottish social anthropologist 1854–1941

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