LUSTRATION, a term that includes all the methods of purification and expiation among the Greeks and Romans. Among the Greeks two ideas prevailed; that human nature must purify itself (K6.0apacs) from guilt before it is fit to enter into com munion with God or even to associate with men, and that guilt must be expiated voluntarily (iXaa Os) by certain processes which God has revealed. The methods of purification consist in ceremonies performed with water, fire, air or earth, or with a branch of a sacred tree, especially of the laurel, and also in sacrifice and other ceremonial. The torch and sulphur (so Oeiov) were also powerful purifying agents. Purification by air was most frequent in the Dionysiac mysteries; puppets suspended and swinging in the air (oscilla) formed one way of using the lustrative power of the air. Rubbing with sand and salt was another method. The sacrifice chiefly used for purification by the Greeks was a pig; among the Romans it was always, except iri the Lupercalia, a pig, a sheep and a bull (suovetaurilia). On extraordinary oc casions lustrations were performed for a whole city. So Athens
was purified by Epimenides after the Cylonian massacre, and Delos in the Peloponnesian War (426 B.c.) to stop the plague and appease the wrath of Apollo. In Rome, besides such annual ceremonies as the Ambarvalia, Lupercalia, Cerealia, Paganalia, etc., there was a lustration of the fleet before it sailed, and of the army before it marched.
See C. F. Hermann, Griechische Altertiimer, ii. ; G. F. Schomann, ib. ii., J. Donaldson, "On the Expiatory and Substitutionary Sacrifices of the Greeks," in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, xxvii. (1876) ; Marquardt, Ramische Staatsverwaltung, iii. p. 200 (1885) ; P. Stengel, Die griechischen Kultusaltertiimer (1898) ; J. E. Sandys, Companion to Latin Studies, with bibliography (1925) and the articles by A. Bouche-Leclercq in Daremberg and Saglio, Diction naire des Antiquites, and by W. Warde Fowler in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (3rd ed., 1891).