Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion

Robert Parker's Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, published by Oxford University Press in 1983, is the standard scholarly study of pollution and its ritual removal in ancient Greek religion, including rites that stood outside the ordinary sacrificial system. Its strength is that it remains, more than four decades on, the standard reference cited across classical scholarship on Greek religious purity. Its limit is that its focus is specifically Greek religious pollution and purification, so a claim about comparable purity concepts in a different ancient Mediterranean religion needs a source addressing that tradition directly rather than this study of Greece.