ZBORNIK - Matica srpska

the miasma that is for impurities, incurred by their forefathers, as it
happened in the house of Atreus or the line of Sagara.
Where miasma is not incurred but inherited the penalty is no
less severe on that account. And as the individual has no choice but
to accept his situation and attempt to free himself at any cost.
In fact, Antigone lived with pollution which was caused by her
father's action but not to rebel against the situation or think of herself
as different from her family. The misfortune was her portion
(moira), just as it was for Orestes, or just as it was an inherited
duty of Janamejaya to avenge himself over the serpent Takshaka.
The tragic situation that Orestes or Antigone find themselves in is
without any error (koros, hamartia or hubris) on their part. It was
their moira to inherit the pollution. Just as menos or inspiration is
from without, so is miasma. The early Indo-European strain of
thought gives too little choice to the individual. Recalling the situation
at the outset of the great war in the Mahabharata, overcome
with the prospect of killing his kith and kin Arjuna was impelled by
his mentor to take up arms as he was a caste warrior and as not to
fight would only mean lasting infamy. For Arjuna, then, as much
for Achilles the demands of time are supreme. Public esteem again
forces Rama to desert Sita. Tragedy then, or at least the situation of
reversal of fortune (peripeteia) is not to be attributed to any logic
human or divine, the least to any cosmic justice. That the human
condition be related to some sort of cosmic justice is only a wish
which is stated in Aeschylus, and other tragedians. They basically
accept the visitation of pollution to be as arbitrary as the flow of
wind or the eruptlon of a volcano. In the later classical period in
Greece and in the Smriti period of Indian cultural development individual
choice, responsibility and interpretation of dharma or moira
begin to take place. The concept of pollution and its cure also
comes to be questioned. Doubts are expressed if sacrificial blood
can wash away the impurity. Heraklitus and other Ionian philosophers
raised doubts that may have led to the decline of earlier ritual.
In India similar doubts were raised by the Buddhist and Jain
thinkers which led to the decline of sacrificial immolation in Vedic
yajnas.
However, miasma, its katharsis and tragedy belong to an age
when individual responsibility had not been socially accepted. Tragedy,
thus, only selects that situation of fortune reversal, that visitation
of miasma, where there can be a concentration upon the pathetic
feeling. Here pathos is great because of the helplessness of the
situation and the very near innocence of the protagonist. This kind
of tragedy is very different from the tragedy of Christian era, where
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