Interesting note, Jasun. I wouldn’t normally respond here except that you tagged me, since I haven’t read the sources you cite closely and generally prefer to follow my own perception wherever it leads rather than adjudicate secondary debates.

From my perspective, however, the victim of the mob never vanishes. Under Christianity - especially via the logic of privatio boni - one’s darkness is suppressed into the unconscious, where it then leaks out and is projected onto the Other for destruction. Christianity is laudable insofar as it appears to abrogate the scapegoat mechanism at the moral level, but at a deeper psychological and social level it largely shifts and disguises it.

Under pre-Christian paganism, the scapegoat mechanism was more direct and more openly acknowledged. Because this world is fundamentally predatory - one must consume other living beings in order to survive - and because human societies are structured by ruthless status competition, there will always be victims of the social process. What changes historically is not the existence of sacrifice, but how honestly it is seen and owned. From that angle, figures like Apollonius are less interesting as heroes or villains than as expressions of a world that still acknowledged sacrifice as part of cosmic and social reality, whereas later moral systems often deny sacrifice while continuing to produce it.