The _Flight-Ceremony_ recorded by Plutarch[287] is specially instructive, and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the Bouphonia, is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th _Greek Question_, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals celebrated every eighth year at Delphi was one called _Stepterion_[288], and in another discourse (_De defect. orac._ XIV.) he describes the rite practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological mythology that it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. This much is clear; every eighth year a hut (καλιάς) was set up about the threshing-floor at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore more resemblance to a kingly palace than to a snake’s lair; we may therefore safely infer that it held a snake. A boy with both his parents alive was led up by a certain prescribed way[289] with lighted torches; fire was set to the hut, a table overturned, and the celebrants took flight without looking back through the gates of the precinct; afterwards the boy went off to Tempe, fasted, dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in solemn procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake, but as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of the slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may be inferred. Plutarch is of course _more suo_ shocked at the idea that Apollo could need purification, and at a loss to account decently for the curious ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark: ‘finally the wanderings and the servitude of the boy and the purifications at Tempe raise a suspicion of some great pollution and deed of daring’ (μεγάλου τινὸς ἄγους καὶ τολμήματος ὑποψίαν ἔχουσι). This hits the mark: a sacred snake has been slain; the slayer has incurred an ἄγος, from which he must be purified. The slaying is probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to the hut with all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the purpose; but the τόλμημα, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an ἄγος, so he must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or sacred ox, or human victim, the procedure is the same. * * * * * To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony of the pharmakos is briefly this: the gist of the pharmakos rite is physical purification, καθαρμός, and this notion, sometimes alone, sometimes combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is the idea underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to call Human Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in a primitive state of civilization the line between human and animal ‘sacrifice’ is not sharply drawn. KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.