The procession to the sea was called by the somewhat singular name ἔλασις, ‘driving’ or ‘banishing[391],’ and the word is instructive. The procession was not a mere procession, it was a driving out, a banishing. This primary sense seems to lurk in the Greek word πομπή[392], which in primitive days seems to have mainly meant a conducting out, a sending away of evil. The bathing in the sea was a purification, a conducting out, a banishing of evil, and each man took with him his own pharmakos, a young pig. The ἔλασις, the driving, may have been literally the driving of the pig, which, as the goal was some 6 miles distant, must have been a lengthy and troublesome business. Arrived at the sea, each man bathed with his pig—the pig of purification was itself purified. When in the days of Phocion[393] the Athenians were compelled to receive a Macedonian garrison, terrible portents appeared. When the ribbons with which the mystic beds were wound came to be dyed, instead of taking a purple colour they came out of a sallow death-like hue, which was the more remarkable as when it was the ribbons belonging to private persons that were dyed, they came out all right. And more portentous still—‘when a mystic was bathing his pig in the harbour called Kantharos, a sea-monster ate off the lower part of his body, by which the god made clear beforehand that they would be deprived of the lower parts of the city that lay near the sea, but keep the upper portion.’ [Illustration: FIG. 14.] The pig of purification was a ritual element, so important that when Eleusis was permitted (B.C. 350-327) to issue her autonomous coinage[394] it is the pig that she chooses as the sign and symbol of her mysteries. The bronze coin in fig. 14 shows the pig standing on the torch: in the _exergue_ an ivy spray. The pig was the cheapest and commonest of sacrificial animals, one that each and every citizen could afford. Socrates in the _Republic_[395] says ‘if people are to hear shameful and monstrous stories about the gods it should be only rarely and to a select few in a mystery, and they should have to sacrifice not a (mere) pig but some huge and unprocurable victim.’