‘Up to the hill they came, Yet in their hand No seed of burning flame, And for the Rhodian land With fireless rite The grove upon the citadel they dight.’ And the scholiast commenting on the passage says: ‘The Rhodians going up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot to take fire with them for their offerings (ἐναγίσμασι) and made a fireless sacrifice. Hence it came about that, as the Athenians were the first to sacrifice by fire, Athene thought it best to live with them.’ Athene was always a prudent goddess, ready to swim with the tide; she was ‘all for the father,’ all for the Olympians, and she had her reward. Philostratos[248] tells the same story with something more of emphasis. He contrasts the Acropolis of Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes; the Rhodians had only a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour of burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke; the goddess went to live with them because ‘they were wiser in their generation (σοφωτέρους) and good at sacrificing.’ From Diodorus[249] we learn that it was Cecrops who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens. On Cecrops were fathered many of the innovations of civilized life, among them marriage. He was halfway between the old and the new, half civilized man, half snake. He, Pausanias[250] significantly tells us, was the first to give to Zeus the name of the Highest. He too became all for the Olympian. These forms of primitive sacrifice—the _pelanos_, the barley grains, the _nephalia_, the fireless rites—have been considered at some length because, though in part they went over to the Olympians, they remain broadly speaking and in their simplest forms characteristic of the lower stratum and of the worship of underworld spirits. Moreover it is these primitive rites which were, as will later be seen, taken up and mysticized by the religion of Orpheus. It remains to consider the second and by far the most important element in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the ceremony of the Pharmakos. THE PHARMAKOS. That the leading out of the _pharmakos_ was a part of the festival of the Thargelia we know from Harpocration[251]. He says in commenting on the word: ‘At Athens they led out two men to be purifications for the city; it was at the Thargelia, one was for the men and the other for the women.’ These men, these pharmakoi, whose function it was to purify the city, were, it will later be seen, in all probability put to death, but the expression used by Harpocration is noteworthy—they were led out. The gist of the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it occurs, is incidental.