The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically certain, on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be forgotten, for it was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius[252] says in his life of Socrates: ‘He was born on the 6th day of Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city.’ The pharmakos is not expressly named, but it will be seen in the sequel that the cleansing of the city by the expulsion of the pharmakos was regarded as _the_ typical purification of the whole year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when the nature of the rites has been examined[253]. The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, but I think frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. It appears at first sight to involve what we in our modern terminology call ‘Human Sacrifice.’ To be told that this went on in civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.C. shocks our preconceived notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely to do or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the difficulty in one of two ways: either we try to relegate the ceremony of the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, or we so modify and mollify its main issues as to make it unmeaning. The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. We have to determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, and next, did that ceremonial last on into historic times? My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence that it did last on into the 5th century B.C., but that, if the gist of the ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori difficulty about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty being removed, we shall accept an overwhelming probability. The evidence for the historical pharmakos is just as good as e.g. the evidence for the chewing of the buckthorn at the Anthesteria. It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the human scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible notion, was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic literature practically proverbial. Aristophanes[254] wants to point the contrast between the old mint of sterling state officials and the new democratic coinage: he says, now-a-days we fill offices by ‘Any chance man that we come across, Not fit in old days for a pharmakos, These we use And these we choose, The veriest scum, the mere refuse,’ and again in a fragment[255]: ‘_Your_ kinsman! how and whence, you pharmakos,’ and in the _Knights_[256] Demos says to Agoracritos: ‘I bid you take the seat In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos Was wont to sit.’ Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ‘offscouring’ (κάθαρμα), a current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt.