Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias[257] in his speech against Andokides is explicit: ‘We needs must hold that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly expel a pharmakos and rid ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is.’ For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted to a very late author. Tzetzes[258] (A.D. 1150) in his _Thousand Histories_ describes it as follows: ‘The pharmakos was a purification of this sort of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of God, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other mischief, they led forth as though to a sacrifice the most unsightly of them all as a purification and a remedy to the suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed place, and gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs, and seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other wild plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of wild trees and scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, for a purification, as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, I think, Lycophron records it of the Locrian maidens, speaking somewhat after this manner, I do not remember the exact verse, “when, having consumed their limbs with fuel from fruitless trees, the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of the maidens that died on the hill of Traron.”’ Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward confused way he goes on to tell us his source—the iambic poet Hipponax. ‘And Hipponax gives us the best complete account of the custom when he says, ‘_to purify the city and strike_ (the pharmakos) _with branches_’; and in another place he says in his first iambic poem, ‘_striking him in the meadow and beating him with branches and with leeks like a pharmakos_’; and again in other places he says as follows: ‘_we must make of him a pharmakos_’; and he says, ‘_offering him figs and a barley cake and cheese such as pharmakoi eat_’; and ‘_they have long been waiting agape for them, holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do_’; and somewhere else he says in the same iambic poem, ‘_may he be parched with hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos and beaten seven times_.’ Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from Hipponax, and the words of Hipponax correspond so closely in every detail with his own account that we are justified in supposing that his account of the end of the ceremonial, the burning and scattering of the ashes, is also borrowed; but the evidence of this from Hipponax he omits.