The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal importance. It was a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of the flute. Hesychius[261] says, ‘The song of the branches is a measure that they play on the flute when the pharmakoi are expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig sprigs. The pharmakos was actually called “he of the branches.”’ It must have been a matter of very early observation that beating is expulsive. You beat a bush, a bird escapes; you beat a garment, the dust comes out; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will surely emerge. We associate beating with moral stimulus, but the first notion is clearly expulsive. Probably some notion of the application or instigation of good as well as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be conjectured from the fact that rods made of special plants and trees were used, notably leeks and fig-trees. Plants with strong smells, and plants the eating of which is purgative, are naturally regarded as ‘good medicine’; as expulsive of evil, and hence in a secondary way as promotive of good. Pythagoras[262] taught that to have a leek hung up over a doorway was a good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and Dioscorides[263] records the same belief. Lucian[264] makes Menippus relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was ‘purged and wiped clean and consecrated with leek and torches.’ The _locus classicus_ on beating with leek is of course the beating of the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus[265] makes Simichidas sing: ‘Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be Then never shall the boys of Arcady Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting When scanty meat is left for offering; If not, thy skin with nails be flayed and torn And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.’ And the scholiast remarks, ‘they say that a festival was held in Arcadia in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the officials sacrificed a small victim, and there was not enough to eat for the worshipper; or the Arcadians when they went out hunting if they had good sport paid honour to Pan; if the reverse they maltreated him with leeks because, being a mountain god, he had power over the produce of the chase.’ The first explanation confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right. Pan is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his business.