It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi beaten, in order to ‘stimulate their powers of fertility.’ In a sense this is ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and misleading emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten partly to drive out evil influences, partly, it should not be forgotten, to relieve the feelings of the beaters. When the evil influences are beaten out, the god will undoubtedly do better next time, but it is only in this sense that the powers of fertility are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance. He is utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is doomed to death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already discussed (p. 51), the women are struck by the _februum_ as a fertility charm, but even here the primary notion must have been the expulsion of evil influences. The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial. Aristophanes[266] makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed Xanthias, and the real Xanthias makes answer: ‘Oh, in the usual way, but when you beat him Don’t do it with a leek or a young onion.’ Here undoubtedly the meaning is, ‘don’t let this be a merely ceremonial beating, a religious performance,’ and the allusion gains in point by the fact that the supposed slave was a real god to be treated worse than a pharmakos. Lucian[267] says that the Muses, he is sure, would never deign to come near his vulgar book-buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of myrtle they will beat him with myrrh and mallow and _get rid of him_, so that he may not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar book-buyer is a pharmakos. We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was beaten; was he also put to death? Tzetzes, as has been seen, states that he was burnt with the wood of certain fruitless trees, and that his ashes were scattered to the sea and the winds. The scholiast on Aristophanes[268] also states expressly that by δημόσιοι, i.e. people fed and kept at the public expense, was meant ‘those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi purified cities by their slaughter.’ So far his statement is of the most general character, and it need not have been inferred that he was speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ‘for the Athenians maintained certain very ignoble and useless persons, and on the occasion of any calamity befalling the city, I mean a pestilence or anything of that sort, they sacrificed these persons with a view to purification from pollution and they called them purifications’ (καθάρματα). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was excessively ungainly (ἀμορφότερον), the scholiast, worthless and useless. Aristophanes himself regarded them as the ‘scum’ of humanity.