The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, and did the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and on Tzetzes alone, we might be inclined to question it. A better authority is preserved for us by Harpocration[269]; he says, ‘Istros (_circ._ B.C. 230), in the first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says that Pharmakos is a proper name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred _phialae_ belonging to Apollo, and was taken and stoned by the men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at the Thargelia are mimetic representations of these things.’ The aetiology of Istros is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the ceremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to death. That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human pharmakos was actually put to death scarcely admits of doubt: that Istros believed this took place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in honour of Apollo may be _inferred_ from his aetiology. There still remains in the minds of some a feeling that the Athens of the fifth century was too civilized a place to have suffered the actual death of human victims, and that periodically, as part of a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was indicated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a θυσία, a burnt sacrifice; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern sense at all, though, as will later be shown, it was one of the diverse notions that went to the making of the ancient idea of sacrifice.