The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a vicarious sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that his life is a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom his lot would necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, an incarnate pollution; the educated who believe no such nonsense know that the kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is worse than death. Moreover nearly every civilized state to this day offers ‘human sacrifice’ in the shape of the criminals it executes. Why not combine religious tradition with a supposed judicial necessity? Civilized Athens had its barathron; why should civilized Athens shrink from annually utilizing two vicious and already condemned criminals to ‘purify the city’? The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to death in civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly subordinate one. It has only been discussed in detail because the answer that we return to it depends in great measure on how far we realize the primary gist of a pharmakos, i.e. the two notions of (_a_) the _physicalness_, the actuality of evil, and (_b_) the possibility of contagion and transfer. Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to be unduly influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape-goat. We remember how ‘The scape-goat stood all skin and bone _While moral business, not his own,_ _Was bound about his head_.’ And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents us from realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more primitive physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in this moralized Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a sacrifice proper; its sending away was _preceded by sacrifice_. The priest ‘made an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year,’ and when the sacrifice of bullock and goat and the burning of incense, and the sprinkling of blood was over, then and not till then the live goat was presented to the Lord[273]. The Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that the burden laid upon the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence or famine, but rather the burden of moral guilt. ‘And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’ But so close is the connection of moral and physical that even here, where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, there is evident danger of infection; the goat is sent forth into a land not inhabited and it would be manifestly undesirable that he should return. At Athens we hear of no confession of sins, it is famine and pestilence from which a terror-stricken city seeks riddance.