This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out in a ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch[274] himself, when he was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has left us the account. A household slave was taken and ceremonially beaten with rods of agnus castus—again a plant of cathartic quality—and driven out of doors to the words, ‘Out with hunger, in with wealth and health.’ The ceremony was called the ‘expulsion of hunger,’ and Plutarch speaks of it as an ‘ancestral sacrifice.’ It was performed by each householder for his own house, and by the archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch was archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name of the ‘ceremony’ is instructive, it is ἐξέλασις, riddance, expulsion, not as the pharmakos was, καθαρμός, purification; both are called θυσίαι, sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage when every religious ceremony is regarded as of the nature of burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of the pharmakos was taken on by Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ‘expulsion’ there is no pretence that any god is worshipped; the performance remains frankly magical. At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At Delphi a pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in which the victim was merely a puppet. In his 12th _Greek Question_ Plutarch asks, ‘What is Charila among the Delphians?’ His answer is as follows: ‘Concerning Charila they tell a story something on this wise. The Delphians were afflicted by a famine following after a drought. They came to the gates of the king’s palace with their children and their wives to make supplication. And the king distributed grain and pulse to the noblest of them as there was not enough for all. And there came a little girl who had lost both her father and mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his shoe and threw the shoe into her face. Now she was poor and desolate but of noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her girdle and hanged herself. As the famine went on and pestilence was added thereto, the Pythia gave an oracle to the king that he must appease Charila, a maiden who had died by her own hand. After some difficulty they found out that this was the name of the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice which had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they still perform every nine years.’ The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account for certain features in an established ritual. The expression Plutarch uses, a ‘sacrifice with admixture of purification’ (μεμιγμένην τινὰ καθαρμοῦ θυσίαν), is interesting because it shows that though by his time almost every religious ceremony was called a θυσία, his mind is haunted by the feeling that the Charila ceremony was in reality a purification, a καθαρμός; he would have been nearer the truth had he said it was a ‘purification containing in it a certain element of sacrifice.’