Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/374

 *casional calamity, but annually as part of the Thargelia, and was therefore associated with Apollo.

All this evidence, with corroboration from other sources than those to which I have referred, has recently been set forth by Miss Harrison, who certainly has made out a strong case for the view which she thus summarises: 'The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion .' In other words, the pharmakos was treated as an incarnation of the polluting influence from which the city was suffering; and his expulsion (which only incidentally involved his death) was the means of purification.

But there are certain points in the practice which incline me to put forward another view of the pharmakos. His mission undoubtedly was to purify the city; but the question to my mind is whether he was expelled as a personification of the pollution or was led out and despatched to the other world as a messenger on the city's behalf to petition Apollo or some other deity for purification from the defilement.

It might, I think, have been this Greek rite which was present to Herodotus' mind when he was describing human sacrifice among the Getae. He was apparently familiar, we saw, with the conception of the human victim as a messenger; and the contrasts in method which seem to have struck him most would certainly have been provided by the ceremony of the pharmakos. The Getae chose the victim by lot from among themselves; the Athenians apparently selected some deformed or criminal slave—one of the very scum of the population. The Getae impaled their messenger upon the spears of warriors; the Athenians treated the pharmakos as a burnt-sacrifice. The Getae entrusted their messages to the victim before he was slain; did the Athenians perchance whisper their petitions for purification in the ear of the dead pharmakos as he lay on the pyre? Was he the messenger whose treatment Herodotus had in mind?

There are certain points in the ritual itself which make for that view. The pharmakos was maintained for a time at the public