On the first day of the Thargelia, a festival of Apollo at Athens, two men, the pharmakoi, were led out as if to be sacrificed as an expiation.
Compton surveys important poets who were exiled, executed or suffered unjust trials, either in history, legend or Greek or Indo-European myth.
Walter Burkert and René Girard have written influential modern interpretations of the pharmakos rite.
Burkert shows that humans were sacrificed or expelled after being fed well, and, according to some sources, their ashes were scattered to the ocean.
[2] Some scholars have connected the practice of ostracism, in which a prominent politician was exiled from Athens after a vote using pottery pieces, with the pharmakos custom.