a person chosen at regular intervals, or as a consequence of some catastrophic epidemic or famine, who was ritually burdened with the impurities of the entire community and then driven across the frontier--if he was not actually killed and his ashes thrown in the sea.
This person is thought of as both the source of the trouble and the pharmakos , i.e. the medicine, the curative charm. ( from Bourgead, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. ) To take a prominent legendary pharmakos, we may look at Oedipus. Here the crime of the hero — the murder of his father, creates ritual pollution . This causes a communal disaster, in the form of plague and famine. Oedipus the king sends to the Delphic oracle Though there is no trial per se in the myth, there is a legal investigation, headed up by Oedipus himself, that eventually convicts him of the crime. Oedipus expels himself voluntarily from Thebes (eventually). He is the king, the best. but he turns out to be a patricide, the worst, undergoes a peripety, and is expelled from the city. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, he wishes for stoning, he is viewed as a sacrifice. He eventually receives hero cult, and like Androgeus, becomes a revenant. This is a typical legendary pharmakos pattern, which is characterized by the bestness, the royalty, of the hero, his simultaneous worstness and encapsulation of worstness, the voluntary expulsion, and hero cult. [75]