#is Liber according to the scholia

[deathlessathanasia]

"Then her (the witch Erictho's) voice, more powerful than any herb to bewitch the powers of Lethe, began to utter dissonant cries, far different from any human speech. The dog’s yowl, the wolf’s howl, were there, the restless barn-owl’s hoot, and the screech-owl’s call, beasts’ wails and shrieks, the hissing of snakes, they were all expressed within; and the roar of waves beating on rocks, the forest’s moan, the thunder through a rift in the cloud, all such things formed that single voice. Next she began a Thessalian spell, in accents that penetrated Tartarus: ‘You Furies, and you Stygian horrors, you torments of the guilty, and you, Chaos, ready to confound innumerable worlds in ruin; and you, ruler of the world below, a god whom lingering Death torments through long centuries; and Styx, and that Elysium no Thessalianwitch deserves; and Persephone who shuns her mother in heaven; and the third form of our patroness, Hecate, through whom the shades and I converse silently; and the Janitor of the wide realm, who throws men’s flesh to the savage hound; and the Sisters who must re-spin the thread of life; and you, ancient ferryman of the fiery wave, weary of rowing shades back to me: hear my prayer! If I invoke you with sufficiently foul and impious lips; if I never chant these spells fasting from human flesh; if I have often slit open those breasts filled with divinity, and laved them with warm brains; if any infant whose head and organs were laid on your platters might prevail with you, grant me my request. …

With this, foaming at the mouth, she raised her head to find the shade of the unburied dead close beside her. It feared the lifeless corpse, the loathsome confinement of its former prison; it shrank from entering the gaping breast, the flesh and innards ruined by the mortal wound. Oh wretched ghost, iniquitously robbed of death’s final gift, that is: to die no more! Erictho marvelled that fate could be delayed so, and enraged by the dead she lashed the inert corpse with a live serpent, and through the clefts where the earth had been split by her spells she growled like a dog at the shades below and shattering the silence of their realm, cried: ‘Tisiphone and Megaera, unheeding of my voice, will you not drive the unhappy spirit with your cruel whips from the void of Erebus? Or shall I summon you by your secret names, Hounds of Hell, and render you helpless in the light above; there to keep you from graves and funerals; banish you from tombs, drive you from urns of the dead. And you, Hecate, all pale and withered in form, who paint your face before you visit the gods above, I will show them you as you are, and prevent you altering your hellish form. I shall speak aloud about that food which confines Proserpine beneath the vast weight of earth above, by what compact she loves the gloomy king of darkness, what defilement she suffered such that you Ceres would not recall her. I shall burst your caves asunder, Ruler of the Underworld, and admit light instantly to blast you. Will you obey me? Or shall I call on one at the sound of whose name earth ever quakes and trembles, who views the Gorgon’s head without its veil, who lashes the cowering Fury with her own whip, who dwells in Tartarus beyond your sight, for whom you are the gods above, who swears by Styx while perjuring himself.’"

- Lucan, Pharsalia, Book VI

First, Erictho is genuinely terrifying and makes my skin crawl, I recommend reading the full section she appears in. Second, I find it funny when people claim that the Romans ruined Hades and Persephone's beautiful and consensual romance considering that the idea of Persephone/Proserpina refusing to leave her husband for her mother and the… stuff in this particular passage come from Roman sources.

[zahut]

Do you believe Hipponax is a pharmakos?

Well the Greek ritual scapegoat is a complex religio-historical phenomenon. The pharmakos was a human embodiment of evil who was expelled from the Greek city at moments of crisis and disaster. The name is probably, but problematically, connected with pharmakon, ‘medicine, drug, poison’. Both poison and drug were originally magical; so a pharmakon is a magical dose (Greek dosis ‘gift, dose’, cf. the German Gift ‘poison’) causing destruction or healing. On the one hand, the pharmakos could be the medicine that heals the city (according to scholia on Aristophanes Knights 1136c, the pharmakos is used in order to obtain a therapeia—‘service, tending, medical treatment’—for the prevailing disaster); on the other, he could be the poison that had to be expelled from the system (he is often ugly or criminal—just like Hipponax, but hold on). Thus these two interpretations are not exclusive. Sometimes the pharmakos crisis was real (such as a plague or famine), as at Massilia (“for the Massilians, as often as they were suffering from the plague…”) and Colophon (“either famine or plague or another harm”). Sometimes it was a periodic calendrical moment of crisis, as in the Attic Thargelia, when the city had to be cleansed before the first fruits of the harvest could be stored up.

Hipponax was an iambic satirist second only to Archilochus in fame, and his traditional life shares important themes with Archilochus’ (for example, causing death through satire). Like Archilochus, he is an exiled poet. Hipponax is of special interest because he is the earliest extant witness for the pharmakos rite. It is striking that an exiled, death-dealing blame poet should be our earliest source for the pharmakos ritual; this poetic pharmakos uses the scapegoat custom in order to practice blame, to make someone else a pharmakos. Hipponax was a satirist whose abuse was, if anything, even more extreme than that of Archilochus. One poem is a perfect verbal mirroring of physical aggression: “Take my clothes, I’ll punch Bupalus in the eye. For I’m ambidextrous, and I don’t miss when I hit.” As is often the case for blame poets, the curse plays a prominent part in his work. Hipponax is our source for the tune played by flutes “when the pharmakoi (plural of pharmakos) were being led out” (τοῖς ἐκπεμπομένοις φαρμακοῖς, 152–153W/146Dg). So, yes, Hipponax, the blame poet, is a pharmakos—as well as our primary early source for the pharmakos, for he uses pharmakos imagery to attack his poetic targets, as Aristophanes would do later. Yet the poet himself is reportedly ugly and deformed. He is a blame poet who in legend kills through his satire after he himself is unjustly satirized; he uses the curse liberally in his poetry. He is exiled after conflict with political leaders; and in a poem he portrays himself as a pharmakos who is stoned.