Κάθαρμα

"Aren't you going to waste the offscourings, he said, and go away from us?"¹ Aristophanes says [this]. For the purification of a city they used to kill some adorned [animal],² which they called katharma.³
"And then he drags [Tithonus] into court and interrogates [him], setting traps [made] of words."⁴ There are two ways to construe this: all in one,⁵ and [= or] again [with] an apostrophe after the r, [to produce] skanda/lhqr’ i(sta\s. Those who prefer the all in one [option] explain it as follows: the word comes from the phrase [to\ i(sta/nai ta\ skanda/lhqra, namely] the perches of the traps, because when they are triggered they close and hold in [the trap] which fell in. And the sense [is]: after dragging [Tithonus] before the tribunal he asks us [to be] co-advocates for himself and hunters of words. For the hyperbaton⁶ [would be] as follows: "then after dragging us into court and interrogating us he put out traps". *skanda/lhqra is the name for the small bent wooden sticks in the traps, into which they fit, and which Archilochos [calls] r(o/ptron.⁷ So [Aristophanes] is saying here fixings and weights of words.