 According to the scholiast on Lucian, during the Thesmophoria pigs were sacrificed, and their remains were put into pits called "megara".An inscription from Delos shows that part of the cost of the Thesmophoria there went towards paying for a ritual butcher to perform the sacrifices for the festival; literary evidence suggests that in other places, however, the sacrifices may have been made by the women themselves.Some time later, the rotten remains of these sacrifices were retrieved from the pits by "bailers" – women who were required to spend three days in a state of ritual purity before descending into the "megara".