were more
forcibly localized, as well as identified with the presence and
keeping of the statue. To the Athenians, when they went forth on the
following morning, each man seeing the divine guardian at his doorway
dishonored and defaced, and each man gradually coming to know that the
devastation was general--it would seem that the town had become, as it
were, god-less--that the streets, the market-place, the porticoes were
robbed of their divine protectors, and what was worse still, that
these protectors, having been grossly insulted, carried away with them
alienated sentiments--wrathful and vindictive instead of tutelary and
sympathizing. It was on the protection of the gods that all their
political constitution as well as the blessings of civil life
depended; insomuch that the curses of the gods were habitually invoked
as sanction and punishment for grave offenses, political as well as
others; an extension and generalization of the feeling still attached
to the judicial oath. This was, in the minds of the people of Athens,
a sincere and literal conviction--not simply a form of speech to be
pronounced in prayers and public harangues, without being ever
construed as a reality in calculating consequences and determining
practical measures. Accordingly, they drew from the mutilation of the
Hermae the inference, not less natural than terrifying, that heavy
public misfortune was impending over the city, and that the political
constitution to which they were attached was in imminent danger of
being subverted.

Such was the mysterious incident which broke in upon the eager and
bustling movement of Athens, a few days before the Sicilian
expedition was starting. In reference to that expedition, it was
taken to heart as a most depressing omen. It would doubtless have been
so interpreted, had it been a mere undesigned accident happening to
any venerated religious object--just as we are told that similar
misgivings were occasioned by the occurrence, about this same time, of
the melancholy festival of the Adonia, wherein the women loudly
bewailed the untimely death of Adonis. The mutilation of the Hermae,
however, was something much more ominous than the worst accident. It
proclaimed itself as the deliberate act of organized conspirators, not
inconsiderable in number, whose names and final purpose were indeed
unknown, but who had begun by committing sacrilege of a character
flagrant and unheard of. For intentional mutilation of a p