Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/189

171 HERM.E MUTILATED BY CONSPIRATORS. 171 indeed unknown, but who had begun by committing sacrilege of a character flagrant and unheard of. For intentional mutilation of a public and sacred statue, where the material afforded no temptation to plunder, is a case to which we know no parallel : much more mutilation by wholesale, spread by one band and in one night throughout an entire city. Though neither the parties concerned, nor their purposes, were ever more than partially made out, the concert and conspiracy itself is unquestionable. It seems probable, as far as we can form an opinion, that the conspirators had two objects, perhaps some of them one and some the other : to ruin Alkibiades, to frustrate or delay the expedition. How they pursued the former purpose, Avili be presently seen : towards the latter, nothing was ostensibly done, but the position of Teukrus, and other metics implicated, renders it more likely that they were influenced by sympathies with Corinth and Megara, 1 prompting them to intercept an expedition which was > .pposed to promise great triumphs to Athens, rather than cor- rupted by the violent antipathies of intestine politics. Indeed, the two objects were intimately connected with each other ; for the prosecution of the enterprise, while full of prospective conquest to Athens, Avas yet more pregnant with future power and wealth to Alkibiades himself. Such chances would disappear if the ex- pedition could be prevented ; nor was it at all impossible that the Athenians, under the intense impression of religious terror conse- quent on the mutilation of the Hermse, might throw up the scheme altogether. Especially Nikias, exquisitely sensitive in his own 'Plutarch, Alkib. c. 18; Pseudo-Plutarch, Vit. X, Orator, p. 834, who professes to quote from Kratippus, an author nearly contemporary. The Pseudo-Plutarch, however, asserts, what cannot be true, that the Corin- thians employed Leontine and Egestaean agents to destroy the Hermae. The Leontines and Egcstccans were exactly the parties who had greatest interest in getting the Sicilian expedition to start : they are the last persona whom the Corinthians would have chosen as instruments. The fact is, that no foreigners could well have done the deed : it required great familiarity with all the buildings, highways, and byways of Athens. The Athenian Philochorus (writing about the date 3 10-2 80 B.C.) ascribed the mutilation of the Hermaj to the Corinthians ; if we may believe the scholiast on Aristophanes ; who, however, is not very careful, since ho tells us that TJiucydidis ascribed that act to Alkibiades and his friends ; which is not true (P:ulochor. Frag. 110, cd. Didot ; Schol. Aristoph. Lysistr. 1094)