Some days before the fleet was to have sailed, when everyone was up and about betimes, and full of eager preparation, it was discovered by someone who had gone first abroad that one and then another of these statues had been shamefully cut and disfigured. Dismayed and horrified, those who first heard of it spread the dreadful news about the town. Then, by degrees, the fact was realized that not one or two, but almost every image of the god before the temples and the houses, as well as at the cross-roads, had been treated in the same disgraceful, sacrilegious manner, and in many instances reduced to a mere shapeless block of stone. To understand the great horror of the people, we must recollect how religious feeling in a Greek permeated his whole being, lived in his life, his thoughts, his actions, and, as it were, controlled him; how it was closely bound up with the state political; how he believed that the gods were incorporated with the city; how the deity, too, was almost identical, and embodied with his statue. To do reverence to the statue was to reverence the god; the reverse had never been conceived as possible. Astonishment was soon turned to indignation. Rumour ran wild. The timid, the more religious, the superstitious, feared the wrath of Heaven, the destruction of the state. Others saw in it the work of traitors in their midst. It was the work of secret emissaries of Syrakuse, or of Korinth, the parent country of the Syrakusan colony. Or it was a party of the citizens, too cowardly to oppose openly the Sicilian expedition, who had thus attempted to turn men’s thoughts away from the great enterprise; or perhaps it was a deep-seated plan of the ever-suspected oligarchs to overthrow the democratic Constitution. All were, at any rate, agreed that, whoever the sacrilegious culprits were, their punishment should be exemplary, so that the anger of the gods might be averted and the honour of the city vindicated. The Senate immediately met and appointed three citizens, whom they called ‘searchers,’ to sift the matter to the bottom, and report to the Assembly. The perpetrators of the outrage, it was evident, must be very numerous. It was impossible that a few conspirators could, in one short summer’s night, have worked this havoc on hundreds of the cherished effigies. Rewards were offered, and other inducements were held out to all men of whatever rank, even to slaves, to give any information which might lead to the discovery of participators in the abomination. Even pardon was assured to an accomplice who should inform against his co-conspirators.