predominance of the various favorable religious signs and prophecies, there were also some unfavorable. Usually, on all public matters of risk or gravity, there were prophets who gave assurances in opposite ways: those which turned out right were treasured up: the rest were at once forgotten, or never long remembered.[241] [239] Thucyd. vi, 26. I do not trust the statement given in Æschinês, De Fals. Legat. c. 54, p. 302, and in Andokidês, De Pace, sect. 8, that seven thousand talents were laid by as an accumulated treasure in the acropolis during the Peace of Nikias, and that four hundred triremes, or three hundred triremes, were newly built. The numerous historical inaccuracies in those orations, concerning the facts prior to 400 B.C., are such as to deprive them of all authority, except where they are confirmed by other testimony; even if we admitted the oration ascribed to Andokidês as genuine, which in all probability it is not. But there exists an interesting Inscription which proves that the sum of three thousand talents at least must have been laid by, during the interval between the conclusion of the Peace of Nikias and the Sicilian Expedition, in the acropolis; and that over and above this accumulated fund, the state was in condition to discharge, out of the current receipts, various sums which it had borrowed during the previous war from the treasury of various temples, and seems to have had besides a surplus for docks and fortifications. The Inscription above named records the vote passed for discharging these debts, and for securing the sums so paid in the opisthodomus, or back-chamber, of the Parthenon, for account of those gods to whom they respectively belonged. See Boeckh’s Corp. Inscr. part ii, Inscr. Att. No. 76, p. 117; also the Staats-haushaltung der Athener of the same author, vol. ii, p. 198. This Inscription belongs unquestionably to one of the years between 421-415 B.C., to which year we cannot say. [240] Thucyd. vi, 31; Diodor. xiii, 2, 3. [241] Plutarch (Nikias, c. 12, 13; Alkibiad. c. 17). Immediately after the catastrophe at Syracuse, the Athenians were very angry with those prophets who had promised them success (Thucyd. viii, 1). After between two and three months of active preparations, the expedition was almost ready to start, when an event happened which fatally poisoned the prevalent cheerfulness of the city. This was the mutilation of the Hermæ, one of the most extraordinary events in all Grecian history.