This summons, pregnant with momentous results both to Athens and to
her enemies, arose out of the mutilation of the Hermæ, described a
few pages back, and the inquiries instituted into the authorship
of that deed, since the departure of the armament. The extensive
and anxious sympathies connected with so large a body of departing
citizens, combined with the solemnity of the scene itself, had for
the moment suspended the alarm caused by that sacrilege; but it
speedily revived, and the people could not rest without finding out
by whom the deed had been done. Considerable rewards, one thousand
and even ten thousand drachms, were proclaimed to informers; of whom
others soon appeared, in addition to the slave Andromachus, before
mentioned. A metic named Teukrus had fled from Athens, immediately
after the event, to Megara, from whence he sent intimation to the
senate at Athens that he had himself been a party concerned in the
recent sacrilege concerning the mysteries, as well as cognizant of
the mutilation of the Hermæ, and that, if impunity were guaranteed
to him, he would come back and give full information. A vote of
the senate was immediately passed to invite him. He denounced by
name eleven persons as having been concerned, jointly with himself,
in the mock-celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, and eighteen
different persons, himself not being one, as the violators of the
Hermæ. A woman named Agaristê, daughter of Alkmæonidês,—these names
bespeak her great rank and family in the city,—deposed farther that
Alkibiadês, Axiochus, and Adeimantus, had gone through a parody of
the mysteries in a similar manner, in the house of Charmidês. And
lastly Lydus, slave of a citizen named Phereklês, stated that the
like scene had been enacted in the house of his master in the deme
Thêmakus, giving the names of the parties present, one of whom—though
asleep, and unconscious of what was passing—he stated to be Leogoras,
the father of Andokidês.[290] Of the parties named in these different
depositions, the greater number seem to have fled from the city at
once; but all who remained were put into prison to stand future
trial.[291] Those informers received the promised rewards, after
some debate as to the parties entitled to receive the reward; for
Pythonikus, the citizen who had produced the slave Andromachus,
pretended to the first claim, while Androkles, one of the senators,
contended that the senate collectively ought to receive[292] the
money; a strange pretension, which we do not know how he justified.
At last, however, at the time of the Panathenaic festival,
Andromachus the slave received the first reward of ten thousand
drachms; Teukrus the metic, the second reward of one thousand drachms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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