If we could imagine the excitement of a Spanish or Italian town, on finding that all the images of the Virgin had been defaced during the same night, we should have a parallel to what was now felt at Athens--where religious associations and persons were far more intimately allied with all civil acts and with all the proceedings of every-day life--where, too, the god and his efficiency 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.