In the summer of 415 BC, the city was in the midst of preparations for a massive
naval attack on Sicily. While the fleet was getting ready to depart, the city experienced,
in the words of one of our sources, ‘‘a number of inauspicious signs and portents’’
(Plutarch,Alcibiades18.2). Of these, one that generated a particularly heightened
response was the celebration of the Adonia:
In many places in the city, images of the god were being laid out for burial and funeral
rites were being held for them, accompanied by the wailing cries of the women, so that
all those who cared for things such as these were troubled, fearing that the mighty
expedition, equipped with such brilliance and vitality, might wither away in its prime and
come to nothing. (Plutarch,Nicias13.7; cf.Alcibiades18.2–3)This reaction involved an extraordinary inversion of the status of Adonis. As a foreign
deity worshiped in a curious manner, he was normally a marginal figure, perhaps even
the most marginalized of all the beings worshiped in the city. Yet in the summer of
415 the women’s lamentations over this youth, who died in his prime, contributed to
the sense of unease over the fate of the fleet.
These feelings were compounded by an audacious act of impiety (asebe ̄ma) that
stunned the city. Such was its impact that it was interpreted not only as a bad omen
for the expedition, but as a conspiracy against the entire democratic system. One
morning, close to the time when the fleet was due to depart, the people woke up to
find that most of their herms had been vandalized. Damaging any statue would be an
act of impiety, but these mutilations were especially sacrilegious. As we have seen, the
statues were found in porches, where they served the purpose of protecting temples
and houses. What the perpetrators did was to attack the deity who protected the
places where gods and people dwelt.
The seriousness of the act becomes further apparent when we consider Hermes’
divine roles. He was the mediator who presided over boundaries, including two that
were especially inauspicious in the circumstances: the passage of souls from this world
to the underworld, and travel in general. To compound matters, he was the messen-
ger of the gods who was thought to intervene between the human and divine worlds,
and thereby help maintain a healthy relationship with the gods. In other words, the
vandalism had ramifications for the whole channel of communication with the gods
that Athenian religion provided. As Grote wrote, an equivalent would be a Spanish or
Italian town having all its images of the Virgin defaced: in effect leaving the town
‘‘godless’’ (1855:168).
There was an immediate and extreme response to the sacrilege. The demos offered
financial rewards and immunity from prosecution for anyone who could supply
details about any other acts of impiety. And they found one in particular when
information was received that groups of aristocrats, among them Alcibiades and
another prominent citizen, Andocides, had been conducting performances of the
Eleusinian Mysteries in private houses. These were, in the words of theHomeric
Hymn to Demeter, ‘‘the awful mysteries that are not to be transgressed, pried into, or
divulged, for reverence for the gods checks the voice’’ (478–9). Yet, as set out in one
of the speeches of Lysias (probably written for a prosecution of Andocides in 400 or
399 BC for a separate offence):
The Religious System at Athens 233