n able, either then or since,
to say for certain who did the deed. However this may be, the other
found arguments to persuade him, that even if he had not done it, he
ought to save himself by gaining a promise of impunity, and free the
state of its present suspicions; as he would be surer of safety if he
confessed after promise of impunity than if he denied and were brought
to trial. He accordingly made a revelation, affecting himself and others
in the affair of the Hermae; and the Athenian people, glad at last, as
they supposed, to get at the truth, and furious until then at not being
able to discover those who had conspired against the commons, at once
let go the informer and all the rest whom he had not denounced, and
bringing the accused to trial executed as many as were apprehended, and
condemned to death such as had fled and set a price upon their heads.
In this it was, after all, not clear whether the sufferers had been
punished unjustly, while in any case the rest of the city received
immediate and manifest relief.

To return to Alcibiades: public feeling was very hostile to him, being
worked on by the same enemies who had attacked him before he went out;
and now that the Athenians fancied that they had got at the truth of
the matter of the Hermae, they believed more firmly than ever that
the affair of the mysteries also, in which he was implicated, had been
contrived by him in the same intention and was connected with the plot
against the democracy. Meanwhile it so happened that, just at the time
of this agitation, a small force of Lacedaemonians had advanced as far
as the Isthmus, in pursuance of some scheme with the Boeotians. It was
now thought that this had come by appointment, at his instigation, and
not on account of the Boeotians, and that, if the citizens had not
acted on the information received, and forestalled them by arresting the
prisoners, the city would have been betrayed. The citizens went so far
as to sleep one night armed in the temple of Theseus within the walls.
The friends also of Alcibiades at Argos were just at this time suspected
of a design to attack the commons; and the Argive hostages deposited in
the islands were given up by the Athenians to the Argive people to be
put to death upon that account: in short, everywhere something was found
to create suspicion against Alcibiades. It was therefore decided to
bring him to trial and execute him, and the Salaminia was sent to Sicily
for him