The playwright Euripides, inspired by this outrageous act, writes and stages Trojan Women before his fellow Athenians, attacking Athenian cruelty in his pathos-ridden antiwar drama in which the women and children of the Trojan royal family are variously murdered or enslaved by the victorious Achaean Greeks led by Odysseus and Agamemnon. (One can likely still see this compelling tragedy being performed somewhere; powerful antiwar plays are seldom long out of fashion.)

In an different arena, the ever-mercurial Alcibiades had meanwhile restored his reputation by entering seven chariots at Olympia and taking first, second, and fourth places.

His newly improved stature makes it easier for him in the following year to persuade the Athenians, over the opposition of Nicias, to send a major military expedition to Sicily to help Ionians and non-Greeks against the rising power of Syracuse.

Alcibiades is appointed to share the command with the great general Lamachus and a reluctant Nicias.

Shortly before the expedition is due to sail, however, the hermae (busts of Hermes, messenger of Zeus and patron of all who use the roads, set up in public places throughout the city) are found to have been mutilated.

In the ensuing panic, Alcibiades is accused of being the originator of the sacrilege as well as of having profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries.

He demands an immediate inquiry, but his enemies, led by Androcles (Hyperbolus's successor, and a demagogue in the same mold), ensure that he sails with the charge still hanging over him.