CONFEDERACY AGAINST MACEDONIA
[331-330 B.C.]
It is beyond question that Persian gold, imputed by all writers, greatly promoted the Persian interest. It appears to have been after the disastrous battle of Arbela, when the Persian monarch’s hope even of personal safety depended on opportunity to raise new enemies to Alexander, that he found means to make remittances to Greece. Æschines, uncontradicted by Demosthenes, stated before the assembled Athenian people, as a matter publicly known and not to be gainsaid, that a present to them of three hundred talents (about sixty thousand pounds) was offered in the name of the king of Persia. The prevalence of Phocion’s party however at the time sufficed to procure a refusal of the disgraceful offer.
But in Peloponnesus the Persian party, under the lead of the king of Lacedæmon, for whom there was no difficulty in taking subsidies from the Persian court, obtained superiority. Argos and Messenia were inveterately hostile to Lacedæmon, and were indeed neither by bribes nor threats to be gained. But all Elis, all Arcadia, except Megalopolis, and all Achaia, one small town only refusing, renounced the confederacy under the lead of Macedonia, and joined Lacedæmon in war, equally against Macedonia and all Grecian republics which might adhere to the confederacy. Beyond the peninsula the opposite politics generally prevailed; though in Athens Phocion’s party could do no more than maintain nominal adherence to engagement, and a real neutrality; the weight of the party of Demosthenes sufficing to prevent any exertion against the Lacedæmonian league.
That league however was not of such extent that it could be hoped, with the civic troops only of the several states, to support war against the general confederacy under the lead of Macedonia; and those states were not of wealth to maintain any considerable number of those, called mercenaries, ready to engage with any party. Nevertheless mercenary troops were engaged for that league, to the number, if the contemporary orator Dinarchus should be trusted, of ten thousand—Persia supplying the means, as Æschines, still uncontradicted by Demosthenes, affirms; and another source is hardly to be imagined. With such preparation and such support Agis ventured to commence offensive war. A small force of the opposing Peloponnesian states was overborne and destroyed or dispersed; siege was laid to the only adverse Arcadian city, Megalopolis, and its fall was expected daily.
Alexander was then in pursuit of Darius. Accounts of him received in Greece of course would vary: some reported him in the extreme north of Asia; others in India. Meanwhile revolt in Thessaly and Perrhæbia, excited by the able intrigues of Demosthenes, and, according to Diodorus,[c] also in Thrace, distressed Antipater; while it was a most imperious duty upon him, as vicegerent of the head of the Grecian confederacy, to protect the members of that confederacy, apparently the most numerous part of the nation, against the domestic enemy, supported by the great foreign enemy who threatened them.