PHOCION’S DISGRACE
The Macedonian Clitus was instructed to convey them to Athens as prisoners under a guard. Mournful was the spectacle as they entered the city; being carried along the Ceramicus in carts, through sympathising friends and an embittered multitude, until they reached the theatre, wherein the assembly was to be convened.
The common feeling of antipathy against him burst out into furious manifestations. Agnonides the principal accuser, supported by Epicurus and Demophilus, found their denunciations welcomed and even anticipated, when they arraigned Phocion as a criminal who had lent his hand to the subversion of the constitution, to the sufferings of his deported fellow-citizens, and to the holding of Athens in subjection under a foreign potentate; in addition to which, the betrayal of Piræus to Nicanor constituted a new crime—fastening on the people the yoke of Cassander, when autonomy had been promised to them by the recent imperial edict. After the accusation was concluded, Phocion was called on for his defence; but he found it impossible to obtain a hearing. Attempting several times to speak, he was as often interrupted by angry shouts; several of his friends were cried down in like manner; until at length he gave up the case in despair, and exclaimed:
“For myself, Athenians, I plead guilty; I pronounce against myself the sentence of death for my political conduct; but why are you to sentence these men near me, who are not guilty?”
Greek Terra-cotta Jar
(In the British Museum)
“Because they are your friends, Phocion,” was the exclamation of those around. Phocion then said no more; while Agnonides proposed a decree, to the effect that the assembled people should decide by show of hands, whether the persons now arraigned were guilty or not; and that if declared guilty, they should be put to death. Some persons present cried out that the penalty of torture ought to precede death: but this savage proposition, utterly at variance with Athenian law in respect to citizens, was repudiated not less by Agnonides than by the Macedonian officer Clitus. The decree was then passed; after which the show of hands was called for. Nearly every hand in the assembly was held up in condemnation; each man even rose from his seat to make the effect more imposing; and some went so far as to put on wreaths in token of triumph.
After sentence, the five condemned persons, Phocion, Nicocles, Thudippus, Hegemon, and Pythocles, were consigned to the supreme magistrates of Police, called the Eleven, and led to prison for the purpose of having the customary dose of poison administered. Hostile bystanders ran alongside, taunting and reviling them. It is even said that one man planted himself in the front, and spat upon Phocion; who turned to the public officers and exclaimed, “Will no one check this indecent fellow?” This was the only emotion which he manifested; in other respects, his tranquillity and self-possession were resolutely maintained, during this soul-subduing march from the theatre to the prison, amidst the wailings of his friends, the broken spirit of his four comrades, and the fiercest demonstrations of antipathy from his fellow-citizens generally. One ray of comfort presented itself as he entered the prison. It was the day on which the Knights celebrated their festal procession with wreaths on their heads in honour of Zeus. Several of these horsemen halted in passing, took off their wreaths, and wept as they looked through the gratings of the prison.
Being asked whether he had anything to tell his son Phocus, Phocion replied: “I tell him emphatically, not to hold evil memory of the Athenians.” The draught of hemlock was then administered to all five—to Phocion last. Having been condemned for treason, they were not buried in Attica; nor were Phocion’s friends allowed to light a funeral pile for the burning of his body; which was carried out of Attica into the Megarid, by a hired agent named Conopion, and there burned by fire obtained at Megara. The wife of Phocion, with her maids, poured libations and marked the spot by a small mound of earth; she also collected the bones and brought them back to Athens in her bosom, during the secrecy of night. She buried them near her own domestic hearth, with this address: “Beloved Hestia, I confide to thee these relics of a good man. Restore them to his own family vault, as soon as the Athenians shall come to their senses.”[43]
After a short time (we are told by Plutarch) the Athenians did thus come to their senses. They discovered that Phocion had been a faithful and excellent public servant, repented of their severity towards him, celebrated his funeral obsequies at the public expense, erected a statue in his honour, and put to death Agnonides by public judicial sentence; while Epicurus and Demophilus fled from the city and were slain by Phocion’s son.
These facts are ostensibly correct; but Plutarch omits to notice the real explanation of them. Within two or three months after the death of Phocion, Cassander, already in possession of Piræus and Munychia, became also master of Athens; the oligarchical or Phocionic party again acquired predominance; Demetrius the Phalerean was recalled from exile, and placed to administer the city under Cassander, as Phocion had administered it under Antipater.
We cannot indeed read without painful sympathy the narrative of an old man above eighty,—personally brave, mild, and superior to all pecuniary temptation, so far as his positive administration was concerned,—perishing under an intense and crushing storm of popular execration. But when we look at the whole case—when we survey, not merely the details of Phocion’s administration, but the grand public objects which those details subserved, and towards which he conducted his fellow-citizens—we shall see that this judgment is fully merited. In Phocion’s patriotism—for so doubtless he himself sincerely conceived it—no account was taken of Athenian independence; of the autonomy or self-management of the Hellenic world; of the conditions, in reference to foreign kings, under which alone such autonomy could exist. He had neither the Panhellenic sentiment of Aristides, Callicratidas, and Demosthenes, nor the narrower Athenian sentiment, like the devotion of Agesilaus to Sparta, and of Epaminondas to Thebes. To Phocion it was indifferent whether Greece was an aggregate of autonomous cities, with Athens as first or second among them, or one of the satrapies under the Macedonian kings. Now this was among the most fatal defects of a Grecian public man.
It was precisely during the fifty years of Phocion’s political and military influence, that the Greeks were degraded from a state of freedom, into absolute servitude. In so far as this great public misfortune can be imputed to anyone man—to no one was it more ascribable than to Phocion. He was strategus during most of the long series of years when Philip’s power was growing; it was his duty to look ahead for the safety of his countrymen, and to combat the yet immature giant. He heard the warnings of Demosthenes, and he possessed exactly those qualities which were wanting to Demosthenes—military energy and aptitude. Had he lent his influence to inform the short-sightedness, to stimulate the inertia, to direct the armed efforts, of his countrymen, the kings of Macedon might have been kept within their own limits, and the future history of Greece might have been altogether different. Unfortunately, he took the opposite side. He acted with Æschines and the Philippisers; without receiving money from Philip, he did gratuitously all that Philip desired—by nullifying and sneering down the efforts of Demosthenes and the other active politicians. After the battle of Chæronea, Phocion received from Philip first, and from Alexander afterwards, marks of esteem not shown towards any other Athenian. This was both the fruit and the proof of his past political action—anti-Hellenic as well as anti-Athenian.
Having done much, in the earlier part of his life, to promote the subjugation of Greece under the Macedonian kings, he contributed somewhat, during the latter half, to lighten the severity of their dominion; and it is the most honourable point in his character that he always refrained from abusing their marked favour towards himself, for purposes either of personal gain or of oppression over his fellow-citizens. Alexander not only wrote letters to him, even during the plenitude of imperial power, in terms of respectful friendship, but tendered to him the largest presents—at one time the sum of one hundred talents [£20,000 or $100,000]; at another time the choice of four towns on the coast of Asia Minor, as Xerxes gave to Themistocles. He even expressed his displeasure when Phocion, refusing everything, consented only to request the liberation of three Grecian prisoners confined at Sardis. The intense and unanimous wrath of the people against him is an instructive, though a distressing spectacle. It was directed, not against the man or the administrator—for in both characters Phocion had been blameless, except as to the last collusion with Nicanor in the seizure of the Piræus—but against his public policy. It was the last protest of extinct Grecian freedom, speaking as it were from the tomb in a voice of thunder, against that fatal system of mistrust, inertia, self-seeking, and corruption, which had betrayed the once autonomous Athens to a foreign conqueror.[e]