While Philip marched straight from Pheræ to Thermopylæ,—and while the Athenian envoys returned to Athens,—Phokian deputies visited Athens also, to learn the last determination of the Athenian people, upon which their own destiny turned. Though Philip, on reaching the neighborhood of Thermopylæ, summoned the Phokian leader, Phalækus to surrender the pass, and offered him terms,—Phalækus would make no reply until his deputies returned to Athens.[898] These deputies, present at the public assembly of the 16th Skirrophorion, heard the same fallacious assurances as before respecting Philip’s designs, repeated by Philokrates and Æschines with unabated impudence, and still accepted by the people. But they also heard, in the very same assembly, the decree proposed by Philokrates and adopted, that unless the Phokians restored the Delphian temple forthwith to the Amphiktyons, the Athenian people would compel them to do so by armed force. If the Phokians still cherished hopes, this conditional declaration of war, from a city which still continued by name to be their ally, opened their eyes, and satisfied them that no hope was left except to make the best terms they could with Philip.[899] To defend Thermopylæ successfully without Athens, much more against Athens, was impracticable.
Leaving Athens after the assembly of the 16th Skirrophorion, the Phokian deputies carried back the tidings of what had passed to Phalækus, whom they reached at Nikæa, near Thermopylæ, about the 20th of the same month.[900] Three days afterwards, Phalækus, with his powerful army of eight thousand or ten thousand mercenary infantry and one thousand cavalry, had concluded a convention with Philip. The Lacedæmonian auxiliaries, perceiving the insincere policy of Athens, and the certain ruin of the Phokians, had gone away a little before.[901] It was stipulated in the convention that Phalækus should evacuate the territory, and retire wherever else he pleased, with his entire mercenary force and with all such Phokians as chose to accompany him. The remaining natives threw themselves upon the mercy of the conqueror.
All the towns in Phokis, twenty-two in number, together with the pass of Thermopylæ, were placed in the hands of Philip; all surrendering at discretion; all without resistance. The moment Philip was thus master of the country, he joined his forces with those of the Thebans, and proclaimed his purpose of acting thoroughly upon their policy; of transferring to them a considerable portion of Phokis; of restoring to them Orchomenus, Korsiæ, and Koroneia, Bœotian towns which the Phokians had taken from them; and of keeping the rest of Bœotia in their dependence, just as he found it.[902]
In the meantime, the Athenians, after having passed the decree above mentioned, re-appointed (in the very same assembly of the 16th Skirrophorion, June), the same ten envoys to carry intelligence of it to Philip, and to be witnesses of the accomplishment of the splendid promises made in his name. But Demosthenes immediately swore off, and refused to serve; while Æschines, though he did not swear off, was nevertheless so much indisposed, as to be unable to go. This at least is his own statement; though Demosthenes affirms that the illness was a mere concerted pretence, in order that Æschines might remain at home to counterwork any reaction of public feeling at Athens, likely to arise on the arrival of the bad news, which Æschines knew to be at hand, from Phokis.[903] Others having been chosen in place of Æschines and Demosthenes,[904] the ten envoys set out, and proceeded as far as Chalkis in Eubœa. It was there that they learned the fatal intelligence from the main land on the other side of the Eubœan strait. On the 23d of Skirrophorion, Phalækus and all the Phokian towns had surrendered; Philip was master of Thermopylæ, had joined his forces with the Thebans, and proclaimed an unqualified philo-Theban policy; on the 27th of Skirrophorion, Derkyllus, one of the envoys, arrived in haste back at Athens, having stopped short in his mission on hearing the facts.
At the moment when he arrived, the people were holding an assembly in the Peiræus, on matters connected with the docks and arsenal; and to this assembly, actually sitting, Derkyllus made his unexpected report.[905] The shock to the public of Athens was prodigious. Not only were all their splendid anticipations of anti-Theban policy from Philip (hitherto believed and welcomed by the people on the positive assurances of Philokrates and Æschines) now dashed to the ground—not only were the Athenians smitten with the consciousness that they had been overreached by Philip, that they had played into the hands of their enemies the Thebans, and that they had betrayed their allies the Phokians to ruin—but they felt also that they had yielded up Thermopylæ, the defence at once of Attica and of Greece, and that the road to Athens lay open to their worst enemies the Thebans, now aided by Macedonian force. Under this pressure of surprise, sorrow, and terror, the Athenians, on the motion of Kallisthenes, passed these votes:—To put the Peiræus, as well as the fortresses throughout Attica, in immediate defence—To bring within these walls, for safety, all the women and children, and all the movable property, now spread abroad in Attica—To celebrate the approaching festival of the Herakleia, not in the country, as was usual, but in the interior of Athens.[906]
Such were the significant votes, the like of which had not been passed at Athens since the Peloponnesian war, attesting the terrible reaction of feeling occasioned at Athens by the disastrous news from Phokis. Æschines had now recovered from his indisposition; or (if we are to believe Demosthenes) found it convenient to lay aside the pretence. He set out as self-appointed envoy, without any new nomination by the people—probably with such of the Ten as were favorable to his views—to Philip and to the joint Macedonian and Theban army in Phokis. And what is yet more remarkable, he took his journey thither through Thebes itself;[907] though his speeches and his policy had been for months past (according to his own statement) violently anti-Theban;[908] and though he had affirmed (this, however, rests upon the testimony of his rival) that the Thebans had set a price upon his head. Having joined Philip, Æschines took part in the festive sacrifices and solemn pæans celebrated by the Macedonians, Thebans and Thessalians,[909] in commemoration and thanksgiving for their easy, though long-deferred, triumph over the Phokians, and for the conclusion of the Ten-Years Sacred War.
Shortly after Philip had become master of Thermopylæ and Phokis, he communicated his success in a letter to the Athenians. His letter betokened a full consciousness of the fear and repugnance which his recent unexpected proceedings had excited at Athens:[910] but in other respects, it was conciliatory and even seductive; expressing great regard for them as his sworn allies, and promising again that they should reap solid fruits from the alliance. It allayed that keen apprehension of Macedonian and Theban attack, which had induced the Athenians recently to sanction the precautionary measures proposed by Kallisthenes. In his subsequent communications also with Athens, Philip found his advantage in continuing to profess the same friendship and to intersperse similar promises;[911] which, when enlarged upon by his partisans in the assembly, contributed to please the Athenians and to lull them into repose, thus enabling him to carry on without opposition real measures of an insidious or hostile character. Even shortly after Philip’s passage of Thermopylæ, when he was in full coöperation with the Thebans and Thessalians, Æschines boldly justified him by the assertion, that these Thebans and Thessalians had been too strong for him, and had constrained him against his will to act on their policy, both to the ruin of the Phokians and to the offence of Athens.[912] And we cannot doubt that the restoration of the prisoners taken at Olynthus, which must soon have occurred, diffused a lively satisfaction at Athens, and tended for the time to countervail the mortifying public results of her recent policy.
Master as he now was of Phokis, at the head of an irresistible force of Macedonians and Thebans, Philip restored the Delphian temple to its inhabitants, and convoked anew the Amphiktyonic assembly, which had not met since the seizure of the temple by Philomelus. The Amphiktyons reassembled under feelings of vindictive antipathy against the Phokians, and of unqualified devotion to Philip. Their first vote was to dispossess the Phokians of their place in the assembly as one of the twelve ancient Amphiktyonic races, and to confer upon Philip the place and two votes (each of the twelve races had two votes) thus left vacant. All the rights to which the Phokians laid claim over the Delphian temple were formally cancelled. All the towns in Phokis, twenty-two in number, were dismantled and broken up into villages. Abæ alone was spared; being preserved by its ancient and oracular temple of Apollo, and by the fact that its inhabitants had taken no part in the spoliation of Delphi.[913] No village was allowed to contain more than fifty houses, nor to be nearer to another than a minimum distance of one furlong. Under such restriction, the Phokians were still allowed to possess and cultivate their territory, with the exception of a certain portion of the frontier transferred to the Thebans;[914] but they were required to pay to the Delphian temple an annual tribute of fifty talents, until the wealth taken away should have been made good. The horses of the Phokians were directed to be sold; their arms were to be cast down the precipices of Parnassus, or burnt. Such Phokians as had participated individually in the spoliation, were proclaimed accursed, and rendered liable to arrest wherever they were found.[915]
By the same Amphiktyonic assembly, farther, the Lacedæmonians, as having been allies of the Phokians, were dispossessed of their franchise, that is, of their right to concur in the Amphiktyonic suffrage of the Dorian nation. This vote probably emanated from the political antipathies of the Argeians and Messenians.[916]
The sentence, rigorous as it is, pronounced by the Amphiktyons against the Phokians, was merciful as compared with some of the propositions made in the assembly. The Œtæans went so far as to propose, that all the Phokians of military age should be cast down the precipice; and Æschines takes credit to himself for having induced the assembly to hear their defence, and thereby preserved their lives.[917] But though the terms of the sentence may have been thus softened, we may be sure that the execution of it by Thebans, Thessalians, and other foreigners quartered on the country,—all bitter enemies of the Phokian name, and giving vent to their antipathies under the mask of pious indignation against sacrilege,—went far beyond the literal terms in active cruelty. That the Phokians were stripped and slain[918]—that children were torn from their parents, wives from their husbands, and the images of the gods from their temples,—that Philip took for himself the lion’s share of the plunder and movable property,—all these are facts naturally to be expected, as incidental to the violent measure of breaking up the cities and scattering the inhabitants. Of those, however, who had taken known part in the spoliation of the temple, the greater number went into exile with Phalækus; and not they alone, but even all such of the moderate and meritorious citizens as could find means to emigrate.[919] Many of them obtained shelter at Athens. The poorer Phokians remained at home by necessity. But such was the destruction inflicted by the conquerors, that even two or three years afterwards, when Demosthenes and other Athenian envoys passed through the country in their way to the Amphiktyonic meeting at Delphi, they saw nothing but evidences of misery; old men, women and little children, without adults,—ruined houses, impoverished villages, half-cultivated fields.[920] Well might Demosthenes say that events more terrific and momentous had never occurred in the Grecian world, either in his own time or in that of his predecessors.[921]