It is said that Phokion and Demades heard these terms with satisfaction, as lenient and reasonable. Xenokrates entered against them the strongest protest which the occasion admitted, when he said[768]—“If Antipater looks upon us as slaves, the terms are moderate; if as freemen, they are severe.” To Phokion’s entreaty, that the introduction of the garrison might be dispensed with, Antipater replied in the negative, intimating that the garrison would be not less serviceable to Phokion himself than to the Macedonians; while Kallimedon also, an Athenian exile there present, repelled the proposition with scorn. Respecting the island of Samos, Antipater was prevailed upon to allow a special reference to the imperial authority.
If Phokion thought these terms lenient, we must imagine that he expected a sentence of destruction against Athens, such as Alexander had pronounced and executed against Thebes. Under no other comparison can they appear lenient. Out of 21,000 qualified citizens of Athens, all those who did not possess property to the amount of 2000 drachmæ were condemned to disfranchisement and deportation. The number below this prescribed qualification, who came under the penalty, was 12,000, or three-fifths of the whole. They were set aside as turbulent, noisy democrats; the 9000 richest citizens, the “party of order”, were left in exclusive possession, not only of the citizenship, but of the city. The condemned 12,000 were deported out of Attica, some to Thrace, some to the Illyrian or Italian coast, some to Libya or the Kyrenaic territory. Besides the multitude banished simply on the score of comparative poverty, the marked anti-Macedonian politicians were banished also, including Agnonides, the friend of Demosthenes, and one of his earnest advocates when accused respecting the Harpalian treasures.[769] At the request of Phokion, Antipater consented to render the deportation less sweeping than he had originally intended, so far as to permit some exiles, Agnonides among the rest, to remain within the limits of Peloponnesus.[770] We shall see him presently contemplating a still more wholesale deportation of the Ætolian people.
It is deeply to be lamented that this important revolution, not only cutting down Athens to less than one-half of her citizen population, but involving a deportation fraught with individual hardship and suffering, is communicated to us only in two or three sentences of Plutarch and Diodorus, without any details from contemporary observers. It is called by Diodorus a return to the Solonian constitution; but the comparison disgraces the name of that admirable lawgiver, whose changes, taken as a whole, were prodigiously liberal and enfranchising, compared with what he found established. The deportation ordained by Antipater must indeed have brought upon the poor citizens of Athens a state of suffering in foreign lands analogous to that which Solon describes as having preceded his Seisachtheia, or measure for the relief of debtors.[771] What rules the nine thousand remaining citizens adopted for their new constitution, we do not know. Whatever they did, must now have been subject to the consent of Antipater and the Macedonian garrison, which entered Munychia, under the command of Menyllus, on the twentieth day of the month Boedromion (September), rather more than a month after the battle of Krannon. The day of its entry presented a sorrowful contrast. It was the day on which, during the annual ceremony of the mysteries of Eleusinian Demeter, the multitudinous festal procession of citizens escorted the god Iacchus from Athens to Eleusis.[772]
One of the earliest measures of the nine thousand was, to condemn to death, at the motion of Demades, the distinguished anti-Macedonian orators who had already fled—Demosthenes, Hyperides, Aristonikus, and Himeræus, brother of the citizen afterwards celebrated as Demetrius the Phalerean. The three last having taken refuge in Ægina, and Demosthenes in Kalauria, all of them were out of the reach of an Athenian sentence, but not beyond that of the Macedonian sword. At this miserable season, Greece was full of similar exiles, the anti-Macedonian leaders out of all the cities which had taken part in the Lamian war. The officers of Antipater, called in the language of the time the Exile-Hunters,[773] were everywhere on the look-out to seize these proscribed men; many of the orators, from other cities as well as from Athens, were slain; and there was no refuge except the mountains of Ætolia for any of them.[774] One of these officers, a Thurian named Archias, who had once been a tragic actor, passed over with a company of Thracian soldiers to Ægina, where he seized the three Athenian orators—Hyperides, Aristonikus, and Himeræus—dragging them out of the sanctuary of the Æakeion or chapel of Æakus. They were all sent as prisoners to Antipater, who had by this time marched forward with his army to Corinth and Kleonæ in Peloponnesus. All were there put to death, by his order. It is even said, and on respectable authority, that the tongue of Hyperides was cut out before he was slain; according to another statement, he himself bit it out—being put to the torture, and resolving to make revelation of secrets impossible. Respecting the details of his death, there were several different stories.[775]
Having conducted these prisoners to Antipater, Archias proceeded with his Thracians to Kalauria in search of Demosthenes. The temple of Poseidon there situated, in which the orator had taken sanctuary, was held in such high veneration, that Archias, hesitating to drag him out by force, tried to persuade him to come forth voluntarily, under promise that he should suffer no harm. But Demosthenes, well aware of the fate which awaited him, swallowed poison in the temple, and when the dose was beginning to take effect, came out of the sacred ground, expiring immediately after he had passed the boundary. The accompanying circumstances were recounted in several different ways.[776] Eratosthenes (to whose authority I lean) affirmed that Demosthenes carried the poison in a ring round his arm; others said that it was suspended in a linen bag round his neck; according to a third story, it was contained in a writing-quill, which he was seen to bite and suck, while composing a last letter to Antipater. Amidst these contradictory details, we can only affirm as certain, that the poison which he had provided beforehand preserved him from the sword of Antipater, and perhaps from having his tongue cut out. The most remarkable assertion was that of Demochares, nephew of Demosthenes, made in his harangues at Athens a few years afterwards. Demochares asserted that his uncle had not taken poison, but had been softly withdrawn from the world by a special providence of the gods, just at the moment essential to rescue him from the cruelty of the Macedonians. It is not less to be noted, as an illustration of the vein of sentiment afterwards prevalent, that Archias the Exile-Hunter was affirmed to have perished in the utmost dishonor and wretchedness.[777]
The violent deaths of these illustrious orators, the disfranchisement and deportation of the Athenian Demos, the suppression of the public Dikasteries, the occupation of Athens by a Macedonian garrison, and of Greece generally by Macedonian Exile-Hunters—are events belonging to one and the same calamitous tragedy, and marking the extinction of the autonomous hellenic world. Of Hyperides as a citizen we know only the general fact, that he maintained from first to last, and with oratorical ability inferior only to Demosthenes, a strenuous opposition to Macedonian dominion over Greece; though his prosecution of Demosthenes respecting the Harpalian treasure appears (as far as it comes before us) discreditable. Of Demosthenes we know more—enough to form a judgment of him both as citizen and statesman. At the time of his death he was about sixty-two years of age, and we have before us his first Philippic, delivered thirty years before (352-351 B. C.). We are thus sure, that even at that early day, he took a sagacious and provident measure of the danger which threatened Grecian liberty from the energy and encroachments of Philip. He impressed upon his countrymen this coming danger, at a time when the older and more influential politicians either could not or would not see it; he called aloud upon his fellow-citizens for personal service and pecuniary contributions, enforcing the call by all the artifices of consummate oratory, when such distasteful propositions only entailed unpopularity upon himself. At the period when Demosthenes first addressed these earnest appeals to his countrymen, long before the fall of Olynthus, the power of Philip, though formidable, might have been kept perfectly well within the limits of Macedonia and Thrace; and would probably have been so kept, had Demosthenes possessed in 351 B. C. as much public influence as he had acquired ten years afterwards, in 341 B. C.
Throughout the whole career of Demosthenes as a public adviser, down to the battle of Chæroneia, we trace the same combination of earnest patriotism with wise and long-sighted policy. During the three years’ war which ended with the battle of Chæroneia, the Athenians in the main followed his counsel; and disastrous as were the ultimate military results of that war, for which Demosthenes could not be responsible—its earlier periods were creditable and successful, its general scheme was the best that the case admitted, and its diplomatic management universally triumphant. But what invests the purposes and policy of Demosthenes with peculiar grandeur, is, that they were not simply Athenian, but in an eminent degree Panhellenic also. It was not Athens only that he sought to defend against Philip, but the whole hellenic world. In this he towers above the greatest of his predecessors for half a century before his birth—Perikles, Archidamus, Agesilaus, Epaminondas; whose policy was Athenian, Spartan, Theban, rather than hellenic. He carries us back to the time of the invasion of Xerxes and the generation immediately succeeding it, when the struggles and sufferings of the Athenians against Persia were consecrated by complete identity of interest with collective Greece. The sentiments to which Demosthenes appeals throughout his numerous orations, are those of the noblest and largest patriotism; trying to inflame the ancient Grecian sentiment, of an autonomous hellenic world, as the indispensable condition of a dignified and desirable existence[778]—but inculcating at the same time that these blessings could only be preserved by toil, self-sacrifice, devotion of fortune, and willingness to brave hard and steady personal service.
From the destruction of Thebes by Alexander in 335 B. C., to the Lamian war after his death, the policy of Athens neither was nor could be conducted by Demosthenes. But, condemned as he was to comparative inefficacy, he yet rendered material service to Athens, in the Harpalian affair of 324 B. C. If, instead of opposing the alliance of the city with Harpalus, he had supported it as warmly as Hyperides—the exaggerated promises of the exile might probably have prevailed, and war would have been declared against Alexander. In respect to the charge of having been corrupted by Harpalus, I have already shown reasons for believing him innocent. The Lamian war, the closing scene of his activity, was not of his original suggestion, since he was in exile at its commencement. But he threw himself into it with unreserved ardor, and was greatly instrumental in procuring the large number of adhesions which it obtained from so many Grecian states. In spite of its disastrous result, it was, like the battle of Chæroneia, a glorious effort for the recovery of Grecian liberty, undertaken under circumstances which promised a fair chance of success. There was no excessive rashness in calculating on distractions in the empire left by Alexander—on mutual hostility among the principal officers—and on the probability of having only to make head against Antipater and Macedonia, with little or no reinforcement from Asia. Disastrous as the enterprise ultimately proved, yet the risk was one fairly worth incurring, with so noble an object at stake; and could the war have been protracted another year, its termination would probably have been very different. We shall see this presently when we come to follow Asiatic events. After a catastrophe so ruinous, extinguishing free speech in Greece, and dispersing the Athenian Demos to distant lands, Demosthenes himself could hardly have desired, at the age of sixty-two, to prolong his existence as a fugitive beyond sea.
Of the speeches which he composed for private litigants, occasionally also for himself, before the Dikastery—and of the numerous stimulating and admonitory harangues on the public affairs of the moment, which he had addressed to his assembled countrymen, a few remain for the admiration of posterity. These harangues serve to us, not only as evidence of his unrivalled excellence as an orator, but as one of the chief sources from which we are enabled to appreciate the last phase of free Grecian life, as an acting and working reality.