The Historians' History of the World 04

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

FOOTNOTES

[42] [Plutarchc tells this story: “A certain soldier being sent for to come unto his captain, did put such pieces of gold as he had into the hands of Demosthenes’ statue, which had both his hands joined together: and there grew hard by it a great plane tree, divers leaves whereof either blown off by wind by chance, or else put there of purpose by the soldier, covered so this gold, that it was there a long time, and no man found it: until such time as the soldier came again, and found it as he left it. Hereupon this matter running abroad in every man’s mouth, there were divers wise men that took occasion of this subject to make epigrams in the praise of Demosthenes, who in his life was never corrupted.” But the same story was told of other statues.]