CHAPTER XVI.

THE RISE OF MACEDONIA

 

After the battle of Mantinea, when Thebes retired from her aggressive policy, Athens stood forth the most important state in Old Greece. She would have been free to devote all her energies to re-establishing her power on the coasts of the northern Aegean and by the gates of the Pontic waters, and would doubtless have successfully achieved this main object of her policy, if two outlying powers had not suddenly stepped upon the scene to thwart her and cut short her empire. These powers, Caria and Macedon, lay in opposite quarters of the Greek world. Both were monarchies, both were semi-Hellenic. Macedon was a land-power; Caria was both a land-power and a sea-power, but it was as a sea-power that she was formidable to Athens. Of the two, it was Caria which seemed to Greece the country with a future and to Athens the dangerous rival. Of Macedonia little account was taken by the civilised world, and Athens expected that she could always manage it. No prophet in his happiest hour of clairvoyance could have predicted that within thirty years Caria would have sunk back into insignificance, leaving nothing to posterity save the sepulchre of her prince, while Macedon would bear the arts and wisdom of Hellas to the ends of the earth.

 

Sect. 1. Athens regains the Chersonese and Euboea

The death of Epaminondas delivered Athens from her most dangerous and active enemy; but the intrigues which he had spun against her in the north bore results after his death. Alexander of Pherae, who had become the ally of the Thebans, seized the island of Peparethus with his pirate ships and defeated an Athenian armament under Leosthenes. He then repeated the daring enterprise of the Spartan Teleutias, sailing rapidly into the Piraeus, plundering the shops, and disappearing as rapidly with ample spoil. The Athenians replied by making a close defensive and offensive alliance with the federal state of the Thessalians. The stone of the treaty is preserved. The allies of both parties are included. The Thessalians bind themselves not to conclude the war against Alexander without the Athenians, and the Athenians in like wise “without the president (archon) and league of the Thessalians”; and the treasurers of Athens are directed to pull down the stele on which the former alliance with Alexander had been inscribed.

But the Athenians vented their indignation within their own walls. Since the capture of Oropus there had been signs of smouldering discontent at the conduct of affairs. Callistratus had been indicted and acquitted in the matter of Oropus; but his credit had been roughly shaken, and Alexander’s insult to the city at her very doors excited the popular wrath to such a pitch that the statesman as well as the defeated admiral was condemned to death, and escaped only by a timely flight. Thus the ablest Athenian statesman of the fourth century passed from the stage, and no sympathy followed him. Some years later he ventured to return from his Macedonian exile, hoping that the wrath of his countrymen would have passed away. Their wrath had passed, but it had not been replaced by regret. On reaching Athens he sought the refuge of suppliants at the altar of the Twelve Gods; but no voice was raised to save him, and the executioner carried out the doom of the people. The Athenians were always austere masters of their statesmen, and it sometimes appears to us—though in truth we seldom have sufficient knowledge of the circumstances to justify a confident judgment—that they unreasonably expected an ingathering where no seed had been sown.

The public indignation which had been aroused by the daring stroke of the tyrant of Pherae was enhanced by the bad tidings which came from Thrace. King Cotys, the reviver of the Odrysian power, had succeeded in laying hold of Sestos and almost the whole peninsula which guards the entrance to the Propontis, in spite of the Athenian fleet. Soon afterwards the old king was murdered and his realm was divided among his three sons. This change was advantageous to Athens, as she could play off one Thracian prince against another. The territory on the Propontis fell to Cersobleptes, who was supported by the Euboean Charidemus, a mercenary captain who had frequently been employed in the service of Athens, and had married, like Iphicrates, a daughter of the Thracian king. Cersobleptes engaged to hand over to Athens the entire Chersonese, except Cardia, “the enemy of Athens,” which was to remain independent. But there was no fleet on the spot to enforce the immediate fulfilment of the promise; and, when an admiral was presently sent out, he was defeated by Charidemus. At length a capable man was sent, Chares, a daring, dissolute, and experienced son of Ares, who speedily captured Sestos and punished the inhabitants for their unfaithfulness by an unmerciful slaughter. Cersobleptes was forced to change his attitude, and the peninsula was recovered. The Athenians, adopting the same policy which they had followed in Samos, sent outsettlers to the Chersonese. In the same year Euboea was won back to the Athenian league, and there even seemed a fair prospect of accomplishing what of all things would have rejoiced them most, the recovery of long-lost Amphipolis. But their new scheme against Amphipolis may be said to open, in a certain way, a new chapter in the history of Greece.

 

Sect. 2. Philip II of Macedonia

The man for whom Macedonia had waited long came at last. We have met once and again in the course of our history kings of that ambiguous country—Hellenic, and yet not Hellenic: Alexander playing a double part at Plataea; Perdiccas playing, with consummate skill, a double part in the war of Sparta and Athens. But now the hour of Macedonia has come, and we must look more closely at the cradle of the power which was destined to change the face not only of the Greek but of the oriental world.

In their fortress of Aegae the Macedonian kings had ruled for ages with absolute sway over the lands on the northern and north- western coasts of the Thermaic Gulf, which formed Macedonia in the strictest sense. The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify. They were a military people, and they extended their power westward and northward over the peoples of the hills, so that Macedonia in a wider sense reached to the borders of the Illyrians in the west and of the Paeonians in the north. These hill tribes, the Orestians, Lyncestians, and others, belonged to the Illyrian race, and they were ever seeking to cast off the bond of subjection which attached them to the kings of Aegae. In Illyria and Paeonia they had allies who were generally ready to support them in rebellion; and the dangers which Macedonia had constantly to encounter and always to dread from half-subjugated vassals and warlike enemies had effectually hindered her hitherto from playing any conspicuous part in the Greek world.

Thus the Macedonian kingdom consisted of two heterogeneous parts, and the Macedonian kings had two different characters. Over the Greek Macedonians of the coast the king ruled immediately; they were his own people, his own “Companions.” Over the Illyric folks of the hills he was only overlord; they were each subject to its own chieftain, and the chieftains were his unruly vassals. It is clear that Macedonia could never become a great power until these vassal peoples had been completely tamed and brought under the direct rule of the kings, and until the Illyrian and Paeonian neighbours had been taught a severe lesson. These were the tasks which awaited the man who should make Macedonia. The kings had made some efforts to introduce Greek civilisation into their land. Archelaus, who succeeded Perdiccas, had been a builder and a roadmaker, and, following the example of Greek tyrants, he had succeeded m making his court at Pella a centre for famous artists and poets. Euripides, the tragic poet, Timotheus, the most eminent leader of a new school of music, Zeuxis the painter, and many another, may have found pleasure and relief in a change from the highly civilised cities of the south to a new and fresher atmosphere, where there were no politicians. It is sometimes said that Macedonia was still in the Homeric stage of development. There is truth in this; but the position of the monarch was different from that of the Homeric king. No law bound the Macedonian monarch; his will was binding on his subjects; and against him they had only one solitary right. In the case of a capital charge, the king could not put a Macedonian to death without the authority of a general Assembly. This was the charter of Macedonian liberty. Fighting and hunting were the chief occupations of this vigorous people. A Macedonian who had not killed his man wore a cord round his waist; and until he had slain a wild boar he could not sit at table with the men. Like the Thracians, they drank deep; Bacchic mysteries had been introduced; it was in Macedonian air, on the banks of Lake Ludias, that Euripides drew inspiration for his Bacchae.

We have seen how Perdiccas slew his guardian and stepfather Ptolemy and reigned alone. Six years later the Illyrians swooped down upon Macedonia, and the king was slain in battle. It was a critical moment for the kingdom; the land was surrounded by enemies, for the Paeonians at the same time menaced it in the north, and from the east a Thracian army was advancing to set a pretender on the throne. The rightful heir, Amyntas, the son of the slain king, was a child. But there was one man in the land who was equal to the situation—this child’s uncle, Philip; and he took the government and the guardianship of the boy into his own hands. We have already met Philip as one of the hostages who were carried off to Thebes. He had lived there for a few years, and drunk in the military and political wisdom of Epaminondas and Pelopidas. We know not why he was allowed to return to his home soon after the death of Ptolemy; perhaps it was thought that his affections had been firmly won by Thebes and that he would be more useful to her in Macedonia.

Philip was twenty-four years old when he was called upon to rescue his country and the dynasty of his own house. The danger consisted in the number of his enemies,—foreign invaders, and domestic pretenders, and pretenders supported by foreign powers. Philip’s first step was to buy off the Paeonians by a large sum of money, his next to get rid of the pretenders. One of these, Argaeus, was assisted by Athens with a strong fleet. Philip defeated him, and did all in his power to come to terms with Athens. He released without ransom the Athenians whom he had made prisoners in the battle; and he renounced all claim to the possession of Amphipolis, which his brother king Perdiccas had occupied with a garrison. Gold easily induced the Thracians to desert the pretender whom they had come forth to support.

But the Paeonians were quieted only for the moment, and the Illyrians were still in the land, besetting Macedonian towns. It was necessary to deal with these enemies once for all, and to assert decisively the military power of Macedon. Philip had new ideas on the art of war, and he spent the winter in remodelling and training his army. When the springtide came round he had 10,000 foot- soldiers and 600 horsemen, thoroughly disciplined and of great physical strength. With this force he marched against the Paeonians and quelled them in a single battle. He then turned against the Illyrians, who refused to evacuate the towns they held in the Lyncestian territory. A great battle was fought, in which Philip tested his new military ideas; the Illyrians left 7000 on the field; and the vassals of the highlands, who had supported the invaders, were reduced to abject submission.

When he had thus established his power over his dependencies and cleared the land of foes, Philip lost little time in pushing eastward, on the side of Thrace. The motive for this rapid advance was the imperative necessity of obtaining gold. Without gold Philip could not develop his country or carry out his military schemes; the Macedonians were not a commercial folk; and therefore his prospects depended on possessing land which produced the precious ore. In Mount Pangaeus on his eastern frontier there were rich sources of gold; and, incited by him, a number of people from the opposite island of Thasos, where the art of mining was well understood, had crossed over to Crenides on that mountain and formed a settlement. But in order to control the new mines it was indispensable to become master of the great fortress on the Strymon, the much-coveted Amphipolis. The interests of Philip thus came into direct collision with the interests of Athens. Here Philip revealed his skill in diplomacy. When he released the Athenian prisoners, he professed to resign all claim to Amphipolis ; and on this basis negotiated a peace with Athens. When the treaty was concluded, a secret article was agreed upon, by which Philip undertook to conquer Amphipolis for Athens, and Athens undertook to surrender to him the free town of Pydna. It is probable that this secret engagement was not made until Philip had actually attacked Amphipolis, and the Amphipolitans—preferring Athens to Macedon —had sent a request for Athenian succour. The moment was inconvenient, as the forces of Athens could not be spared from the Chersonese; and the Athenians, failing to grasp the situation, trusted the promises of Philip. Of course Philip deceived them, and they deserve no sympathy; for their own part of the agreement was a shameful act of treachery to Pydna, their ally. Their orators might cry out against the perfidy of the Macedonian; but the truth is that they thought to make Philip a tool of their own designs and he showed them that in diplomacy he was not their dupe but their master.

When Philip had taken Amphipolis, he converted the Thasian settlement of Crenides into a great fortress, which he called after his own name, Philippi. He had thus two strong stations to secure Mount Pangaeus; and the yield of the gold mines, which were soon actively worked, amounted to at least 1000 talents a year. No Greek state was so rich. The old capital, Aegae or Edessa, was now definitely abandoned, and the seat of government was established at Pella, the favourite residence of Archelaus. This coming down from Aegae to Pella is significant of the opening of a new epoch in Macedonian history.

Not long afterwards Philip captured Pydna. If the seizure of Amphipolis was an injury to Athens, the capture of Pydna was an insult. He then took Potidaea, but instead of keeping it for himself, handed it over to the Olynthians, to whom he also ceded Anthemus. The Olynthians, alarmed by his operations on the Strymon, had made proposals to Athens for common action against Macedon. The Athenians, trusting Philip, had rejected the overtures. But when they found that they had been duped, they would have been ready and glad to co-operate with Olynthus; and it was to prevent such a combination that Philip dexterously propitiated the Olynthians—intending to devour them on some future day. With the exception of Methone, the Athenians had no foothold now on the coasts of the Thermaic Gulf.

They formed alliances with the Thracians of the west, who were indignant at the Macedonian occupation of Crenides, and with the Paeonian and Illyrian kings, who were smarting under their recent discomfitures. But Philip prevented the common action of the allies. He forced the Paeonians to become his vassals; his ablest general— his only general, he used to say himself—Parmenion inflicted another overwhelming defeat on the Illyrians; and the Thracians, again bought off, renounced their rights to Mount Pangaeus.

But the successes cost Philip little. Having established his mining town, he assumed the royal title, setting his nephew aside, and devoted himself during the next few years to the consolidation of his kingdom, and the creation of a national army. It was in these years that he made Macedonia. His task, as has been already indicated, was to unite the hill tribes, along with his own Macedonians of the coast, into one nation. The means by which he accomplished this was military organisation. He made the highlanders into professional soldiers and kept them always under arms. Caught by the infection of the military spirit, seduced by the motives of emulation and ambition, they were to forget that they were Orestians or Lyncestians, and blend into a single homogeneous Macedonian people. To complete this consummation would be a work of years, but Philip conceived the project clearly and set about it at once. “A professional army with a national spirit—that was the new idea.” Both infantry and cavalry were indeed organised in territorial regiments; perhaps Philip could not have ventured at first on any other system. But common pride and common desire of promotion, common hope of victory, tended to obliterate these distinctions, and they were done away with under Philip’s son. The heavy cavalry were called “Companions” of the king and “Royal” soldiers, and they were more honourable than the infantry. Among the infantry there was one body of “Royal” guards, the silver-shielded Hypaspistae.

The famous Macedonian phalanx, which Philip drilled, was merely a modified form of the usual battle-line of Greek spearmen. The men in the phalanx stood freer, in a more open array, and used a longer spear; so that the whole line, though still cumbrous enough, was more easily wielded, and the effect was produced not merely by the sheer pressure of a heavy mass of men but by the skilful manipulation of weapons. Nor was the phalanx intended to decide a battle, like the deep columns of Epaminondas; its function was to keep the front of the foe in play, while the cavalry, in wedge-like squadrons, rode into the flanks. It was by these tactics that Philip had won his victory over the Illyrians.

But Greece paid little heed to the things which Philip was doing. The Athenians might indeed encourage his Illyrian and Paeonian enemies, and urge the Thracians to drive him from Mount Pangaeus, but though he had outwitted them, they could not yet see that he was an enemy of a different stamp from a Cotys or a Cersobleptes; having managed Macedonia for a hundred years, they had little fear that as soon as they had the time to spare they would easily manage it again. When Philip married Olympias, the daughter of an Epirot prince, the event could cause no sensation; the birth of a son a year later stirred no man’s heart in Greece; for who, in his wildest dreams, could have foreseen in the Macedonian infant the greatest conqueror who had yet been born into the world? If it had been revealed to men in that autumn that a power had started up which was to guide history into new paths, they would have turned their eyes not to Pella but to Halicarnassus.

 

Sect. 3. Mausolus of Caria

Caria, like Macedonia, was peopled by a double race, the native Carians and the Greek settlers on the coast. But the native Carians were further removed than the Illyrians from the Greeks : the Illyrians spoke a tongue of the same Indo-Germanic stock as the Greeks; the Carians belonged to an older race which held the region of the Aegean before Greeks and Illyrians came. Yet the Carians were in closer touch with Greece than the Greeks of Macedonia. The Greeks of Caria were always abreast of Greek civilisation, and they had assimilated and tutored the natives of the land. Tralles and Mylasa were to all appearance Greek towns; Greek was the dominant language of the country. A province of the Persian empire, Caria had yet a certain independent bond of union among her cities in an Amphictionic League which met in the temple of Zeus at Lagina. It was a religious union, though it might be used for purposes of common political action. But political unity was given to Caria not by federation but by monarchy. A citizen of Mylasa named Hecatomnus succeeded in establishing his rule over the whole land, soon after the death of Tissaphernes, and the Great King esteemed it his most prudent policy to acknowledge the “dynast of Caria” as his official satrap. Both Hecatomnus and his son Mausolus, who succeeded to his power, never failed to pay their tribute to the treasury of Susa or to display the becoming submission to the Persian king; only once— as we have seen—when all the western satraps rebelled, did Mausolus fall short in his loyalty. The Carian Dynasts—they never assumed the royal title—thus secured for themselves a free hand. With the constitutions of the Carian cities their sovereignty did not interfere. Thus even in their own city, Mylasa, the popular Assembly still passes decrees, and these decrees are ratified not by Mausolus but by the “Three Tribes” perhaps a sort of aristocratic council. In fact Hecatomnus and Mausolus held in relation to the Carian states an analogous position to that which Pisistratus and his sons held in the Athenian hate; they were the actual rulers but officially they did not exist. The differences were that the Carian dynast held the official position of Persian satrap, and was “tyrant” of a number of states which were independent of each other.

These native satraps brought the Greek towns of the coast, Halicarnassus, Iasus, Cnidus, perhaps Miletus itself, gradually under their power; and Mausolus annexed the neighbouring land of Lycia.

Thus at the time of Philip’s accession to the throne of Macedonia, a rich and ambitious monarchy had arisen on the south-eastern shores of the Aegean. To develop his power, it was desirable for Mausolus to win the lordship of the islands adjacent to his coasts, and it was clearly necessary to form a strong navy. The change of the satrap’s residence from inland Mylasa to Halicarnassus on the sea is thus politically significant; Caria was to become a sea-power. Mausolus built himself a strong castle on the little island of Zephyrion in front of the city, and constructed two harbours, one for ships of war, the other for ships of trade.

The great islands of Rhodes, Cos, and Chios, which Mausolus especially coveted, belonged to the Athenian alliance. But recently there was much discontent at the Athenian supremacy, and there were good grounds for this feeling. The reversion to the policy of cleruchies in neighbouring Samos, as well as in distant Potidaea excited apprehensions for the future; and the exactions of the rapacious and irresponsible mercenaries whom Athens regularly employed, but did not regularly pay, caused many complaints. There were moreover strong oligarchical parties in these states which would be glad to sever connexion with Athens. The scheme of the Carian prince was first to induce these islands to detach themselves from Athens and then to bring them under his own sway. He fanned the flame of discontent, and the three islands jointly revolted from the Athenian alliance and were supported by Byzantium.

Athens immediately sent naval forces to Chios under Chabrias and Chares, two of the generals of the year, and the town was attacked by land and sea. But in trying to enter the harbour, Chabrias, who led the way, was assailed on all sides and fell fighting, Thus the Athenians lost the most gallant of their soldiers—a commander of whom it was said that he never spared himself and always spared his men. The attack on Chios was abandoned, and the Chians, much elated, and commanding a fleet of 100 ships, proceeded to aggressive warfare against the outsettlers of Athens, and blockaded Samos. With only sixty ships Chares could do nothing and as many more were hastily sent under the command of Timotheus and Iphicrates. Under three such generals much migh be expected from such a fleet; but more would probably have been accomplished under any one of them alone. They relieved Samos and made an unsuccessful diversion to the Propontis, hoping to take Byzantium. Then they sailed to Chios, and concerted a plan of attack in the strait between the island and the mainland. But the day proved stormy, and the two veteran admirals, Iphicrates and Timotheus, deemed that it would be rash to fight. Chares, however, against their judgment, attacked the enemy, and being unsupported was repulsed with loss.

The ineffectual operations of two such tried and famous generals were a cruel disappointment to the Athenians, who had given them an adequate fleet. Chares, furious at the behaviour of his colleagues, formally accused them of deliberate treachery, and was supported by the orator Aristophon. The charge was that they had received bribes from the Chians and the Rhodians. Counter-charges were brought against Chares by Timotheus and Iphicrates, but the sympathies of Athens were altogether given to the commander who erred on the side of boldness. Iphicrates, however, had less political influence and therefore fewer enemies than Timotheus, and he knew how to conciliate the people; he was accordingly acquitted. Timotheus, always haughty and unpopular, probably assumed a posture as haughty and unbending as ever, Aristophon probably pressed him hard, and he was fined 100 talents. Rich as he was, he was unable to pay this enormous sum, and he withdrew to Chalcis where he died soon afterwards. Thus within twelve months the Athenians lost the two men, Chabrias and Timotheus, who had built up their second empire. They afterwards recognised that the measure which they had dealt out to Timotheus was hard, and they permitted his son—who had himself been tried and acquitted on the same charge to settle the fine by a payment of ten talents.

Chares now went forth as sole commander to sustain the war against the recreant allies; but he went unfurnished with money to pay his troops. He found the means of supplying this deficiency in the disturbed state of Asia Minor. The satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, Artabazus, had rebelled, but was not strong enough to hold his own against the king’s troops. Chares came to his rescue, gained a brilliant victory over the satraps who were arrayed against him, and received from the grateful Artabazus money which enabled him to pay and maintain the army. The victory and the money pleased the Athenians, but Artaxerxes was deeply incensed. The news presently reached Athens that the Great King was equipping a vast armament in Syria and Cilicia to avenge the audacity of Chares. How much truth there was in this report it is impossible to say; but it evoked an outburst of patriotism and supplied the Athenian orators with material for invectives and declamations. Men began to talk in earnest of realising the dream of Isocrates, of convoking a pan-Hellenic congress and arming Hellas against the barbarian. Demo- Demosthenes, who was now beginning to rise into public notice, delivered in these days a speech which was more to the point than many of his later more famous orations. He showed that the alarm was premature; and that the notion of sending round appeals to the cities of Greece was foolish; “your envoys will do nothing more than rhapsodise in their round of visits.” The truth was that Athens could in no case think of embarking at this juncture in a big war; she had not the means. Isocrates himself raised his voice for peace in a remarkable pamphlet, distinguished by the nobility of tone and the width of view which always mark his writings. It was a scathing condemnation of Imperialism. Passing from the momentary state of affairs, he looked out into the future and boldly declared that the only salvation for Athens lay in giving up her naval empire. “It is that,” he said, “which brought us to this pass; it is that which caused the fall of our democracy.” He showed the calamities which the empires of Athens and Sparta had drawn upon themselves and Greece. But it is to be observed that, when a moment had come at which his favourite plan of a common attack on Persia seemed at length feasible, he was wise enough not to advise it. He looks to Thrace, not to Persia, to find lands for endowing those needy Greeks who were roving about for subsistence.

In the end prudent counsels prevailed; Chares was recalled negotiations were opened with the revolted allies, and a peace was made. Athens recognised the independence of the three islands, Chios, Cos, and Rhodes, and of the city of Byzantium. It was not long before Lesbos also severed itself from the Athenian alliance which thus lost all its important members in the eastern Aegean and in the west Corcyra fell away about the same time.

All happened as Mausolus foresaw. He helped the oligarchies to overthrow the popular governments, and then gave them the protection of Carian garrisons. But the prince did not live to develop his empire. Soon after the success of his policy against Athens, he died, leaving his power to his widow Artemisia. The opportunity was seized by the democrats of Rhodes to regain their freedom, and they appealed to Athens. After what had passed they had little right to expect a hearing; and under the influence of the wise and pacific statesmen who now controlled the Assembly, their appeal was refused—in spite of the hot and somewhat sentimental pleadings of Demosthenes, who upheld the extraordinary doctrine that Athens was bound, whenever she was called upon, to intervene to support democracy against oligarchy. Artemisia soon recovered her grip on Rhodes.

Caria remained for another twenty years under dynasts of the house of Hecatomnus, until it submitted to Alexander the Great. The expansion of the Carian power, which seemed probable under the active administration of Mausolus, was never fulfilled. Though we know nothing of his personal character, the outward appearance of Mausolus is familiar to us, the islanders of the north, who possess in our capital his genuine portrait, and the headless figure of his queen. The colossal statue, made, at latest, soon after his death, represents a man of a noble cast of face, of a type presumably Carian, certainly not Greek, and with the hair curiously brushed back from the brow. This statue stood, along with that of Artemisia, within the sepulchral tomb which he probably began and which she certainly completed. Such a royal tomb seems to take us back to the days of prehistoric Greece; it strikes one almost like a glorified resurrection of one of the old chamber sepulchres of the Leleges which are strewed about the Halicarnassian peninsula. It rose above the harbour at Halicarnassus, conspicuous from the sea, crowned with a chariot on its apex. The building was adorned with friezes, wrought by four of the most illustrious sculptors of the day, of whom Scopas himself was one. The precious fragments of these works of art are the legacy which the Carian realm has bequeathed to mankind—these and a new word which the tomb of Mausolus added to the vocabularies of Europe.

Sect. 4. Phocis and the Sacred War

In the meantime, another of the states of northern Greece seemed likely to will the position of supremacy which Thessaly had seemed on the eve of winning, and which Boeotia had actually held for a few years. Phocis now came forward in her turn and enjoyed a brief moment of expansion and conquest—a flashlight which vanished almost as soon as it appeared. In succession to the national leaders, Jason of Pherae and Epaminondas of Thebes, we now meet Onomarchus of Elatea.

Into this career of aggrandisement Phocis was thrust by the aggression of her neighbours rather than lured by the lust of conquest. The Phocians had never been zealous adherents of the Boeotian alliance, which they were forced to join after the battle of Leuctra, and they cut themselves loose from it after the death of Epaminondas. But though Thebes could no longer maintain hejr wider supremacy in Greece, an independent Phocis was a source of constant danger to her in her narrower supremacy in Boeotia, as the western cities of the land could always find in Phocis a stay and support for their own independence. It was therefore deemed necessary by the politicians of Thebes to strike a blow at their western neighbours. One of the instruments of which Epaminondas had made use to promote his city’s influence in the north was the old Amphictionic League, which for a hundred years had never appeared on the scene of history. At an assembly of this body, soon after Leuctra, the Thebans accused the Spartans of having seized the Cadmea in time of peace. The Spartans were sentenced to pay a fine of 500 talents; the fine could not indeed be exacted, but they were doubtless excluded from the temple of Delphi. The Thebans resolved to wield against Phocis the same engine which they had wielded against Sparta. The nature of the pretext is uncertain, but it was not difficult to find a misdemeanour which would seem grave enough to the Thessalians and Locrians, inveterate enemies of Phocis, to justify a sentence of condemnation. A number of rich and prominent Phocians were condemned to pay large fines for sacrilege, and when these sums were not paid within the prescribed time, the Ampliations decreed that the lands of the defaulters should be taken from them and consecrated to the Delphian god, and a tablet with the inscribed decree was set up at Delphi.

The men who were implicated in the alleged sacrilege determined to resist, and they appealed to their fellow-countrymen, in whatever form of federal assembly the Phocian cities used to discuss their common interests, to protect themselves and their property against the threatened danger. The man who took the lead in organising the resistance was Philomelus, a weathy citizen of Ledon. He discerned clearly that mercenaries would be required to defend Phocis against her enemies—Boeotians, Locrians, and Thessalians—and made the bold and practical proposal that Delphi should be seized, since the treasures of Delphi would supply at need the sinews of war. It is hardly likely that he openly avowed the true reason of the importance of seizing Delphi; it was enough to assert the old rights of the Phocians over rocky Pytho—rights for which he could appeal to the highest authority, the sacred text of Homer—and to point out that the Delphians were implicated in the unjust decrees of the Amphictions. The proposals of Philomelus were adopted, and he was appointed general of the Phocian forces, with full powers. His first step was to visit Sparta, not only as the enemy of Thebes, but as being in the same case as Phocis, lying under an Amphictionic sentence which had recently been renewed and confirmed. King Archidamus welcomed the proposals of the Phocian plenipotentiary, but Sparta stood in a rather awkward position. Hitherto she had always supported the Delphians in maintaining their independence against Phocian claims, as, for instance, when in the days of Pericles she restored them to their shrine after the Phocians with Athenian aid had dispossessed them. It would consequently have been a flagrant inconsistency in Spartan policy to turn against the Delphians now; so that Archidamus did not openly avow his sympathy with the Phocian cause, but privately he supported it by placing fifteen talents in the hands of Philomelus. With this sum and fifteen talents from his own purse, Philomelus was able to hire some mercenaries, and with their help to seize Delphi. The Locrians of neighbouring Amphissa, whom the Delphians had summoned to their aid, arrived too late and were repulsed. Philomelus did no hurt to the people of Delphi, excepting only the clan of the Thracidae, bitter anti-Phocians, whom he put to death.

The first object of Philomelus was to enlist Hellenic opinion in his favour. He had the secret sympathy of Sparta, and he might count on the friendship of Athens, who had always been an ally of Phocis and was now an enemy of Thebes. He sent envoys to Sparta, to Athens, to Thebes itself, to explain the Phocian position. These envoys were instructed to say that in seizing Delphi the Phocians were simply resuming their rights over the temple, which belonged to them and had been usurped by others, and to declare that they would act merely as administrators of the Panhellenic Sanctuary, and were ready to allow all the treasures to be weighed and numbered, and to be responsible to Greece for their safety. In consequence of these embassies Sparta came forward from her reserve and openly allied herself with Phocis, while Athens and some smaller states promised their support. The Thebans and their Amphictionic friends resolved to make war.

In the meantime, Philomelus had fortified the Delphic sanctuary by a wall, and had collected an army of 5000 men, with which he could easily hold the position. It was his wish that the oracular responses from the mystic tripod should continue to be given as usual to those who came to consult Apollo, and he was anxious above all to receive some voice of approval or encouragement from the god. But the Delphian priestess was stubborn to the Phocian intruder, and refused to prophesy. He tried to seat her by force upon the tripod, and in her alarm she bade him do as he would. He eagerly seized these words as an oracular sanction of his acts. It soon became necessary to raise more money for paying the mercenaries, and for this purpose Philomelus, refraining as long as he could from touching the treasures of the shrine, levied a contribution from the rich Delphians. At first he had to deal only with the Locrians, whom he finally defeated in a hot battle near the Phaedriad cliffs which rise sheer above Delphi. The loss of the Locrians was heavy; some of them, driven to the edge, hurled themselves down the cliffs.

This victory forced the Thebans to prepare actively to intervene. The Amphictionic assembly met at Thermopylae, and it was decided that an Amphictionic army should enforce the decree of the league against the Phocians, and rescue Delphi from their power. Philomelus, with the forces which he had, might hold his own against the Locrians, but not against the host which would now be arrayed against him. There were only two means of saving Phocis. One was the active support of Athens or Sparta, or both; the other was the organisation of a large army of mercenaries. As neither Athens nor Sparta showed willingness to give any immediate assistance, nothing remained but the other alternative. And that alternative, as Philomelus must have foreseen from the beginning, would not be possible without the control of far larger sums of money than could either be contributed by the Phocian cities or extorted from the Delphian proprietors. No resource remained but to make use of the treasures of the temple. At first Philomelus was scrupulous. He only borrowed from the god enough to meet the demand of the moment; but, as habitude blunted the first feelings of scrupulousness, and as needs grew more pressing, the Phocians dealt as freely with the sacred vessels and the precious dedications as if they were their own. By offering large pay Philomelus assembled an army of 10,000 men, who cared little whence the money came. An indecisive war with the Thebans and Locrians was waged for some time, till at length the Phocians underwent a severe defeat near Neon on the north side of Mount Parnassus. The general fought desperately, and, covered with wounds, he was driven to the verge of a precipice where he had to choose between capture and self-destruction. He hurled himself from the cliff and perished.

The Thebans imagined that the death of Philomelus meant the doom of the Phocian cause, and they retired after the battle. But it was not so. In Onomarchus of Elatea, who had been associated with him in the command of the army, he had a successor as able as himself. The retreat of the enemy gave Onomarchus time to re-organise the troops and collect reinforcements; and he not only coined the gold and silver ornaments of the temple, but beat the bronze and iron donatives into arms for the soldiers. He then entered upon a short career of signal successes. Westward, he forced Locrian Amphissa to submit; to northward he reduced Doris, and crossing the passes of Mount Oeta he made himself master of Thermopylae, and captured the Locrian Thronion near the eastern gate of the pass. Eastward, he took possession of Orchomenus and restored those of the inhabitants who had escaped the sword of the Thebans ten years before.

The Thebans meanwhile were hampered by want of money, and, having neither mines like Philip nor a rich temple like Phocis, they decided to replenish their treasury by sending out a body of troops on foreign service. We have already seen Sparta and Athens raising money by the same means, and the Theban soldiers who now went forth under Pammenes hired themselves out to the same Persian satrap Artabazus, for whom the Athenian Chares had won a victory over the army of the king. Pammenes was equally successful, but it does not seem that his expedition profited the Boeotian treasury; for he presently became suspected by Artabazus, who threw him into prison.

Among the most important uses to which Onomarchus applied the gold of Delphi was the purchase of the alliance of the tyrants of Pherae. By this policy Thessaly was divided; and the Thessalian league, beset by the hostility of Pherae, was unable to co-operate with the Thebans against Phocis. But the Thessalians, being hard pressed, turned for help to their northern neighbour, Philip of Macedon, and his intervention south of Mount Olympus marks a new stage in the course of the Sacred War.

Philip had lately deprived Athens of her last ally on the Thermaic Gulf by the capture of Methone, the Athenian expedition of relief coming too late to save it. He readily acceded to the request of the Thessalians to act as their general; it was a convenient occasion to begin the push southward, and lay the foundation of Macedonian supremacy in Greece, plans which were now coming within the range of practical effort. Against the forces which Philip led to the support of the Thessalian league, it was hopeless for Lycophron of Pherae to stand alone; the tyrant was lost unless he were succoured by the arm of those who had already furnished him with gold. Nor did the Phocians leave him unsupported. The strength of Onomarchus was now so great that he could spare a force of 7000 men for a campaign in the north. But his brother Phayllus, to whom he entrusted the command, was beaten out of Thessaly by Philip. Then Onomarchus went forth himself, at the head of the whole Phocian host (about 20,000), to rescue his ally. Far superior in numbers, he defeated the Macedonian army in two battles with serious loss; Philip was compelled to withdraw into Macedonia; and Onomarchus delivered Thessaly into the hands of Lycophron.

At this moment, the power of the Phocians was at its height. Their supremacy reached from the shores of the Corinthian Gulf to the slopes of Olympus. They were masters of the pass of Thermopylae, and they had two important posts in western Boeotia, in addition to Orchomenus, they won Coronea immediately after the Thessalian expedition. If all these things had befallen at some other epoch, the Phocian power might have endured for a time, and the name of their able leader might have been more familiar to posterity. But Onomarchus had fallen on evil days. He and his petty people were swept away in the onward course of a greater nation and a greater chief.

Philip of Macedon speedily retrieved the humiliation which he had suffered at the hands of his Phocian foes. In the following year he descended again into Thessaly, and Onomarchus went forth again to succour his ally or dependent. In the preceding campaign Philip had captured the port of Pagasae, and placed in it a Macedonian garrison. It was important not only for Pherae, but for Athens, that this post should not remain in his hands, and Chares was sent with an Athenian fleet to assist the Phocians in recovering it. The decisive battle was fought at a place unknown, near the Pagasaean Gulf. The numbers of the infantry were nearly equal, but Philip’s cavalry and his tactics were far superior. More than a third of the Phocian army was slain or made prisoners, and Onomarchus was killed. Pherae was then captured and Lycophron driven from the land; and Philip, having thus become master of Thessaly, prepared to march southward for the purpose of delivering the shrine of Apollo from the possession of the Phocians, whom he professed to regard as sacrilegious usurpers.

Phocis was now in great need, and her allies—Sparta, Achaea, and Athens—at length determined to give her active help. The Macedonian must not be permitted to pass Thermopylae. The statesman Eubulus, whose influence was now predominant at Athens, and was chiefly directed to the maintenance of peace, acted promptly on this occasion, and sent a large force under Nausicles to defend the pass. Philip at once recognised that it would be extremely hazardous to attempt to force the position, and he retired. He was a prince who knew when to wait and when to strike. Thus Phocis was rescued for the time; she was indebted both to Sparta and Achaea who had sent her aid, but most of all to Athens.

In supporting Phocis, the Spartans had objects of their own in view.

They had not abandoned their hopes of winning back Messenia and destroying Megalopolis. It was therefore their policy to sustain Phocis, in order that Phocis might keep Thebes so fully occupied that they would have a free hand in the Peloponnesus without fear of Theban interference. The successes of Onomarchus in his first Thessalian campaign encouraged Sparta to prepare for action, and Megalopolis, made aware of the danger, applied to Athens for help. It was a request which no practical statesman could have entertained, and it had no chance of being granted under the regime of as wise a head as Eubulus. Orators like Demosthenes, who constituted themselves the opponents of Eubulus, might invoke the old principle that it was the policy of Athens to keep Sparta weak. But this was an obsolete maxim, for there was now no serious prospect of Sparta becoming formidably strong. It was no concern of Athens to meddle in the Peloponnesus now. Her true policy was to keep on friendly terms with Sparta, and, in conjunction with her, to support the Phocian state against Thebes, Thessaly, and Macedon. This was the policy which Eubulus followed.

The war broke out in the Peloponnesus soon after the check of Philip at Thermopylae. While Athens held aloof, Achaea and Elis, Phlius and Mantinea, supported Sparta, and the Phocians sent 3000 men to her help. But all these forces were outnumbered by the Messenians, Arcadians, and Argives, to whom the Thebans had sent a considerable aid. A series of engagements were fought; they were almost all indecisive; but they rescued Messenia and the Arcadian capital, and frustrated the plans of Lacedaemon.

The death of Onomarchus devolved the leadership of the Phocian league upon his brother Phayllus. At first the Phocians barely maintained their posts in western Boeotia; but presently—after the return of the auxiliaries whom they had sent to the Peloponnesus—they conquered Epicnemidian Locris and laid siege to Naryx, which they ultimately captured. Thus Phayllus maintained the power of Phocis for about two years; then he was carried off by disease, and was succeeded by his nephew, Phalaecus, son of Onomarchus. Under Phalaecus the war dragged on for a few more years, without any notable achievement, the Thebans winning battles of no importance and ravaging Phocis, the Phocians retaining their grip on western Boeotia.

The rise of Phocis to its momentary position as one of the leading powers in Greece depended on two conditions—the possession of Delphi and the possibility of hiring mercenaries. It is therefore clear that Phocis could not easily have come to the front before the fourth century, when mercenary service had come widely into vogue. But these two essential features of the Phocian power, the occupation of Delphi and the employment of mercenary troops, gave it a bad name. Historians echo the invectives of the enemies of Phocis, and give the impression that during the Sacred War the sanctuary of Apollo was in the hands of sacrilegious and unscrupulous barbarians. Tales were told how the dedicatory offerings were bestowed upon the loose favourites of the generals—how Philomelus gave a golden wreath to a dancing girl, or Phayllus a silver beaker to a flute-player. It matters little whether such scandals are true or false; if true, they would only show that the generals were not above petty peculations. But the Phocians were not alien desecrators of the shrine of Apollo. They could establish as good a claim to Delphi as many claims founded on remote events in the past; and they certainly desired to maintain the Panhellenic dignity and sanctity of the shrine and the oracle as high as ever under their own administration. But they regarded Delphi not only as a Panhellenic sanctuary, but as a national sanctuary of Phocis; somewhat in the same way as Athens employed the treasures of her temples for national purposes of defence in the Peloponnesian war, so Phocis felt justified in employing the treasures of Apollo for the national interest of Phocis. Throughout all, the Phocian statesmen could have maintained that they were only borrowing from the god loans which would be gradually paid back after the restoration of peace.

Recently there has come to light, among the original documents inscribed on the stones of Delphi, a striking disproof of the old view which conceived the Phocians of Onomarchus and Phayllus as a band of robbers holding their orgies in a holy place. The temple of the god which had been built by the Alcmaeonids was destroyed by an earthquake nearly twenty years before the Phocian usurpation. The work of rebuilding had been begun, perhaps soon after, but had advanced slowly, and when Philomelus seized Delphi the completion of the temple was still far off. The work was carried out under a commission of “Temple-builders,” in which all the Amphictionic states were represented; and this body administered a fund set apart for the building. During the Phocian usurpation the council of Temple-builders still held their meetings  the work still went on; the skilful artisans in Corinth and elsewhere wrought the stone material and transferred it to Delphi, as if nothing had befallen; the payments were made, as usual, from the fund; and the accounts were kept—we have some of them still. Those Amphictionic states which were at war with Phocis, like Thebes and Thessaly, were naturally not represented at the meetings of the board of the Temple-builders, but Delphian members were always present; and after Locris had been conquered by Phayllus we find Locrians also attending the meetings. Thus the completion of the temple of Apollo was not suspended while the Phocians held the sanctuary; and the Dorian and Ionian states continued to take their part in the Panhellenic work of supervising the structure, as if nothing had happened to alter the centre of the Greek world.

 

Sect. 5. The Advance of Macedonia

The Macedonian monarch was now master not only of the Thermaic Gulf and the mouth of the Strymon, but of the basin of Pagasae, and he was beginning to create a fleet. His marauding vessels, let loose in the northern Aegean, captured the cornships of Athens, descended on her possessions and dependencies—Lemnos, Imbros, and Euboea—and once even insulted the coast of Attica itself. The most important interests of Athens centred round the Hellespont and Propontis; and it was obviously her policy to form a close combination with the Thracian king Cersobleptes, with a view to offering common resistance to the advance of the new northern power on the Thracian side. It was an effort in this direction when Aristocrates proposed a resolution in honour of Charidemus, the adventurer who had become the brother-in-law and the chief minister of the Thracian king. The resolution was impeached as illegal, and the accuser was supplied with a speech by the young politician Demosthenes. The legal objections were probably cogent, but the opponents of the proposal might wisely have confined themselves to this aspect of the question. They went on to impugn the expediency of the measure; and the speech of Demosthenes against Aristocrates was calculated, so far as a single speech could have a political effect, to alienate a power which it was distinctly the interest of Athens to conciliate.

But it mattered little. No sooner had Philip returned from Thessaly than he moved against Thrace. Supported by a rival Thracian prince and by the cities of Byzantium and Perinthus, he advanced to the Propontis, besieged Heraeon-Teichos the capital of Cersobleptes, and forced that potentate to submit to the overlordship of Macedon. The movements of Philip had been so rapid that Athens had no time to come to the rescue of Thrace. When the news arrived there was a panic, and an armament was voted to save the Chersonese. But a new message came that Philip had fallen ill; then he was reported dead; and the sending of the armament was postponed. Philip’s illness was a fact; it compelled him to desist from further operations, and the Chersonesus was saved.

Eight years had not elapsed since Philip had mounted the throne of Macedon; and he had shifted the balance of power in Greece, and altered the whole prospect of the Greek world, for those who had eyes to see. He had created an army, and a thoroughly adequate revenue; he had made himself lord of almost the whole sea-board of the northern Aegean from the defile of Thermopylae to the shores of the Propontis. The only lands which were still excepted from his direct or indirect sway were the Chersonesus and the territory of the Chalcidian league. He was ambitious to secure a recognised hegemony in Greece; to hold such a position as had been held by Athens, by Sparta, and by Thebes in the days of their greatness; to form, in fact, a confederation of allies, which should hold some such dependent relation towards him as the confederates of Delos had held towards Athens. Rumours were already floating about that his ultimate design was to lead a Panhellenic expedition against the Persian king—the same design which was ascribed to Jason of Pherae. Though the Greek states regarded Philip as in a certain sense an outsider, both because Macedonia had hitherto lain aloof from their politics and because absolute monarchy was repugnant to their political ideas, it must never be forgotten that Philip desired to identify Macedonia with Greece, and to bring his own country up to the level of the kindred peoples which had so far outstripped it in civilisation. Throughout his whole career he regarded Athens with respect; he would have given much for her friendship, and he showed that he deemed it one of his misfortunes that she compelled him to be her foe. He was himself imbued with Greek culture; and if the robust Macedonian enjoyed the society of the somewhat rude boon companions of his own land with whom he could drink deep, he knew how to make himself agreeable to Attic philosophers or men of letters whom he always delighted to honour. He chose an accomplished man of letters, Aristotle of Stagira, who had been educated at Athens, to be the instructor of his son Alexander. This fact alone sets Philip in the true light, as a conscious and deliberate promoter of Greek civilisation.

Greece saw with alarm the increase of the Macedonian power, though men were yet far from apprehending what it really meant. No state had been directly hit except Athens—though the day of Chalcidice was at hand; and it was now too late for Athens to retrieve her lost position, either alone or with any combination she could form, against a state which possessed an ample revenue and a well- drilled national army, under the sovereign command of the greatest general and diplomatist of the day. The only event which could now have availed to stay the course of Macedon would have been the death of Philip. But the Athenians did not apprehend this; they still dreamed of recovering Amphipolis. Their best policy would have been peace and alliance with Macedonia. There can be little question that Philip would have gladly secured them the Chersonese and their cornships; for the possession of the Chersonese had not the same vital importance for him as Amphipolis, or as the towns around the Thermaic Gulf.

In these years, Athens was under the guidance of a cautious statesman, Eubulus, who was a marvellously able minister of finance. He was appointed chancellor of the Theoric Fund for four years, and this office, while it was specially concerned with the administration of the surplus of revenue which was devoted to theoric purposes, involved a general control over the finances of the state. He pursued a peace policy; yet it was he who struck the one effective blow that Athens ever struck at Philip, when she hindered him from passing Thermopylae. But Eubulus wisely refused to allow Athens to be misled into embarking in unnecessary wars in the Peloponnesus or Asia Minor; and frankly accepted the peace which had concluded the war of Athens with her allies. The mass of the Athenians were well contented to follow the counsel of a dexterous financier, who, while he met fully all the expenses of administration, distributed large dividends of festival-money. The news of Philip’s campaign in Thrace may have temporarily weakened his influence: it was felt that there had been slackness in watching Athenian interests in the Hellespontine regions; and his opponents had a fair opportunity to inveigh against an inactive policy.

The most prominent among these opponents was Demosthenes, who had recently made a reputation as a speaker in the Assembly. The father of Demosthenes was an Athenian manufacturer, who died when his son was still a child; his mother had Scythian blood in her veins. His guardians dealt fraudulently with the considerable fortune which his father had left him; and when he came of age he resolved to recover it. For this purpose he sat at the feet of the orator Isaeus, and was trained in law and rhetoric. Though he received but a small portion of his patrimony, the oratory of Demosthenes owed to this training with a practical purpose many qualities which it would never have acquired under the academic instruction of Isocrates. He used himself to tell how he struggled to overcome his natural defects of speech and manner, how he practised gesticulation before a mirror and declaimed verses with pebbles in his mouth. In the end he became as brilliant an orator as the Pnyx had ever cheered; perhaps his only fault was a too theatrical manner. His earlier political speeches are not monuments of wisdom. He came forward as an opponent of the policy of Eubulus, and so we have already met him supporting the appeals of Rhodes and Megalopolis. The advance of Philip to the Propontis gave him a more promising occasion to urge the Athenians to act, since their own interests were directly involved. And the effort of Demosthenes was more than adequate. The harangue, which is known as the First Philippic, one of his most brilliant and effective speeches, calls upon the Athenians to brace themselves vigorously to oppose Philip “our enemy.” He draws a lively picture of the indifference of his country-men and contrasts it with the energy of Philip “who is not the man to rest content with that he has subdued, but is always adding to his conquests, and casts his snare around us while we sit at home postponing.” Again: “Is Philip dead? Nay, but he is ill. What does it matter to you? For, if this Philip die, you will soon raise up a second Philip by your apathy.” Demosthenes proposed a scheme for increasing the military forces of the city; and the most essential part of the scheme was that a force should be sent to Thrace of which a quarter should consist of citizens, and the officers should be citizens. At present the numerous officers whom they elected were kept for services at home: “You choose your captains, not to fight but to be displayed like dolls in the market-place.”

Demosthenes was applauded, but nothing was done. His ideal was the Athens of Pericles; but he lived in the Athens of Eubulus. In the fourth century the Athenians were quite capable of holding their own among their old friends and enemies, the Spartans and Thebans and the islanders of the Aegean; with paid soldiers and generals like Iphicrates and Chares they could maintain their position as a first-rate power. But against a large, vigorous land-power with a formidable army their chances were hopeless; for, since the fall of their empire, the whole spirit of the people had tended to peace and not to war; they were no longer animated by the idea of empire; and the memories of the past, which Demosthenes might invoke, were powerless to stir them to action. The orations of Demosthenes, however carefully studied, however imbued with passion, could not change the character of his country-men; their spirit did not respond to his, and, not being under the imperious dominion of an idea, they saw no reason for great undertakings. Nor was the condition of Athens as ill as the opponent of Eubulus painted it. Under the administration of Eubulus the fleet was increased, the building of a new arsenal was begun, new ship-sheds were made, and the military establishment of Athens was in various ways improved. She was still the great sea-power of the Aegean, and strong enough to protect her commercial interests.

The next stage in the development of Macedonia was the incorporation of Chalcidice, and as soon as Philip recovered from his illness he turned his attention to this quarter. If the Olynthians had treated Philip honourably, they would probably have been left a self-governing community, with their territory intact, dependent on Macedonia. But they treated both Athens and Philip badly. They first made a close alliance with Philip to rob Athens; and then, when they had received from Philip Anthemus and Potidaea, they turned round and made peace with Athens, a power with which Philip was at war, and recognised the right of Athens to Amphipolis. At the time Philip was otherwise engaged; but three years later he sent a requisition to Olynthus, demanding the surrender of his half-brother, a pretender to the Macedonian throne, to whom they had given shelter. The demand was refused and Philip marched against Chalcidice. One after another the cities of the Olynthian confederacy opened their gates to him; or if they refused, like Stagira, they were captured.

In her jeopardy Olynthus sought an alliance with Athens, and on this occasion both the leaders of the Athenian Assembly and the advocates of a war policy found themselves in harmony. It was during the debates on the question of alliance that Demosthenes pronounced his Olynthiac orations, which were animated by the same spirit as his Philippic, and were in fact Philippics. At this juncture the Athenians seem to have been awakened to the necessity of action sufficiently to embolden Demosthenes to throw out the unpopular suggestion that the Theoric Fund should be devoted to military purposes; and he repeats his old plea for citizen-soldiers. An alliance was concluded and mercenaries were dispatched to the Chalcidian peninsula under Chares and Charidemus (who had left the service of Cersobleptes). More troops would certainly have followed, and Philip might have been placed in some embarrassment, especially as Cersobleptes had rebelled. But he diverted the concern of Athens in another direction, and so divided her forces. He had long been engaged in intrigues in Euboea, and now Eretria revolted and drove out Plutarch, the tyrant who held the city for Athens. Neighbouring Chalcis, and Oreos in the north, followed the example; Euboea was in a state of revolt. It is just possible that, if Athens had left Euboea alone, and concentrated all her military power in Chalcidice, she might have saved Olynthus for the time. The division of her forces was certainly fatal; and Demosthenes deserves great credit for opposing any interference in Euboea. But the Athenians would have been strong-minded indeed if they had done nothing to regain the neighbouring island, while they dispatched all their troops to succour an ally. The expedition to Euboea, which was now entrusted to the general Phocion, might better never have been sent; but beforehand there seemed no reason why it should not succeed. Phocion’s only exploit was to extricate himself from a dangerous position at Tamynae, by winning a battle, but he returned to Athens without having recovered any of the rebellious cities. The enemy had taken a number of prisoners, for whose ransom Athens had to pay fifty talents; and it was decided that there was nothing for it but to acknowledge the independence of Euboea, with the exception of Carystus, which remained loyal.

Meanwhile Philip was pressing Olynthus hard, and urgent appeals were sent to Athens. This time Demosthenes had his way, and 2000 citizen-soldiers sailed for the north. But it was too late. Olynthus was captured before they reached it; and Philip showed no mercy to the city which had played him false. The place was destroyed and the inhabitants scattered in various parts of Macedonia, some set to work as slaves in the royal domains. The other cities of the confederacy were practically incorporated in Macedonia; but they still continued to exist as cities and manage their local affairs. There was no question of their extermination.

Demosthenes had opposed the expedition to Euboea, and thereby hangs a story. He had a bitter foe in a rich man, named Meidias, who was a supporter of Eubulus. Their personal hostility was reawakened in the debates over the Euboean question, and Meidias seized the occasion of the great Dionysiac feast to put a public affront on his enemy. Demosthenes had undertaken the duty of supplying a chorus for his tribe, and on the day of the performance, when he appeared in the sacred robe of a choregus, Meidias struck him in the face. The outrage involved contempt of a religious festival, and Demosthenes instituted proceedings against his insulter. The speech which he composed for the occasion contains fine scathing invective. The description of Meidias vulgarly displaying his wealth may be quoted to illustrate contemporary manners. “Where,” Demosthenes asks, “are his splendid outlays? For myself, I cannot see unless it be in this—that he has built a mansion at Eleusis large enough to darken all the neighbourhood— that he keeps a pair of white horses from Sicyon, with which he conducts his wife to the mysteries or anywhere else he fancies—that he sweeps through the market-place with three or four lackeys all to himself, and talks about his bowls and drinking-horns and saucers, loud enough to be heard by the passers-by.” But Demosthenes consented to compromise the matter for a small sum before it was brought to an issue, and there can be little question that his consent was given from political motives. On the capture of Olynthus the different parties drew together and agreed to co-operate; and this new political combination rendered it necessary for Demosthenes, however reluctant, to patch up the feud with Meidias.

 

Sect. 6. The Peace of Philocrates

Her recent military efforts had exhausted the revenue of Athens; there was not enough money in the treasury to pay the judges their daily wage. Peace was clearly a necessity, and this must have been fully recognised by Eubulus. But there was great indignation at the fall of Olynthus, and the feeling that a disaster had been sustained was augmented by the fact that there were a considerable number of Athenians among the captives. Accordingly the pressure of popular opinion, which was for the moment strongly aroused against Philip, induced Eubulus to countenance the dispatch of envoys to the cities of the Peloponnesus, for the purpose of organising a national resistance in Hellas against the man who had destroyed Olynthus. It is probable that this measure was advocated by Demosthenes; in later years, a national resistance to Philip was his favourite idea. It was an effort foredoomed to failure, as Eubulus knew perfectly well; yet it served his purpose, for it protected him against suspicions of being secretly friendly to Philip. On this occasion the orator Aeschines, famous as the antagonist of Demosthenes, first came prominently forward. He had begun life as an usher in a school kept by his father, he had then been a tragic actor, and finally a public clerk. He was now sent to rouse the Greeks of the Peloponnesus against Macedonia, and he used such strong language in disparagement of Philip, especially at Megalopolis, that no one could accuse him of “philippizing.” The mere fact that envoys were sent to Megalopolis—whose application for help had so recently been rejected by Athens—is enough to cast suspicion on the whole round of embassies as a farce, got up to satisfy public opinion at home. Demosthenes, like other politicians, saw the necessity of peace and worked towards it.

Philip desired two things, to conclude peace with Athens and to become a member of the Amphictionic Council. Towards this second end a path was prepared by the Thebans, who along with the Thessalians addressed an appeal to Philip that he would undertake the championship of the Amphictionic League and crush the Phocians. In Phocis itself there had recently been domestic strife; Phalaecus had been deposed from the generalship, but he had a party of his own and he held Thermopylae with the strong places in its neighbourhood. When it was noised abroad that Philip was about to march southward in answer to the Theban prayer, the Phocians invited Athens and Sparta to help them once again to hold the gates of Greece. Both Athens and Sparta again responded to the call; but the call had come from the political opponents of Phalaecus, and he refused to admit either Spartan or Athenian into the pass.  Phalaecus seems to have previously assisted the enemies of Athens in Euboea; and statesmen at Athens might now feel some uneasiness, whether he would not turn traitor and surrender the pass to Philip. It was another reason for acquiescing in the necessity of making peace.

The first overtures came from Athens. Ten Athenian envoys, and one representative of the Synedrion of Athenian allies, were sent to Pella to negotiate terms of peace with the Macedonian king. Among the envoys were Philocrates, who had proposed the embassy, Aeschines, and Demosthenes. The terms to which Philip agreed were that Athens and Macedon should each retain the territories of which they were actually in possession at the time the peace was concluded; the peace would be concluded when both sides had sworn to it. Both the allies of Macedonia and those of Athens were to be included, with two exceptions: Philip refused to treat with Halus in Thessaly—a place which he had recently attacked—or with the Phocians, whom he was determined to crush.

By these terms, which were perfectly explicit, Athens would surrender her old claim to Amphipolis, and on the other hand Philip would recognise Athens as mistress of the Chersonese. The two exceptions which Philip made were inevitable. Halus indeed was a trifle which no one heeded; but it was an essential part of the Macedonian policy to proceed against Phocis. To the envoys, whom the king charmed by his courteous hospitality at Pella, he privately intimated that he was far from being ill-disposed to the Phocians; and perhaps a few of them hoped that there was something in the assurance. But in truth the Athenian statesmen troubled themselves little about Phocis; some of them, like the Theban proxenos Demosthenes, were more disposed to lean towards Thebes. It would be necessary to keep up the appearance of protecting an ally,— though relations with that ally had recently grown somewhat strained; but neither Eubulus nor Demosthenes would for a moment have dreamed of forgoing the peace for the sake of supporting Phocis against her enemies.

There were a few Thracian forts, belonging to Cersobleptes, which Philip was anxious to capture before the peace was made  and, when the envoys left Pella, he set out for Thrace, having given them an undertaking to respect the Chersonese. The envoys returned home bearing with them a friendly letter from Philip to the Athenian people, and they were followed in a few days by three Macedonian delegates, appointed to receive the oaths from the Athenians and their allies. How important this negotiation was for Philip is proved by the fact that two of these deputies were the two greatest of his subjects, Parmenio and Antipater. On the motion of Philocrates, the Peace was accepted by Athens on the terms which Philip offered, though there were dissentient voices against the exclusion of Phocis and Halus; but the murmurs of the opposition were silenced by the plain speaking of Eubulus, who showed that if the terms were rejected the war must be continued. And some of the ambassadors disseminated the unofficial utterances of Philip, that he would not ruin the Phocians and that he would help Athens to win back Euboea and Oropus. The upshot was that Phocis was not mentioned in the treaty; she was tacitly, not expressly, excluded.

The Peace was now concluded on one side, and it remained for the envoys of Athens to administer the oath to Philip and his allies. It was to the interest of Athens that this act should be accomplished as speedily as possible, for Philip was entitled to make new conquests until he swore to the Peace, and he was actually engaged in making new conquests in Thrace. The same ambassadors who had visited Macedonia to arrange the terms of a treaty now set forth a second time to administer the oaths.

Meanwhile Philip had taken the Thracian fortresses which he had gone to take, and had reduced Cersobleptes to be a vassal of Macedonia. When he returned to Pella, he found not only the embassy from Athens, but envoys from many other Greek states also awaiting his arrival with various hopes and fears. He was beginning to be recognised as the arbiter of northern Hellas.

So far as the formal conclusion of the Peace went, there was no difficulty. But the Athenian ambassadors had received general powers to negotiate further with Philip, with a view to some common decision on the settlement of the Phocian question and northern Greece. The treaty was a treaty of “peace and alliance,” and, if Philip could have had his way, the alliance would have become a bond of close friendship and co-operation. And it was in this direction that Eubulus and his party were inclined cautiously to move. Athens might have now taken her position as joint arbitrator with Philip in the settlement of the Amphictionic states. Both Philip and Athens had a common interest in reducing the power of Thebes; and, if it was the interest of Athens that Phocis should not be utterly destroyed, Philip had no special enmity against Phocis, whose strength was now exhausted; the Phocian “sacrilege” was a convenient pretext to interfere and step into the place of Phocis in the Delphian Amphictiony. A common programme was discussed, and might easily have been concerted between Philip and the ambassadors. To treat the Phocians with clemency and to force Thebes to acknowledge the independence of the Boeotian cities would have been the basis of common action; the restoration of Plataea was mentioned; and while Philip promised to secure the restitution to Athens of Euboea and Oropus, Athens would have supported the admission of Macedonia into the Amphictionic Council. Aeschines was the chief mouthpiece of the counsels of Eubulus. But the project of an active alliance was opposed strenuously by Demosthenes, and as Demosthenes had great and daily increasing influence with the Athenian Assembly, it would have been unsafe for Philip to conclude any definite agreement with the majority of the embassy. The policy of Demosthenes was to abandon the Phocians to their fate and to draw closer to Thebes; so that, when his city had recovered from her financial exhaustion, Thebes and Athens together might form a joint resistance to the aggrandisement of Macedonia. In consequence of this irreconcilable division, which broke out in most unseemly quarrels among the ambassadors, nothing more was done than the administration of the oath. The envoys accompanied the king into Thessaly, and at Pherae the oath was administered to the Thessalians, his allies. A peace was then arranged with Halonnesus, and the envoys returned to Athens, leaving Philip to proceed on his own way.

It now remained to be seen whether Eubulus would carry the Assembly with him in favour of a rational policy of co-operation with Macedon, or would be defeated by the brilliant oratory of his younger rival. Philip’s course of action would depend on the decision of the Assembly.

It was a calamity for Athens that at this critical moment there was no strong man at the helm of the state. The Assembly was swayed between the opposite counsels of Demosthenes, whose oratory was irresistible, and of Eubulus, whose influence had been paramount for the past eight years. When the ambassadors returned, Demosthenes lost no time in denouncing his colleagues, as having treacherously intrigued with Philip against the interests of the city. His denunciation was successful for a moment, and the usual vote of thanks to the embassy was withheld. But the success was only for a moment; Aeschines and his colleagues defended their policy triumphantly before the Assembly; and it was clear that the programme which they had discussed with Philip would have been satisfactory to the people. The Assembly decreed that the treaty of peace and alliance should be extended to the posterity of Philip.

It further decreed that Athens should formally call upon the Phocians to surrender Delphi to the Amphictions, and should threaten them with armed intervention if they declined. Demosthenes appears to have made no opposition to this measure against the Phocians; and it seemed that the policy of co-operation with Philip was about to be realised.

Philip in the meantime advanced southward. The pass of Thermopylae was held by Phalaecus, who had been reinforced by some Lacedaemonian troops; but Phalaecus had opened secret negotiations with Pella some months before; and the hostile vote of the Athenians decided him to capitulate on condition of departing unhindered where he would. Before he reached Thermopylae, Philip had addressed two friendly letters to Athens, inviting her to send an army to arrange the affairs of Phocis and Boeotia. Indisposed as the Athenian citizens were to leave Athens on military service, they lent ready ears to the absurd terrors which Demosthenes conjured up, suggesting that Philip would detain their army as hostages. Accordingly they contented themselves with sending an embassy (on which Demosthenes declined to serve) to convey to Philip an announcement of the decree which they had passed against the Phocians. Thus swayed between Eubulus and Demosthenes, the Athenians had done too much or too little. They had abandoned the Phocians, and at the same time they resigned the voice which they should, and could, have had in the political settlement of northern Greece.

As it was clear that Philip could not trust Athens, owing to the attitude of Demosthenes, he was constrained to act in conjunction with her enemy, Thebes. The cities of western Boeotia, which had been held by the Phocians, were restored to the Boeotian confederacy. The doom of the Phocians was decided by the Amphictionic Council which was now convoked. If some of the members had had their way, all the men of military age would have been cast down a precipice; but Philip would not have permitted this, and the sentence was as mild as could have been expected. The Phocians were deprived of their place in the Amphictionic body; and all their cities (with the exception of Abae) were broken up into villages, so that they might not again be a danger to Delphi. They were obliged to undertake to pay back, by instalments of sixty talents a year, the value of the treasures which they had taken from the sanctuary. The Lacedaemonians were also punished for the support which they had given to Phocis, by being disqualified to return either of the members who represented the Dorian vote. The place which Phocis vacated in the Council was transferred to Macedonia, in recognition of Philip’s services in expelling the desecrators of the temple.

The Athenian declaration against Phocis exempted Athens from the penalty which was inflicted on Sparta at this Amphictionic meeting. But this was small comfort, and when the Athenians realised that they had gained nothing and that Thebes had gained all she wanted, they felt with indignation that the statesmanship of their city had been unskilful. The futility of their policy had been mainly due to Demosthenes, who had done all in his power to thwart Eubulus; and he now seized the occasion to discredit that statesman and his party. He encouraged his fellow-countrymen in the unreasonable fear that Philip would invade Attica, and the panic was so great that they brought their families and movable property from the country into the city. The fear was soon dispelled by a letter from Philip himself; but Demosthenes had succeeded in creating a profound distrust of Philip, and there was soon an opportunity of expressing this feeling.

An occasion offered itself to Philip almost immediately to display publicly to the assembled Greek world the position of leadership which he had thus won. It so happened that the celebration of the Pythian games fell in the year of the Peace. It will be remembered how the despot of Pherae, when he had made himself ruler of Thessaly, was about to come down to Delphi and assume the presidency of the Pythian feast, when he was cut down by assassins. The ambitions and plans of Pherae had passed to Pella, and Greece, which had dreaded the claims of the Thessalian tyrant, had now to bend the knee before the Macedonian king. Athens sulked; she sent no deputy to the Amphictionic meeting which elected Philip president for the festival, no delegates to the festival itself. This marked omission was a protest against the admission of Macedonia to the Amphictionic League, and Philip understood it as such. But he did not wish to quarrel with Athens; he hoped ultimately to gain her good-will; and instead of marching into Attica, whither his Thessalian and Theban friends would have only too gladly followed him, he contented himself with sending an embassy to notify to the Athenian people the vote which made him a member of the Amphictiony and to invite them to concur. The invitation was in fact an ultimatum. Eubulus and his party had lost their influence in the outburst of anti-Macedonian feeling which Demosthenes had succeeded in stirring up. But the current had gone too far, and Demosthenes had some difficulty in allaying the spirits which he had conjured up. The Assembly was ready, on the slightest encouragement, to refuse its concurrence to the Amphictionic decree, and Demosthenes was forced to save the city from the results of his own agitation by showing that it would be foolish and absurd “to go to war now for the shadow at Delphi”. Rarely had Athens been placed in such an undignified posture—a plight for which she had to thank the brilliant orator whom a malignant fate had sent to guide her on a futile path. From this time forward Demosthenes was the most influential of her counsellors.

Neither Demosthenes, the eloquent speaker, nor Eubulus, the able financier, saw far into the future. The only man of the day perhaps who grasped the situation in its ecumenical aspect, who descried, as it were from without, the place of Macedonia in Greece and the place of Greece in the world, was the nonagenarian Isocrates. He had never ventured to raise his voice in the din of party politics; he had kept his garments unspotted from the defilement of public life; and when he condescended to give political advice to Greece, it was easy for the second-rate statesman as well as the party hack to laugh at a mere man of study stepping into a field where he had no practical experience. But Isocrates discerned the drift of events, where the orators who madly declaimed in the Pnyx were at fault; and the view which he took of the situation after the conclusion of the Peace of Philocrates simply anticipated the decrees of history. He explained his view in an open letter to king Philip. He had, long since, seen the endless futility of perpetuating that international system of Greece which existed within the memory of men : a number of small sovereign states, which ought by virtue of all they had in common to form a single nation, divided and constantly at feud. The time had come, he thought, to unite Greece, now that there had arisen a man who had the brains, the power, and the gold to become the central pivot of the union. Sovereign and independent the city states would of course remain; but they might be drawn together into one fold by a common hope and allegiance to a common leader. And under such a leader as Philip there was a great programme for Greece; and not a mere programme of ambition, undertaken for the sake of something to do, but an enterprise which was urgently needed to meet a pressing social danger. We have already seen how Greece was flooded for many years past with a superfluous population who went about as armed rovers, attached to no city, hiring themselves out to any state that needed fighting men, a constant menace to society. A new country to colonise was the only remedy for this overflow of Greece, as Isocrates recognised. And the new country must be won from the barbarian. The time had come for Hellas to take the offensive against Persia, and the task appointed for Philip was to lead forth the hosts of Hellas on this splendid enterprise. If he did not destroy the whole empire of the Great King, he might at least annex Asia Minor “from Cilicia to Sinope” to the Hellenic world and appropriate it to the needs of the Hellenic folk.

Ten years later the fulfilment of this task which Isocrates laid upon Philip was begun, not indeed by Philip himself, but by his successor. We shall see in due time how the fulfilment surpassed the utmost hopes of the Athenian speculator. But it is fair to note how justly Isocrates had discerned the signs of the times and the tendency of history. He saw that the inveterate quarrel between Europe and Asia, which had existed since the “Trojan war,” was the great abiding fact; he foresaw that it must soon come to an issue; and throughout the later part of his long life he was always watching for the inevitable day. The expedition of Cyrus and the campaign of Agesilaus were foreshadowings of that day; and it had seemed for a moment that Jason of Pherae was chosen to be the successor of Agamemnon and Cimon. Now the day had come at last; the choice of destiny had fallen upon the man of Macedonia. And Isocrates knew that this expansion of Greece would meet Greece’s chief practical need. It is instructive to contrast his sane and practical view of the situation of Greece with the chimerical conservatism of some of his contemporaries. This conservatism, to which the orator Demosthenes gave a most noble expression, was founded on the delusion that the Athens of his day could be converted by his own eloquence and influence into the form and feature of the Periclean city. That was a delusion which took no account of the change which events had wrought in the Athenian character; it was a noble delusion which could have misled no great statesman or hard-headed thinker. It did not mislead Isocrates; he appreciated the trend of history, and saw the expansion of Greece, to which the world was moving.

 

Sect. 7. Interval of Peace and Preparations for War (346-1 B.C.)

Having gained for Macedonia the coveted place in the religious league of Greece, Philip spent the next year or two in improving his small navy, in settling the administration of Thessaly, and in acquiring influence in the Peloponnesus. It may fairly be said that Thessaly was now joined to Macedonia by a personal union. The Thessalian cities elected the Macedonian king as their archon—the old name of tagus with its Pheraean associations was avoided,—and he set four governors over the four great divisions of the country. South of the Corinthian Isthmus, Philip adopted the old policy of Thebes, offering friendship to those states which needed a friend to stand by them against Sparta. His negotiations gained him the adhesion of Messenia and Megalopolis, Elis and Argos. In Megalopolis they set up a bronze statue of Philip, while Argos had a special tie with Macedon, since she claimed to be the original home of the Macedonian kings.

Nor did Philip yet despair of achieving his chief aim, the conciliation of Athens. No one knew how to bribe better than he, and we may be sure that he gave gold without stint to his Athenian supporters. The Athenians naturally preferred peace to war; and the political party which was favourable to friendly relations with Philip was still strong and might at any moment regain its power. The influence of the veteran Eubulus, who seems to have withdrawn somewhat from public affairs, was on that side; there were Aeschines and Philocrates who had been active in the negotiation of the Peace; and there was the incorruptible soldier Phocion, who was a remarkable figure at Athens, although he had no pretensions to eminence either as a soldier or as a statesman. He was marked among his contemporaries as an honest man, superior to all temptations of money; and, as the Athenians always prized this superhuman integrity which few of them attempted to practise, they elected him forty-five times as strategos, though in military capacity he was no more than a respectable sergeant. But his strong common sense, which was impervious to oratory, and his exceptional probity made him an useful member of his party.

There was one man in Athens who was firmly resolved that the peace should be no abiding peace, but a mere interval preparatory to war. Demosthenes, supported by Hypereides, Lycurgus, and others, spent the time in inflaming the wrath of his countrymen against Philip and in seeking to ruin his political antagonists. These years are therefore marked by a great struggle between the parties of war and peace; the influence of Demosthenes being most often in the ascendency and ultimately emerging victorious.

After Philip’s installation in the Amphictionic Council, Demosthenes lost no time in striking a blow at his opponents. He brought an impeachment against Aeschines for receiving bribes from the Macedonian king and betraying the interests of Athens in the negotiations which preceded the Peace. Men’s minds were irritated by the triumph of Thebes, and Demosthenes might have succeeded in inducing them to make Aeschines a scapegoat, if he had not committed a fatal mistake. He associated with himself in the prosecution a certain Timarchus, whose early life had been devoted to vices which disqualified him from the rights of a citizen; and thus Aeschines easily parried the stroke by bringing an action against Timarchus and submitting his private life to an annihilating exposure. The case of Demosthenes was thereby discredited, and he was obliged to let it drop for the time.

A year or so later we find Demosthenes going forth on a mission to the cities of the Peloponnesus, to counteract by his oratory the influence of Philip. But his oratory roused no echoes, and Philip had good reason to complain of invectives which could hardly be justified from the lips of the representative of a power which was at peace and in alliance with Macedonia. An embassy came from Pella to remonstrate with the Athenians on their obstinate misconstruction of Macedonian motives, and Demosthenes seized the occasion to deliver one of his uncompromising anti-Macedonian harangues. The basis of his reasoning in this Philippic, and in the political speeches which followed it during the next few years, is the proposition that Philip desired and purposed to destroy Athens. It was a proposition of which he had no valid proof; and it was actually untrue, as the sequel showed.

We are not told what answer Athens sent to Pella, but it would seem that she complained of the terms of the recent Peace as unfair, and specially mentioned her right to Halus. This island off the coast of Thessaly, a place of no value whatever, had belonged to the Athenian Confederacy, but it had been seized by pirates, and the pirates had been expelled by Philip’s soldiers. Philip sent an embassy with a courteous message, requesting Athens to propose emendations in the terms of the Peace, and offering to give her Halonnesus. But the place was of so little consequence to Athens or any one, that it served as an excellent pretext for diplomatic wrangling, and Demosthenes could persuade the people to refuse Halonnesus as it was offered, and demand that it should not be “given” but “given back.” Besides the “restoration” of this worthless island, Athens made the proposal that the basis of the Peace should be altered, and that each party should retain, not the territories which were actually in its possession when the treaty was concluded, but the territories which lawfully belonged to it. This proposal was preposterous; no peace can be made on a basis that leaves open all the debated questions which it is the object of the treaty to settle. Athens also complained of the Thracian fortresses which Philip captured and retained after the negotiation had begun.

On this question Philip was legally in the right, but he offered to submit the matter to arbitration. Athens refused the offer on the plea that suitable arbiters could not be found. She thus showed that she was not in earnest; her objection was as frivolous as her proposal. Demosthenes was responsible for the attitude of the city, and his intention was to keep up the friction with Macedonia and prevent any conciliation.

The ascendency which Demosthenes and his fellows had now won emboldened them to make a grand attack upon their political opponents, and thereby deal Philip a sensible blow. Hypereides brought an accusation of treachery against Philocrates, whose name was especially associated with the Peace, and so formidable did the prospect of the trial seem, in the present state of popular opinion, that Philocrates fled, and he was condemned to death for contempt of court. Encouraged by this success, Demosthenes again took up his indictment against Aeschines, but Aeschines stood his ground; and one of the most famous political trials of antiquity was witnessed by the Athenian public. We can still hear the two rivals scurrilously reviling each other and vying to deceive the judges; for they published their speeches after the trial, to instruct and perplex posterity. It is in these documents, burning with the passions of political hatred, that the modern historian, picking his doubtful way through lies and distortions of fact, has to discover the course of the negotiations which led to the Peace of Philocrates. The speech of Demosthenes, in particular, is a triumph in the art of sophistry. No politician ever knew better than he how short is the memory of ordinary men for the political events which they have themselves watched and even helped to shape by their votes and opinions; and none ever traded more audaciously on this weakness of human nature. Hardly four brief years had passed since the Peace was made, and Demosthenes, confident that his audience will remember nothing accurately, ventures lightly to falsify facts which had so lately been notorious in the streets of Athens. Disclaiming all responsibility for a peace which he had himself worked hard to bring about but now seeks to discredit, he discovers that the Phocians were basely abandoned and imputes their fate to Aeschines. Against Aeschines there was in fact no case; the charge of receiving bribes from Philip was not supported by any actual evidence. The reply of Aeschines, which as an oratorical achievement is not inferior to that of his accuser, rings less falsely. Eubulus and Phocion, men of the highest character, supported Aeschines, but the public feeling was so hostile to Philip at this juncture, that the defendant barely escaped.

That Aeschines and many others of his party received money from Philip we may well believe—though the reiterations of Demosthenes are no evidence. But to receive money from Philip was one thing and to betray the interests of Athens was another. It must be proved that a politician had sacrificed the manifest good of his country, or deserted his own political convictions, for a sackful of silver or gold, before he could be considered unconditionally a traitor. Public opinion in Greece thought no worse of a man for accepting a few talents from foreigners who were pleased with his policy; although those few public men—Demosthenes was not among them—who made it a rule never to accept an obol in connexion with any political transaction were respected as beings of superhuman virtue. Philip, who unlocked many a city by golden keys, was doubtless generous to the party whose programme was identical with his own interests ; and it may be that Aeschines and others, who were not in affluent circumstances, would have been unable to devote themselves to public affairs if the king had not lined their wallets with gold.

Meanwhile Philip was seeking influence and intriguing in the countries which lay on either side of Attica,—in Megara on the west, and Euboea on the north-east. An attempt at a revolution in Megara was defeated, and the city allied itself with its neighbour and old enemy Athens. But in Euboea the movements supported by Macedonia were more successful. Both in Eretria and in Oreus oligarchies were established, really dependent on Philip. But in Chalcis, which from its strategic position was of greater importance, the democracy held its ground, and sought an equal alliance with Athens, to which Athens gladly consented.

Events in another quarter of Greece now caused a number of lesser Greek states to rally round Athens, and so bring within the field of near possibilities a league such as it was the dream of Demosthenes to form against Macedonia. By his marriage with an Epirot princess, it naturally devolved upon Philip to intervene in the struggles for the Epirot throne which followed her father’s death. He espoused the cause of her brother Alexander against her uncle Arybbas, marched into the country, and established Alexander in the sovereignty. Epirus would now become dependent on Macedonia, and Philip saw in it a road to the Corinthian Gulf and a means of reaching Greece on the western side. His first step was to annex the region of Cassopia (between the rivers Acheron and Oropus) to the Epirote league of which his brother-in-law was head; and his eyes were then cast upon Ambracia, which stood as a barrier to the southward expansion of Epirus. But the place which he desired above all was doubtless Naupactus, the key to the Corinthian Gulf, now in the hands of the Achaeans. For compassing his schemes in this quarter his natural allies were the Aetolians. They too coveted Naupactus and would have held it for him; and they were the enemies of the Ambraciots and Acarnanians, whom he hoped to render dependent on Epirus. The evident designs of Philip alarmed all these peoples, and not only Ambracia, Acarnania, and Achaea, but Corcyra also, sought the alliance of Athens.

Philip, however, judged that the time had not come for further advances on this side, and some recent movements of Cersobleptes decided him to turn now to one of the greatest tasks which were imposed upon the expander of Macedonia—the subjugation of Thrace. Since the Persians had been beaten out of Europe, Thrace had been subject to native princes, some of whom—Teres, Sitalces, Cotys—we have seen ruling the whole land from the Strymon’s to the Danube’s mouth. It was now to pass again under the rule of a foreigner, but its new lords were Europeans who would lead Thracian soldiers to avenge upon Asia the oriental yoke which had been laid upon their ancestors. Of the Thracian expedition of Philip we know as little as of the Thracian expedition of Darius. Unlike Darius, he did not cross the rivers of the north or penetrate into any part of Scythia, but his campaign lasted ten months, and he spent a winter in the field in that wintry land, suffering from sickness as well as from the cold. In war Philip never spared himself either hardship or danger. Demosthenes in later years described his reckless energy, ruthless to himself, in a famous passage : “To gain empire and power he had an eye knocked out, his collar-bone broken, his arm and his leg maimed; he abandoned to fortune any part of his body she cared to take, so that honour and glory might be the portion of the rest.”

The Thracian king was dethroned, and his kingdom became a tributary province of Macedon. There is still in the land a city which bears Philip’s name, and is the most conspicuous memorial of that great and obscure campaign. Philippopolis on the Hebrus was the chief of the cities which the conqueror built to maintain Macedonian influence in Thrace.

This conquest was not an infringement of the Peace, for Cersobleptes had not been admitted to the treaty as an ally of Athens. But it affected nearly and seriously the position of Athens at the gates of the Black Sea. The Macedonian frontier was now advanced to the immediate neighbourhood of the Chersonese, and Athens had no longer Thracian princes to wield against Philip. The prospect did not escape Demosthenes, and he resolved to force on a war,—though both his own country and Philip were averse to hostilities. Accordingly he induced Athens to send a few ships and mercenaries under a swashbuckler named Diopeithes, to protect her interests in the Chersonese. There had been some disputes with Cardia touching the lands of the Athenian outsettlers, and Diopeithes lost no time in attacking Cardia. Now Cardia had been expressly recognised as an ally of Philip in the Peace, and thus the action of Diopeithes was a violation of the Peace. The admiral followed up this aggression by invading some of Philip’s Thracian possessions, and Philip then remonstrated at Athens. Their admiral was so manifestly in the wrong that the Athenians were prepared to disown his conduct, but Demosthenes saved his tool and persuaded the people to sustain Diopeithes. He followed up his speech on the Chersonese question, which scored this success, by a loud call to war (341 b.c.)—the harangue known as the Third Philippic. The orator’s thesis is that Philip, inveterately hostile to Athens and aiming at her destruction, is talking peace but acting war; and, when all the king’s acts have been construed in this light, the perfectly sound conclusion is drawn that Athens should act at once. The proposals of Demosthenes are to make military preparations, to send forces to the Chersonese, and to organise an Hellenic league against “the Macedonian wretch.”

Envoys were sent here and there to raise the alarm. Demo- Demosthenes himself proceeded to the Propontis and succeeded in detaching Byzantium and Perinthus from the Macedonian alliance. At the same time Athenian troops were sent into Euboe; the governments in Oreus and Eretria were overthrown, and these cities joined an independent Euboeic league, of which the Synod met at Chalcis. The island was thus liberated from Macedon without becoming dependent on Athens.

All these acts of hostility were committed without an overt breach of the Peace between Athens and Philip. But the secession of Perinthus and Byzantium was a blow which Philip was not prepared to take with equanimity. When he had settled his Thracian province, he began the siege of Perinthus by land and sea. There was an Athenian squadron in the Hellespont which barred the passage of the Macedonian fleet, but Philip caused a diversion by sending land troops into the Chersonese, and by this stratagem got his ships successfully through. The siege of Perinthus, marks, for eastern Greece, the beginning of those new developments of the art of besieging, which in Sicily had long since been practised with success. But all the engines and rams, the towers and the mines of Philip failed to take Perinthus on its steep peninsular cliff. His blockade on the seaside was inefficient, and the besieged were furnished with stores and men from Byzantium. The Athenians were still holding aloof. They had addressed a remonstrance to Philip for violating the Chersonese and capturing some of their cruisers. Philip replied by a letter in which he rehearsed numerous acts of Athenian hostility to himself. But the decisive moment came when the king suddenly raised the siege of Perinthus and marched against Byzantium, hoping to capture it by the unexpectedness of his attack. Athens could no longer hold aloof when the key of the Bosphorus was in peril. The marble tablet on which the Peace was inscribed was pulled down; it was openly war at last. A squadron under Chares was sent to help Byzantium, and Phocion presently followed with a second fleet. Other help had come from Rhodes and Chios, and Philip was compelled to withdraw into Thrace, baffled in both his undertakings. It was the first triumph of Demosthenes over the arch-foe, and he received a public vote of thanks from the Athenian people.

But one wonders that the naval power of Athens had not made itself more immediately and effectively felt. The Macedonian fleet was insignificant; it could inflict damage on merchant-vessels or raid a coast, but it had no hold on the sea. The Athenian navy was 300 strong and controlled the northern Aegean; and yet it seems that in these critical years there was no permanent squadron of any strength stationed in the Hellespont. Naval affairs had been by no means neglected. Eubulus had seen to the building of new ship-sheds and had begun the construction of a magnificent arsenal, close to the harbour of Zea, for the storage of the sails and rigging and tackle of the ships of war. But these luxuries were vain, if the ships themselves were not efficient, and the group-system on which the ships were furnished worked badly. Demosthenes had long ago desired to reform this system, which had been in force for seventeen years. The 1200 richest citizens were liable to the trierarchy—each trireme being charged on a small group, of which each member contributed the same proportion of the expense. If a large number of ships were required, the group might consist of five persons; if a small, of fifteen. This system bore hardly on the poorer members of the partnership, who had to pay the same amount as the richer, and some were ruined by the burden. But the great mischief was that these poorer members were often unable to pay their quota in time and consequently the completion of the triremes was delayed. The influence of Demosthenes was now so enormous that he was able, in the face of bitter opposition from the wealthy class, to introduce a new law, by which the cost of furnishing the ships should fall on each citizen in proportion to his property. Thus a citizen whose property was rated as exceeding thirty talents, would henceforward, instead of having to pay one-fifth or perhaps one-fifteenth of the cost of a single trireme, be obliged to furnish three triremes and a boat.

So popular was Demosthenes, by the successes of Euboea and Byzantium, that he was able to accomplish a still greater feat. Years before he had cautiously hinted at the expediency of devoting the Festival Fund to military purposes; he now persuaded the Athenians to adopt this highly disagreeable measure. The building of the arsenal and ship-sheds was interrupted also, in order to save the expenses.

Philip in the meantime had again withdrawn into the wilds of Thrace. The Scythians near the mouth of the Danube had rebelled, and he crossed the Balkan range to crush them. In returning to Macedon through the land of the Triballi, in the centre of the peninsula, he had some sore mountain warfare and was severely wounded in the leg. But Thrace was now safe, and he was free to deal with Greece.

 

Sect. 8. Battle of Chaeronea

Philip had no longer the slightest prospect of realising the hope, which he had cherished both before and after the Peace of Philocrates, of establishing friendly relations with Athens. The influence of the irreconcilable orator was now triumphant; through the persistent agitation of Demosthenes, coldness and quarrelling had issued in war; and Macedonia had received a distinct check. There was nothing for it now but to accept the war and bring the Macedonian cavalry into play. There were two points where Athens could be attacked effectively, at the gates of her own city, and at the gates of her granary in the Euxine. But a land-power like Macedonia could not operate effectively in the Propontis, unless aided by allies which possessed an effective navy; and Philip had experienced the truth of this when he laid siege to Perinthus and Byzantium. And in that quarter he had now to reckon not only with the Athenian sea-power but with the small navies of the Asiatic islands, Rhodes, Cos, and Chios, which had recently come to the rescue of the menaced cities. For these island states calculated that, if Philip won control of the passage between the two continents, he would not only tax their trade, but would soon cross over to the conquest of Asia Minor, and their fleets would then be appropriated to form the nucleus of a Macedonian navy. Now that Athens had been awakened from her slumbers, it was abundantly evident that the only place where Macedonia could inflict upon her a decisive blow was Attica.

On her side Athens had lightly engaged in a war, for which she had not either fully counted the cost or meditated an adequate programme. In truth the Athenians had no craving for the war; and they were not driven to it by an imperious necessity, or urged by an irresistible instinct, or persuaded by a rational conviction of its expediency. The persistent and crafty agitation of Demosthenes and his party had drawn them on step by step; their natural feeling of irritation at the rise of a new great power in the north had been sedulously fed and fostered by that eloquent orator and his friends, till it had grown into an unreasoning hatred of the Macedonian king, whose character, aims, and resources were totally misrepresented. But now that war was declared, what was to be the plan of action? Athens had not even an able general who could make an effective combination. She controlled the sea, and it was something that Euboea had shaken off the Macedonian influence. In Chalcis, Athens had a point of vantage against Boeotia, and from Oreus she could raid the Thessalian coast and operate in the bay of Pagasae. But when Philip advanced southward, and passed Thermopylae, which was in his hands, the Athenian superiority at sea was of no use, for his communications were independent of the sea. There was no means of offering serious opposition if he marched on Attica; and the citizens were hardly likely at the bidding of Demosthenes to ascend their ships as they had done at the bidding of Themistocles. If events fell out according to the only probable forecast which could be made—on the assumption of Demosthenes that the invasion of Attica and ruin of Athens were the supreme objects of Philip—the Athenians had to look forward to the devastation of their country and the siege of their city. How was this peril to be met? They were practically isolated; for they had no strong continental power to support them; what could Megarians or Corinthians, Ambraciots or Achaeans, do for them against the host of Philip and his allies? “Ah, if we were only islanders!” many an Athenian must have murmured in these critical years. It was the calamity of Athens, as it has been the calamity of Holland, that she was solidly attached to the continent. Now that the crisis approaches nearer, it is borne in upon us more and more how improvident the policy of Athens had been. If she had accepted Macedonian friendship and kept a strong naval force permanently in the Propontis, assuring herself of undisputed control of her own element, she would have been perfectly safe. The constant presence of a powerful fleet belonging to a predominant naval state may be in itself a strategic success equivalent to a series of victories. But, though we have almost no notices of the movements of the Athenian galleys at this time, we cannot help suspecting that the naval power of Athens was inefficiently handled.

Demosthenes had never had a free hand until the siege of Byzantium; till then, he could do little more than agitate. When at length he became in the full sense of the word the director of Athenian policy, his energy and skill were amazing. But we cannot help asking with what hopes he was prepared to undertake the responsibility of bringing an invader into his country and a besieger to the walls of his city. The answer is that he rested his hope on a single chance. From the beginning of his public career Demosthenes had a strong leaning to Thebes; it has been already mentioned that he was Theban proxenos at Athens. This was a predilection which it behoved him to be very careful of airing; for the general feeling in his city was unfriendly to Thebes. The rhetorical tears which Demosthenes shed over the fate of the Phocians were not inconsistent with his attachment to the enemies of Phocis; for he never raised his voice for the victims of Theban hatred until their doom was accomplished. The aim of his policy was to unite Athens in alliance with Thebes. It was a difficult and doubtful game. Could Thebes be induced to turn against her Macedonian ally, who had recently secured for her the full supremacy of Boeotia, and who, she might reasonably reckon, would continue to support her as an useful neighbour to Attica? On this chance, and a poor chance it seemed, rested the desperate policy of Demosthenes. If Thebes joined Philip, or even gave him a free passage through Boeotia, the fate of Attica was sealed. But if she could be brought to desert him, her well-trained troops, joined with those of Athens, might successfully oppose his invasion.

The invasion was not long delayed; and it came about in a curious way. During the recent Sacred War, the Athenians had burnished anew and set up again in the sanctuary of Delphi the donative which they had dedicated after the victory of Plataea, being gold shields with the inscription, “From the spoils of Persians and Thebans, who fought together against the Greeks.” Such a re-dedication, while Delphi was in the hands of the Phocians, who had been condemned as sacrilegious robbers, might be regarded as an offence against religion; at all events, the Thebans and their friends had an excellent pretext to revenge themselves on Athens for that most offensive inscription, which had perpetuated the shame of Thebes for a century and a half. The Thebans themselves did not come forward, but their friends of the Locrian Amphissa arranged to accuse the Athenians at the autumn session of the Amphictionic Council and propose a fine of fifty talents. At this session Aeschines was one of the Athenian deputies and he discovered the movement which was afoot against his city. He was an able man and he forestalled the blow by dealing another. The men who had been incited to charge Athens with sacrilege had been themselves guilty of a sacrilege far more enormous. They had cultivated part of the accursed field which had once been the land of Crisa. Aeschines arose in the assembly and, in an impressive and convincing speech which carried his audience with him, called upon the Amphictions to punish the men who had wrought this impious act. On the morrow at break of day the Amphictions and the Delphians, armed with pickaxes, marched down the hill to lay waste the places which had been unlawfully cultivated, and, as they did so, were assaulted by the Amphissians, whose city is visible from the plain. The Council then resolved to hold a special meeting at Thermopylae, in order to consult on measures for the punishment of the Locrians, who, to their former crime, had added the offence of violating the persons of the Amphictionic deputies.

By his promptness and eloquence the Athenian orator had secured a great triumph. He had completely turned the tables on the enemies, Amphissa and Thebes, who must have been prepared to declare an Amphictionic war against Athens, in case she declined, as she certainly would have done, to pay the fine. They calculated of course on the support of Philip of Macedon. But it was now for Athens to take the lead in a sacred war against Amphissa; and it was a favourable opportunity for her to make peace with Philip—so that the combination should be Philip and Athens against Thebes, instead of Philip and Thebes against Athens. It was not to be expected that this advantage which Aeschines had gained would be welcome to Demosthenes; for it was the object of Demosthenes to avoid an embroilment with Thebes. Accordingly he persuaded the people to send no deputies to the special Amphictionic meeting and take no part in the proceedings against Amphissa. He upbraided Aeschines with trying to “bring an Amphictionic war into Attica”: a strange taunt to the man who had prevented the declaration of an Amphictionic war against Athens.

Thus, although the attack upon Athens must have been prepared at Theban instigation, the incident was converted, through the policy of Demosthenes, into a means of bringing Athens and Thebes closer together. Athens and Thebes alike abstained from attending the special meeting. The Amphictions, in accordance with the decisions of that meeting, marched against the Amphissians, but were not strong enough to impose the penalties which had been decreed. Accordingly, at the next autumn session, they determined to invite Philip to come down once more to be leader in a sacred war.

Philip did not delay a moment. An Amphictionic war, from which both Athens and Thebes held aloof, was a matter which needed prompt attention. When he reached Thermopylae, he probably sent on, by the mountain road which passes through Doris to Amphissa, a small force to occupy Cytinion, the chief town on that road. Advancing himself through the defile of Thermopylae into northern Phocis, he seized and refortified the dismantled city of Elatea. The purpose of this action was to protect himself in the rear against Boeotia, and preserve his communications with Thermopylae, while he was operating against Amphissa. But while he halted at Elatea, he sent ambassadors to explore the intentions of Thebes. He declared that he intended to invade Attica, and called upon the Thebans to join him in the invasion, or, if they would not do this, to give his army a free passage through Boeotia. This was a diplomatic method of forcing Thebes to declare herself; it does not prove that Philip had any serious intention of marching against Attica, and his later conduct seems to show that he did not contemplate such a step.

But in Athens, when the news came that the Macedonian army was at Elatea, the folk fell into extreme panic and alarm. It would seem that Philip’s rapid movements had brought him into central Greece far sooner than was expected; and the news of his arrival, which must have been transmitted by way of Thebes, was accompanied by the rumour that he was about to march on Athens. And thus the Athenians in their fright connected the seizure of Elatea with the supposed design against themselves, although Elatea had no closer connexion than the pass of Thermopylae with an attack on Athens. For a night and a day the city was filled with consternation, and these anxious hours have become famous in history through the genius of the orator Demosthenes, who in later years recalled to the people the scene and their own emotions by a picturesque description which no orator has surpassed.

On the advice of Demosthenes, the Athenians dispatched ten envoys to Thebes; everything depended on detaching Thebes from the Macedonian alliance. And it seemed at least possible that this emight be effected. For, though there were probably few in Thebes who were inclined to be friendly to Athens, there was a party of some weight which was distinctly hostile to Macedonia. Moreover, there was a feeling of soreness against Philip for having seized Nicaea, close to Thermopylae, and replaced its Theban garrison by Thessalians. The envoys, of whom Demosthenes was one, were instructed to make concessions and exact none.

The ambassadors of Athens and Macedon met in the Boeotian capital, and their messages were heard in turn by the Theban assembly. It would be too much to say that the fate of Greece depended on the deliberations of this assembly, but it is the mere truth that the Theban vote not only decided the doom of Thebes itself, but determined the shape of the great event to which Greece had been irresistibly moving.

In considering the situation which the rise of Macedon had created we have hitherto stood in Pella or in Athens; we must now for Situation a moment take our point of view at Thebes. The inveterate rivalry and ever-smouldering hate which existed between Thebes and Athens was a strong motive inducing Thebes to embrace an opportunity for rendering Athens harmless. But it would require no great foresight to see that, by weakening her old rival, Thebes would gravely endanger her own position. So long as Philip had a strong Athens to reckon with, it behoved him to treat Thebes with respect, but, if Athens were reduced to nothingness, Thebes would be absolutely in his power, and probably his first step would be to free the cities of Boeotia from her domination. To put it shortly, the independent attitude which Thebes had hitherto been able to maintain towards her friend Macedonia depended on the integrity of Athens. Thus the positions of Thebes and Athens were remarkably different. While Athens could with impunity stand alone as Philip’s enemy, when Thebes was Philip’s friend, Thebes could not safely be Philip’s friend unless Athens were his enemy. The reason of this difference was that Athens was a sea-power.

To a Theban statesman then, possessing any foresight, the subjugation of Athens would have been feared as the prelude to the depression of Thebes; and it would have seemed wiser to join in a common resistance to Philip. This sound reasoning was quickened by the eloquence of Demosthenes and the offers of Athens. The Athenians were ready to pay two-thirds of the expenses of the war; they abandoned their claim to Oropus, and they recognised the Boeotian dominion of Thebes—a dominion which they had always condemned before as an outrage on the rights of free communities. But professing now, through the mouth of Demosthenes, to be the champion of Hellenic liberty, Athens scrupled little to sacrifice the liberties of a few Boeotian cities. By these concessions she secured the alliance of Thebes, and Demosthenes won the greatest diplomatic success that he had yet achieved — the consummation to which his policy had been directed for many years.

The first concern of Philip was to do the work which the Amphictions had summoned him to perform; but he is completely lost to our sight in this campaign. We only know that the allies followed him into Phocis and gained some advantages in two engagements, but that he ultimately captured not only Amphissa, cutting up a force of mercenaries that Athens had sent thither, but also Naupactus, thus gaining a point of vantage against the Peloponnesus. He then turned back to carry the war into Boeotia, and when he entered the great western gate of that country close to Chaeronea, he found the army of the allies guarding the way to Thebes, and prepared to give him battle. He had 30,000 foot soldiers and 2000 horse, perhaps slightly outnumbering his foes.

Their line extended over about three and a half miles, the left wing resting on Chaeronea and the right on the river Cephisus. The Theban hoplites, with the Sacred Band in front, under the command of Theagenes, did not occupy the left wing, as when Epaminondas led them to victory at Leuctra and at Mantinea, but were assigned the right, which was esteemed the post of honour. In the centre were ranged the troops of the lesser allies, Achaeans, Corinthians, Phocians, and others, whom Demosthenes boasted of having rallied to the cause of Hellenic liberty. On the left stood the Athenians under three generals, Chares, Lysicles, and Stratocles, of whom Chares was a respectable soldier with considerable experience and no talent, while the other two were incompetent. Demosthenes himself was serving as a hoplite in the ranks.

Of the battle we know less perhaps than of any other equally important engagement in the history of Greece. But we can form a general notion of the tactics of Philip. The most formidable part of the adverse array was the Theban infantry; and accordingly he posted on his own left wing the phalanx, with its more open order and long pikes, to try its strength against the most efficient of the old-fashioned hoplites of Greece. On the flank of this wing he placed his heavy cavalry, to ride down upon the Thebans when the phalanx had worn them out. The cavalry was commanded by Alexander, now a lad of eighteen, and, many hundred years after, “the oak of Alexander” was shown on the bank of the river. The right wing was comparatively weak, and Philip planned that it should gradually give way before the attack of the Athenians, and draw them on, so as to divide them from their allies. This plan of holding back the right wing reminds us of the tactics of Epaminondas; but the use of cavalry to decide the combat is the characteristic feature of Philip’s battles.

The Athenians pressed forward, fondly fancying that they were pressing to victory, and Stratocles in the flush of success cried, “On to Macedonia!” But in the meantime the Thebans had been broken by Alexander’s horsemen : their leader had fallen, and the comrades of the Sacred Lochos were making a last hopeless stand. Philip could now spare some of his Macedonian footmen, and he moved them so as to take the Athenians in flank and rear. Against the assault of these trained troops the Athenians were helpless. One thousand were slain, two thousand captured, and the rest ran, Demosthenes running with the fleetest. But the Sacred Band did not flee. They fought till they fell, and it is their heroism which has won for the battle of Chaeronea its glory as a struggle for liberty. When the traveller, journeying on the highway from Phocis to Thebes, has passed the town of Chaeronea, he sees at the roadside the tomb where those heroes were laid, and the fragments of the lion which was set up to keep a long ward over their bones.

An epitaph which was composed in honour of the Athenian dead suggested the consolation that God alone is sure of success, men must be prepared to fail. It is true, but in this case the failure cannot be imputed to the chances of war. When the allies opened the campaign the outlook was not hopeless; if they had been led by a competent general they might have reduced the Macedonian army to serious straits amid the valleys of Phocis and the hills of Locris. But to oppose to a Philip, the best they had was a Chares. The war was really decided in Locris by the strategical inferiority of the Athenian and Theban generals; and the inevitable sequel of the blunders there was the catastrophe in Boeotia. The advantage in numerical strength with which the allies started had been lost, and when they stood face to face with the advancing foe at Chaeronea, all the chances were adverse to any issue save defeat, in a battle in the open against a general of such pre-eminent ability. Men must be prepared to fail when they have no competent leader.

If the chances of another issue to the battle of Chaeronea have been exaggerated, the significance of that event has been often misrepresented. The battle of Chaeronea belongs to the same historical series as the battles of Aegospotami and Leuctra. As the hegemony or first place among Greek states had passed successively from Athens to Sparta, and to Thebes, so now it passed to Macedon. The statement that Greek liberty perished on the plain of Chaeronea is as true or as false as that it perished on the field of Leuctra or the strand of the Goat’s River. Whenever a Greek state became supreme, that supremacy entailed the depression of some states and the dependency or subjection of others. Athens was reduced to a secondary place by Macedon, and Thebes fared still worse; but we must not forget what Sparta, in the day of her triumph, did to Athens, or the more evil things which Thebes proposed. There were, however, in the case of Macedonia, special circumstances which seemed to give her victory a more fatal character than those previous victories which had initiated new supremacies.

For Macedon was regarded in Hellas as an outsider. This was a feeling which the southern Greeks entertained even in regard to Thessaly when Jason threatened them with a Thessalian hegemony; and Macedonia, politically and historically as well as geographically, was some steps further away than Thessaly. If Thessaly was hardly inside the inner circle of Hellenic politics, Macedonia was distinctly outside it. To Athens and Sparta, to Corinth and Argos and Thebes, the old powers, who, as we might say, had known each other all their lives as foes or friends, and had a common international history, the supremacy of Macedonia seemed the intrusion of an upstart. And, in the second place, this supremacy was the triumph of an absolute monarchy over free commonwealths, so that the submission of the Greek states to Macedon’s king might be rhetorically branded as an enslavement to a tyrant in a sense in which subjection to a sovereign Athens or a sovereign Sparta could not be so described. For these reasons the tidings of Chaeronea sent a new kind of thrill through Greece. And the impression that there was something unique in Philip’s victory might be said to have been confirmed by subsequent history, which showed that the old Greek commonwealths had had their day and might never again rise to be first-rate powers.

 

Sect. 9. The Synedrion of the Greeks. Philip’s Death

Isocrates just lived to hear the tidings of Chaeronea, and died consoled for the fate of his fallen fellow-citizens by the thought that the unity of Hellas was now assured. But a Greek unity, such as he dreamed of, was by no means assured. The hegemony of Macedonia did as little to unite the Greek states or abolish the separatist tendency as the hegemony of Athens or of Sparta. But we must see how Philip used his victory.

He treated Thebes just as Sparta had treated it when Phoebidas surprised the citadel. He punished by death or confiscation his leading opponents; he established a Macedonian garrison in the Cadmea, and broke up the Boeotian league, giving all the cities their independence, and restoring the dismantled towns of Orchomenus and Plataea. But if his dealing with Thebes did not go beyond the usual dealing of one Greek state with its vanquished rival, his dealing with Athens was unusually lenient. The truth was that Athens did not lie defenceless at his feet. He might invade and ravage Attica, but when he came to invest Athens and Piraeus, he might find himself confronted by a task more arduous than that which had thwarted him at Perinthus and Byzantium. The sea-power of Athens saved her, and not less, perhaps, the respect which Philip always felt for her intellectual eminence. Now, at last, by unexpected leniency, he might win what he had always striven for, the moral and material support of Athens. And in Athens men were now ready to listen to the voices which were raised for peace. The policy of Demosthenes had failed, and all desired to recover the 2000 captives and avert an invasion of Attic soil. There was little disposition to hearken to the advice of Hyperides, who proposed to enfranchise and arm 150,00o slaves. Among the captives was an orator of consummate talent named Demades, who belonged to the peace party and saw that the supremacy of Macedon was inevitable. An anecdote was noised abroad that Philip, who spent the night after the battle in wild revelry came reeling drunk to the place where his prisoners were and jeered at their misfortune, making merry, too, over the flight of the great Demosthenes. But Demades stood forth and ventured to rebuke him: “O king, fortune has given you the role of Agamemnon, and you play the part of Thersites!” The words stung and sobered the drunken victor; he flung away his garlands and all the gear of his revel, and set the bold speaker free. But whether this story be true or not, Demades was politically sympathetic with Philip and was sent by him to negotiate peace at Athens.

Philip offered to restore all the prisoners without ransom and not march into Attica. The Athenians on their side were to dissolve what remained of their confederacy, and join the new Hellenic union which Philip proposed to organise. In regard to territory, Oropus was to be given to Athens, but the Chersonesus was to be surrendered to Macedonia. On these terms peace was concluded, and the Athenian people thought that they had come off well. Philip sent his son and two of his chief officers to Athens, with the bodies of the Athenians who had been slain. They were received with great honour, and a statue of the Macedonian king was set up in the market-place, a token of gratitude which was probably genuine, Demosthenes himself afterwards confessed with a snarl that Philip had been kind.

It was now necessary for Macedonia to win the recognition of her supremacy from the Peloponnesian states. Philip marched himself to Peloponnesus, and met with no resistance. Sparta alone refused to submit, and the conqueror bore down upon her, with the purpose of forcing on her a reform of the constitution and the abolition of her peculiar kingship, which seemed to him like a relic of the dark ages. But something mysterious happened which induced him to desist from his purpose, and a poet of Epidaurus, who was at that time a boy, told in later years how the god Asklepios had intervened to save the Spartan state —

What time king Philip unto Sparta came,

Bent on abolishing the royal name.

But Sparta, though her kings were saved, had to suffer at the hands of Philip what she had before suffered at the hands of Epaminondas, the devastation of Laconia and the diminution of her territory. The frontier districts on three sides were given to her neighbours, Argos, Aeegea, Megalopolis, and Messenia. Having thus displayed his arms and power in the south, the Macedonian king invited all the Greek states within Thermopylae to send delegates to a congress at Corinth, (338 B.C.), and, with the sole exception of Sparta, all the states obeyed.

It was a Federal congress: the first assembly of an Hellenic Confederacy, of which the place of meeting was to be Corinth, and Macedonia the head. The aim of the Confederacy was understood from the first; but it would seem that it was not till the second meeting, a year later, that Philip announced his resolve to make war upon Persia, in behalf of Greece and her gods, to liberate the Greek cities of Asia, and to punish the barbarians for the acts of sacrilege which their forefathers had wrought in the days of Xerxes. It was the formal announcement that a new act in the eternal struggle between Europe and Asia was about to begin, and Europe, having found a leader, might now have her revenge for many a deed of insolence. The federal gathering voted for the war and elected Philip general with supreme powers. It was arranged what contingents in men or ships each city should contribute to the Panhellenic army; the Athenians undertook to send a considerable fleet.

The league which was thus organised under the hegemony of Macedon had the advantage of placing before its members a definite object to be accomplished, and, it might be thought, a common interest. But if Themistocles found it hard to unite the Greek states by a common fear, it was harder still for Philip to unite them by common hope; and the idea which Macedon promulgated produced no Panhellenic effort, and awakened but small enthusiasm. Yet the Congress of Corinth has its significance; it is the counterpart of that earlier congress which met at the Isthmus, when Greece was trembling at the thought of the barbarian host which was rolling towards her from the east. She had so long since ceased to tremble that she had almost forgotten to remember before the day of vengeance came; but with the revolution of fortune’s wheel, that day came duly round, and Greece met once more on the Isthmus to concert how her ancient tremors might be amply avenged. The new league did not unite the Greeks in the sense in which Isocrates hoped for their union. There was a common dependency on Macedon, but there was no zeal for the aims of the northern power, no faith in her as the guide and leader of Greece. Each state went its own private way; and the interests of the Greek communities remained as isolated and particular as ever. A league of such members could not be held together, the peace which the league stipulated could not be maintained, without some military stations in the midst of the country; and Philip established three Macedonian garrisons at important points : at Ambracia to watch the west, at Corinth to hold the Peloponnesus in check, and at Chalcis to control north-eastern Greece.

The designs of Philip probably did not extend beyond the conquest of western Asia Minor, but it was not fated that he should achieve this himself. In the spring after the congress, his preparations for war were nearly complete, and he sent forward an advance force under Parmenio and other generals to secure the passage of the Hellespont and win a footing in the Troad and Bithynia. The rest of the army was soon to follow under his own command.

But Philip, as a frank Corinthian friend told him, had filled his own house with division and bitterness. A Macedonian king was not expected to be faithful to his wife; but the proud and stormy princess whom he had wedded was impatient of his open infidelities. Nor was her own virtue deemed above suspicion, and it was even whispered that Alexander was not Philip’s son. The crisis came when Philip fell in love with a Macedonian maiden of too high a station to become his concubine—Cleopatra, the niece of his general Attalus. Yielding to his passion, he put Olympias away and celebrated his second marriage. At the wedding feast, Attalus, bold with wine, invited the nobles to pray the gods for a legitimate heir to the throne. Alexander flung his drinking-cup in the face of the man who had insulted his mother, and Philip started up, drawing his sword to transpierce his son. But he reeled and fell, and Alexander jeered, “Behold the man who would pass from Europe to Asia, and trips in passing from couch to couch!” Pella was no longer the place for Alexander. He took the divorced queen to Epirus, and withdrew himself to the hills of Lyncestis, until Philip invited him to return.

But the restless intrigues of the injured mother soon created new debates, and when a son was born to Cleopatra, it was easy to arouse the fears of Alexander that his own succession to the throne was imperilled. Philip’s most urgent desire was to avoid a breach with the powerful king of Epirus, the brother of the injured woman. To this end he offered him his daughter in wedlock, and the marriage was to be celebrated with great pomp in Pella, on the eve of Philip’s departure for Asia. But it was decreed that he should not depart. Olympias was made of the stuff which does not hesitate at crime, and a tool was easily found to avenge the wrongs of the wife and assure the succession of the son. A certain Pausanias, an obscure man of no merit, had been grossly wronged by Attalus, and was madly incensed against the king, who refused to do him justice. On the wedding day, as Philip, in solemn procession, entered the theatre a little in advance of his guards, Pausanias rushed forward with a Celtic dagger and laid him a corpse at the gate. The assassin was caught and killed, but the true assassin was Olympias; and it was Alexander who reaped the fruits of the crime. Willingly would we believe that he knew nothing of the plot, and that a man of such a generous nature never stooped to thoughts of parricide. Beyond dark whispers, there is no evidence against him; yet it would be rash to say that his innocence is certain.

To none of the world’s great rulers has history done less justice than to Philip. This failure in appreciation has been due to two or perhaps to three causes. The overwhelming greatness of a son greater than himself has overshadowed him and drawn men’s eyes to achievements which could never have been wrought but for Philip’s lifetime of toil. In the second place, we depend for our knowledge of Philip’s work almost entirely on the Athenian orators, and especially on Demosthenes, whose main object was to misrepresent the king. And we may add, thirdly, that we possess no account of one of the greatest and most difficult of his exploits, the conquest of Thrace.

Thus through chance, through the malignant eloquence of his opponent, who has held the ears of posterity, and through the very results of his own deeds, the maker and expander of Macedonia, the conqueror of Thrace and Greece, has hardly held his due place in the history of the world. The importance of his work cannot be fully understood until the consequences which it devolved upon his son to carry out have been studied. The work of Alexander is the most authentic testimony to the work of Philip

But there was one notable man of the day whose imagination grasped the ecumenical importance of the king of Macedon. A pupil of Isocrates, Theopompus of Chios—who played some part in the politics of his own island—was inspired by the deeds of Philip to write a history of his own time, with Philip as its central figure. In that elaborate work, the loss of which is irreparable, Theopompus exposed candidly and impartially the king’s weaknesses and misdeeds; but he declared his judgment that Europe had never produced so great a man as the son of Amyntas.

It is part of the injustice to Philip that the history of Greece during his reign has so often been treated as little more than a biography of Demosthenes. Only his political opponents would deny that Demosthenes was the most eloquent of orators and the most patriotic of citizens. But that oratory in which he excelled was one of the curses of Greek politics. The art of persuasive speech is indispensable in a free commonwealth, and, when it is wielded by a statesman or a general,—a Pericles, a Cleon, or a Xenophon,—is a noble as well as useful instrument. But once it ceases to be a merely auxiliary art, it becomes dangerous and hurtful. This is what had happened at Athens. Rhetoric had been carried to such perfection that the best years of a man’s youth were absorbed in learning it, and when he entered upon public life he was a finished speaker, but a poor politician. Briefly, orators took the place of statesmen, and Demosthenes was the most eminent of the class. They could all formulate striking phrases of profound political wisdom; but their school-taught lore did not carry them far against the craft of the Macedonian statesman. The men of mighty words were as children in the hands of the man of mighty deeds. The Athenians took pleasure in hearing and criticising the elaborate speeches of their orators; and the eloquence of Demosthenes, though it was thoroughly appreciated, imposed far less on such connoisseurs than it has imposed upon posterity. The common sense of a plain man could easily expose his sophistries; he said himself that the blunt Phocion was the “chopper” of his periods.

Demosthenes used his brilliant gift of speech in the service of his country; he used it unscrupulously according to his light—the light of a purblind patriotism. He could take a lofty tone; he professed to regard Philip as a barbarian threatening Hellas and her gods. There is no need to show that, judged from the point of view of the history of the world, his policy was retrograde and retarding. We cannot fairly criticise him either for not having seen, even as fully as Isocrates, that the day for the expansion of Greece had come, and that no existing Greek commonwealth was competent to conduct that expansion; or if he did vaguely see it, for having looked the other way. All he saw, or at least all he cared, was that the increase of Macedonia meant the curtailment of Athens; and his political life was one long agitation against Macedonia’s resistless advance. But it was nothing more than a busy and often brilliant agitation, carried on from day to day and from month to month, without any comprehensive plan. A fervent patriot does not make a great statesman. Demosthenes could devise reforms in special departments of the administration; he could admonish his fellow-citizens to be up and doing; but he did not grapple seriously with any of the new problems of the day; he did not originate one fertile political idea. A statesman of genius might conceivably have infused fresh life into Athens by effecting some radical change in her constitution and finding for her a new part to play. The fact that no such statesman arose is perhaps merely another side of the fact that her part as a chief actor was over. It has often been said that the Demosthenic Athenians were irreclaimable. They certainly could not have been reclaimed by Demosthenes ; for Demosthenes, when all is said, was a typical Demosthenic Athenian.