The troops who heard the last plans, however, felt neither inspiration nor revulsion but fatigue. They had already shown in India that their stamina was the weak link in their king’s dream of universal empire. Asked for its response, the army rejected the plans on the grounds that they were, in Diodorus’ words, “overly grand and difficult to achieve.” Most were never contemplated again.
By the simple expedient of a vote, Perdiccas brought the thirty-five-year expansion of the Macedonian empire to a halt. He would seek merely to preserve what had been won, and that task was already proving immensely difficult.
3
The Athenians’ Last Stand (I)
The European Greek World
SUMMER–WINTER 323 B.C.
News of Alexander’s death took several weeks to reach the cities of European Greece. The quickest path was across the Aegean from the ports of western Asia. Probably a ship that left those ports in mid-June, after the first reports from Babylon had arrived there, got to a European harbor by early July. Most likely that harbor was Piraeus, the busiest trade hub in the Aegean, the port that served the Greek world’s foremost democracy and greatest military power—the city of Athens.
Many lives, and the collective fate of the city, would be profoundly changed by the arrival of this news. The politicians of Athens, called rhētores, or “public speakers,” because they wielded influence by speaking in the citizens’ Assembly, had defined themselves by their relationship to Alexander and Macedonian power. Some, like Demosthenes and his fiery-tongued colleague Hyperides, resented that power and itched for the chance to resist it; others, like Demades, collaborated. The most senior statesman of the day, the philosophic Phocion, *stood somewhere between these extremes, grudgingly accepting Macedonian power because he thought Athens too weak to do anything else. All four men had made difficult choices over the preceding three decades, as Athens grappled with the reality of its newly humbled status. Now they faced other, harder decisions, as well as a fresh reckoning for those already made.
Not only political leaders but intellectuals as well would soon be called to account for their relations with Macedonian power. Many such thinkers, including the renowned Aristotle, had been drawn to Athens from other parts of the Greek world, attracted by the city’s liberal climate and by philosophic schools like the Academy of Plato. But the fate of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had shown that the city’s liberality had its limits. To be on the wrong side of a political divide during dangerous times, as Socrates was perceived to be, could, even in the Greek world’s most pluralistic society, incur a death sentence.
Times were about to become dangerous once again. For the past fifteen years, the regime of Alexander and his chief agent in Europe, Antipater, though widely resented, had provided stability and certainty. It was the polestar by which the ship of state was steered. Without that fixed point of navigation, Athens was about to be set adrift amid treacherous currents and riptides. Its adult male citizens, who by their votes in the courts and Assembly decided all questions of policy, lacked a reliable compass. The speakers on whom they relied for counsel were divided on the question that had loomed throughout Alexander’s reign: whether to revolt from Macedonian control and make Athens again what it had often been, superpower of Europe.
Worse, the city’s two most trusted leaders were both off the scene. One had recently died: the brilliant administrator Lycurgus, who with fiscal reforms and a careful military buildup had made Athens stronger than at any time since the rise of Macedon. The other, Demosthenes, had inopportunely been driven into exile and deprived of his citizenship rights. This golden-tongued orator, the man who ordinarily would have been first to step forward in the Assembly in a time of crisis, was not there to offer the Athenians guidance just when they needed it most.
1. DEMOSTHENES (
CALAURIA, JULY 323 B.C.)
For Demosthenes, this was an unbearable moment to be away from Athens. For much of his long career in politics, a career begun in boyhood with a rigorous program of public-speaking exercises, he had spoken out against the Macedonians, rallying his fellow citizens to stand up to the power to the north. In 338 he had prodded them into full-scale war, a war they had lost to Philip, Alexander’s father, on the fields of nearby Chaeronea. Athens had then stood together with Thebes, the two cities combining to put some thirty thousand soldiers in the field. Demosthenes himself had been one of them, a forty-six-year-old statesman donning infantry armor for the first time. Against Philip’s crack veterans, he and other green Athenian recruits never had a chance.
Thanks to Philip’s generosity, Athens retained its fabled democracy after its defeat, but lost the option of setting its own foreign policy. Like most other Greek states, it was forced to join the League, a Hellenic alliance pledged to support Macedonia and accept its leadership. Philip, and then his son Alexander, dominated the League and kept Athens in line. But even while watching his city forced to truckle to the Macedonians, Demosthenes had also seen it recover and even surpass its prewar strength. And now, at the very moment Athens was most ready for a fight, a piece of news had arrived more potent than a corps of infantry. Alexander was dead.
Sadly, Demosthenes had to celebrate this news alone. When it came, he was living in exile on Calauria (modern Poros), a tiny, rocky island between Attica, Athens’ home peninsula, and the Peloponnese. He had been ignominiously drummed out of Athens months earlier, exiled for the banal crime of taking illicit money. Hyperides, once his partner in opposing Macedon and his closest friend, had helped to secure his exile, using his fiery tongue to lead the prosecution at the corruption trial. Hyperides had won an easy conviction by playing the role of the injured member of a famous partnership gone sour. “You destroyed our friendship,” he told Demosthenes in front of a jury of fifteen hundred Athenians. “You made yourself a laughingstock.”
In exile, Demosthenes had found refuge on Calauria, in a grove sacred to Poseidon where the defenseless were supposedly protected from all harm. From here he could almost see the shores of his homeland, only thirty miles away but for him inaccessible. His empty days gave him time to ponder the upheavals no doubt taking place there. With Alexander’s death, his longtime rivals Demades and Phocion would be cast down, resented for their too-close embrace of Macedon. The city would put itself on a war footing. All would turn for leadership to Hyperides, the man who had often agitated for a military showdown. Hyperides, Hyperides—it would be hisname, not that of Demosthenes, on every Athenian’s lips.
Once before, Demosthenes had seen the political game board overturned by a change of power in Macedon, and that time it was he who had benefited. King Philip, Alexander’s father, had been assassinated in 336, suddenly and at the height of his powers, only two years after routing the Athenians at Chaeronea. At Athens a public celebration was decreed, with a state-sponsored sacrifice and feast; Demosthenes appeared dressed splendidly in white, with his head garlanded, even though his daughter had just died and some said he ought to have worn mourning. The new Macedonian king, he told cheering throngs, was a bumbling teenager named Alexander, a nonentity who would quickly lose his father’s empire. The sense of vindication, of being on the right side of history, was exhilarating—for a few months. But then Alexander swung into action, and Athens sheepishly put its neck back into the yoke.