Now, as Demosthenes well knew, there was no second Alexander to take the place of the first, only a handful of quarrelsome generals likely to tear one another to pieces. The long Athenian nightmare of intimidation by Macedon might truly end, as it had seemed to do after Philip’s demise. His city could win back the honor it had lost at Chaeronea, could beat the Macedonian army and prove to the world that Greeks were masters of barbarians, not the other way around. For Demosthenes regarded the Macedonians as barbarians, a brutish and boorish people, despite the Argeads’ claims of Greek ancestry and their buying up of Greek artists and poets. “Macedon!” he had sneered to the Assembly in one of his fiery Philippics.“A place where you can’t even procure a decent slave!”
Demosthenes could not stand and watch as a great historical moment passed him by. He made up his mind to win his way back to Athens. Eloquence and argument, always his most potent weapons, were now his best hope. He began a series of letters to the Athenians pleading for recall and offering to reconcile with his opponents. In the four letters that have survived, Demosthenes becomes by turns wheedling, outraged, self-righteous, and coldly calculating. At one moment he protests his innocence; at the next he grandly refuses to dwell on past hurts. He reaches out obliquely to Hyperides, though never mentioning his former ally by name. He tries, in every way his forty-year legal career had taught him, to convince his countrymen: Bring me back.
It was a short hop for these letters to be ferried over to Troezen, the nearest major port, where ships could easily be found making ready to sail for Athens.
2. PHOCION (ATHENS, JULY 323 B.C.)
At Athens, news of Alexander’s death had put the city into an uproar. A man named Asclepiades was the first to bring the report; the Council of Five Hundred was quickly alerted and the people’s Assembly summoned into session. No one could be sure whether to trust the news. There had been false reports before, including one twelve years earlier, in 335, that sparked a disastrous rebellion by the city of Thebes. In the Assembly many shouted that this time Alexander wasdead, and they demanded action. It was Phocion, the city’s cautious senior statesman, who stepped to the speaker’s platform to dispel the sense of urgency. “If Alexander is dead today, he will still be dead tomorrow, and the day after that,” he told the crowd. “We can deliberate then with more calmness and not make mistakes.”
It was the same advice Phocion had given through six decades as general and politician, though the people had rarely listened. His approach toward Macedon was too moderate, too watchful of consequences, to suit their rages and passions. Once Demosthenes had taunted him by saying, “If the people ever lose their heads completely, Phocion, they will kill you.” “Yes, and they’ll kill youafter they regain their sanity,” Phocion replied. Demosthenes and thatcrowd—they were always beating the drum for war, never thinking of the price to be paid. Now Demosthenes was off the scene, but Hyperides, an even more rash war hawk, had the ear of the Athenians. They would make the same mistakes they had made at Chaeronea, unless Phocion and his allies could stop them.
Phocion had just barely stopped them in 335, after the false report of Alexander’s death ignited the rebellion of Thebes. Demosthenes had urged Athens to support the revolt, not just with money but with an army. The Assembly thrilled with anger and excitement and was on the point of casting the die for war, but Phocion stepped forward to urge restraint. He turned angrily on Demosthenes and thundered a line from Homer’s Odyssey: “Rash fool, why wilt thou stir the wrath of a savage?”Those words had been spoken by Odysseus’ crew to stop their captain from taunting the blinded Cyclops. Odysseus did not heed the warning; he boastfully yelled to the monster his own name, up to then cleverly concealed. As a result, the entire crew later drowned in a storm sent by Poseidon, who, unbeknown to Odysseus, was the Cyclops’ father. Phocion had made his point: it was the people who would pay the price, not Demosthenes, should they join the Theban revolt and the revolt fail. The Assembly pulled back at the last minute.
The speaker’s platform of the Pnyx at Athens, from which Demosthenes and Phocion addressed the citizen body (here captured in a nineteenth-century albumen print) (Illustration credit 3.1)
Alexander’s revenge on Thebes was terrible. After capturing the city, he let loose the full wrath of the Macedonian army, allowing his troops to slaughter thousands in their very houses. More than thirty thousand survivors were executed or sold into slavery; an entire Greek city-state suddenly ceased to exist. From across the thirty-five miles that separated them from Thebes, the Athenians looked on in horror at the fate that could have been theirs.
Phocion had carried the day on that occasion; but had he saved Athens or doomed Thebes? Perhaps the rebellion had failed only because Phocion robbed it of support. Some Athenians may have even suspected he was serving Macedon’s interests more than those of his homeland. Indeed, only a few days after the Theban cataclysm, Phocion gave ample grounds for this kind of suspicion. In a tense crisis played out before thousands in the Assembly, he showed that his politics could go beyond restraint and caution, into the realm of appeasement.
While the rubble of Thebes was still settling, Alexander, his fury not yet slaked, demanded the surrender of ten Athenian orators who had supported the rebellion. Demosthenes’ name was of course at the head of the list. This was a stern test of Athens’ famously liberal ideals. The city had never before, in its century and a half as a democracy, seen its freedom of speech threatened by a foreign power. But it had also never seen the obliteration of a Greek state as important, and as close by, as Thebes.
In the hush at the start of the Assembly session, the eyes of all turned to Phocion. With his triumph only days earlier in the debate over Thebes, Phocion had taken first place in the people’s esteem, and he was now in a position either to save or to cast out his chief rivals. True to his severe nature, Phocion gave the Assembly stern advice: Cast them out.Or, better yet, he said, the men on the list could go voluntarily to Alexander, sacrificing themselves to save their city as the mythical daughters of Erechtheus had once done. Their inevitable death sentences would repay them, Phocion implied, for the troubles they had caused with their demagogy. At his peroration, he grabbed his close friend Nicocles—no doubt planted in the crowd for this purpose—and pulled the man up to the rostrum. “Athenians,” he declared, “these men”—he pointed to Demosthenes and his partisans, in the crowd below him—“have so led their city astray that, even if it were my friend Nicocles here whose name was on that list, I would tell you: Give him up.”
But Phocion had overplayed his hand. He had advised the Athenians not only to avoid provoking the Macedonian Cyclops but to feed it a banquet of men. With jeers of derision—a powerful weapon of protest in the Assembly—the Athenians drove him off the speaker’s platform.
Demosthenes stepped up next, ready to deliver the speech of—and for—his life. Just as Phocion had done with his quotation from the Odyssey, Demosthenes drew on Greek legend to make his case. He reminded the Athenians of one of Aesop’s tales, concerning a time when sheep were at war with wolves. The sheep held their own for a while, thanks to their alliance with the dogs, but one day the wolves asked the sheep to betray that alliance and surrender the dogs, promising peace in exchange. The sheep accepted the offer. But then, without their guardians, they were devoured by the wolves, one by one. It was a story Aesop had once used to save his own neck, when an angry barbarian king had demanded his surrender. Now Demosthenes gave it his own embellishment. Alexander, he said, was not just a wolf but a monolycus, a “lone wolf,” the most rapacious and savage kind, an implacable killer.