After a six-month investigation produced the expected indictments, including that of Demosthenes, Athens prepared to watch a thrilling spectacle of political blood sport. Hyperides, the second-greatest orator of the day, was about to turn all his rhetorical weapons on the greatest, his own lifelong friend.

“Don’t you dare talk to me of friendship,” Hyperides fumed in his speech (partly recovered from a tattered roll of papyrus that turned up in Egypt in 1847). “You yourself destroyed that friendship when you took money to oppose your country’s interests and changed sides. You made a laughingstock of yourself. You cast shame on those who, in former times, chose to go along with your policies. To think that together we might have been most glorious in the eyes of the people … But you have overturned all that.” Hyperides spared nothing in his caricature of Demosthenes’ venality. He reduced the man’s career to one long quest for bribes. Demosthenes had supported the Theban revolt, said Hyperides, only because he was bought and paid for by Persian gold. Then he had doomed that revolt to failure by pocketing money meant for Thebes.

The rhetorical jabs hit their mark. Demosthenes was convicted, along with only one other defendant, Demades, long notorious both for corruption and for aiding the Macedonians. It was a catastrophe for Demosthenes’ political career and a deep humiliation. The Athenians fined him fifty talents, a sum he would be unable to pay unless he revealed that he did in fact have Harpalus’ missing money. When he did not pay, he was imprisoned, but friends, and no doubt bribes, helped him get out of jail and into exile.

At about the same moment, word arrived from Babylon. Alexander had rejected the pleas of the Athenian envoys. Samos was to be returned to the Samians. Athens hoped to petition him a second time but never got the chance. Three months later, he was dead.

5.

THE OUTBREAK OF WAR (ATHENS AND NORTHERN GREECE, AUTUMN 323 B.C.)

Even after reports of Alexander’s death were confirmed, revolt was not an easy choice for the Athenians. Those with money and property, who would principally foot the bill for the war, did not want to fight. Their lot had improved in the last twelve years, and promised to get better yet if the Pax Macedonica were sustained. Then there were the arguments of Phocion to reckon with. Phocion, as usual, did not think Athens strong enough for war. An experienced military man, now almost eighty with more than forty years of generalship, Phocion had the ear of those disinclined to take risks. Hyperides, who chafed for war, had often despaired at Phocion’s cautiousness. “When will you everadvise Athens to fight?” he challenged the old man before the Assembly. “When I see the young men willing to keep in formation, the rich to pay war taxes, and the politicians to stop stealing from the treasury,” the high-minded Phocion replied, lording it over those implicated in the recent bribery scandal.

Now, though, Hyperides had a way to trump Phocion’s caution. Into the Assembly he brought Leosthenes, the mercenary captain of Taenaron, who had secretly been on the Athenian payroll for several months. Here was a general who had all the swagger Phocion lacked, who commanded thousands of mercenaries, men with experience fighting under, or against, the Macedonians. And here was the money to pay for that army: the stash of 350 talents still left on the Acropolis. Alexander’s stolen hoard, though mysteriously reduced by half, could now at last serve the purpose for which Harpalus had brought it, revolt from Macedon.

The Athenians were wild with enthusiasm. In a flurry of votes the Assembly elected Leosthenes a state military commander, mobilized all citizens up to age forty, and dispatched envoys to the rest of Greece to seek alliances. The goal of the coming war, according to the Assembly’s decrees, was “the common freedom of the Greeks and the liberation of the garrisoned cities,” the places guarded by hated Macedonian detachments. A team was sent to northern Greece to make common cause with the powerful Aetolian League. The Aetolians had just as much reason as the Athenians to stop enforcement of the Exiles’ Decree: some years earlier they had seized a neighboring city and expelled its inhabitants, just as the Athenians had expelled the Samians. The Aetolians promised to add their troops to Leosthenes’ core force of five thousand Athenian infantry and five hundred cavalry, plus almost twice as many hired mercenaries.

Most Athenians rushed to get behind Hyperides and the war party, but Phocion remained cool. Some citizens tauntingly asked him whether he was impressed by the city’s armed forces. In reply Phocion invoked a comparison from the Greek athletic games. “They are good enough for the stadion,” he said, referring to a sprint of about two hundred yards, “but it’s the dolichosof war I fear”—a footrace several miles in length. Athens was throwing all its ships, soldiers, and money into a single attack force, he said; were these defeated, there would be no reserves to draw on. He might have added rowers to this list, the power supply of Greek battleships. In the end it was rowers, more than any other resource, on which the outcome of the war would hang.

Despite his contrarian views, Phocion’s long military record made him valuable to the Athenians. They could not leave him without a command. They appointed him to lead the home guard, the force that would meet a seaborne invasion of Attica were the Macedonians somehow to get past Athens’ expert navy. In that post, within sight of Athens’ walls, Phocion could help the war effort without getting in the way of Leosthenes. For the two men disliked and mistrusted each other and had sparred bitterly in the Assembly. In a recent debate Leosthenes had challenged Phocion, a man twice his age, to say what good hehad done for the Athenians in all his many generalships. “Do you think it no boon that they’re buried here, in civilian graves?” the old man replied.

6. ARISTOTLE (ATHENS, AUTUMN 323 B.C.)

While Athens was bustling with mobilization for war, a quieter scene was taking place in the Lyceum outside the city’s east gate. Aristotle was making ready to leave.

The wolf pack of Athenian public life, those who advanced or got rich from denouncing others, had been drawing ever-tighter circles around him. Now that Alexander was dead, they were snarling and baying for his blood. They hated Aristotle for his ties to old man Antipater and the Macedonian elite, ties recently revealed by the fact that Nicanor, Aristotle’s adopted son, had been chosen to read out the Exiles’ Decree. But they chose to attack the philosopher on private and religious, not political, grounds. It was Aristotle’s devotion to his father-in-law, Hermias, the petty king tortured and killed by the Persians almost twenty years earlier, that gave his enemies the means to blacken his name.

Hermias was easily demonized by Athenian gossip. He was rumored (perhaps falsely) to be a barbarian and a eunuch, and a former slave, yet he had philosophic ambitions and was friends with many of Plato’s former students. He thus conjured up stereotypes of both the effeminate Asian and the effete, high-minded intellectual, a grotesque combination. Above all, he had taken the Macedonian side when war loomed between Philip and the Persians. Aristotle’s marriage to this man’s daughter, Pythias—long dead, but called to mind by their daughter, also named Pythias—could be exploited as proof of moral baseness and philo-Macedonian tendencies.

Aristotle had set up a cenotaph for Hermias in Delphi, inscribed with verses of his own composition. A cruel parodist by the name of Theocritus, an inveterate Macedonian hater, now came forward with a mock epitaph in the same meter:

                For Hermias the eunuch, the slave of Eubulus,