Phocion attempted to speak but was shouted down by the mob. Whenever the hoots and catcalls grew fainter, he tried again to defend himself but each time was drowned out. At last he succeeded in shouting a question above the uproar: “Do you want to execute me justly or unjustly?” When a few answered “Justly!” Phocion replied, “How will you know which you do unless you hear me out?” But this only provoked more heckling. The poor and downtrodden of Athens had been disenfranchised for too long. They would exact every ounce of vengeance they felt was their due.

In a last effort to save others by sacrificing himself, Phocion shouted, to any who could hear, that he freely accepted the death sentence but that those in the dock with him were innocent. “Athenians, why will you put themto death?” he implored, to which the answer came: “Because they are your friends!” Phocion fell silent, and Hagnonides stepped onto the stage. He proposed a vote on the guilt or innocence of the accused, with death the automatic penalty if they were deemed guilty. Some in the crowd demanded torture on the rack, but Cleitus, the Macedonian overseer, signaled his disapproval. Hagnonides brushed aside the demand, vowing that torture would be reserved for a worse criminal than Phocion, a man known as Callimedon the Crab. A cynic called out that the rack would someday be brought for Hagnonides himself.

The proceeding now moved to a vote. For all their love of dissent and free speech, the Athenians used an unfree method of voting, the public raising of hands. Secret balloting was known to them and was widely used for polling juries, but political decisions were taken openly, and votes were often lopsided as a result. In this instance, according to Plutarch, not a single hand was raised in support of Phocion. Many no doubt regretted the fate of a leader whose service stretched out longer than their life spans. But the anger of their neighbors made them ashamed to declare themselves.

Phocion and his colleagues were taken to the desmoterion, the little prison house where men awaiting execution were kept under guard. The philosopher Socrates had been jailed here more than eighty years earlier, condemned in large part as a scapegoat after Athens had lost a long and costly war. Now Phocion too bore the brunt of a defeated city’s rage. The lost battles of Amorgus and Crannon four years earlier, the battle of Chaeronea before that, the two decades Athens had spent appeasing Macedonian Ares—all these accompanied Phocion as he was led away for execution, jeered at and spat on by the crowd that ran alongside.

On the nineteenth of Munychion (mid-May by our calendar), the day of the Olympieia festival honoring the god Zeus, Phocion’s death sentence was carried out inside the desmoterion.Quantities of poison had been prepared by bruising the leaves of the hemlock plant; the foul-smelling juice induced a creeping paralysis that started at the feet and finally froze the heart and lungs. Phocion was the last of the five condemned to drink the poison, and there was an agonizing delay when it was found that not enough had been prepared. In a last, grim act of public service, Phocion himself arranged the payment of twelve drachmas to the state poison master, who had not been given enough money to purchase more hemlock leaves.

A band of horsemen, riding past the prison house as they led the festal procession of the Olympieia, stopped to reflect on what was taking place inside. Wealthy men, members of Phocion’s social class, they and their peers had stood aside from the proceeding that condemned the oligarchs, bowing to the new democratic order in the city. Now they paused in silence outside the place of execution and removed the ceremonial wreaths from their heads. It was a small, passive gesture of sympathy, probably unseen by the dying man within.

The fury of the radical democrats was not slaked by the death of Phocion. A subsequent Assembly passed a motion denying him burial on Attic soil and forbidding any Athenian to kindle his pyre. Undeterred, his relatives managed to get his body cremated in a remote location by hiring an underground agent. Phocion’s wife smuggled the ashes back into Athens hidden in the folds of her cloak and buried them secretly inside her own house, beside the hearth. Later the remains were reinterred in the Cerameicus, for it was not long before the city repented the fall of Phocion and restored him to honor, voting him a memorial statue and a public burial.

In 1948 a fourth-century grave monument was unearthed in Athens, a somber marble relief bearing no inscription or identifying marks. Recently one expert has proposed that it is the tombstone of Phocion. It shows a powerful, magnificent horse only barely controlled by a small African boy, quite clearly a slave. There is no rider or owner in the scene, only the horse and the diminutive, hard-pressed groom who holds its reins.

Whether this stone marked Phocion’s grave remains a matter of speculation, though one cannot help but see in it a marker of his times. With the passing of the two grand old men of Europe, Phocion and Antipater, the political order that had stabilized the continent for a generation had collapsed. All Greece was ablaze with factional fighting. Long-standing rivals, the partisans of democracy and oligarchy, could now call in opposing champions, Polyperchon and Cassander. Athens, the only major Greek power as yet undestroyed by the Macedonians, was split in two, its politics volatile and chaotic. Hellas was riderless as never before.

A late fourth century funerary monument found at Athens, possibly that of Phocion (Illustration credit 8.3)

10. CASSANDER AND POLYPERCHON (ATHENS, SUMMER 318 B.C.)

Soon after the death of Phocion, the rebel Cassander sailed into Piraeus with ships and troops supplied by Antigonus One-eye. He relieved Nicanor of his garrison command and assumed control of the port. His forces were still tiny compared with what Polyperchon could muster, but he held an impregnable base and could be resupplied by sea. The Athenian populace, deprived of their harbor, would need to rely on their own thin soil for nurture and share that meager resource with the army camped outside their walls. The democrats had enjoyed their counterrevolution, but they would have to go hungry as a result.

Polyperchon himself at last arrived outside Athens with another, larger army but found he could accomplish little except consume the food supply more quickly. His chance to take Piraeus had slipped past, for the forces Cassander had brought in had made the place unassailable. He marched on into the Peloponnese to deal with matters there, leaving his son Alexander behind to guard the countryside.

Cassander had gained his toehold in Europe. Phocion had lived just long enough, and had given Nicanor just enough support, to ensure that the rebellion against Polyperchon would survive. The European civil war would go forward to a new and more violent phase, and Phocion would be only one in a long line of its victims.

9

Duels to the Death

Europe and Asia

SUMMER 318–WINTER, LATE 317 B.C.

Alexander the Great had taught his disciples well. During his twelve-year Asian campaign, his officers had watched him manage with surgical skill the world’s most complex army. They had seen him orchestrate the phalanx bristling with spears, the cavalry strike force, and the quick-moving Hypaspists, or Shield Bearers; draw on one force or another, or combine the three, depending on terrain and opponent; synchronize their rates of travel; and keep them fed and provisioned by despoiling the route of their march. In India they had seen him master the only known war machine his army then lacked, the trained elephant. Alexander had brought some two hundred of these fortresslike beasts out of India, to terrorize the enemies he never got to fight—Arabs, Carthaginians, and other targets historians can only guess at.