Ending of the Sacred War by the surrender of Phalaikos. 346 B.C. actors in it was becoming more rapid. Fooled with the promise that they should see the humiliation of Thebes, the Athenians who had been induced to omit the name of the Phokians from the list of their allies were by an infatuation immeasurably more gross cheated into the declaration, that if the Phokians would not surrender Delphoi to the Amphiktyonic body, the Athenians would compel them to do so by force. The Phokians were not to be thus blinded. They had listened thus far time after time to speeches which told them that things done apparently for the purpose of destroying them were really done only for the sake of insuring their safety and their welfare; but they felt that the mask had at length been flung aside when they heard the conditional declaration of war put out against them by the Athenians. Within three days Phalaikos had put an end to the Sacred War by making his submission to Philip; and Philip, master of Phokis, threw off all disguise and declared himself the hearty friend Alliance of and ally of Thebes. The Athenian people were assembled in Peiraieus when the tidings came that the man whom Eschines was never weary of Treachery of praising was in possession of Thermopylai. At once schines. they passed the vote which at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war had brought the country population of Attics into Athens; but Philip had as yet no intention of attacking them. Without striking a blow, he had broken up the power of Phalaikos, and wrested from him the whole Phokian territory; but he well knew that, even if he should succeed in conquering Athens, victory must be preceded by a terrible struggle. He was soon joined by Eschines, who went to him through Thebes, although he had lately denounced the Thebans as thirsting for his blood; and that trusty servant, who probably concocted with him a fresh letter to cajole his countrymen, returned to Athens to say with effrontery seldom surpassed that Philip, sorely against his will, had been constrained by the Thebans to crush the Phokians, and so to give offence to the Athenians, with whom he heartily desired to be at peace. Peace was accordingly made, and the Athenians were left at leisure to contemplate the ruin caused by their persistence in a policy against which Demosthenes had for years, in season and out of season, protested in vain. The cities of Phokis were all broken up; the vengeance of the Thebans was let loose upon their miserable inhabitants; and murder, lust, and violence made the whole land a howling wilderness. Meanwhile Philip was exalted to a greatness which in his most sanguine moments he could scarcely have dared to hope for. He had restored the Delphians to the guardianship of the temple; Election of he had summoned together the Amphiktyonic council; and by it he had been solemnly recognised as a member of the Amphiktyonic brotherhood. The two votes hitherto belonging to the Phokians were transferred to him, and he could now interfere and dictate in Hellenic affairs as the chosen For Eschines Philip into the Amphiktyonic brotherhood. champion of the god of Delphoi. it may be enough to say that he was content to bask in the radiance of his master's greatness. Thus much at least is certain (as Demosthenes himself puts it), that only on the hypothesis of his. treachery can we account for his subsequent behaviour. An honest but weak-minded man might be fooled twice or thrice by a wily and unscrupulous plotter; but so soon as he discovered thecheat, his indignation against the man who had thus plunged him in the mire would be the more vehement and lasting. With Æschines, Demosthenes insists, there was no indignation at all. Before the occupation of Thermopylai he had been content to be-spatter Philip with indiscriminate praises; but after that time. he was eager to proclaim his enthusiastic devotion to his service. Attempts to screen this consummate traitor on the score of ignorance are absurd. Eschines betrays his full knowledge of Philip's designs, when he admits that he had counselled him so to use his power on becoming master of Thermopylai as to protect the Boiotian cities against the cruelty and tyranny of Thebes. Probably he would not himself have journeyed through Thebes had he not taken care to inform its citizens that his expressions were generally to be interpreted by their contraries. The sequel of the story to the dismal day of Chaironeia may be briefly told. With the exception of one or two vivid pictures we know it only in its outlines; and these bring before Day-dreams us only the old struggle of one clear-sighted and of Isokrates. honest man against an indifference or an apathy in which treason found its most efficient instrument. While Isokrates was inditingorations urging Philip to lead the combined armaments of tifechief Hellenic cities against the Persian king, Demosthenes, with the true moderation of genuine patriotism, besought his countrymen to acquiesce in the peace which they had been constrained to accept. To Demosthenes the avoidance of any offence which, by placing Athens under the Amphiktyonic ban, might give Philip the handle which he needed, was, under the circumstances of the moment, a matter of the first importance: to Isokrates the vain. pretence of vengeance for wrongs done by Xerxes brought with it more than a compensation for ignominious subservience to a foreign dictator. To the weaker mind of Isokrates the condition of the slave seemed changed if he were decked out with the trappings of a conqueror; in the healthy judgement of Demosthenes, the only hope of safety lay in the union of caution with promptitude, and the most strenuous effort was amply rewarded by a slight gain, so long as this gain were real. But if Isokrates could banish from his thoughts the degradation of the Greeks at home by framing pictures of Greeks triumphant at Sousa, for Demosthenes this artificial greatness had no value whatever. He could foresee with overpowering vividness the colossal proportions which the Makedonian empire must shortly reach, unless at the eleventh hour Sparta, Thebes, and Athens could lay aside their feuds, and go hand in hand against the common enemy. He could see that in the jealousies which kept the Hellenic cities apart Philip had for the present precisely those conditions which he most earnestly coveted, and that so long as these dissensions were continued, he could safely multiply his conquests in Ambrakia and Thrace, in Elis and Epeiros, in the Corinthian gulf and among the strongholds of Illyrian and Paionian mountaineers. But if Demosthenes had at the first hoped that peace might be permanently maintained, the course pursued by Philip speedily taught him that Athens was left to herself only until he should be ready to crush her; nor could he well fail to see that the catastrophe could not very long be postponed. Disputes between the Athenians and Philip. 343 B.C. A dispute respecting the islet of Halonnesos brought Athens almost to the verge of open war. Philip had seized it, as he pretended, from the pirate Sostratos, and, having so taken it, he offered to hand it over as a gift to the Athenians, who claimed it as their ancient possession. If no modern statesman could be found to listen to such a proposal, we must hold the Athenians fully justified in rejecting it. Nor was it here only that Philip was carrying on war with a people with whom he professed to be at peace. The active alliance of the Byzantians would enable him to cut off the supplies of corn on which Athens in great measure depended; and this alliance he was striving to bring about, when the eloquence of Demosthenes induced them to make common cause with the one city which, if it were not indeed already too late, might break in upon his course of uninterrupted conquest. The anger of Philip showed itself not merely in the siege of Perinthos, but in the march of his army across the Chersonesos. This ravaging of their territories exhausted the patience of the Athenians, who declared war against Philip, while Demosthenes, it would seem, still absent on his mission. The step was one of which he would gladly have taken to himself the credit; we may, therefore, well believe him when he tells us that it was not taken on his advice. 340 B.C. was The semblance of peace which for six years had tied the hands the Athe not of the Makedonian conqueror, but of his enfeebled enemies, was now exchanged for the reality of open war; and Philip Revived found it convenient to string together a multitude of energy of charges all designed to show that the war was brought nians. about wholly by the provocation of Athens. Her orators made a trade of exciting the people against their most friendly and peaceloving neighbour; and the people, carried away by their love of war, had plunged into a struggle with a king who desired nothing less than their cordial friendship. The form into which he chose to throw his accusations fully proves his talent for biting satire; but he was now to learn for a while that Athenian energy could still weigh down the balance against him. Compelled to abandon the siege of Perinthos, he flew to the assault of Byzantion. He had thought to carry the place by the suddenness of his attack, and here, too, he was baffled. Athens remained mistress of the highway to the Euxine; and Demosthenes, cheered by the gratitude of his countrymen, went manfully onwards in the great work of his life. The Athenians were beginning to see the true character of their adversary, and the need of strenuous resistance. Seizing the opportune moment, the great orator besought them to place on a better footing the system which regulated contributions for purposes of war. Thus far the wealthier citizens, divided into certain classes by fixed limits of income, had been called upon to take part in the equipment of the navy; but all the members in any class were assessed in precisely the same sum. On the suggestion of Demosthenes, each man was now called upon to contribute according to his rated property. The aggregate revenue was thus largely increased, the burden on the less wealthy contributors was sensibly lessened, and the navy was put into a state of efficiency which would have done no discredit to the city in the palmiest days of her empire. Financial reforms of Demosthe nes. Origin of the Third Sacred War. But the evil genius of Athens and of Hellas was now to work busily elsewhere. After the battle which destroyed the army of Mardonios at Plataiai,' the Athenians had placed in the Delphian temple some gilt shields, bearing an inscription which marked them as spoils taken from the Persians and Thebans when they fought together against the Greeks. Through lapse of time the gold had become tarnished and the inscriptions so faded as to be almost illegible. The Athenians, therefore, ordered them to be burnished, and the visitors could now read at a glance the words which recorded the ancient treachery of the Thebans. With some fairness and force it might have been urged that this parading of old misdeeds was both injudicious and 1 malignant; but the Lokrians of Amphissa, who stood forth as accusers, chose rather to arraign the Athenians on the ground of impiety for setting up these offerings without going through the usual ceremonies of re-consecration. In the default of the Hieromnemon Diognetos, who was prostrate with fever, it fell to the lot of Eschines to reply to this charge. He might have insisted that from lack of the previous notice, to which all members of the Amphiktyonic brotherhood were intitled, the case could not be heard in the present session of the council; and there can be no doubt that this plea must have insured its postponement. He might also have argued the matter on its merits, and have urged that the Athenians had a perfect right to regild the letters of a faded inscription. He chose to do neither, in all likelihood because he saw that the Assembly was in a state of dangerous excitement. The element cf religious animosity, which had been allowed full play during the ten years of the last Sacred War, was not easily to be repressed; and Eschines, as he tells us, felt instinctively that the charge of impiety would be effectually met only by prompt retort. From the lofty platform of the temple he could look down on the haven of Kirrha enlivened with the ships which brought crowds of pilgrims to the Delphian shrine, and surrounded by the olive groves and corn fields which interposed a girdle of verdure between the city and the dreary desert beyond them. From this pleasant and busy scene he could draw the eyes of his hearers to the brazen plate on the wall, hard by, which recorded the sentence of the Amphiktyonic judges in the days of Solon. That strip of luxurious vegetation was a deadly offence against the Delphian god; the wealth of the Kirrhaian port was amassed in direct defiance of the judgement pronounced by the mouth of his ministers. If he wished to rekindle the slumbering fires of religious fanaticism, he had but to point the contrast between the prosperity of the pilgrims' haven and the desolation to which the whole plain had been doomed for ever. Seeing that he could thus turn the tables on the accusers of Athens, Æschines hesitated not for an instant. There, on the wall before them, was the fatal record; and there, on the plain below, they might see the groves which bore witness to the impiety of generations, and the haven where the dock-owners enriched themselves by tolls the gathering of which was a profanation. It is for you,' he said, addressing the Council, to take vengeance for the sacrilege; and if you fail to do so, you can no longer with a clear conscience take part in the worship of the god.' His words roused in his hearers an ungovernable wrath: but the day was wearing on, and time was lacking to finish 1 The secretary sent by each State to the meetings of the Amphiktyonie council. |