The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

Ruins of the Gate of the Propylea of Athens

Professor Buryf is even more direct in Philip’s praise and in blame for Demosthenes: “To none of the world’s great rulers has history done less justice than to Philip. The overwhelming greatness of a son greater than himself has overshadowed him and drawn men’s eyes to achievements which could never have been wrought but for Philip’s life of toil.” He also notes that we have no information of Philip’s stupendous conquest of Thrace, and that what we know of him at all has come through Athenian mouths and chiefly from “the malignant eloquence” of Demosthenes, on which account the Greek history of Philip’s time has often been regarded “as little more than a biography of Demosthenes,” whose policy Professor Bury finds retrograde and retarding, unrelieved by any new ideas. The time needed an Athenian statesman of adaptability and judgment. In the long look, Æschines was more nearly that man than Demosthenes.a

THE SACRED WAR

[359-351 B.C.]

Alexander, the tyrant of Pheræ, was assassinated in 359 by his brothers-in-law, at the instigation of his wife, Thebe, she having taken care to deprive him of his sword while he slept and to remove the dogs which guarded the entrance to his chamber. She then introduced her brothers, and on their hesitating to deal the blow she threatened to awake her husband. The murderers assumed Alexander’s tyranny, and one of them, Lycophron, was on the throne when Philip was summoned to oppose him by the powerful family of the Aleuadæ of Larissa, who, like the Macedonian kings, pretended to descend from Hercules. Philip was then besieging Methone, the only city of the Thermaic Gulf which still formed part of the Athenian federation. After having received a wound which cost him one eye, he took the city, razed it to the ground, and seized the occasion which then offered to enter Thessaly. Lycophron having made an alliance with the Phocians, Phayllus, brother of Onomarchus, came to his aid with seven thousand men. Philip defeated Phayllus, but was himself defeated by Onomarchus, who forced him back into Macedonia while he, Onomarchus, returned to Bœotia to gain possession of Coronea. But Philip reappeared shortly with a new army: his forces united to those of Thessaly amounted to twenty thousand men and three thousand horses. Against the Phocians, who had stolen the treasure of the temple of Delphi, he appeared as an avenger of Apollo, and all his soldiers wore crowns made of laurel leaves from Tempe.

The encounter took place near the Gulf of Pagasæ, where was stationed an Athenian fleet. Philip obtained a complete victory, due principally to the Thessalian cavalry. The Phocians lost six thousand men; of those made prisoners three thousand were cast into the sea as being sacrilegious, but many of them were able to reach the Athenian vessels by swimming. Onomarchus had been killed in battle, and his body crucified. Lycophron obtained by bribes permission to retire to the Peloponnesus with his troops, delivering the city of Pheræ over to Philip, who seized the port of Pagasæ and the fleet constructed by Alexander. Philip caused to be paid over to him by his Thessalian allies, as war indemnity, a large part of the revenues of the country. He wished to penetrate farther, and under pretext of entering Phocia marched towards Thermopylæ in order to take up his position on a spot that was the key to all Greece. But an Athenian corps commanded by Diophantus occupied the pass, and Philip was obliged to turn back (352).

THE FIRST PHILIPPIC

[351 B.C.]

Demosthenes

It was at this epoch that Demosthenes pronounced, before the people of Athens, his first Philippic. So absorbed had been the Greeks by their private rivalries that they had paid no heed to the rapid and increasing progress made by the Macedonian monarchy. One man alone saw the danger; he had no other arms than his patriotism and his eloquence, but with these he fought valiantly, and though he could not preserve to his country liberty, he at least preserved its honour. The unequal conflict which was about to take place between Demosthenes and Philip was not alone a duel between the ablest of politicians and the greatest of orators; it was a duel to the death between two principles, monarchism and republicanism. These two principles had once before, in the reign of Xerxes, been arrayed against each other; but at that time the Greeks were able to forget their private differences in the common danger, and to superiority of numbers they had opposed, not alone heroism, which does not always suffice to conquer, but military tactics. Now conditions were different; Philip had borrowed of the Greeks their tactics, which he brought to perfection, and he managed to turn to his own advantage the condition of the land, now more than ever divided. It was never again to have that unity of military command so necessary in the face of the enemy. The hegemony of Sparta which Athens nobly accepted in the Median War was forever destroyed, and Sparta, which struggled vainly under its double burden, Megalopolis and Messene, took no notice of the progress of Philip. Thebes, which had broken Sparta’s power, was not strong enough to take its place, and foolishly inviting the approach of the enemy, repented too late and died in expiation of its fault. Athens remained, but how fallen from its former condition of active energy. In vain Demosthenes tried to awaken it; it asked but to sleep the long sleep of worn-out races. “When, Athenians,” cried the great demagogue, “will you rouse and do your duty? What new event, what pressing need, do you await? What contingency more urgent for free men than the danger of dishonour? Will you always assemble in the public squares to ask each other, ‘Well, what is new?’ What can be newer than a man from Macedonia making himself victor of Athens and master over all Greece? Is Philip dead? No, he is only ailing. But what matter to you if he be sick or dead; if heaven were to deliver you from him to-day, to-morrow you would cause another Philip to arise, for his victorious advance is far less a result of his own power than of your inertia.”