A star actor sang arias at a state banquet and on the following morning at the theater at Aegae, the old capital, splendid games were scheduled. Spectators took their seats while it was still dark and at sunrise a magnificent procession entered, headed by statues of the twelve Olympians and accompanied by one of Philip, “suitable for a god.”
Finally, the king came in wearing a white cloak. He had dispensed with the royal bodyguard, for he wanted to show that he was no despot who needed protection from his people. The Greeks had chosen him as their leader and he was guarded by their goodwill.
A young man jumped forward with a sword, which he drove into the king’s side. Philip died at once and Pausanias, for that was the assassin’s name, ran off. Unfortunately for him, he tripped on the root of a vine and three young Macedonians, all of them close to Alexander, caught up with Pausanias and killed him. This meant that he could not be interrogated and tell his tale.
Later, the story went the rounds that Pausanias was one of Philip’s discarded lovers; when he complained about his treatment, he was gang-raped on Attalus’s orders. On this account the motive for the deed was revenge.
There may have been another explanation for what happened. The crown prince’s political position and that of his mother were precarious. Motive and opportunity point to their involvement. If we can believe the reports that have come down to us, Pausanias was a friend of Alexander and had previously asked for his advice about the rape. Also, Olympias’s behavior after the event was suggestive. Pausanias’s body was hung on a cross and she placed a gold crown on its head. When it was taken down she arranged for its cremation.
The tale had a moral that every intelligent seeker after truth was wise to heed. When asking for the god’s advice at Delphi, he should never interpret an ambiguous answer to his advantage. Philip should have remembered the story of Croesus of Lydia.
It was not the Great King who was the garlanded bull. The king of Macedon himself was the sacrificial victim to be offered up to the gods.
—
The king’s great opponent, Demosthenes, also died a violent death, but by his own hand.
The orator received the news of Philip’s assassination with delight: he appeared in public dressed in a magnificent costume and with a wreath on his head. He persuaded the boulē to vote a crown for Pausanias. He was certain that the Macedonian hegemony was finished.
Nothing was further from the truth. Alexander succeeded his father and made it clear that he meant to keep Greece under his thumb. He turned out to be a field commander of genius. In 335 Thebes revolted, but in a lightning expedition he captured the city and razed it to the ground as “a terrible warning.” The atrocity shocked all good Hellenes. They never forgave him, but they gave up any thought of resistance.
Demosthenes kept a low profile, although he was implicated in a massive financial scandal that led to his exile. When Alexander invaded the Persian Empire, the orator wrote letters to Persian generals in which he encouraged them to defeat Alexander. In public, though, he was silent on political matters. More than ten years passed, during which the invincible young king scored victory after victory over the Persians and became Great King himself.
Then in 323 Alexander, worn out from wounds and drink, unexpectedly succumbed after a few days of fever. When the news arrived in Athens, Demades advised the ecclesia not to believe a word of it. “If Alexander has really died, the stench of his corpse would have filled the world long before now.”
A new anti-Macedonian Hellenic League instantly formed itself. It was headed by Athens. Demosthenes was recalled and arrived at Piraeus to cheering crowds. It was like the return of Alcibiades, he remarked complacently, “but with greater honor.” The attempt to regain liberty was a last, failed roll of the dice. The Macedonian fleet was victorious at sea and Antipater, who had been Alexander’s deputy in Macedon, quashed the revolt by land. He led his army towards Athens and the city swiftly surrendered.
Alexander had shared his father’s soft spot for Athens, but Antipater was no sentimentalist. He was determined that Athens would never give him trouble again. So he insisted that the Athenian fleet should not be rebuilt. He installed a garrison in Piraeus and replaced the full democracy with a restricted franchise. He demanded the surrender of Demosthenes and other anti-Macedonian politicians. They fled from Attica.
Wherever he went Demosthenes knew he was too famous to escape notice, and he did not travel far. He made for the tiny, hilly, and densely wooded island of Calauria (today’s Poros) in the Saronic Gulf. It is about thirty-six miles from Piraeus. On a hill overlooking the main town stood a temple of Poseidon, famous for offering sanctuary to men on the run, and here the orator found refuge. Its ruins can still be seen.
It took only a few days for his whereabouts to be discovered. A Macedonian officer called Archias, accompanied by some soldiers, arrived at the temple at the head of a military detachment. His orders from Antipater were to hunt down all the Athenian opposition politicians and send them to him for execution. A former actor, he was good at his work and was nicknamed the exile-catcher.
Demosthenes emerged from the shrine to talk with Archias, who assured him that he would not be harshly treated. He was not taken in. “I was never convinced by your acting when you were on stage,” the orator said, “and I am not convinced by your advice now.” When Archias threatened to remove him by force, local people prevented him.
The orator went back inside the temple. He picked up his writing tablets, put to his mouth a pen made from a reed, and bit it, his custom when thinking what he was going to write. After a time, he covered his head with a cloak and lay down.
Some Macedonian soldiers gathered at the temple door and jeered at him for being afraid to take his own life. In fact, the pen contained a poison that he sucked up. Once it began to take effect Demosthenes uncovered himself. To avoid polluting the shrine by his death, he asked to be helped outside. As he passed the altar, he collapsed and died. He was sixty-two.
—
Demosthenes was a man out of his time. He would have flourished in the fifth century when Athenian citizens were energetic, ambitious, and ready to fight for the leadership of Greece. The Peloponnesian War had cut back the city’s population and the loss of empire had reduced its wealth. It could still muster a powerful fleet, but could not afford a lengthy war.
A brilliant orator whose speeches uphold the cause of freedom, Demosthenes dominated the ecclesia, but his foreign policy was based on a false premise—that he was a latter-day Pericles. Against the evidence, he believed that Athens was still a first-rate power.
Among his fellow-Greeks he was a contentious and divisive figure. A narrow nationalist, he did not have an answer to the real question of the day—how the Greeks could unite to counter the rise of an aggressive power, whose resources far outstripped those of the multitude of mini-states that made up Hellas. It had done so triumphantly but briefly during the Persian Wars, but the trick could not be repeated in an unheroic age and another solution had to be found.
Opponents of Demosthenes, such as his great rival Aeschines, were also patriots—despite his best efforts to subvert their reputations for honesty and loyalty. They advocated genuine cooperation with Macedon under the umbrella of a Common Peace. This was a superior alternative to the abrasive and inflexible approach of Demosthenes and his war party. It was much more likely than confrontation to maintain Athenian independence and influence in the world.