 Chapter 18 Part 6 and 7 of A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great Vol. 2 Chapter 18 Part 6 Section 6 The Episode of Harpalas and the Greek Revolt Meanwhile an incident had happened which might induce some of the Patriots to hope that Alexander's empire rested on slippery foundations. Harpalas had arrived off the coast of Attica with five thousand talents, a body of mercenaries, and thirty ships. He had come to excite a revolt against his master. A gift of corn had formally secured him the citizenship of Athens, but the Athenians prudently refused to harbour him, coming in this guise. He sailed away to Cape Teneron, always a refuge of adventurers, and leaving his men and ships there returned to Athens with a sum of about seven hundred talents. He was now received since he did not come with an armed array, but after a while messages arrived both from Macedonia and from Philoxinus, Alexander's financial minister in western Asia, demanding his surrender. It would have been an act of war to protect the runaway treasurer and his stolen monies, but the Athenians, on the proposal of Demosthenes, adopted a clever device. They arrested Harpalas, seizing his treasure, and said that they would surrender him to officers expressly sent by Alexander, but declined to give him up to Philoxinus or Antipater. It was not long before Harpalas escaped. He returned to Teneron, and was shortly afterwards murdered by one of his fellow adventurers. The stolen money was deposited in the Acropolis, under the charge of specially appointed commissioners, of whom Demosthenes was won. It was known by report that the sum was about seven hundred talents, but Demosthenes and his fellows had strangely admitted to make any official entry or report of the amount. Suddenly it was discovered that only three hundred and fifty talents were actually in the Acropolis. Charges immediately circulated against the inferential politicians, that the other three hundred and fifty talents had been received in bribes by them before the money was deposited in the citadel. Men of opposite sides were suspected, to mages, for example, as well as Demosthenes. But apart from the suspicion of bribery, manifest blame rested upon Demosthenes for having grossly neglected his duty. He was responsible for the custody of the treasure, for which Athens was responsible to Alexander. He was bound to demand an investigation, and on his motion the people directed the council of Aeropagus to hold an inquiry. Philoxenus furnished the account book of her palace, which had come into his hands. By this evidence it was proved that seven hundred talents had been delivered for safekeeping in the Acropolis, the entries seized at this point. It was also shown that certain Athenians had previously been bribed, but Demosthenes was not among them. Other evidence was necessary to show how the missing half of the seven hundred talents had disappeared. We know not what this evidence was, but the court of Aeropagus satisfied themselves that a number of leading statesmen had received considerable sums. Demosthenes appeared in their report as the recipient of twenty talents. The proofs against him were irrefutable, for he confessed the misdemeanor himself, and sought to excuse it by the paltry and transparent subterfuge that he had taken it to repay himself for twenty talents which he had advanced to the theoric fund. But why should he repay himself, without any authorisation, out of Alexander's money, for a debt owed him by the Athenian state? There can be little doubt that Demosthenes took the money not for personal gratifications, but for the good of his party. It was all the more necessary for his party to clear themselves from implication in such corrupt transactions. We therefore find hyperides coming forward as a public prosecutor of Demosthenes. We possess considerable portions of his speech, and we have in its complete form another speech, written for one of the other prosecutors by a miserable hack named Ninarcus. The charges against Demosthenes were twofold. He had taken money, and he had culpably omitted to report the amount of the deposit and the neglect of those who were set to guard it. For the second offence alone he deserved a severe sentence. The judges were not excessively severe, if we consider that his behaviour had placed the city in the most embarrassing position towards Alexander. He was condemned to pay a fine of fifty talents. Unable to pay it, he was imprisoned, but presently affected his escape. It was a venial offence in the eyes of Greece for a statesman to take a bribe, provided he did not take it to injure his country. And in the view of public opinion the moral character of Demosthenes was little damaged by this torturous transaction. He was not on a level with men like Nikias and Fokion, whom millions would not have tempted, but then nobody ever supposed that he was incorruptible. Yet there were two circumstances which aggravated the case. The money of which Demosthenes partook was stolen money, which Athens was about to sequester for Alexander, and he was himself a commissioner responsible for its safety. It was far from being an ordinary case of corruption. If Alexander had lived the Athenians might have persuaded him to let them remain in occupation of Samos, for he was always disposed to be lenient to Athens. When the tidings of his death came, men almost refused to credit it. The orator Demardis forcibly said, if he were indeed dead the whole world would have smelt of his corpse. The Patriots had been building on the slender hopes of some disaster, and the greatest disaster of all had been fallen. It had been recognized as madness to defy the power of Alexander, but it did not seem rash to strike for freedom in the unsettled condition of things after his death. Athens revolted from Macedonia. She was joined by Aetolia and many states in northern Greece, and she secured the services of a band of eight thousand discharged mercenaries, who had just returned from Alexander's army. One of their captains, the Athenian, the Austanese, occupied Thermopylae, and near that pass the United Greeks gained a slight advantage over Antipater, who had marched southward as soon as he could gather his troops together. The Thessalian cavalry had deserted him, and no state in northern Greece, except Boetia, remained true to Macedonia. The regent shut himself in the strong hill-city of Lamia, which stands over against the pass of Thermopylae under a spur of orthoes, and here he was besieged during the winter by the Austanese. These successes had gained some adherence to the cause in the Peloponnesus, and, if the Greeks had been stronger at sea, that cause might have triumphed, at least for a while. But the strange thing was, that notwithstanding the improvements of recent years in her naval establishment, Athens seemed to have been able to set afloat no more than a hundred and seventy warships against two hundred and forty of Macedon. The brave general, the Austanese, was hampered by a council of war, in which the various allies were represented, reminding us of the days of the Persian invasion. Yet, if a fatal stone had not put an end to his life during the beleaguement, more would probably have been affected for the cause of the allies. In spring the arrival of Leonatus, governor of Hellespontine Prygia, at the head of an army, raised the siege of Lamia. The Greeks marched into Thessaly to meet the new army before it united with Antipater. A battle was fought in which the Greeks had the upper hand, and Leonatus was wounded to death. Antipater arrived the next day, and, joining forces with the defeated army, was drew into Macedonia to await Crataus, who was approaching from the east. When Crataus arrived, they entered Thessaly together, and in an engagement at Cranon, in which the losses on both sides were light, the Macedonians had a slight advantage. This battle apparently decided the war, but the true cause which hindered the Greeks from continuing the struggle was not the insignificant defeat at Cranon, but the want of unity among themselves, the want of a leader whom they entirely trusted. They were forced to make terms singly, each state on its own behoof. Hyperades pronounced a funeral oration, distinguished by that lucidity of which he was a perfect master, over those who had fallen in this hopeless war, and gave his due. It is not for us to say that he gave more than his due to Leostonese, who succeeded in what he undertook, but not in escaping fate. There is a fine passage which distorts indeed the historical perspective, but well displays the spirit of the Patriots. In the dark underworld, suffer us to ask, who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the captain of our dead? May we not deem that Leostonese will be granted with welcome and with wonder by those half-gods who bore arms against Troy? Aye, and there I deem will be Militiades, and Themistocles, and those others who made Hellas free to the glory of their names. Athens submitted when Antipata advanced into Boesia and prepared to invade Attica. She paid dearly for her attempt to win back her power. Antipata was not like Alexander. He was an able man, warmly devoted to the royal house of Macedon, but he did not share in Alexander's sympathies with the Greek culture. He had no soft place in his heart for the memories and traditions of Athens. He saw only that, unless strong and stern measures were taken, Macedonia would not be safe against a repetition of the rising which he had suppressed. He therefore imposed three conditions which Vokion and Demades were obliged to accept. That the democratic constitution should be modified by a property qualification, that a Macedonian garrison should be lodged in Munukia, and that the agitators, Demostonese, Hyperades and their friends, should be surrendered. Demostonese had exerted eloquence in gaining support for the cause of the allies in the Peloponnesus, and his efforts had been rewarded by his recall to Athens. As soon as the city had submitted, he and the other orators fled. Hyperades with two companions sought refuge in the Temple of Iarchus at Egyna, whence they were taken to Antipata and put to death. Demostonese fled to the Temple of Poseidon in the island of Caloria. When the messengers of Antipata appeared and summoned him forth, he swallowed poison, which he had concealed according to one story in a pen, and was thus delivered from falling into the hands of the executioner. The constitutional change which was carried out at the direction of the Macedonian general would have been judged by Aristotle and improvement. The institutions were not changed, but the democracy was converted into a polity, or limited democracy, such as there are many such striven for, by a restriction of the franchise. All citizens whose property amounted to less than two thousand drachmae were deprived of their civic rights. It is said that this measure erased twelve thousand names from the burger lists, and that nine thousand citizens remained. A large number of the poorer people thus disfranchised left Attica and settled in Thrace, where Antipata gave them land. Perhaps these settlers included some of the outdwellers of Samos, who were now turned adrift, being obliged to quit the island and make way for the rightful possessors. Section 7. Aristotle and Alexander It was through an accident that Alexander was brought into contact with the one other man of his time whose genius was destined to move the world. Aristotle's father had been court-position of Amintas II, and Aristotle was meant to follow his father's profession. At the age of seventeen he went to Athens, where he was under the guardianship of a certain proxenus, to whose son Nikonor, the same Nikonor who made public Alexander's edict at Olympia, he afterwards betrothed his only daughter. At first Aristotle studied in the school of Isocrates, but when Plato returned from Sicily he came under the influence of that philosopher's idealism, and this decided him for the life of speculation, which he regards, and it is the deliberate judgment of his mature years, as the only life that is perfectly happy. After Plato's death he spent some years on the north-eastern coast of the Aegean, at Asos and Metrolini, and then received a call from Philip to undertake the education of the crown prince. As yet he had won no eminent reputation for wisdom or learning, and Philip probably chose him because his father had been connected with the Macedonian court. The instruction which Aristotle imparted to Alexander was perhaps chiefly literary and philological. He came as a tutor, not as a philosopher. We know nothing of the mutual relations between the brilliant master and his brilliant pupil. They were men of different and hardly sympathetic tempers. We may suspect that Aristotle was fainter to curb than spur the ardent straining spirit of Alexander. Certainly the episode led to no such maintenance of intimacy afterwards as it might have led to if Plato had been the teacher. On his return to Athens, Aristotle founded his school of philosophy, and the Lyceum soon took the place formally occupied by the Academy, which ever since the discomfiting adventures in Sicily had withdrawn itself more and more from the public attention. He taught for twelve or thirteen years, and these were doubtless the time of his most effective philosophical activity, and died not long after the death of Alexander. Never were there more wonderful years than these in which the brains of Alexander and Aristotle were ceaselessly working. It is not an overstatement to say that there is no one to whom Europe owes a greater debt for the higher education of her people than to Aristotle. The science of the laws of thought is still taught mainly as he first worked it out. There are no better introductions to ethical and political speculation than his fundamental treatises on ethical and political science. Nor was it a small thing that his system controlled the acutious minds of the Middle Ages, whose reasoning faculties, though cabined by the imminence of a narrowly interpreted theology, were amazingly powerful and subtle. But Aristotle, supreme as he was in abstract reasoning, zealous as he was in collecting and appreciating concrete facts, was not without prejudices. As a boy in the narrow self-satisfied community of little remote Staghira, he had imbibed the dislike which was openly or secretly felt towards Athens in all the Chalcidian regions. And though he established his abode at Athens, he never overcame this distrust. He always remained a citizen of Staghira and lived in Athens as a stranger. This initial prejudice prevented him from ever judging with perfect impartiality the Athenian institutions, which he took as the type of democracy. He was also prejudiced against Macedonia. The Chalcidians looked upon the Macedonian neighbours as far below themselves in civilisation. And Aristotle's experience of the Court of Pella, where he must have been a spectator of the scandalous quarrels between Philip and Olympius, did not create a favourable impression. He was thus disposed to hold his sympathies entirely aloof from the enterprises of Alexander. But not only did he not sympathise, he disapproved, for he was wedded to the idea of the small Greek republic. He condemned the larger state. Moreover, he held firmly to the Hellenic conviction that Hellenes were superior by nature to peoples of other race. And he was thus opposed to the most original and enlightened feature of Alexander's policy, the ruling of Greeks and barbarians on an equality. Owing to this attitude of coldness and distrust towards the Macedonians, he missed a great opportunity. Alexander's expedition threw open to science a new field of discovery in natural history, and we can imagine what endless pains the king would have given himself if Aristotle's urged him to collect extensive observations on the animal and vegetable kingdoms in the various countries and climates through which he passed. It is a strange sensation to pass from the view of the state which Alexander was fashioning to the sketch of an ideal state which was drawn by the most thoughtful of men at the same time. Aristotle desires a little north-country city, situated in a compact, defensible territory, close to the sea and yet not on the coast, having a harbour with an easy reach, but quite disconnected, so that the precincts of the city may not be contaminated and its indwellers troubled by the presence of a motley crowd of outlanders, such as Throng the Seaport's keys. He will not have his city a centre of trade. It is to import and export only for the purposes of its own strict needs. It is to be a tiny city. The number of the burgers so limited that each one may be able to know all about each of the others, the burgers are to have equal rights. Their early manhood is to be spent on military duties. When they come to middle life they are to be eligible for political offices. In their old age they are to act as priests. Subject to the citizen aristocracy, but entirely excluded from the franchise, are to be the artisans and merchants. Part of the land is to be public, the yields to be devoted to maintaining the worship of the gods and providing the public meals of the city, part is to be the private property of the citizens, and the fields are to be tilled by slaves or labourers of non-hellenic race. Such was the little exclusive community which Aristotle designed, while his former pupil was settling in motion schemes for worldwide commerce, shattering the barriers which sundered nations from nation, building an empire which should include millions, founding cities composed of men of diverse races, hearing his ways through a maze of new political problems which were beyond Aristotle's horizon. The Republic of Aristotle's wish is not quickened like Plato's by striking original ideas. It is a commonplace Greek aristocracy with its claws cut, carefully trimmed and pruned, refined by a punctilious education without any expensive vitality, and like Sparta leaving no room for the free development of the individual citizens. If the cities of Hellas had been moulded and fashioned on the model of the city of the philosopher's wish, they would hardly have done what they did for European civilization. We may wonder whether Aristotle divined before his death that the Hellenic cities were not to have the last word in the history of men. More probably the untimely end of Alexander reassured him that the old fashion of things would soon go on again as before. The brilliant day of the Greek city-states had indeed drawn to a close, so suddenly that they could not be expected to grasp the fact, and no people that has ever borne the torch of civilization has been willing, or even able, to recognize that the hour of relinquishing sovereignty has come. The Greeks may well be excused if they were reluctant to acquiesce in the vicissitude which forced them to sink into a subordinate place. But it is thus that the austere laws of history reward the meritorious. The republics of Greece had performed an imperitable work. They had shown mankind many things, and above all the most precious thing in the world—fearless freedom of thought. Released to the death of Alexander the Great, Volume 2 by John Bagnell Bury