The Historians' History of the World 04

To make the members of the alliance more ready for sacrifices Athens herself set a magnanimous example of patriotic devotion. It was not only that, on Demosthenes’ suggestion, a change had been effected in the organisation of the trierarchy and thus the less wealthy were secured from oppressive tradition and the rich constrained to make greater efforts in proportion to their resources; the people also agreed that the sums which it had hitherto been customary to apply to festival expenses, entertainments, and dramatic representations should be utilised for military operations. “The people,” says Niebuhr, “whose poverty was dominant in the assembly and refused the gifts by which alone they obtained the luxury of eating meat on certain festival days since all the rest of the year they ate only olives, cabbages, and onions with dry bread and salt fish,—they who made this sacrifice to provide for the honour of their country; this people has my whole heart and my deepest veneration.”

PHILIP RETURNS TO THE FRAY

[341-340 B.C.]

The warlike impulse in Athens did not long remain unknown to the Macedonian king. He concealed his anger so long as the Thracian War was still in progress; but when he had destroyed the once powerful Odrysian kingdom and secured the Thracian districts by means of colonies and garrisons, when he had led his army across the Hæmus to the Getæ and had won over the colonies on the western shore of the Pontus by conciliation or force, he proceeded to send the Athenians a defiant letter, full of complaints and accusations, and added to them such insults by marching into their possessions on the Chersonesus and seizing Athenian merchantmen, that the assembly of the people declared the peace to have been violated, threw down the peace column, and took measures to furnish substantial aid to the Byzantines whom Philip was even then threatening with a siege.

There was no delusion in Athens as to the importance of the step. When Hegesippus recommended the refusal of Philip’s last proposals, there was a cry “Thou art bringing war upon us,” whereupon he answered: “Not war alone, but early death and mourning garments and public burials and funeral orations if ye will give yourselves in earnest to free the Hellenes and win back the hegemony which your fathers maintained.”

Thus ended the hollow Peace of Philocrates which had lasted seven years, and although from the aspect of affairs and the previous course of events there could be no hope of a successful struggle of divided Hellas against the advancing power of the Macedonian kingdom, now in the youthful vigour of its military strength; yet we cannot but feel the deepest respect for the manly impulse, the resolution which defied death, and preferred to fall gloriously and honourably under the feet of hostile armies, rather than be any longer a prey to the deceitful trickery of the king and his purchased satellites, or hover any longer in the undignified and ruinous state between war and peace. It was not a question of preserving “a piece of finery which had grown old-fashioned,” but of saving liberty and the popular government handed down from their forefathers, of passing on unimpaired to their successors the institutions and political forms for which former generations had staked their property and their blood, and of avoiding the break with the great historical past as long as possible.

SIEGE OF PERINTHUS AND BYZANTIUM

[340-339 B.C.]

And that there was still strength and courage in the Greek people, Philip to his great chagrin soon received sensible evidence before Perinthus, a maritime city, built in terrace fashion on the high ridge of a tongue of land on the Propontis, with rows of houses crowded thickly together and which he failed to take after a long siege by land and sea. Supported by the Byzantines and the Persian governor, the brave citizens repelled storm and attack with spirit. And now encouraged by the example of the Perinthians, and with the co-operation of the Athenians who sent first Chares, then Phocion, with ships and men to the aid of their hard-pressed ally, the Byzantines offered a manful resistance; so that here too Philip had to raise the siege and it was only by a stratagem that he succeeded in bringing off his fleet from the Black Sea through the Bosporus and the Hellespont.