Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [39]
But did Athens want to revolt? As Harpalus and his fleet waited off Attica for permission to dock, the Assembly met to consider its options. Debate proceeded along familiar lines: the war hawks spoke in favor of admitting Harpalus, while the entente party, Phocion and his ilk, argued that the danger to Athens would be too great. Demosthenes, unaccountably, switched sides from his customary alignment. The man who had roused his countrymen to fight at Chaeronea fifteen years before, and who had urged them to fight at Thebes, now said that the time was not ripe for war. He said that Harpalus should be sent away, and his support carried the motion.
Hyperides and the other hawks were aghast at this seeming betrayal, and at the thought that Harpalus’ flotilla, with its fabulous cargo of military might, would be allowed to pass Athens by. As Harpalus raised sail and headed for Taenaron, at the tip of the Peloponnese, it must have seemed to Hyperides that Athens was destined always to be under the thumb of Macedon and never regain its former glory. But there were other reasons, arising from just the place Harpalus was heading, for Hyperides and his partisans to live in hope.
Leosthenes at Taenaron
Alexander’s order disbanding personal armies produced a wave of unemployed Greek mercenaries. Alexander intended to hire many himself, but before he could do so, some crossed the Aegean and landed in Taenaron, where sheer distance from Macedonia, and the buffer provided by Sparta, placed them beyond Alexander’s control. Mercenaries returning from all parts of Asia found safe haven in this no-man’s-land. In a short time Taenaron was bustling with thousands of them, enough for a sizable army, were they to come together under one leader. And just such a leader emerged in Taenaron in 324: a swashbuckling captain named Leosthenes, an Athenian who had spent his life among the Macedonians—his father had been exiled from Athens decades earlier and had gone to the court of King Philip—but who had, for reasons unknown, become a die-hard foe of Alexander.
Some at Athens, including Hyperides, noted with interest that the captain general of the Taenaron troops was Athenian (by birth at least). For they were aware by early 324 of an edict Alexander was about to issue at that summer’s Olympic Games and of the disastrous effect it would have on their city. Hyperides and the war hawks at Athens kept in secret contact with Leosthenes as they awaited the edict’s announcement. They could foresee that its terms, if not softened by Alexander, might very well push Athens into war with Macedon, despite any arguments that Phocion and the entente party might raise.
The Exiles’ Decree and Harpalus’ Return
The Olympic Games of the summer of 324 were unusually crowded. The ranks of attendees were swollen by more than twenty thousand Greek exiles, people thrown out of their home cities for various misdeeds or banished by political enemies. These exiles came not so much to watch the games as to hear the reading of a letter from Alexander, the contents of which had already been rumored in Greece for several tense months. The pronouncement it contained is known today as the Exiles’ Decree.
The Olympics were not normally a venue for edicts, but this was no ordinary edict. It represented Alexander’s first attempt to set policy for the entire Greek world, not by way of hirelings or puppets, but with his own words. Such arbitrary use of power violated the charter the Greeks had made with Philip fifteen years earlier. They were supposed to make their own laws by votes of the League, not receive them from a distant dictator. But the exiles in the stadium at Olympia had come to cheer this edict. By its terms they