Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [69]
When the Athenian envoys broached terms of surrender, however, Antipater turned icy. He spat back the words Leosthenes had once spoken to him: the victors would set the terms.
Unable to stomach an unconditional defeat, Phocion and Demades returned to Athens. The Assembly sent them out a second time but put a new team member in place: Xenocrates, an aged philosopher, a former friend and fellow student of Aristotle’s, and, at this time, head of Plato’s Academy. The city hoped to remind Antipater of its great intellectual traditions—a strong argument against its destruction—and also to play on his known friendship with Aristotle. But when the new team arrived in Thebes, Antipater ignored Xenocrates entirely and rudely spoke over him every time the man opened his mouth.
Though initially bent on surrender without terms, Antipater at last laid out steps by which Athens could avoid an invasion. The city was to hand over Demosthenes and Hyperides, along with other instigators of the revolt. It had to change its time-honored democracy into an oligarchy, accept a Macedonian garrison in Piraeus (Athens’ harbor), and repay all the costs Macedon had incurred in the war, plus a fine. This was better than Phocion and Demades had reason to expect, and they signaled approval. Xenocrates, who had been excluded from the discussion, was less reconciled. He delivered a bitter parting shot, telling Antipater he was treating the Athenians too generously for slaves but too cruelly for free men.
Installation of the Piraeus garrison was the harshest of Antipater’s terms, as far as Phocion was concerned. Other Greek cities had long before submitted to armed occupation, but Athens had always been spared; its proud history conferred special standing even under Macedonian hegemony. Phocion pleaded with Antipater to once again exempt Athens, but the old general replied, “Phocion, we are willing to grant you anything, except what will destroy you and us both.” This was a winking acknowledgment of the new realities Phocion faced as Antipater’s collaborator. Were the Athenians, left unguarded, to revolt again, Phocion would be as much their enemy as Antipater. Reluctantly, Phocion agreed to the garrison.
Under the command of a certain Menyllus, Antipater’s troops sailed into Piraeus a few weeks later, in mid-September, to take up guard duties on the fortified hill of Munychia. It was the very day that a sacred procession left Athens for nearby Eleusis as part of the local religious rites known as the Mysteries. The conjunction of this treasured ritual with the arrival of garrison troops distressed the Athenians, who felt the gods themselves had abandoned their city. Strange portents and visions were seen, giving the day dire significance. A worshipper taking part in the Mysteries, while washing a sacrificial pig in the harbor waters, watched in horror as a shark bit the animal in two and swam away with the lower half. Seers divined that Athens would forever lose the “lower part” of its city, meaning Piraeus, to Macedonian power.
Phocion and Demades became the leaders of an Athenian government refashioned as a broad plutocracy. Only those with property worth at least two thousand drachmas—a sizable upper-middle-class estate—were allowed to hold office or vote. The organs of the old democracy continued to function, but more than twenty thousand, well over half the citizen body, were now barred from participation. Many of these left the city and accepted new lands in Thrace, lands that old man Antipater graciously—and expeditiously—provided.