Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [70]
The disenfranchised poor who stayed in Athens chafed at their second-class status. In other Greek cities they would never have tasted power, but having grown used to it, they found its loss hard to bear. Their humiliation embittered them against their burgher neighbors, and especially the man whose aristocratic manner made him the perfect target of their rage—a former student of Plato’s, now seemingly Antipater’s puppet, Do-good Phocion.
10. HYPERIDES (AEGINA AND CORINTH, LATE SEPTEMBER–EARLY OCTOBER 322 B.C.)
Hyperides and Demosthenes did not wait to hear Antipater’s terms before making their escape from Athens. It had been clear for a long time that the old general would seek their lives if he won the war, and that this time, unlike in the showdown with Alexander thirteen years earlier, Athens would not protect them. In the end, Demosthenes’ nephew and protégé, Demochares, made a show of defending his uncle, rising boldly to speak in the Assembly with a sword at his waist. But the time for such defiance had passed. The Assembly soon voted, on the motion of Demades, to condemn both Demosthenes and Hyperides to death in absentia, and to forbid their burial on Attic soil. This last clause was an unusually harsh measure, an obvious sop to the wrath of Macedon.
Athens’ two greatest living orators, and two lesser ones condemned along with them, had little hope except sanctuary at the altars of the gods. In former days, when Asia still belonged to the Persians, an Athenian forced into exile could find safety there, among the enemies of his enemies. But now the whole known world was in Macedonian hands. There was nowhere to hide.
Together the party of fugitives went to the island of Aegina, where a vast marble enclosure sacred to the mythic hero Aeacus offered protection to suppliants. Close on their heels came a notorious Greek bounty hunter, Archias the Exile-chaser, with a squad of Thracian toughs. This versatile man had abandoned two earlier careers, as a tragic actor and as a rhetorician, to become Antipater’s bloodhound, no doubt in exchange for handsome rewards. (At some point he came a cropper in his new line of work, for Arrian, in a lost portion of Events After Alexander, told how he ended his life in poverty and despair.)
Hyperides and his two comrades chose to stay on Aegina and await their fate, while Demosthenes went on to the tiny island of Calauria, where he had lived in exile the previous year. The sanctuary of Poseidon there was said to be inviolable. Before his departure, he and Hyperides said their final farewells. Their forty-year partnership had been briefly severed amid the turmoil of the bribery scandal, but it had been miraculously restored in the last few months, when Athens had come agonizingly close to the liberation both men had sought. Now, at the doorway of death, Hyperides apologized for his prosecution of Demosthenes, and the two men parted as friends. Perhaps they paused to consider that, were it not for the chance arc of a stone at Lamia, they might together have become the greatest heroes in Athenian political history.
Archias the Exile-chaser arrived in Aegina not long after Demosthenes left. Undeterred by religious scruple, he had the three proscribed orators dragged out of the sacred enclosure and sent to Antipater, who was then at Cleonae, near Corinth. All three were executed, and Hyperides’ tongue, the tongue that had delivered so many speeches against Macedon, was cut out of his head. His corpse was cast out unburied as a warning to his sympathizers and as punishment for his support of the Hellenic War.
Later, though, Hyperides’ body was given to a kinsman named Alphinous, thanks to the intervention of a Greek doctor who had influence at the Macedonian court. After honorable cremation, the ashes were secretly interred near the Hippades Gate at Athens, in Hyperides’ native soil, in