Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/384

 36o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE fust excitement of the defeat, to arm and liberate all slaves. This was unconstitutional, and he was prose- cuted by Aristogeiton. His simple confession : "// was the battle of Chczronea that spoke, not I . . . The arms of Mace don took away my sight" — was enough to secure his acquittal. A desperate onslaught was made against Demosthenes ; Aristogeiton, Sosicles, Philocrates, Dion- das, and Melanthus, among others, prosecuted him. But the city was true to him. Some of the accusers failed to get a fifth of the votes, and he was chosen to make the funeral speech over those slain at Chjeronea.^ Then came the strange counter-campaign of Lycurgus against the Macedonian party. The man was a kind of Cato. Of unassailable reputation himself, he had a fury for ex- tirpating all that was corrupt and unpatriotic, and his standard was intolerably high. The only speech of his preserved to us is Against Leocrates, a person whose crime was that he had left the city after Chaeronea, instead of staying to fight and suffer. The penalty de- manded for this slight lack of patriotism was death, and the votes were actually equal. This shows the temper of the city ; but resistance to Macedon was for the time impossible. Athens was content with an opportunist coalition directed by Demosthenes and Demades. On Philip's murder a rising was contemplated, but checked by Alexander's promptitude. Soon after, on a rumour that Alexander had been slain in Illyria, Thebes rebelled, and Demos- thenes carried a motion for joining her. Army and fleet were prepared, money despatched to Thebes, and an embassy sent to the Great King for Persian aid, when Alexander returned, razed Thebes to the ground, and ^ The extant speech is spurious.