Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/385

 PIIOKION CARRIED PRISONER TO ATHENS 35J ers and slaves. But it would have been fortunate for Phokion had such really been the case ; for foreigners and slaves had nc cause of antipathy towards him. The assembly was mainly com- posed of Phokion's keenest enemies, the citizens just returned from exile or deportation ; among whom may doubtless have been intermixed more or less of non-qualitied persons, since the lists had probably not yet been verified. AVhen the assembly was about to be opened, the friends of Phokion moved, that on occasion of so important a trial, foreigners and slaves should be sent away. This was in every sense an impolitic proceeding ; for the restored exiles, chiefly poor men, took it as an insult to themselves, and became only the more embittered, exclaiming against the oligarchs who were trying to exclude them. It is not easy to conceive stronger grounds of exasperation than those which inflamed the bosoms of these returned exiles. We must recollect that at the close of the Lamian war, the Athenian democracy had been forcibly subverted. Demosthenes and its principal leaders had been slain, some of them with ante- cedent cruelties ; the poorer multitude, in number more than half of the qualified citizens, had been banished or deported into distant regions. To all the public shame and calamity, there was thus superadded a vast mass of individual sufilering and im- poverishment, the mischiefs of which were very imperfectly healed, even by that unexpected contingency which had again thrown open to them their native city. Accordingly, when these men returned from different regions, each hearing from the rest new tales of past hardship, they felt the bitterest hatred against the authors of the Antipatrian revolution ; and among these au- thors Phokion stood distinctly marked. For although he had neither originated nor advised these severities, yet he and his friends, as administering the Antipatrian government at Athens, must have been agents in carrying them out, and had rendered themselves distinctly liable to the fearful penalties pronounced by the psephism of Demophantus,i consecrated by an oath taken by Athenians generally, against any one who should hold an offi- cial post after the government was subverted. ■ Andokides de Mystcriis, sect 96, 97 ; Lycurgus adv. Leokrat. s. 127 30*