Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/410

 378 HISTORY OF GREECE. or more of whom had nearly all Greece under military occupa- tion, — was an enterprise too hopeless to have been attempted even by men such as the combatants of Marathon or the con- temporaries of Perikles. " Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow ! " but the Athenians had not force enough to strike it ; and the liberty proclaimed by Demetrius Poliorketes was a boon dependent upon him for its extent and even for its continuance. The Athenian assembly of that day w^as held under his army as masters of Attica, as it had been held a few months before under the controlling force of the Phalerean Demetrius together with the Kassandrian governor of Munychia ; and the most fulsome votes of adulation proposed in honor of Demetrius Poliorketes by his partisans, though perhaps disap- proved by many, would hardly find a single pronounced oppo- nent One man, however, there was, who ventured to oppose several of the votes — the nephew of Demosthenes — Demochares ; who deserves to be commemorated as the last known spokesman of free Athenian citizenship. "We know only that such were his general politics, and that his opposition to the obsequious rhetor Stratokles ended in banishment, four years afterwards.-^ He ap- pears to have discharged the functions of general during this pe- riod — to have been active in strengthening the fortifications and military equipment of the city — and to have been employed in occasional missions.^ The altered politics of Athens were manifested by impeach- ment against Demetrius Phalereus and other leading partisans of the late Kassandrian government. He and many others had already gone into voluntary exile ; when their trials came on, they were not forthcoming, and all were condemned to death. But all those who remained, and presented themselves for trial, were acquitted ; ^ so little was there of reactionary violence on this occasion. Stratokles also proposed a decree, commemorat- ing the orator Lykurgus (who had been dead about seventeen years) by a statue, an honorary inscription, and a grant of main- ^ Plutarch, Demetr. 24. ' Philocliori Fragm. 144, ed. Didot, ap. Dionys. Hal. p. 636
 * Polybius, xii. 13 ; Decretum apud Plutarch, Vit. X. Oratt. p. 851.