Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/368

 360 PHOCION. Agnonides, the sycophant. He was no less studious to manage the affairs within the city with equity and mod- eration, preferring constantly those that were men of worth and good education to the magistracies, and recom- mending the busy and turbulent talkers, to whom it was a mortal blow to be excluded from office and public debating, to learn to stay at home, and be content to till their land. And observing that Xenocrates paid his alien-tax as a foreigner, he offered him the freedom of the city, which he refused, saying he could not accept a franchise which he had been sent, as an ambassador, to deprecate. Menyllus wished to give Phocion a considerable pres- ent of money, who, thanking him, said, neither was Menyllus greater than Alexander, nor his own occasions more urgent to receive it now, than when he refused it from him. And on his pressing him to permit his son Phocus to receive it, he replied, " If my son returns to a right mind, his patrimony is sufficient ; if not, all supplies will be insufficient." But to Antipater he answered more sharply, who would have him engaged in something dis- honorable. " Antipater," said he, " cannot have me both as his friend and his flatterer." And, indeed, Antipater was wont to say, he had two friends at Athens, Phocion and Demades ; the one would never suffer him to gratify him at all, the other would never be satisfied. Phocion might well think that poverty a virtue, in which, after having so often been general of the Athenians, and ad- mitted to the friendship of potentates and princes, he had now grown old. Demades, meantime, delighted in lavishing his wealth even in positive transgressions of the law. For there having been an order that no foreigner should be hired to dance in any chorus on the penalty of a fine of one thousand drachmas on the exhibitor, he had the vanity to exhibit an entire chorus of a hundred