Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/376

 368 PHOCION. less as to refuse you, I must gratify you in this also." After they had all drunk of it, the poison ran short; and the executioner refused to prepare more, except they would pay him twelve drachmas, to defray the cost of the quantity required. Some delay was' made, and time spent, when Phocion called one of his friends, and observ- ing that a man could not even die at Athens without pay- ing for it, requested him to give the sum. It was the nineteenth clay of the month Munychion, on which it was the usage to have a solemn procession in the city, in honor of Jupiter. The horsemen, as they passed by, some of them threw away their garlands, others stopped, weeping, and casting sorrowful looks towards the prison doors, and all the citizens whose minds were not absolutely debauched by spite and passion, or who had any humanity left, acknowledged it to have been most impi- ously done, not, at least, to let that day pass, and the city so be kept pure from death and a public execu- tion at the solemn festival. But as if this triumph had been insufficient, the malice of Phocion's enemies went yet further; his dead body was excluded from burial within the boundaries of the country, and none of the Athenians could light a funeral pile to burn the corpse ; neither durst any of his friends venture to concern them- selves about it. A certain Conopion, a man who used to do these offices for hire, took the body and carried it be- yond Eleusis, and procuring fire from over the frontier of Megara,* burned it. Phocion's wife, with her servant- maids, being present and assisting at the solemnity, raised there an empty tomb, and performed the customary liba- tions, and gathering up the bones in her lap, and bring- corrected reading. According to in the waste ground left between the usual text it is, " a Megarian the Athenian and the Megarian woman." Those who were con- territories.
 * This is in accordance with a demned for treason, were burned