peace; and, as every believer in Demosthenes must hold, not wisely, but too well-for the invader. None, however, distrust the integrity of Phocion's purpose, or suspect the incorrupt singleness of his motives, with whom Athenian honours sunk, according to the poet of the "Seasons," And left a mass of sordid lees behind; But when, beneath his low illustrious roof, Sweet peace and happy wisdom smooth'd his brow, But to zealous anti-Macedonians the role assumed by Phocion, as agent of Macedonian supremacy in a city reft of half its citizens, does seem in character only with that of - a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward,— the actual age at which he had now arrived, though they cannot add that, to deal plainly, They fear he was not in his perfect mind, but in a state of "second childishness and mere oblivion," the consequence of attaining to such years of indiscretion,-since the policy Phocion adopted as an octogenarian was but a continuation of what he had all along sanctioned by precept and example. Of course he is, politically, no favourite with Mr. Grote, who always does justice, however, as well to his public probity as to his private worth. The story of his condemnation and death is told with impressive simplicity. His last sayings and sufferings, so characteristic of the man, and of those who judged him, are once again recorded, which they never can be without effect: how he exclaimed, when a hearing was refused him, "For myself, Athenians, I plead guilty; I pronounce against myself the sentence of death for my political conduct; but," pointing to his friends, who, like him, were cried down with tumultuous clamour,-" but why are you to sentence these men near me, who are not guilty?" And the bitter answer was, "Because they are your friends, Phocion!" -how, when one brutal mobsman planted himself in front of the hooting ranks, through which Phocion and his friends had to pass on the way to prison and to death, and there aspired to a "bad eminence" among the throng by spitting upon the aged statesman, the latter turned to the public officers, and exclaimed, "Will no one check this indecent fellow?"-and how, being asked whether he had anything to tell his son Phocus, Phocion replied, "I tell him emphatically, not to hold evil memory of the Athenians." This bequest of pardon and good-will to Athens was a very VOL. XXXIX. 2 U 66 nor were morituri salutatio-just before the hemlock was administered to him in the condemned cell. He was the last of the five to drink it. As it was for treason they suffered, the bodies of the prisoners were excluded from burial within Attica; Phokion's friends allowed to light a funeral pile for the burning of his body; which was carried out of Attica into the Megaris, by a hired agent named Konopion, and there burnt by fire obtained at Megara. The wife of Phokion, with her maids, poured libations, and marked the spot by a small mound of earth; she also collected the bones and brought them back to Athens in her bosom, during the secrecy of night. She buried them near her own domestic hearth, with this address-Beloved Hestia, I confide to thee the relics of a good man. Restore them to his own family vault, as soon as the Athenians shall come to their senses." Plutarch tells us the Athenians did soon come to their senses: they discovered that Phocion had been a faithful and excellent public servant, they repented of their severity towards him, they celebrated his funeral obsequies at the public expense, they erected a statue in his honour, and they made an example of his adversaries. All this Mr. Grote admits, except the involved inference that the Athenians had come to their senses. Plutarch's facts he accepts, but Plutarch's philosophy on the subject he rejects. The real explanation of the change, according to Mr. Grote, lies in this that within two or three months after the death of Phocion, Cassander became master of Athens, and the oligarchical or Phocionic party again got the upper hand,-Demetrius the Phalerean being recalled from exile, and charged with the government of the city under Cassander, just as Phocion had governed it under Antipater. The anti-Phocionites were again under a cloud; it was not by act or deed of theirs that Phocion was now honoured-by no reaction in their feelings was his memory now canonised, in the city that had condemned him not many weeks since. Plutarch's account implies a spontaneous change of popular opinion respecting him, and this is what Mr. Grote will not allow. "I see no reason,' he declares, "why such change of opinion should have occurred, nor do I believe that it did occur." For the historian is of opinion that the demos of Athens, banished and deported in mass, had the best ground for hating Phocion, and were not likely to become ashamed of the feeling. He recognises the virtues of Phocion, his personally mild and incorruptible character,-but can see no benefit that the people of Athens ever derived from these good qualities in the minister: to them it was of little moment that he should steadily refuse all presents from Antipater, when he did Antipater's work gratuitously. He might deliver his own soul by this superiority to corruption; but they, meanwhile, were in the same position as though he were the sold, salaried, servile tool of the Macedonian Hence, in remarking on the condemnation of Phocion by the Athenians, while Mr. Grote owns that, considered as a judicial trial, that last scene before the people in the theatre is nothing better than a cruel imposture, he is yet careful to add, that considered as a manifestation of public opinion already settled, it is one for which the facts of the past supplied ample warrant. He freely and feelingly confesses how impossible it is to read, without painful sympathy, the narrative of an old man above eighty-personally brave, mild, and superior to all pecuniary seductionperishing under an intense and crushing storm of popular execration. But he contends, on the other hand, than when we look at the whole case, and survey, not merely the details of Phocion's administration, but the grand public objects which those details subserved, and towards which he conducted his fellow-citizens, we shall see that this judgment was fully merited. "In Phokion's patriotism -for so, doubtless, he himself sincerely conceived it-no account was taken of Athenian independence; of the autonomy or selfmanagement of the Hellenic world; of the conditions, in reference to foreign kings, under which alone such autonomy could exist. He had neither the Pan-hellenic sentiment of Aristeides, Kallikratides, and Demosthenes-nor the narrower Athenian sentiment, like the devotion of Agesilaus to Sparta, and of Epaminondas to Thebes. To Phokion it was indifferent whether Greece was an aggregate of autonomous cities, with Athens as first or second among them-or one of the satrapies under the Macedonian kings." Now this, in the historian's frequently and earnestly enunciated view of the case,-a view of capital interest, of essential moment to a History of Greece, in any large and lofty and liberal sense,— this unpatriotic patriotism, this indifference to the free polity whether of Hellas in general, or of his own Athens in particular, was among the most fatal defects of a Grecian public man. By this view, had Themistocles, Aristides, and Leonidas resembled Phocion, Greece would have passed quietly under the dominion of Persia, and the brilliant, though chequered, century and more of independent politics which succeeded the repulse of Xerxes would never have occurred. And reviewing the fifty years of Phocion's political and military influence-a half century during which the Greeks were degraded from a state of freedom, and Athens from ascendancy as well as freedom, into absolute servitude-the historian avers, that in so far as this great public misfortune can be imputed to any one man, to no one was it more ascribable than to Phocion. He was stratêgus during most of the long series of years when Philip's power was growing; it was his duty to look ahead for the safety of his countrymen, and to combat the yet immature giant. He heard the warnings of Demosthenes, and he possessed exactly those qualities which were wanting to Demosthenes-military energy and aptitude. Had he lent his influence to inform the shortsightedness, to stimulate the inertia, to direct the armed efforts of his countrymen, the kings of Macedon might have been kept within their own limits, and the future history of Greece might have been altogether different. Unfortunately he took the opposite side. He acted with Eschines and the Philippizers; without receiving money from Philip, he did gratuitously all that Philip desired." It is granted, as respects the latter half of his life, that Phocionom o gilbred edt-bomis -TV tab. Not less, though dogs of faction bay, yradil letiler I Would serve his kind in deed and word;eonde trans that he contributed to lighten the severity of Macedonian dominion in Greece; that he always refrained from abusing the marked favour shown towards himself by the Macedonian princes, for purposes either of personal gain or of oppression over his fellowcitizens. די chief Athenian orators, but disfranchisetrong While the Lamian war was running its disastrous course, Phocion remained at Athens, and gave free expression to his disapproval of that struggle. At its close, he "undertook the thankless and dishonourable function of satrap under Antipater at Athens, with the Macedonian garrison at Munychia to back him," thus becoming the locum tenens of a conqueror, who not only slaughtered the deported the Demos in mass." In this phase of his career, a strong case is made out against the aged viceroy, who having thus accepted partnership and responsibility in these strong measures, was no longer safe, except under the protection of a foreign prince; and who, accordingly, on the return of the banished demos, had to seek safety for himself by making interest (in one instance by what Mr. Grote calls "that treasonable connivance" with Nicanor) with successive and opposed arbiters of the city's fate. A voluntary expatriation (along with his friend the Phalerean Demetrius) would have been less dangerous, and less discreditable, than these manoeuvres, which still further darkened the close of his life, without averting from him, after all, the necessity of facing the restored Demos. This said demos was almost demon-iac in vehemence of wrath against him. The spectacle is pronounced by Mr. Grote "instructive, though "distressing." It was directed, he says, "not against the man or the administrator for in both characters Phokion had been the last collusion with Nikanor in the seizure of the Peiræus-but against his public policy. It was the last protest of extinct Grecian freedom, speaking as it were from the tomb in a voice of thunder, against that fatal system of mistrust, inertia, self-seeking, and corruption, which had betrayed the once autonomous Athens to a foreign conqueror."† seizureless, except as to Referring to Nicanor's seizure of the Peiræus. t + Grote, XII. 477-86. The affairs of Sicily have throughout been treated by Mr. Grote with great fulness, and made at once more important and interesting than is common with his predecessors. The concluding volume contains a very animated narrative of the career of Agathocles, that soldier of fortune, who raised himself from the meanest beginnings to the summit of political power, and approved himself a thorough adept in that art at which all aspiring men of his age aimed the handling of mercenary soldiers for the extinction of political liberty and security at home, and for predatory aggrandisement abroad, by Scipio Africanus pronounced the elder Dionysius and Agathocles the most daring, sagacious, and capable men of action within his knowledge. Apart from this enterprising genius, employed, Mr. Grote adds, in the service of unmeasured personal ambition, we know nothing of Agathocles except his sanguinary, faithless, and nefarious dispositions; in which attributes also he stands pre-eminent; though, in spite of his often-proved perfidy, he seems to have had a joviality and apparent simplicity of manner (the same is recounted of Cæsar Borgia) which amused men and put them off their guard, throwing them perpetually into his trap. At the death of Agathocles, the historian of free-acting Hellas loses sight of the Greeks of Sicily." to In taking leave of Mr. Grote, we cannot but cast a longing, Mr. Grote, we cannot but cast a lingering look behind, at the way by which he has led us, these ten years past, a guide of such rare intelligence, persevering endea vour, honesty, and general ability. The History of Greece, from first to last, has occupied us with strangely-shifting scenes and brilliant dioramic effects. There is the mythical and legendary period, on which he has so ingeniously elaborated his views, to the non-content of that class of conservative readers, who can digest a hundred myths better than one such theory of the myth, and who regard with more than suspicion the generic race of Wolf, and all such wolfish slaughterers of the innocents, or Heyne, and all such heinous digressors from the old paths. Mr. Grote, for his part, prefers the literal belief of the Claviers, and Larchers, and Raoul Rochettes which has at least the merit of consistency-to what he calls the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men, such as Niebuhr, or O. Mueller, or Bishop Thirlwall. His resolve to decline problems so insoluble as the genesis of the Pelasgi, for example, he justifies by appropriating the remark of Herodotus, respecting one of the theories, then in vogue for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean that "the an who carries up his story visible world, passes out of the range of criticism." But his philosophy on the subject hinders not his exposition, very fully and very perspicuously, of the legends themselves; and we read in * Ibid. pp. 609 sq. into the in |