PHOCION.

Demades, the orator, when in the height of the power which he obtained at Athens by advising the state in the interest of Antipater and the Macedonians, being necessi- tated to write and speak many things below the dignity, and contrary to the character, of the city, was wont to excuse himself by saying he steered only the shipwrecks of the commonwealth. This hardy saying of his might have some appearance of truth, if applied to Phocion's govern- ment. For Demades indeed was himself the mere wreck of his country, living and ruling so dissolutely, that Anti- pater took occasion to say of him, when he was now grown old, that he was like a sacrificed beast, all con- sumed except the tongue and the belly. But Phocion's was a real virtue, only overmatched in the unequal con- test with an adverse time, and rendered by the ill for- tunes of Greece inglorious and obscure. We must not, indeed, allow ourselves to concur with Sophocles in so far diminishing the force of virtue as to say that When fortune fails, the sense we had before Deserts us also, and is ours no more. Yet thus much, indeed, must be allowed to happen in the conflicts between good men and ill fortune, that instead

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