ticle of his attention," says a great authority, "is diverted from the πόλις to the ἔθνος."[1] But to him Macedon was assuredly not wholly barbarian; and war to the death with her kings could not have been to him as natural or desirable as it seemed to Demosthenes. And though he has nothing to tell us of Macedon, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that his desire was for peace and internal reform, even if it were under the guarantee of the northern power, for the sake of the πόλις itself rather than for the sake of gaining military strength to oppose that power as an enemy.
Of this philosophical view of Greek politics Phocion was in a manner the political exponent. But his policy was too much a negative one; it might almost be called one of indifferentism, like the feeling of Lessing and Goethe in Germany's most momentous period. So far as we know, Phocion never proposed an alliance of a durable kind, either Athenian or Hellenic, with Macedon; he was content to be a purely restraining influence.[2] Athens had been constantly at war since 432; her own resources were of the weakest; there was little military skill to be found in her, no reserve force, much talk, but little solid courage. Athens was vulnerable at various points, and could not possibly defend more than one at a time, therefore Phocion
