Phocion

And when many of them sprang towards the bema, and shouted that the tidings brought by Asclepiades were true and that Alexander was dead, Well, then, said Phocion, if he is dead to-day, he will be dead to-morrow and the day after. Therefore we can deliberate in quiet, and with greater safety.

Leosthenes, who had plunged the city into the Lamian war[*](323-322 B.C. So named because the confederate Greeks held Antipater and his forces for some time besieged in Lamia, a city of S. E. Thessaly (§ 4).) much to Phocion’s displeasure, once asked him derisively what good he had done the city during the many years in which he had been general. No slight good, said Phocion, in that its citizens are buried in their own sepulchres.