which they were superior, not with arms, in which they were inferior to them.  Once when they would not attend to his words, or listen to him, he said, “You are able to force me to do what I do not wish, but you shall never force me to counsel what I do not approve.”  When Demosthenes, one of the orators of the opposite party, said to him, “Phokion, the Athenians will kill you, if they lose their senses.”  He answered, “Yes, but they will kill you, if they regain them.”  When he saw Polyeuktus of Sphettus in a great heat urging the Athenians to go to war with Philip, panting and sweating profusely, as he was a very fat man, and drinking great draughts of water, he said, “Ought you to believe what this man says, and vote for war?  What sort of a figure will he make in a suit of armour and with a shield to carry, when the enemy are at hand, if he cannot explain his thoughts to you without nearly choking himself?” When Lykurgus abused him freely in the public assembly and above all, reproached him with having advised the people to deliver up ten citizens to Alexander when he demanded them, he said, “I have often given the people good advice, but they will not obey me.”

X. There was one Archibiades, who was surnamed the Laconizer, who grew a great beard, wore a Spartan cloak, and affected a stern demeanour like a Spartan.  Once when Phokion was being violently attacked in the assembly he called upon this man to bear witness to the truth of what he said, and to assist him.  Archibiades now rose and said what he thought would please the Athenians, upon which Phokion, seizing him by the beard, exclaimed, “Why then, Archibiades, do you not shave?"[625] When Aristogeiton, the informer, who made warlike speeches in the public assembly, and urged the people to action, came to be enrolled on the list for active service leaning on a stick, with his legs bandaged, Phokion, catching sight of him from the tribune where he stood, called out “Write down Aristogeiton, a cripple and a villain.”  From this it appears strange that so harsh and ungenial a man should have been named “The Good.”

It is difficult, I imagine, but not impossible, for the same man to be like wine, both sweet and harsh:  just as other men and other wines seem at first to be pleasant, but prove in the end both disagreeable and injurious to those who use them.  We are told that Hypereides once said to the Athenians, “Men of Athens, do not think whether I am harsh or not, but whether I am harsh for nothing;” as if it was only covetousness that made men hated, and as if those persons were not much more generally disliked who used their power to gratify their insolence, their private grudges, their anger, or their ambition.  Phokion never harmed any Athenian because he disliked him, and never accounted any man his enemy, but merely showed himself stern and inexorable to those who opposed his efforts to save his country, while in the rest of his life he was so kind and amiable to all men,