XXXVI.  When after the assembly broke up the condemned men were being taken to prison, the others threw themselves into the arms of their friends and relations, and walked along with tears and lamentations; but when they saw that the countenance of Phokion was as calm as when he used as general to be conducted in state out of the assembly, they wondered at his composure and greatness of soul.  His enemies accompanied him and abused him, and one even came up to him and spat in his face.  At this outrage it is said that Phokion looked towards the archons, and said, “Will no one make this fellow behave himself?” As Thodippus in prison, when he saw the hemlock being prepared, bewailed his fate, and said that he did not deserve to perish with Phokion, Phokion said, “Are you not satisfied then to die in Phokion’s company?” When one of his friends asked him if he had any message for his son Phokus, he answered, “Yes, tell him not to bear any malice against the Athenians.”  When Nikokles, the most trusty of his friends, begged to be allowed to drink the poison before him, he answered, “Your request is one which it grieves me to grant; but, as I have never refused you anything in your life, I agree even to this.”  When all his friends had drunk, the poison ran short, and the executioner refused to prepare any more unless he were paid twelve drachmas, the price of that weight of hemlock.  After a long delay, Phokion called one of his friends to him, and, saying that it was hard if a man could not even die gratis at Athens, bade him give the man the money he wanted.

XXXVII.  The day of Phokion’s death was the nineteenth of the month Munychion,[651] and the knights rode past the prison in solemn procession to the temple of Zeus.  Some of them took off their garlands from their heads, while others came in tears to the gates of the prison and looked in.  All whose better feelings were not utterly overpowered by passion and hatred agreed in thinking it a very indecent proceeding not to have waited one day for the execution, and so to have avoided the pollution of the festival by the death of the prisoners.  Moreover, the enemies of Phokion, as if they had not even yet satisfied their spite, passed a decree excluding his body from burial, and forbidding any Athenian to furnish fire to burn it.  In consequence of this, no one of his friends dared to touch the body, but one Konopion, a man who was accustomed to deal with such cases for hire, conveyed the body beyond Eleusis, obtained fire from Megara over the Attic frontier, and burned it.  Phokion’s wife, who was present with her maids, raised an empty tomb[652] on the spot, placed the bones in her bosom, and carried them by night into her own house, where she buried them beside the hearth, saying, “To thee, dear hearth, I entrust these remains of a good man; do you restore them to his fathers’ tomb when the Athenians recover their senses.”