[1] The story about the money, indeed, is generally admitted, namely, that Alexander sent him a present of a hundred talents.
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When this was brought to Athens, Phocion asked the bearers why in the world, when there were so many Athenians, Alexander offered such a sum to him alone. They replied:
Because Alexander judges that thou alone art a man of honour and worth.
In that case, said Phocion,
let him suffer me to be and be thought such always.
[2] But when the messengers accompanied him to his home and saw there a great simplicity,—his wife kneading bread, while Phocion with his own hands drew water from the well and washed his feet,—they were indignant, and pressed the money upon him still more urgently, declaring it an intolerable thing that he, though a friend of the king, should live in such poverty. Phocion, accordingly, seeing a poor old man walking the street in a dirty cloak, asked them if they considered him inferior to this man.
[3]
Heaven forbid! they cried.
And yet this man, said Phocion,
has less to live upon than I, and finds it sufficient. And, in a word, said he,
if I make no use of this great sum of money, it will do me no good to have it; or, if I use it, I shall bring myself, and the king as well, under the calumnies of the citizens. So the treasure went back again from Athens, after it had showed the Greeks that the man who did not want so great a sum was richer than the man who offered it.
[4] Alexander was vexed and wrote back to Phocion that he could not regard as his friends those who wanted nothing of him. But not even then would Phocion take the money; he did, however, ask for the release of Echecratides the sophist, Athenodorus of Imbros, and two men of Rhodes, Demaratus and Sparton, who had been arrested upon sundry charges and imprisoned in Sardis.
[5] These men, then, Alexander set free at once, and at a later time,
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when he sent Craterus back into Macedonia, he ordered him to turn over to Phocion the revenues from whichever one of four cities in Asia he might select,—either Cius, Gergithus, Mylasa, or Elaea,—insisting still more strongly than before that he would be angry if Phocion did not take them. But Phocion would not take them, and very soon Alexander died. And even to the present day Phocion’s house is pointed out in Melité,
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adorned with bronze disks, but otherwise plain and simple.
Phocion. Plutarch. Bernadotte Perrin (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1919.
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