The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

THE ANCIENT WORLD

CHAPTER I ‘Glorious Hermes, Herald of the Deathless Gods’
i. The World of Greek Diplomacy

I swear by Zeus, Gê, Helios, Poseidon, Athena, Ares and all the gods and goddesses. I shall abide in peace and I shall not infringe the treaty with Philip of Macedon. Neither by land nor by sea shall I bear arms with injurious intent against any party which abides by the oath, and I shall refrain from the capture by any device or stratagem of any city, fortification or harbour of the parties who abide by the Peace. I shall not subvert the monarchy of Philip and his successors…If anyone perpetrates any act in contravention of the terms of the agreement I shall render assistance accordingly as the wronged party may request and I shall make war upon him who contravenes the Common Peace…and I shall not fall short.

The oath of the Greek city states when joining

the League of Corinth, 338 BC¹

In the eleventh century BC, during the reign of Ramesses XI, an Egyptian envoy named Wen Amun travelled to Lebanon to buy timber for the sacred barque of the god Amun-re. Much like Iosip Nepea, his journey was plagued with bad fortune. At the port of Dor in the Nile delta he was robbed of all his money, although he quickly made good his loss by seizing an equivalent quantity of silver on board a ship bound for the Syrian port of Byblos.

The prince of Byblos was distinctly unimpressed by the arrival of an Egyptian envoy. He lacked written credentials, he had brought no gifts, so there was little incentive to provide him with precious timber. Wen Amun sent word to his superiors and they quickly despatched four jars of gold, five jars of silver, five hundred ox-hides, twenty sacks of lentils and thirty baskets of fish. The gambit was successful, and Wen Amun purchased his timber from a suddenly much more amenable ruler.

Just before departing from Byblos, the men from whom Wen Amun had seized the silver arrived at court demanding justice. The prince took the night to mull over the envoy’s fate, though he was sure to treat Wen Amun courteously during his temporary captivity – providing him with wine, food and an Egyptian singer. The following morning the prince announced that, wince Wen Amun was an official envoy, he was immune from arrest.

Wen Amun embarked upon his homeward journey only to encounter a storm that forced him to put ashore on Cyprus. The startled local people were intent on massacring the envoy and his crew, but Wen Amun begged for the right to plead for his life with the local princess, Hatiba. Mercifully, one of the locals could speak Egyptian, and he set about translating the envoy’s threatening words. Wen Amun insisted upon his ambassadorial immunity, and warned the princess that killing a Byblian crew would be a calamitous error of judgement. If she killed his crew, the ruler of Byblos would hunt down and kill ten of hers. Once again, Wen Amun skirted disaster and continued on his trek home.

His story is exceptional – a detailed ambassadorial adventure that just happened to survive on a roll of Egyptian papyrus. The sources are rarely so generous. In the centuries since the Amarna period, the work of envoys, messengers and ambassadors had continued, just as it always would. All of the civilizations of the ancient world – whether Vedic India, the Cretan Minoans and the Greek Mycenaeans of the Mediterranean, the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Near East, or the tribes of Bronze Age Europe – had need of envoys. They fostered trade, brokered alliances, carried tribute, and the rest. But, almost without exception, they did so locally, with immediate or none-too-distant neighbours. The era of the continent-traversing ambassador had not yet dawned.

Across much of Eurasia, however, the second half of the first millennium BC can be understood as an era of consolidation. The first great, stable Chinese empires were emerging, coming to dominate the politics of East Asia. In India, by the fourth century BC, the first empire to genuinely hold sway across much of the subcontinent had appeared. In the Near East the bridge between the two continents, the Assyrian empire, had fallen at the end of the seventh century BC, to be replaced by a series of redoubtable Persian empires – the Achaemenids, the Parthians and finally, in the first centuries AD, the Sassanids. The links between these civilizations were fragile, their knowledge of one another limited – but this was soon to change. As in much else, Greece led the way.

Hermes, lover of Persephone and Aphrodite, protector of Perseus and Hercules, was the father of all ambassadors. God of gambling, trade and profit, he traversed the earth like a breath of wind, carrying Zeus’s messages, shepherding all travellers, escorting souls to the underworld. He would announce the weddings of the gods and execute their punishments, binding fire-thieving Prometheus to Mount Caucasus with iron spikes. He would visit all the communities of man to offer rewards for the return of Psyche, Aphrodite’s errant handmaiden: ‘seven sweet kisses’ from the goddess herself ‘and a particularly honeyed one imparted with the thrust of her caressing tongue’. Ancient heralds, aspiring to his eloquence and cunning, would claim to be his offspring. They would carry his caduceus, his serpent-entwined staff, and it would grant them safe passage. Earnest and yet mischievous – stealing Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born – Hermes was to be the ambassadors’ archetype and paragon.²

The caprices of diplomacy in classical Greece often demanded the talents of a Hermes. In southern Europe, Greece had enjoyed something of a resurgence from as early as the eighth century BC. New cities had sprung up, literacy and architecture had blossomed; colonies had been established throughout the Mediterranean, as well as along the coasts of North Africa and the Black Sea. Political life was rooted in the polis, the proud, fiercely independent city state. There was much that united the hundreds of communities across the Greek world – ties of religion, of kinship and, above all, of language – but there was just as much that divided them. The mightiest states – Athens, Corinth, Thebes and Sparta – were inevitable rivals, and while ancient Greece was not quite a theatre of constant war (as is sometimes supposed) it was most certainly a place of shifting leagues, squabbles and intrigue. The states were often willing to unite in the face of a common enemy – most often the Persian Empire – but diplomacy was just as likely to be concerned with territorial disputes, jurisdictional squabbles or cultural rivalry. It was fertile soil for the exploits of ambassadors. As so often, political rivalries and tensions provided the spark for diplomatic endeavour.

In the fifth century BC, Athens had led resistance to the threat of Persian invasion and won famous victories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). She could now claim not only cultural superiority (it was the age of Euripides and Sophocles) but ever-expanding dominion. Her leaders could be boastful. Pericles (495–429 BC) declared: ‘Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer…for our adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every land; and everywhere we have left behind us everlasting memorials of good done to our friends, and of suffering inflicted on our enemies.’³ Here was a rare example of a politician’s swagger being both justified and prescient.

Athenian hegemony was offensive to her rivals. One of the sacred tasks of Greek diplomacy had always been to prevent any one city from becoming unduly powerful. While the comparison may be clumsy and anachronistic, the situation bore some resemblance to that of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe, when nations began to strive for a balance of power. Just as the great European states would frown at the pugnacity of Louis XIV’s France so, centuries earlier, the Greeks had acted upon their resentment of Athens and, led by the Spartans, inaugurated the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). By its end, Athens’ dominance had been shattered and her empire all but dismantled. The city states of Greece embarked upon yet more decades of destructive feuding, marked by periods of Spartan and then Theban dominance, but most of all by political chaos.

To the north, in 359 BC, Philip II ascended to the throne of Macedon. With consummate timing (peppered with bribery and assassination) he set about spreading Macedonian influence across a confused, divided Greece, conquering lands and amassing tributaries (many of them former Athenian allies). It was now the turn of Athens to grumble at the rise of an overambitious rival, and it fell to Demosthenes, the greatest orator of antiquity, to articulate his city’s mounting trepidation.

In a speech before the senate in 351 BC, Demosthenes lambasted the arrogance of Philip II, and the indolence of the Athenians who sat inactive as Philip was ‘casting his net around us’. He was now ‘drunk with the magnitude of his achievements and dreams of further triumphs when, elated by his success, he sees that there is none to bar his way’.

Demosthenes had a simple solution: Athens should recall its glorious past, cast off the marks of infamy and cowardice and raise new and mightier armies to fend off the Macedonian assault.⁴ Many of his fellow Athenians were less hawkish. They thought it wiser to negotiate with Philip, and so it was that Demosthenes found himself a reluctant member of an embassy to Macedonia in 346 BC.

Athenian diplomacy was remarkably transparent. Tactics were debated in political assemblies before embassies actually set out, and negotiations (usually a series of set speeches and replies) were generally conducted in public meetings, although, as so often in the history of diplomacy, it was common for more private discussions between ambassadors and ministers to carry on behind the scenes. If agreement was reached there would be a formal exchange of oaths, and terms would be engraved on stone tablets. If the news was especially important, copies of such tablets would be displayed beyond the territories of the states most directly involved. After Athens and Sparta reached an accord in 421 BC, copies of the treaty were set up at both Olympia and Delphi.

Given its importance, Greek diplomacy was astonishingly extemporaneous. There was no notion of a distinct arm of government dedicated to foreign affairs, nor of a permanent diplomatic establishment. Men were simply chosen for ambassadorial errands – usually bearing the title of angelos (messenger) or presbeis (envoy or elder) – as and when the need arose. There was scant financial reward, and envoys – typically drawn (as in many cultures) from the political classes – were obliged to bear all the expenses of their retinues, although service as an ambassador did tend to enhance a politician’s reputation. There were few successful Athenian statesmen who had not, at one time or another, carried out diplomatic missions. Demosthenes, by the end of his career, would be a veteran of missions to Thebes and the Peloponnese as well as to Macedon.

Greek diplomacy was also riddled with dissent. Unwilling to trust important errands to individuals, Athens generally favoured the larger embassy, of three, five or ten men. Although envoys were furnished with specific, detailed instructions, the potential for bickering between them was a perennial danger. Within the embassy of 346 BC, Demosthenes was predictably hostile to Philip, insisting that any agreement with Macedon would have to be in the Athenians’ best interests; stringent conditions would have to be met before any treaty could be ratified. Some of his colleagues, notably the orator Aeschines, were more sympathetic to the Macedonian cause, and Demosthenes believed they were willing to give way on too many important points of negotiation. Some sources report that the rival factions even refused to sleep under the same roof during their journey. Upon returning to Athens, a furious Demosthenes charged some of his fellow ambassadors with receiving bribes from the Macedonian king.

One of the accused, Aeschines, sought to counter this threat by launching his own attack on the man expected to lead the prosecution: the politician Timarchus. If he could damage Timarchus’s reputation sufficiently, then Aeschines’ own trial would, at the very least, be postponed. Aeschines opted for a spectacular strategy, accusing Timarchus of having been a gay prostitute. One of the most sensational jury trials in the ancient world would reveal, all at once, how seriously the Greeks took the business of embassy, and just how vulnerable their diplomacy was to the selfish machinations of individual ambassadors. Beyond all that, it furnished an extraordinarily intimate example of an ancient ambassador desperately struggling for political survival.

ii. The Trial of Timarchus

The workings of Athenian justice, if we are to believe the comic playwright Aristophanes, were dangerously addictive. His scurrilous play The Wasps tells the story of Philocleon, who spends all his days serving on juries. He revels in the authority this bestows, enjoying the pathetic spectacle of defendants pleading for mercy ‘Is there any creature on earth more blessed, more feared and petted from day to day, or that leads a happier, pleasanter life’ than a juror, he asks? Some defendants ‘vow they are needy…and over their poverty wail and whine, some tell us a legend of days gone by, or a joke from Aesop…to make me laugh, that so I may doff my terrible rage.’ And when the ‘piteous bleating’ is over, he can return home ‘with my fee in my wallet’, to be greeted by his doting daughter and ‘my dear little wife [who] sets on the board nice manchets of bread in a tempting array’.

His son Bdelycleon fears for Philocleon’s sanity and locks him in the family home. His fellow jurors, dressed as a chorus of wasps, stage a rescue attempt and, although Bdelycleon manages to rout them in a debate, Philocleon’s addiction is not so easy defeated. To ease his father’s discomfort, Bdelycleon sets up a makeshift court and, for want of any human reprobates, the family dog is brought to trial for stealing a piece of Sicilian cheese. The creature is only saved by some trickery on Bdelycleon’s part, whereby Philocleon unwittingly votes for acquittal. Devastated – he had never previously found a defendant not guilty – Philocleon ends the play by getting hopelessly drunk.⁵

The reality of Greek jurisprudence was rather more decorous, but Aristophanes had one thing exactly right: Athenian juries were gloriously powerful. In an attempt to check bribery, they were made up of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of members, drawn by lot. Even the wealthiest citizen, so it was supposed, lacked the resources to corrupt that many individuals. At trial, a water-clock was set in motion, and defendants and plaintiffs – who habitually represented themselves – would both make lengthy speeches, cite the relevant laws, and call their witnesses. There was no judge (as we would understand the term) to coordinate proceedings, monitor objections, or offer summations. Success rested solely on whether or not a speaker had been persuasive; eloquence was everything.

A jury’s verdict was final and there was no room for appeal. Jurors, who had to be over thirty years of age and free from any outstanding financial debt to the state, were chosen from a list of 6,000 candidates, drawn up at the beginning of each year. They received a small daily stipend for their service and they knew, and revelled in, their own power. As the trial of Timarchus would demonstrate, the linchpins of any competent legal strategy were to flatter a jury, to appeal to its patriotism, and to avoid the heckling in which jurors regularly indulged.

‘Fellow citizens,’ the embattled ambassador Aeschines began, ‘I have never brought indictment against any Athenian.’ However, ‘when I saw that the city was being seriously injured by the defendant, Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies, and when I myself was made a victim of his blackmailing attack’, he had been compelled to act. ‘I decided that it would be a most shameful thing if I failed to come to the defence of the whole city and its laws, and to your defence and my own.’ It was an irresistible opening salvo.

The city’s lawgivers, Aeschines explained, had been unflinching when they had established who might engage in public debate and hold civic office. There had been no attempts to ‘exclude from the platform the man whose ancestors have not held a general’s office, nor even the man who earns his daily bread by working at a trade’. Such citizens were welcome to participate. Nevertheless, the same privilege did not extend to the man who ‘beats his father or mother, or fails to support them or to provide a home for them’, nor to the man who had failed to perform military service and ‘thrown away his shield’.

Nor did Athens tolerate the individual who ‘because of his shameful private life the laws forbids from speaking before the people’. The city’s constitution was clear. ‘If any Athenian…shall have prostituted his person, he shall not be permitted to become one of the nine archons [chief magistrates of Athens]…nor to discharge the office of priest…nor shall he act as an advocate for the state…nor shall ever hold any office whatsoever…nor shall he be a herald or an ambassador.’ Aeschines intended to prove that Timarchus was just such a man, unworthy of holding office, and entirely disqualified from directing a legal proceeding.

Timarchus’s profligacy had apparently begun early in life. ‘As soon as he was past boyhood he settled down in Piraeus [the port of Athens] at the establishment of Euthydicus the physician, pretending to be a student of medicine, but in fact deliberately offering himself for sale.’ Aeschines next turned his attention to Misgolas, ‘a man otherwise honourable, and beyond reproach’, aside for his penchant for male prostitutes. He had always been ‘accustomed to have about him singers or cithara-players’ and, learning that Timarchus was ‘well-developed, young and lewd’, he paid him a handsome sum of money to come and live with him. He was ‘just the person for the thing that Misgolas wanted to do, and Timarchus wanted to have done’.

The most damning proof of Timarchus’s guilt had been his unwavering ability to live far beyond his means. Certainly, he had once had wealth, but this had quickly vanished. He had sold his house, south of the Acropolis, to the comic poet Nausicrates, and had disposed of his country estates and slaves. Yet he had still been able to enjoy ‘costly suppers’ and maintain ‘the most expensive flute-girls and harlots’. ‘Does it take a wizard to explain all that?’ Aeschines asked. Other men were obviously paying for Timarchus’ excesses, and it was ‘perfectly plain that the man who makes such demands must himself be furnishing in return certain pleasures to the men who are spending their money on him’.

Aeschines insisted that he was not launching an assault on the beauty of young men. All fathers hoped for sons who were ‘fair and beautiful in person, and worthy of the city’. To be a pretty young boy was not the same thing as being a whore. Nor was Aeschines a stranger to love. As he warned the jury, his opposing counsel would doubtless remind them that Aeschines himself had sometimes ‘made a nuisance of myself in the gymnasia and…been many times a lover’. He might even offer extracts from all ‘the erotic poems I have ever addressed to one person or another’.

Such a strategy would, Aeschines concluded, be foolish: ‘as for me, I neither find fault with love that is honourable, nor do I say that those who surpass in beauty are prostitutes. I do not deny that I myself have been a lover and am a lover to this day.’ Love was one thing; love between men was another; but sex offered in return for monetary reward was altogether different, and it did not befit the leaders of Athens.

Each juror placed his pebble in the appropriate urn (one to condemn, the other to acquit). Timarchus was found guilty, reducing his career to tatters. The defence, mounted by Demosthenes, is lost to us. So too is any possibility of deciphering which of the charges levelled by Aeschines were justified. Nonetheless, the spectacle of an ambassador fighting for his political life still resonates down the ages. More poignantly, and not least by virtue of its grubbiness, the trial of Timarchus also seems to encapsulate the decline of Athenian grandeur and influence. A mighty power had entered its dotage.⁶

Three years later, in 343 BC, Demosthenes would finally bring his original case against Aeschines, charging him with corruption during the embassy to Macedonia. Demosthenes realized just how sensational the trial had become. ‘I do not doubt,’ he told the jurors, ‘that you are all pretty well aware that this trial has been the centre of keen partisanship and active canvassing, for you saw the people who were accosting and annoying you just now at the casting of lots.’

They must not be swayed by such distractions, however. Aeschines was ‘trying to introduce into politics a most dangerous and deplorable practice’. He had been criticized and so he had turned his fire on Timarchus. This was a horrendous precedent, ‘for if a man who has undertaken and administered any public function can get rid of accusers not by his honesty but by the fear he inspires, the people will soon lose all control of public affairs’.

There could be little doubt about Aeschines’ guilt, Demosthenes suggested, and all the jurors had to do was call to mind the duties that any ambassador was expected to fulfil. ‘He is responsible, in the first place, for the reports he has made; secondly, for the advice he has offered; thirdly, for his observance of your instructions; and, to crown all, whether he has done his business corruptly or with integrity.’ Measured against this standard, Aeschines had been an abject failure.

There had been a time, Demosthenes reminded the jury, when Aeschines had been among Philip’s harshest critics, making speeches against him and organizing conferences where the Greek states could formulate a united response to the Macedonian threat. But, in an instant, that had all changed. After an earlier mission to Philip’s court, Aeschines had suddenly lent his support to a peace treaty with Macedon that was patently injurious to Athenian interests. After his earlier patriotism he began using language ‘for which, as heaven is my witness, he deserves to die many times over. He told you that you ought to forget the achievements of your forefathers; that you should not tolerate all that talk about old trophies and sea-fights.’ The only possible explanation for such a volte-face was that Aeschines had been bribed by the Macedonian regime, and as an Athenian jury was well aware bribery was one of the heartbeats of Greek political life.

A second embassy – the embassy that had provoked the trial of Timarchus – had been despatched to Philip with the aim of ratifying that peace treaty but it had failed to secure all of the conditions and provisos that the Athenian assembly had insisted upon. A deeply unsatisfactory treaty had been agreed and Aeschines was solely to blame. This is what Demosthenes had told the assembly upon his return to Athens, but he added that it had been hoodwinked by Aeschines’s eloquence. The ambassador had offered no report, given no reply to the charges levelled by Demosthenes, ‘but he made such a fine speech, so full of big promises, that he carried you all away with him’. Through his efforts, Aeschines boasted, Philip had been entirely won over to the Athenian cause and would now be a valued ally.

This was hardly how Demosthenes remembered the embassy, so ‘I rose, and said that the whole story was news to me. I attempted to repeat the statement I had made to the council, but Aeschines and Philocrates posted themselves one on either side of me, shouting, interrupting, and finally jeering. You were all laughing; you would not listen to me, and you did not want to believe anything except what Aeschines had reported.’

A dishonourable peace had been secured and Philip of Macedon’s ascendancy had continued unchecked. ‘Men of Athens,’ Demosthenes suggested, ‘nothing more awful or more momentous has befallen Greece within living memory, nor, as I believe, in all the history of the past.’ Athens had been duped by Philip of Macedon, a man who ‘has many claims to congratulation on his good fortune…Such achievements as the capture of great cities and the subjugation of a vast territory are, I suppose, enviable, as they are undoubtedly imposing; yet we could mention many other men who have done the like.’ But his ‘greatest stroke of good fortune…is that, when he needed scoundrels for his purposes, he found bigger scoundrels than he wanted’. He had found Aeschines, who had not been cajoled into treachery but ‘had sold himself, and pocketed the money, before he made his speech and betrayed us to Philip. To Philip he has been a trusty and well-beloved hireling; to you a treacherous ambassador and a treacherous citizen, worthy of threefold destruction.’

It was not too late to make amends, however. ‘Today you are not merely adjudging this case. You are legislating for all future time, whether every ambassador is basely to serve your enemies for hire, or without fee or bribe to give his best service to you.’ Philip could be warned that ‘he will have to remodel his methods’ when dealing with Athens. ‘At present his chosen policy is to cheat the many and court the few; but, when he learns that his favourites have been brought to ruin, he will wish for the future to deal with the many, who are the real masters of our state…For the sake of your honour, of your religion, of your security, of everything you value,’ Demosthenes implored the jury, ‘you must not acquit this man. Visit him with exemplary punishment, and let his fate be a warning not to our own citizens alone but to every man who lives in the Hellenic world.’⁷

It was rousing stuff, but Aeschines had prepared a compelling story of his own. From the outset he threw himself on the jury’s mercy. ‘I beg you, fellow citizens, to hear me with willing and friendly mind, remembering how great is my peril, and how many the charges against which I have to defend myself; remembering also the arts and devices of my accuser.’ This Demosthenes was hardly the most attractive of personalities, after all, Aeschines reminded the jury.

During the embassy to Philip he had been little more than a nuisance: ‘All the way we were forced to put up with Demosthenes’ odious and insufferable ways.’ That was as nothing when compared with his boastfulness, ‘the over-weening self-confidence of this fellow’. When the ambassadors were discussing their tactics, one of them had ‘remarked that he was afraid Philip would get the better of us in arguing his claims’. Demosthenes immediately ‘promised fountains of oratory, and said that he was going to make such a speech…that he would sew up Philip’s mouth as with an un-soaked rush’. Sadly, as Aeschines remembered it, events turned out rather differently.

When Demosthenes’ turn came to address Philip,

all were intent, expecting to hear a masterpiece of eloquence. For, as we learned afterwards, his extravagant boasting had been reported to Philip and his court. So when all were thus prepared to listen, this creature mouthed forth a proem [an introduction] – an obscure sort of thing and as dead as fright could make it – and getting on a little way into the subject he suddenly stopped speaking and stood helpless. Finally he collapsed completely.

Philip saw Demosthenes’s plight and generously assured him that his faltering speech was not an ‘irreparable calamity’. He was an ambassador, not an actor on the stage. He should calm himself and ‘try gradually to recall his speech, and speak it off as he had prepared it’. Unfortunately, ‘having been once upset, and having forgotten what he had written, he was unable to recover himself…and broke down again.’ Philip was deeply embarrassed and a herald ordered the ambassadors to withdraw. Demosthenes was mortified, at which point his sour feelings towards the entire embassy began to fester. To deflect attention away from his own risible performance, he suddenly began accusing the other ambassadors of negotiating against the best interests of Athens.

Through the rest of the ambassadors’ stay in Macedon, Demosthenes oscillated between showering Philip in fawning speeches and behaving ‘with shameless rudeness’ whenever he was invited to dinner. On the journey home his mood did seem to brighten. ‘Suddenly he began talking to each of us in a surprisingly friendly manner,’ promising to lend his support to their political careers and even praising Aeschines’s oratorical skills. One evening, ‘when we were all dining together at Larisa, he made fun of himself and the embarrassment which had come upon him in his speech, and he declared that Philip was the most wonderful man under the sun’. It was a ruse, however, an attempt to make the other ambassadors say complimentary things about Philip that he could later use as proof of their treachery.

Demosthenes had never been the warmest supporter of a peace treaty with Philip, and his experiences in Macedonia had only brought him humiliation. He was levelling charges of corruption, Aeschines suggested, as a political strategy, to rouse Athens against Philip of Macedon, and as a petulant gesture of revenge. Aeschines allowed that ‘the peace failed to please some of our public men’, but ‘ought they not to have opposed it at the time, instead of putting me on trial now?…They say that Philip bought the peace, that he overreached us at every point in the articles of agreement, and that the peace which he contrived for his own interests, he himself has violated.’ Aeschines disputed this analysis but, regardless, it seemed unfair to him that ‘although I was but one of ten ambassadors, I alone am made to give account.’