The private speeches.

made Demosthenes a great political leader-firm grasp of facts, accurate knowledge of details, clearness of narrative and description, cogency of argument, and honest sincerity of purpose. There is not the easy grace of Lysias, nor does Demosthenes hide his own nature so completely behind that of his client; nevertheless these speeches must have had great influence upon the dicasts. They are the speeches of a great orator, and it is not strange that Demosthenes was a successful logographer. But it is in his political speeches that his genius finds full play. In these his ability as a narrator enables him to bring before his hearers, step by step, the progress of Philip, or perhaps the misconduct of Eschines; his knowledge of details permits him to give an account of the resources of Athens and the best means of increasing them, his clearness and force in argument make his conclusions almost irresistible, and his evident earnestness adds to all he says the weight of a serious and well-grounded conviction. And all these qualities are enhanced by the rhythmic cadence of his sentences and the vigorous and animated beauty of his style. He does not, like Gorgias or Antiphon, employ an unvarying series of antitheses, but neither does he avoid antithesis where it is effective. He employs all kinds of figures of speech and of thought. His vocabulary is that of ordinary life, but he knows how to use poetic words or allusions when his speech soars above the ordinary level. He sometimes adds vividness to his argumentation or narrative by introducing an imaginary conversation or a series of questions. An example of this is in the First Philippic:1

Style and composition.

When then, men of Athens, when will you do what you ought? When what takes place?" When, by Zeus, there is some pressure of necessity." But what ought you to think of what is now happening? for I think that to free men the greatest pressure is shame for what is going on. Or do you wish, tell me, to go about and ask

1 Philippic I, p. 43, 10.

each other, "Is there anything new?" For what could be newer than that a man of Macedon is defeating the Athenians in war, and directing the affairs of the Greeks? "Is Philip dead?" "No, by Zeus, but he is ill." But what difference does it make to you? for if anything happens to him, you will quickly make another Philip, if this is the way in which you attend to things. For he has not grown great so much by his own strength as by your carelessness.

Even in a translation something of the vividness, the rapidity, and the fiery passion of the orator appears. The most famous passage of descriptive narrative is in the oration On the Crown:1

Descriptive narrative.

It was evening, and some one came and reported to the prytanes that Elatea had been taken. And after this they rose in the midst of their dinner and drove out those in the booths in the market place and set fire to the wickerwork, and others sent for the generals and called the trumpeter; and the city was full of tumult. And the next day at daybreak the prytanes called the senate to the senate-house, and you went to the assembly, and before the senate had transacted its business and passed a vote, the whole people was sitting there.

Here the greatest simplicity leads to the greatest vivid

ness.

A passage from the Fourth Philippic may serve as an example of vehemence of statement and also of boldness and lucidity of argument:

But there are some who before they have heard the arguments about matters are accustomed to ask at once, "Well, then, what's to be done?" Not that when they have heard it they may do it (for then they would be the most excellent of men), but that they may get rid of the speaker. But, nevertheless, I must tell what's to be done. First, men of Athens, you must recognize this surely in your hearts, that Philip is making war and has broken the peace, and is evil disposed and hostile to the state and the foundation of the state, and I will add also to the gods in the state (and may they

1 On the Crown, p. 284, 169.

Argumentative style.

destroy him!), but also that he is making war upon and plotting against nothing more than the constitution, and that there is nothing in the world that he regards more than how he can destroy it. And this, in a way, he is now doing of necessity. For consider; he wishes to rule, and he has found you his only opponents therein. He has been doing wrong for a long time, and he is himself most perfectly conscious of that fact; for it is by means of your possessions of which he is able to make use that he possesses all the rest firmly; for if he were to give up Amphipolis and Potidea, he could not even stay safely in Macedonia. Both things then he knows, that he is himself plotting against you and that you know it. And believing that you are sensible, he thinks that you hate him justly. But besides these things which are so important, he knows perfectly well that even if he become master of all the rest, he can not hold anything surely so long as you have a democratic government, but if any reverse happen to him (and many things might happen to a man), all that is now kept down by force will come and take refuge with you.1

In his legal speeches Demosthenes follows the usual arrangement introduction, narrative, argument, and peroration; but even in these speeches he shows originality in the form of the different parts and through them all returns constantly to his main point. This quality is more marked in the political speeches, in which the traditional form had not been so firmly fixed by his predecessors. With persistent energy Demosthenes returns again and again to the main subject of each speech, inserting argument in his narration by means of a sudden question, or perhaps only by an ironical allusion, exhorting, rebuking, appealing to feelings of pride and shame, of patriotism and profit. His are not the stately, elaborate, carefully balanced periods of Isocrates, which become oppressive by their very elegance; his sentences are long or short, combined in periods or isolated, as the varying emotions of the orator demand one or the other form of utterance. In fact, variety is the most striking quality of

Variety in style.

1 Philippic IV, p. 134, 11–13.

his style, the second being vehemence. Demosthenes hardly ever appeals to the tenderer emotions, as love and pity, but he arouses all the sterner emotions as no one had ever done before, and his argumentation, exact and convincing, forces the intellect of his hearers to support their emotions. There is no doubt that the orations as we now have them were edited for publication and are not in the form in which they were delivered, but the qualities we see in them are the same which his contemporaries ascribed to the spoken orations of Demosthenes. Editing doubtless changed some details, but the substance and the general form of the orations is substantially such as aroused and convinced the Athenian audience.

Wisdom of

course.

Struggling against great odds, Demosthenes aroused the Athenians against the Macedonian power and held them to their purpose even to the last. It may be that his patriotism was narrow, that the world gained by the overthrow of Greek independence and the consequent his political spread of Greek civilization, which was carried by the Macedonians even to distant India, but it is certain that without his heroic struggle the world would be poorer. Not only has his eloquence served as a model for later ages, but the courage with which he inspired the Athenians, leading them to fight for their ideal of patriotism in an age when material advantage was more than ever before the mainspring of men's action, will make his name revered wherever a weaker people is struggling against an overwhelming alien force.

CHAPTER XXXII

ESCHINES AND OTHER ORATORS

Æschines, 390 to after 330 B. C.-Hyperides, 389-322 B. C.-Lycurgus, about 390–324 B. C.-Dinarchus, before 342 to after 292 B. C.-Phocion, about 400-317 B. c.-Demades, about 385-319 B. C.-Demetrius of Phalerum, about 350 to about 280 в. C.

Eschines.

DEMOSTHENES is without doubt the greatest of Greek orators. But in his own day he had competitors for the public ear, some of whom supported his political views, while others opposed them. Among his opponents the most important is Eschines. He was born at Athens in 390 or 389 B. C., and was therefore five or six years older than Demosthenes. His father, Atrometus, was a poor schoolmaster according to Demosthenes, but Eschines himself claims to belong to a family of good position, though not of wealth. His mother's name was Glaucothea. He had two brothers, Aphobetus and Philochares, both of whom held important public positions. Eschines served with credit in the army, and was, before entering upon public life, a tragic actor and a clerk of the assembly. Demosthenes describes his utter failure as an actor, but nothing is less trustworthy than the testimony of Demosthenes about Eschines. Personal attacks upon political or legal opponents were ordinary parts of Athenian speeches, and Demosthenes shows in his attacks upon Æschines not only great power of invective but also great imagination. Æschines had a fine voice and good figure, and it is likely enough that he was at least a fair actor. In his boyhood