Stories of Achievement, Volume III | Page 2

against them. As they found many methods of

chicane and delay, he had great opportunity, as Thucydides says, to
exercise his talent for the bar. It was not without much pain and some
risk that he gained his cause; and, at last, it was but a very small part of
his patrimony that he could recover. By this means, however, he
acquired a proper assurance and some experience; and having tasted the
honour and power that go in the train of eloquence, he attempted to
speak in the public debates, and take a share in the administration. As it
is said of Laomedon the Orchomenian, that, by the advice of his
physicians, in some disorder of the spleen, he applied himself to
running, and continued it constantly a great length of way, till he had
gained such excellent health and breath that he tried for the crown at
the public games, and distinguished himself in the long course; so it
happened to Demosthenes, that he first appeared at the bar for the
recovery of his own fortune, which had been so much embezzled; and
having acquired in that cause a persuasive and powerful manner of
speaking, he contested the crown, as I may call it, with the other orators
before the general assembly.
In his first address to the people he was laughed at and interrupted by
their clamours, for the violence of his manner threw him into a
confusion of periods and a distortion of his argument; besides he had a
weakness and a stammering in his voice, and a want of breath, which
caused such a distraction in his discourse that it was difficult for the
audience to understand him. At last, upon his quitting the assembly,
Eunomous the Thriasian, a man now extremely old, found him
wandering in a dejected condition in the Piraeus, and took upon him to
set him right. "You," said he, "have a manner of speaking very like that
of Pericles, and yet you lose yourself out of mere timidity and
cowardice. You neither bear up against the tumults of a popular
assembly nor prepare your body by exercise for the labour of the
rostrum, but suffer your parts to wither away in negligence and
indolence."
Another time, we are told, when his speeches had been ill-received, and
he was going home with his head covered, and in the greatest distress,
Satyrus, the player, who was an acquaintance of his, followed and went
in with him. Demosthenes lamented to him, "That though he was the

most laborious of all the orators, and had almost sacrificed his health to
that application, yet he could gain no favour with the people; but
drunken seamen and other unlettered persons were heard, and kept the
rostrum, while he was entirely disregarded." "You say true," answered
Satyrus, "but I will soon provide a remedy, if you will repeat to me
some speech in Euripides or Sophocles." When Demosthenes had done,
Satyrus pronounced the same speech; and he did it with such propriety
of action, and so much in character, that it appeared to the orator quite a
different passage. He now understood so well how much grace and
dignity action adds to the best oration that he thought it a small matter
to premeditate and compose, though with the utmost care, if the
pronunciation and propriety of gesture were not attended to. Upon this
he built himself a subterraneous study which remained to our times.
Thither he repaired every day to form his action and exercise his voice;
and he would often stay there for two or three months together, shaving
one side of his head, that, if he should happen to be ever so desirous of
going abroad, the shame of appearing in that condition might keep him
in.
When he did go out on a visit, or received one, he would take
something that passed in conversation, some business or fact that was
reported to him, for a subject to exercise himself upon. As soon as he
had parted from his friends, he went to his study, where he repeated the
matter in order as it passed, together with the arguments for and against
it. The substance of the speeches which he heard he committed to
memory, and afterward reduced them to regular sentences and periods,
meditating a variety of corrections and new forms of expression, both
of what others had said to him, and he had addressed to them. Hence, it
was concluded that he was not a man of much genius, and that all his
eloquence was the effect of labour. A strong proof of this seemed to be
that he was seldom heard to speak anything extempore, and though the
people often called upon him by name, as he sat in the assembly, to
speak