The Public Orations of Demosthenes, vol 1 | Page 8

not only because the personal interests at stake made the speaker more unscrupulous, but also, perhaps, because the juries ordinarily included a larger proportion of the poorer, the idler, and the less- educated citizens than the Assembly. The legal question was often that to which the jury were encouraged to pay least attention, and the condemnation or acquittal of the accused was demanded upon grounds quite extraneous to the indictment. (The two court-speeches contained in these volumes afford abundant illustrations of this.) Personalities were freely admitted, of a kind which it is difficult to excuse and impossible to justify. To attempt to blacken the personal character of an opponent by false stories about his parentage and his youth, and by the ascription to him and his relations of nameless immoralities, is a very different thing from the assignment of wrong motives for his political actions, though even in purely political controversy the ancients far exceeded the utmost limits of modern invective. And this both Demosthenes and Aeschines do freely. There is also reason to suspect that some of the tales which each tells of the other's conduct, both while serving as ambassadors and on other occasions, may be fabrications. The descriptive passages for which such falsehoods gave an opening had doubtless their dramatic value in the oratorical performance: possibly they were even expected by the listeners; but their presence in the speeches does not increase our admiration either for the speaker or for his audience.
All the force of Demosthenes' oratory was unable to defeat the great antagonist of his country. To Philip of Macedon failure was an inconceivable idea. Resident during three impressionable years of his youth at Thebes, he had there learned, from the example of Epaminondas, what a single man could do: and he proceeded to each of the three great tasks of his life--the welding of the rough Macedonians into one great engine of war, the unification of Greece under his own leadership, and the preparation for the conquest of the East by a united Greece and Macedonia--without either faltering in face of difficulties, or hesitating, out of any scrupulosity, to use the most effective means towards the end which he wished at the moment to achieve; though in fact the charges of bad faith made against him by Demosthenes are found to be exaggerated, when they are impartially examined. Philip intended to become master of Greece: Demosthenes realized this early, and, with all the Hellenic detestation of a master, resolved to oppose him to the end. Philip was, indeed, in spite of the barbarous traits which revealed themselves in him at times, not only gracious and courteous by nature, but a sincere admirer of Hellenic--in other words, of Athenian--culture; the relations between his house and the people of Athens had generally been friendly; and there was little reason to suppose that, if he conquered Athens, he would treat her less handsomely than in fact he did. Yet this could not justify one who regarded freedom as Demosthenes regarded it, in making any concession not extorted by the necessities of the situation: his duty and his country's duty, as he conceived it, was to defeat the enemy of Hellenic independence or to fall in the attempt. Nor was it for him to consider (as Isocrates might) whether or no Philip's plans had now developed into, or could be transformed into, a beneficent scheme for the conquest of the barbarian world by a united Hellas, if the union was to be achieved at the price of Athenian liberty. It is because, in spite of errors and of the questionable methods to which he sometimes stooped, Demosthenes devoted himself unflinchingly to the cause of freedom, for Athens and for the Hellenes as a whole, that he is entitled, not merely as an orator but as a politician, to the admiration which posterity has generally accorded him. It is, above all, by the second part of his career, when his policy of antagonism to Philip had been accepted by the people, and he was no longer in opposition but, as it were, in office, that Demosthenes himself claims to be justified; and Aeschines' attempt to invalidate the claim is for the most part unconvincing.
It is not easy to describe in a few paragraphs the characteristics of Demosthenes as an orator. That he stands on the highest eminence that an orator has ever reached is generally admitted. But this is not to say that he was wholly free from faults. His contemporaries, as well as later Greek critics, were conscious of a certain artificiality in his eloquence. It was, indeed, the general custom of Athenian orators to prepare their speeches with great care: the speakers who, like Aeschines and Demades, were able to produce a great effect without preparation, and the