The Public Orations of Demosthenes, vol 1 | Page 8

could not be attacked by name or on purely personal grounds; and an
appearance of impartiality was commonly assumed. But in the courts
much greater play was allowed to feeling; and the arguments were
often much more disingenuous, 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