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The Matured Civil Eloquence.

Deliberative Oratory as an art

WHILE a literary prose was being shaped, and while, on the other hand, a series of forensic writers were perfecting a series of types in their own branch, no artistic development that can be traced with the like clearness had been going forward in deliberative oratory. When, with Demosthenes and his contemporaries, deliberative oratory first comes clearly into view, its masters are found to owe their several excellences as artists to models taken from the other ¹ two departments, to a Thucydides or an Isokrates, to a Lysias or an Isaeos. Not only have we no evidence of their obligation, in point of art, to previous speakers in the same kind, but we are able to see for ourselves that the limits of such obligation would necessarily have been narrow. Now this is the reverse of what might have been anticipated. The ekklesia, considering its place in the democracy, might have been expected to be the great school, no less than the great field, of oratory. Further, the popular Dialectic, which, more than anything else, prepared the Athenian taste for artistic speaking, was far more favourable to the deliberative than to the forensic branch. The general profession of the Sophists was to teach men τὰ τῆς πόλεως καὶ λέγειν καὶ πράττειν, to speak and to act in the affairs of the city. Protagoras would have regarded the Sicilian rhetors, such as Korax or Tisias, whose concern was chiefly with the law-courts, much as Isokrates regarded the merely forensic writers of his own day. Nor did the earliest artists cultivate one practical branch to the exclusion of the other. Antiphon was able to help those who were fighting a cause in a law-court or in the assembly². The thirty-fourth oration of Lysias was composed for delivery in the ekklesia³. Nevertheless it was not in the assembly, but in the law-courts or the schools, that oratorical prose was developed; and, when we are able to observe the political eloquence of Athens at its height, we see that what it has owed to the assembly is only the inspiring opportunity, not the discipline which has chastened it nor the secret of its strength.

Why oratory develops in the law-courts

It is worth while to consider the principal causes ⁴ of this phenomenon. They may, perhaps, be reduced to three.

I. Relation of Oratory to Rhetoric.

I. It was of the essence of Greek oratory, as will be seen most clearly when we come to the days of its decline, that its practice should be connected with a theory. Art is the application of rules, generalised from experience, for the production of results; and the Greek conception of speaking as an art implied a Rhetoric. This Rhetoric grew only gradually into a complete system; but from the first there was the fixed tendency to regard oratorical composition as susceptible of a regular analysis. Now, those rules of technical Rhetoric which were the earliest to be formulated could be applied with more precision and more effect in a speech for the law-courts than in a speech for the ekklesia. The true reason of this is not that given derisively by Aristotle⁵, that, in forensic speaking, chicanery ( τὸ κακοῦργον) has the larger scope; the reason is that, in forensic speaking, the subject is fully and accurately known beforehand to the speaker; the utmost clearness of division is imperative, and is obtainable by a uniform method; and the problem is, how best to use all the resources of persuasion in a limited space of time. The two things to which the technical Rhetoric first addressed itself were, partition, and the treatment of probabilities. The law-courts, then, were the natural field of Rhetoric; and, owing to the closeness of the alliance between the theory and the practice, they were also for a long period the chosen field of Oratory.

II. Union of military and political functions.

II. In the true Greek conception the citizen was at once general and statesman. So long as this identity lasted, the men at the head of the State neither had leisure for the laborious training necessary to eminence in artistic oratory, nor felt its attainment to be of paramount importance. It was the separation of military from political functions that enabled some men to become finished speakers while others became accomplished soldiers. Perikles spoke the epitaph of those whom he had led to battle; but he had neither opportunity nor inducement to cultivate the art of war with the exactness of an Iphikrates, or the art of oratory with the exactness of a Demosthenes⁶. Yet the division of labour, when it came, was a proof that the civic life of Athens was decaying. Kleon's disaster at Amphipolis was enough, indeed, to indicate that such a division would thenceforth be the rule. The versatility of Alkibiades combined the two parts with a success which had no later parallel. But the definite and recognised separation of military from political leadership cannot be put much above the days of Timotheos and Kallistratos⁷.

III. Outer history of Athens.

III. The outer history of Athens, from the disaster in Sicily to the battle of Chaeroneia, presents but two moments favourable to a great political eloquence. One is the struggle with Philip of Macedon. The other is the restoration of Athens, in 378, to the headship of a Naval League, followed by the contest at Athens between the Boeotian and antiBoeotian parties. Around this contest cluster the greatest names in deliberative oratory that appear before the reign of Philip. Kallistratos of Aphidnae, the leader of the anti-Boeotian party, was probably the most eloquent statesman between Perikles and Demosthenes⁸. His opponents, Aristophon of Azenia, Leodamas of Acharnae, Thrasybulos and Kephalos of Kollytos,—especially the two first—were powerful speakers. The meagre notices of their oratory warrant only two general inferences. First, that bold and vigorous illustration of argument was their characteristic merit. Secondly, that they had little or no pretension to artistic completeness of form⁹ .

Extant literature of Political Oratory: 354—324 B.C.

Apart from the scantiest fragments,—preserved chiefly by Aristotle in the Rhetoric, and handed down to him mainly, it would seem, like the sayings of Perikles, by oral tradition—the extant literature of Attic Political Oratory begins with the speech of Demosthenes on the Navy Boards, in 354 B.C., and ends with the speeches of Deinarchos against Demosthenes, Aristogeiton and Philokles in 324 B.C.

In this period of thirty years, our concern, as defined by the scope of our inquiry, is no longer with details either of style or of work. It is, here, with tendencies or characteristics, considered as showing in what general relation the perfecters ¹⁰ stand to the inventors. Now, in the first place, Deinarchos may be set aside as being, for this purpose, valueless. The reason of Dionysios for not giving him a separate treatment is equally good for us. He was neither an inventor nor a perfecter¹¹. He has, indeed, been called the best among the imitators of Demosthenes¹². But the praise would be faint, even if the epithets¹³ with which antiquity qualified it, did not attest a coarseness in the copy which is not less evident to modern readers. Hermogenes, his too lenient judge, admits his want of finish¹⁴. A more serious defect is his dependence on imitation or on plagiarism; and it follows that he has nothing to show us which is not incomparably better shown by Demosthenes.

Lykurgos, Hypereides, Aeschines, Demosthenes are the four men who illustrate the maturity of civil eloquence. Each has an interest of his own, and each serves, in his own way, to show the unity of the whole Attic development.

Lykurgos.

Lykurgos is indeed a striking and a noble figure in the Athens of Philokrates. He came of a house that, after the Persian war, had given a colleague to Kimon in his Thracian campaigns, and, in the next generation, a distinguished victim to the Thirty Tyrants. The stock of the Eteobutadae, claiming to spring from Erechtheus, were hereditary priests of Poseidon Erechtheus; from their house, too, was chosen the priestess of Athena Polias; and their services to the State, recognised for generations by public honours in life and in death, were thus enhanced by the most sacred dignities that Athens could revere. The special work that Lykurgos did for the city was to serve it as a steward of the public treasury for a period of office which was thrice renewed¹⁵. During twelve difficult years, from 338 to 326, he so managed the finances as to make them suffice both for the armament and for the embellishment of Athens. But, besides this task, there was a yet graver one that he had made his own. In the ancestral spirit of the great Athenian houses, he raised the voice of a hereditary priest and statesman in fearless reproof of the selfish apathy or luxury which threatened to merge both patriotism and morality. As his biographer¹⁶ expressively says, Lykurgos was παρρησιαστὴς διὰ τὴν εὐγένειαν, outspoken because he was noble. Nor did he stop at words. By restoring the festivals of the gods, by cherishing a faithful tradition of the great poets¹⁷, by enacting sumptuary laws, and, above all, by facing the bitterly invidious task of prosecuting disloyal citizens, he made his name to be, like that of Drakon, a symbol for severity; probably with better reason, certainly in a more urgent cause¹⁸. His character is the best comment on his oratory. Of his fifteen speeches, only one is now extant. It was spoken, probably about 332 B.C., against Leokrates, ¹⁹ an Athenian citizen. Lykurgos brought against this man an indictment for treason ( εἰσαγγελία προδοσίας), because, in 338, he had fled from Athens on the day that brought the fatal news of Chaeroneia.

This speech is a solemn and earnest protest on behalf of public spirit. There is not a trace of personal feeling, there is no attempt to disparage the man's private life. But the tone throughout is that of a lofty and inexorable indignation. And the form of expression is not less distinctive. Lykurgos was scarcely a born orator. The ancient ²⁰ critics were right in denying to him elegance or charm, in blaming the harshness of his diction or his metaphors and his tendency to repeat or to digress²¹. The structure of his sentences is, indeed clear-cut; he has a certain impressive majesty, due chiefly to his intense earnestness; and, as Dionysios says, he is powerful in denunciation²². But his peculiar interest for the history of Attic oratory depends on the union ²³ of two elements.

Lykurgos had been the pupil of Isokrates; and the basis of his style is essentially Isokratic. But his moral and intellectual affinities with the elder Athens assert themselves. Engrafted on the smooth luxuriance of Isokrates, we meet once more the archaic, somewhat rigid stateliness of Antiphon: raised, however, above Antiphon's ordinary tone by the speaker's intimate sympathy with the elder poets, especially with the tragedians. The combination of these manners, the Isokratic and the archaic, has an effect which is not harmonious— Lykurgos lacked the force to fuse them—but which for that very reason is of much interest for a comparison between the elder and the later prose. In the following passages it has been attempted to keep something of the tone. The flight of Leokrates is thus described:—

‘After the battle of Chaeroneia, when you all rushed to ²⁴ the ekklesia, the people decreed that the children and women in the country should be brought within the walls, and that the generals should assign the duties of the defence to the Athenians and other residents as they pleased. Leokrates, however, without a thought for all this, packed up his property and put it, with his servants, on board the boat—the ship was already at moorings off-shore—and, late in the afternoon, passed with Eirenis through the gate to the public beach, rowed out to the ship, and was gone; neither pitying those harbours of Athens from which he was putting forth, nor ashamed before those walls of his native city which, for his part, he was leaving defenceless; nor was he afraid when he saw afar, as he forsook them, the temples of Zeus the saviour and Athena who saves, whom anon he will invoke to save him from his perils. And having come into port at Rhodes, as if he were bringing glad tidings of great blessings on his country, he began to announce how the town had been taken before he left, the Peiraeos blockaded —and he alone left to tell it; nor did he blush to name in one breath his country's fall and his own deliverance. So thoroughly did the Rhodians believe this, that they told off crews for their triremes, and set about launching the vessels; while the merchants or shipmasters who were ready to sail for Athens were led by this man to discharge their corn and other cargoes on the spot.’

Presently he describes the panic at Athens after Chaeroneia:—

‘In those days, Athenians, who would not have pitied ²⁵ the city—what citizen, aye, or what stranger that had visited it formerly? Who was then so bitter against the democracy or against Athens that he could have endured to find himself without a place in the ranks of the defenders, when the news came of the defeat and the disaster that had befallen the people, when the city was all excitement at the tidings, when the hopes of public safety had come to rest on the men past fifty, when you might see free-born women crouching in terror at the house-doors, asking if he is alive—the husband, the father, or the brother—a sight humiliating for the city and for her daughters; while men decrepit of frame, well-stricken in years, released by the laws from service under arms, men on the threshold that leads from age to death, might be seen hurrying helplessly through the city, with their mantles pinned in double folds around them? But, many as were the miseries in the city, great as was the ruin that had come on all the citizens, the keenest grief, the bitterest tears were due to the fortunes of the city itself— when the edict, declaring slaves to be free men, aliens to be Athenians, the disfranchised to be reinstated, was read by any man who once, perhaps, had prided himself on being a freeborn son of the Attic soil. The reverse that had befallen the city was even this; formerly she had vindicated the freedom of the Greeks— then she thought it enough if she could successfully defend her own existence; formerly she had ruled far and wide over the land of barbarians— then she was battling with Macedonians for her own; and the people whose aid was once invoked by Lacedaemonians, by Peloponnesians and by the Greeks of Asia was driven to seek succour for itself from the men of Andros, of Keos, of Troezen, of Epidauros.’

The peroration is, however, the most characteristic passage, not merely for its matter, but also for its form. While the resemblance to Antiphon is marked, there is a strain that surpasses him; but the speaker does not soar; he rises with effort, and shows at the end how his cultivated gift of speech laboured to utter his high enthusiasm:—

‘Be sure, judges, that each of you, by the vote which he ²⁶ now gives in secret, will lay his thought bare to the gods. And I deem that this day, judges, you are passing a collective sentence on all the greatest and most dreadful forms of crime, in all of which Leokrates is manifestly guilty; on treason, since he abandoned the city to its troubles and brought it under the hand of the enemy; on subversion of the democracy, since he did not stand the ordeal of the struggle for freedom; on impiety, since he has done what one man could to obliterate the sacred precincts and to demolish the temples; on illtreatment of parents,—for he sought to destroy the monuments, and to abolish the liturgy, of the dead; on a soldier's desertion of his post and avoidance of his duty—for he did not place his personal service at the disposal of the Generals. Who, then, will acquit this man,—who will condone misdeeds which were deliberate? Who is so foolish as, by saving this man, to place his own safety at the mercy of cowardly deserters,—who will show compassion to this man, and so elect to die unpitied at the hands of the enemy? Who will conciliate the gratitude of his country's betrayer, in order to make himself obnoxious to the vengeance of the gods?

‘In the cause of my country, of the temples and of the laws, I have fairly and justly set forth the issue, without disparaging or vilifying the defendant's private life or bringing any irrelevant accusation. You must reflect, every one of you, that to acquit Leokrates is to pass sentence of death and enslavement on your country. Two urns are before you; and the votes which you give are, in the one case, for the overthrow of your city, in the other, for its safety and its domestic welfare. If you absolve Leokrates, you will vote for betraying the city, the temples, and the ships—if you put him to death, you will exhort men to cherish and preserve their country, her revenues and her prosperity. Deem, then, Athenians, that a prayer goes up to you from the very land and all its groves, from the harbours, from the arsenals, from the walls of the city, deem that the shrines and holy places are summoning you to protect them, and, remembering the charges against him, make Leokrates a proof that compassion and tears do not prevail with you over solicitude for the laws and for the commonweal.’

Each urn was found to contain the same number ²⁷ of votes; and Leokrates benefited by the precedent of Orestes. But that the voices should have been equally divided when the prosecution could have been so easily represented as vexatious, and when the common temper of the city was with the accused, is a remarkable testimony to the character and to the eloquence of the accuser.

Hypereides.

The most complete contrast to Lykurgos, in everything except firm patriotism, is presented by his younger contemporary. Hypereides, son of Glaukippos, of a good Athenian family, had begun life as a forensic speech-writer. At an early age, in 360, he had prosecuted Autokles, a general charged with treason in a Thracian command. He had afterwards appeared as accuser against men so eminent as Aristophon of Azenia — whose oppression of the allies he exposed—and Diopeithes of Sphettos. From the Peace of 346 to the affair of Harpalos in 324 Hypereides stood by the side of Demosthenes as a leader in the struggle against Macedon. The Lamian War was especially his work; and he paid for it with his life. But while in the political sphere Hypereides was a loyal and fiery patriot, in his private character he was a true son of the new Athens. His philosophy was expressed in his own saying— μὴ δύνασθαι καλῶς ζῆν, μὴ μαθὼν τὰ καλὰ τὰ ἐν τῷ βίῳ²⁸: he could not live beautifully until he had learned what beautiful things there were in life. Perikles might have said that; but not in the sense of Hypereides; the study of the beautiful was ceasing to be combined either with frugality or with spiritual chastenment.

Hypereides was, like Lykurgos, a pupil of Isokrates. But while the measured and stately flow of Isokratic numbers was in unison with the character of Lykurgos, the basis of whose style is taken from his master, it was not truly congenial to Hypereides. ²⁹ The chief lesson which Hypereides has learned from Isokrates is the large development of the periodic sentence. As might have been expected, Hypereides is far more Isokratic in the Epitaphios than in anything else of his that we have. The reason is, however, not so much that his diction and composition are there modified by the epideictic form; rather it is that Hypereides has thoroughly caught from Isokrates the tone of elevated panegyric, and that, in the treatment of this really noble theme, the disciple unconsciously breathes the master's spirit.

But the essential tendencies in the style of ³⁰ Hypereides are those of Lysias: and this arises from no accident, but from the natures of the men. Both men united energy in public action with an easy-going, pleasure-loving, humorous temper in social life, which made them peculiarly sensitive to the niceties of social idiom in their day, and peculiarly alive, too, to the real advantages which a public speaker can derive from tact, from wit, and from personal or literary allusion. What Athenian ³¹ Tragedy was to Antiphon and Aeschines, that was Athenian Comedy to Lysias and Hypereides. The description by Lysias of a persistent borrower has been noticed as illustrating the reference of Demetrios to the ‘somewhat comic graces’ of Lysias³². Hypereides had the same kind of affinity with the Middle Comedy; but he went further; he took words or turns of phrase from it; and unquestionably one great secret of his success as a speaker was his art of making a lively Athenian audience feel that here was no austere student of Thucydides, but one who was in bright sympathy with the everyday life of the time. It has been truly remarked³³ that the author of the ‘School for Scandal’ may be recognised in the accuser of Warren Hastings:—

‘He remembered to have heard an honourable and learned gentleman remark that there was something in the frame and constitution of the Company which extended the sordid principles of their origin over all their successive operations; connecting with their civil policy, and even with their boldest achievements, the meanness of a pedlar and the profligacy of pirates—alike in the political and military line, could be observed auctioneering ambassadors and trading generals;—and thus we saw a revolution brought about by affidavits; an army employed in executing an arrest; a town besieged on a note of hand; a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was, they exhibited a Government which united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre, and the little traffic of a merchant's counting-house, wielding a truncheon with one hand, and picking a pocket with the other.’

Hypereides was the Sheridan of Athens.³⁴

Dionysios says³⁵:—‘Hypereides hits his mark neatly, but seldom lends grandeur to his theme. In embellishment of his diction he has surpassed Lysias; in the astuteness with which he disposes his subject-matter he has surpassed all. Then he keeps to the issue throughout, and insists on the really strong points of his arguments. He commands the resources of a large intelligence; he has an exquisite charm; and while he appears simple, is no stranger to consummate art. He is especially to be imitated for the subtlety and symmetry of his narratives, as well as in respect to the avenues ( ἔφοδοι) by which he approaches his case.’ Elsewhere³⁶ he names (1) strength of diction, (2) simplicity of composition, (3) tact in the handling of subject-matter, and (4) avoidance of tragic pomp, as the marks of Hypereides. This criticism seems just in the main. Hypereides resembles Lysias in general simplicity, in grace, and in tact: but has a richer vocabulary, more subtlety of arrangement, and the ampler Isokratic period. Hermogenes puts the masters of civil oratory in this ³⁷ order: Demosthenes, Lysias, Isaeos, Hypereides. Observing that Hypereides has ‘very little finish’, and that his special characteristic is a want of temperance and of elegance in his diction, he instances these words — μονώτατος, γαλεάγρα, ἐκκοκκύζειν, ἐστηλοκόπηται, ἐπήβολος³⁸. Clearly Hermogenes judges Hypereides harshly because he could not forgive his abundant colloquialisms and his borrowing from comedy or from any literary source that would furnish a point. With this judgment it is instructive to compare that of the so-called Longinus. It is the fullest, and ³⁹ in one respect the best, of the ancient notices. Dionysios does not mention the wit, the sarcasm or the irony of Hypereides; and in Hermogenes the omission is not surprising. The treatise On Sublimity does justice to these qualities⁴⁰:—

‘If merits were to be counted, not weighed, Hypereides would stand far before Demosthenes. He has more tones in his voice than Demosthenes, and a greater number of special excellences. In fact, like the pentathlete, Hypereides is second-best all round; for the prize in any given branch, he comes after the specialists, but before the laymen. Besides imitating the merits of Demosthenes in everything except composition, Hypereides has further mastered in an eminent degree the excellences and the graces of Lysias. He expresses himself in the ‘plain’ manner, where it is fitting,—not with the sustained, unvarying tension of Demosthenes; and he has moral persuasiveness, with the flavour of an unstudied suavity. Incomparable wit plays about him; his sarcasm is in perfect keeping with political oratory; he is adroit with the weapons of irony; his jokes are not jarring, ill-bred, or importunate, in the ‘Attic’ manner of that generation; when he does pull people to pieces, he does it neatly, with much humour, and with the pungency of well-aimed banter; and with all this, there is a beauty of style beyond imitation. He has great power of pathos; in relating legends, he has a certain luxuriance, and a facile inspiration that wafts him most smoothly from point to point on his way;—for instance, he has managed Leto's story⁴¹ more artistically than any one else; and, in the Funeral Oration, has perhaps surpassed all in the panegyric manner. Demosthenes, on the other hand, has no gift for delineation of character; his style is not liquid, flexible, or adapted to display; and he is comparatively deficient in each and all of the qualities just mentioned. Again, where Demosthenes strives to be jocose or witty, he makes us laugh rather at him than with him; nor is he ever so far from graciousness as when he courts it. For instance, if he had tried to write the elegant defence of Phryne or of Athenogenes he [would have shown the superiority of Hypereides] still more. The beauties of Hypereides, though many, are yet wanting in grandeur; they are of a sober character, without energy, and allow the hearer to remain placid. No reader of Hypereides feels terror. But Demosthenes is of the greatest nature. He has lofty eloquence, intensity, living passion, copiousness, rapidity of thought. Above all, that which is his own—unapproachable mastery and force of oratorical art. These are heaven-sent, astonishing gifts—human they may not be called—and, having these in their fulness, he prevails over all other orators—even over those who, like Hypereides, have beauties which he lacks. His thunders, his fire, vanquish the speakers of every age; one might as soon face with steady eyes a descending thunder-bolt, as oppose a calm front to the storm of passions which Demosthenes can arouse.’

The two points to which exception may be taken in this otherwise good criticism are, the denial to Demosthenes of power happily to relax his style, or to delineate character; and (so far as we can judge) the denial to Hypereides of energy. As a whole, however, the estimate is probably just. Some ancient critics placed Hypereides before Demosthenes; this was preposterous; but, on the other hand, there are good grounds for believing that, among political orators, Hypereides was second to no one except Demosthenes.

The work of Hypereides is now represented by ⁴² (1) fragments of a speech for Lykophron—probably earlier than 349 B. C.: (2) the speech for Euxenippos, nearly complete, about 330 B. C.: (3) fragments of the speech against Demosthenes in the Harpalos trial, 324 B. C.: (4) the Funeral Oration over Leosthenes and the comrades who fell with him in the Lamian War, 322 B. C.: (5) several small fragments.

It is unfortunate that these remains nowhere illustrate what was especially characteristic of Hypereides—his lighter and more playful grace. But the Epitaphios is a noble monument of his graver eloquence. And the Speech Against Euxenippos— which shall first be noticed—shows his power of scathing reproof.

After the battle of Chaeroneia, Philip had ⁴³ restored Oropos to the Athenians. The territory consisted of five hills, one of which was assigned to every two of the ten Athenian tribes. A religious scruple arose about the hill assigned to the tribes Hippothoontis and Akamantis: had it not been already consecrated to the god Amphiaraos? It was resolved to ask the god himself for a sign. The ekklesia directed Euxenippos and two others to pass a night in the temple of Amphiaraos at Oropos. It does not appear what vision they reported. Polyeuktos, however— a well-known citizen—proposed a decree directing the two tribes to restore the hill to the god, and the other eight tribes to compensate them. This proposal was adjudged to be unconstitutional, and Polyeuktos was fined. He then impeached Euxenippos for reporting falsely to the people. Lykurgos was the accuser and Hypereides the defender. Hypereides shows that Polyeuktos is illogical; that his motive is merely vindictive; and proceeds:—

‘So, if you had been acquitted on that indictment, ⁴⁴ Euxenippos would not have been guilty of perjury against the god; but, since it happened that you were convicted, Euxenippos must be ruined! For you, the proposer of such a decree, the penalty was laid at five and twenty drachmas; but he who, by the order of the people, passed the night in the temple must not even be buried in Attic ground!

“Yes,’ you say: ‘he behaved monstrously in allowing Olympias to dedicate that cup in the temple of the Goddess of Health!’ You introduce the name of Olympias to speed you on your course, you charge Euxenippos with a fictitious flattery, and you fancy that this will expose him to the hatred and anger of the judges.

‘My good friend, you should not invoke the names of Olympias and Alexander on your attempts to hurt your fellow-citizens; no, but when Olympias and Alexander lay unrighteous and improper commands on the Athenian people, then you should get up, and, on behalf of the city, protest, and argue for your rights with their emissaries, and go before the general assembly of the Greeks to uphold your country's honour. In that assembly you never rose: you never mentioned such things; but here you hate Olympias for the sake of Euxenippos, and say that he is a flatterer of her and of the Macedonians. If you can show that he ever visited Macedonia, or received any Macedonian into his house, or that he admits any one from that country to his intimacy or even to his conversation, or that he has expressed any views whatever of such matters either in a workshop or in the marketplace or anywhere else, or that he has not lived decorously and soberly, minding his own affairs, like any other citizen,—then let the judges do what they will to him.

‘If these charges were true, they would have been on other lips than yours,—they would have been the talk of Athens; just as all the other advocates or agents of Macedonia are well-known to the rest of their fellow-citizens, aye, to the children in the schools, even as they are known to their own consciences—the orators who draw Macedonian pay, the entertainers who open their houses to Macedonian visitors, and go to meet them on the roads when they approach. Here, again, you will find that Euxenippos has kept clear of all such association.’

The Funeral Oration belongs to a year hardly so ⁴⁵ memorable for the catastrophe of the Lamian War as for the death of Hypereides himself, of Demosthenes, and of Aristotle. Hypereides, as has been noticed, had been a chief mover in the last effort of Greek freedom against Macedon. After the death of Leosthenes before Lamia a gleam of good fortune had come to the Greeks. Antiphilos had won a battle at Meliteia against Leonnatos. When Hypereides spoke the epitaph of Leosthenes and his comrades, the hopes inspired by this victory were still fresh. In August, 322—perhaps a month later than the speech—these hopes had been shattered by the battle of Krannon:—

‘Leosthenes, aware that all Hellas was abased, ⁴⁶ panic-stricken, ruined by those who take bribes from Philip and Alexander against their native cities,—that Athens was in need of a man, and all Hellas in need of a city, capable of exercising leadership,—gave himself as an offering to Athens, and Athens as an offering to the freedom of Greece. Then, having organised a force of mercenaries, and put himself at the head of the citizens, he saw the first who took the field against Hellenic freedom—Boeotians, Macedonians, Euboeans and their allies—fall before him on a Boeotian plain. Thence he went to the Gates,—seized those passes through which of old barbarians marched against Greeks, arrested the Greece-ward progress of Antipater, found Antipater himself in those regions, beat him in a battle, imprisoned and besieged him in Lamia; made allies of the Thessalians, Phocians, Aetolians and other people of the country; and, where Philip and Alexander had gloried in an extorted submission, received the tribute of a voluntary loyalty. His, indeed, it was to perform the cause that he had taken in hand; but not to evade the doom of destiny. And in justice we must give Leosthenes our gratitude, not merely for all that he did himself, but also for the victory won after his death, and for the other benefits which the campaign has brought to Greece; for it is on the foundations laid by Leosthenes that the achievements of his successors are arising.’

Then he imagines the greeting that awaits Leosthenes and his comrades in the place of the departed:—

‘With us, and with all the living, as we have seen, they ⁴⁷ shall ever have renown; but in the dark under-world—suffer us to ask—who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the captain of our dead? May we not deem that Leosthenes will be greeted with welcome and with wonder by those half-gods who bore arms against Troy,—he who set himself to deeds germane with theirs, but in this surpassed them, that while they, aided by all Hellas, took one town, he, supported by his own city alone, humbled the power that ruled Europe and Asia? They avenged the wrong offered to one woman; he stayed the insults that were being heaped on all the cities of Hellas—he and those who are sharing his last honours—men who, coming after the heroes, wrought deeds of heroic worth. Aye, and there, I deem, will be Miltiades and Themistokles, and those others who made Hellas free, to the credit of their city, to the glory of their names—whom this man surpassed in courage and in counsel, seeing that they repelled the power of the barbarians when it had come against them, but he forbade its approach; they saw the foemen fighting in their own country, but he worsted his enemies on the enemy's soil. And surely they who gave the people trusty proof of their mutual love, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, will count no friends so near to themselves, or so faithful to you, as Leosthenes and those who strove beside him, nor will they so consort with any dwellers in the place of the dead. Well may it be so, since these have done deeds not less than theirs, but, if it may be said, even greater; for they put down the despots of their own city, but these put down the despots of Hellas. O beautiful and wonderful enterprise, O glorious and magnificent devotion, O soldiership transcendant in dangers, which these offered to the freedom of Greece!’

The closing sentences are addressed to the ⁴⁸ kinsfolk of the dead; but here there is no frigid conventionalism of topics; there is a genuine, and therefore reticent, sympathy; above all, there is a tenderness which, though not Christian, is almost more than pagan; and it should be remembered that these words were spoken, over almost the last martyrs of Greek freedom, by one who himself was very soon to suffer torture and death in that cause:—

‘It is hard, perhaps, to comfort those who are in such a sorrow; grief is not laid to rest by speech or by observance; rather is it for the nature of the mourner, and the nearness of the lost, to determine the boundaries of anguish. Still, we must take heart, and lighten pain as we may, and remember not only the death of the departed but the good name also that they have left behind them. We owe not tears to their fate, but rather great praises to their deeds. If they came not to old age among men, they have got the glory that never grows old, and have been made blessed perfectly. Those among them who died childless shall have as their inheritors the immortal eulogies of Greece; and those of them who have left children behind them have bequeathed a trust of which their country's love will assume the guardianship. More than this,—if to die is to be as though we had never been, then these have passed away from sickness and pain and from all the accidents of the earthly life; or, if there is feeling in the under-world, and if, as we conjecture, the care of the Divine Power is over it, then it may well be that they who rendered aid to the worship of the gods in the hour of its imminent desolation are most precious to that Power's providence.’

Lykurgos and Hypereides are men with opposite ⁴⁹ faults, but of characters essentially generous,—with very unequal gifts for language, but alike men of cultivation and of deep sensibility,—who show the chief tendencies of Attic oratory, as already developed, in new combinations. Lykurgos is a thorough Isokratic who, by a natural affinity, reverts to the school of Antiphon. Hypereides is an Isokratic in the chief traits of composition only, who reverts, much more decidedly, to the school of Lysias, but in whom the Lysian manner becomes bolder and more various.

Aeschines

In relation to Demosthenes and the orators contemporary with him, the significance of Aeschines is closely similar to that which Andokides has for the age of Antiphon. Andokides is an amateur, ⁵⁰ not uninfluenced by what the artists are doing, but with no complete theory of his own. Just such an amateur is Aeschines in comparison with (for instance) Hypereides. On the other hand, the positive superiority of Aeschines to Andokides, as an orator, is immense. Scarcely more than Andokides did Aeschines possess the art, τέχνη, of speaking; but he had, in a far greater measure than Andokides, the practice, μελέτη, which, even without art, can do much to serve the need of the hour—this practice including both the habit of composition and skill in declamation. Lastly, he had in an extraordinary degree, the third and supreme requisite— faculty, φύσις. His natural gift was most brilliant. If we ⁵¹ look to that conception of himself as an orator which Aeschines puts forward when he desires to appear at the greatest advantage over against Demosthenes, we shall find that it has two chief traits. First, Aeschines gives it to be understood that he is the man of spontaneous eloquence, while Demosthenes is the laborious rhetor. Secondly, Aeschines piques himself on his culture, meaning by this partly his familiarity with the standard poets, such as the old tragedians; partly a general sense of propriety or refinement, which, for instance, leads him to imitate the decorum ( εὐκοσμία) of the old orators, like Solon or Perikles, by speaking with his hand within his robe, instead of using vehement action;—and which helps to guard him, again, from such faults of taste in expression as he imputes to his rival⁵². This second pretension, in both its parts, is originally the tragic actor's; Aeschines is usually at his worst when he puts it forward; and at the end of his career it comes in as his evil genius in the disastrous peroration against Ktesiphon. As for his other pretension—of representing natural as against laboured oratory—Aeschines was too shrewd to have made this claim if it had not been roughly like the truth. We may be quite sure that a great many people thought it true. Pytheas, too, could taunt Demosthenes with his speeches smelling of the lamp: a taunt of evil augury for all Greek art. Aeschines had had no systematic ⁵³ training. One account, indeed, made him the pupil of Isokrates and Plato; others hint that he had imitated Leodamas or studied Alkidamas⁵⁴. But the ⁵⁵ best answer is the concise description of his style quoted by his scholiast from Greek critics⁵⁶. It has not finish, purity, or beauty of rhythm: it is blatant ( κεχηνυῖα), inartistic, headlong ( προπετής), easily betrayed into coarse abuse ill-becoming an orator; but it has a stamp of power and of facility such as would come of nature and of private study— μελέτης ἀφανοῦς, i.e. not under a master. When the Rhodians asked him to teach them Rhetoric, he said that he did not know it himself.

If, however, Aeschines was no rhetorical artist, ⁵⁷ he brought to public speaking the twofold training of an actor and a scribe. He had a magnificent voice, under perfect musical control: ‘he compares me to the sirens,’ says Aeschines of his rival. As tritagonist, he had often to play showy parts, such as Kreon, Kresphontes, Thyestes; and the pose which he adopted when speaking, in contrast with the then customary ‘action,’ had been studied in the right stage-parts. In his rank of tritagonist, he was probably a good actor. A protagonist, when he had been assigned to the poet by lot, chose his two colleagues; and so eminent a protagonist as Theodoros would not have associated Aeschines with Aristodemos if Aeschines had not been efficient. Demosthenes represents Aeschines as having failed on the boards: the fact seems to be rather that he was ruined by an accident. The Oenomaos of Sophokles was being played at Kollytos. Aeschines was Oenomaos: in hurrying after Pelops, he stumbled and fell, and was helped to his feet by the leader of the chorus. Modern life has probably no adequate parallel for such a fiasco. If one could conceive the sum of all disasters that can mar a solemnity, or an opera, occurring before five thousand attentive Parisians, it might be easier to comprehend why Aeschines left the Attic stage. After having been clerk to some minor official, Aeschines ⁵⁸ was secretary to the statesmen Aristophon and Eubulos, and then, with his brother Aphobetos, for two years secretary to the ekklesia. He thus learned thoroughly the forms of public business, and gained that knowledge of laws and recorded decrees which, next to natural eloquence, was his chief weapon.

Without the intensity of Demosthenes, Aeschines ⁵⁹ has a certain fluent vehemence; his diction, when neither low nor turgid, has that splendour⁶⁰ which both Dionysios and Cicero recognised; and if his descriptions are sometimes tedious or pointless, he is certainly strong in exposition and narrative. The fatal hindrance to his greatness in oratory is the contrast, which never fails to reveal itself in any ambitious passage of much length, between his brilliant impetuosity and his profound want of earnest conviction and of moral nobleness. It is not the occasional coarseness of his style, it is the vulgarity of his soul that counteracts his splendid gift for eloquence: of Aeschines as a speaker it might indeed be said ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. Had he become an artist, his character would not therefore have risen to the height of his faculty; but his faculty would have been better restrained to the level of his character; the contrast just noticed would have been rendered less conspicuous; and if he would not have come so near to supreme success, at least he would not have been so utterly overthrown.

Demosthenes

Demosthenes belongs to the plan of the present ⁶¹ work only in so far as his style has a definite relation to the historical growth and development of Attic oratorical prose. The first and principal question is—Has Dionysios conceived this relation ⁶² rightly? Dionysios sets out from the three types distinguished by Theophrastos. The archaic type, with its harsh dignity, is represented by Antiphon and Thucydides; the type of plain elegance, by Lysias; the middle or normal type, by Thrasymachos, Isokrates and Plato. Demosthenes, says Dionysios, joins the excellences of these three types. He uses the middle style ordinarily, and applies the other two where they are fitting: but in each one of the three types he excels its special masters⁶³. Demosthenes thus represents the final stage in the development of Attic prose. For Thucydides, language is not as yet a plastic material; for Lysias, it is more plastic, indeed, but not perfectly so, and the treatment is one-sided; for Isokrates it is perfectly plastic, but the treatment is again one-sided. Demosthenes comes to find a middle prose mature, indeed, but limited; he enfranchises it by working in older tendencies native to Attic prose; and the result is the most complete organ of speech into which the elements were capable of being wrought. The same conclusion had been reached by others before Dionysios; but no one had so thoroughly worked out the process. Both the conclusion and the method will bear scrutiny, and may be accepted ⁶⁴ as sound. The doctrine involves two leading notions —that of a normal prose, and that of an eclectic and recombining genius. The first will be illustrated in the next chapter. The second appears to describe correctly what Demosthenes did in the province of expression considered as an art. The moral characteristics of his eloquence, the individual tone of the soul which he breathed into the form thus modelled, belong to another field of inquiry: though, since his art was essentially one with his enthusiasm, it must be attempted presently to suggest what the distinctive stamp of that enthusiasm was.

Aeschines and Demosthenes—the Speeches on the Crown.

The last great picture of political life at Athens is an oratorical contest in which, so far as eloquence is concerned, art, allied with genius, wins the day against clever empiricism. The theory of Greek eloquence had its final and its most splendid illustration in that trial which brought forth the two speeches On the Crown: nor could this part of our discussion conclude more fittingly than with an endeavour to call up some faint image of Demosthenes as in that great cause he stood opposed to Aeschines.

In 338, after Chaeroneia, Demosthenes had been ⁶⁵ an active and liberal member of the Commission for the fortification of Athens; he had also been a trustee and a supporter of the theorikon. About March, 336⁶⁶, Ktesiphon proposed that Demosthenes should for these services receive a golden wreath of honour from the State, and that the proclamation of his merit should be made in the theatre at the Great Dionysia. This proposal was adopted by the Senate, and deposited as a bill ( προβούλευμα) among the public records. But before the bill could become an act ( ψήφισμα) it must be passed by the ekklesia. Aeschines, to hinder this, gave notice in 336 that he intended to proceed against Ktesiphon for having proposed an unconstitutional measure: because (1) The accounts of Demosthenes, as trustee, had not been audited when the proposal was made, and no person liable to render such account could receive a public honour: (2) the proclamation should be made in the ekklesia, and could not lawfully be made in the theatre: (3) to record a bill describing Demosthenes as a public benefactor was to deposit a lying document among the public archives.

The first point was legally good. The second was a quibble. The third was the gist of the case. Had that policy towards Macedon which Demosthenes had pursued since 351 been condemned by Chaeroneia? Or, in spite of its failure, had it been right and patriotic?

Mere notice of the action against Ktesiphon was enough to stop the passage of the bill into an act. For six years Aeschines found it easy to shirk bringing the action. Alexander's strength was growing: in 334 he crossed the Hellespont, and in October, 331, the series of his victories culminated at Arbela. In 330, however, Agis raised war against Macedon in the Peloponnesos. In the spring of 330, probably, when there were still hopes of the Spartans prevailing, the patriotic party were emboldened to renew the bill of 337, now a dead letter. Aeschines was driven into a corner. He must again give notice of his action, or the bill will become law. And, having given notice, he must this time follow it up, or suffer the public judgment to go against him by default. So, in the summer of 330, the action was brought.

No public cause had ever drawn so great a ⁶⁷ concourse, not merely of Athenians, but of Greeks from all parts of Hellas. Thirteen years before, the contest between Demosthenes and Aeschines on the Embassy had attracted a crowd. But, since then, the reputation of both men had greatly risen. And this was to be something more than a dazzling display or an exchange of personalities. It was to be a public verdict, after full hearing, on an issue which came home, for good or evil, to every Greek city, to every hearth, almost to every conscience: and for this verdict all Greece was in suspense.

Aeschines was now fifty-nine. Fifteen years ⁶⁸ earlier—when he spoke against Timarchos—he says that he was already grey, and looked more than his age. He was not tall, but was exceedingly handsome, and of a robust frame,—in contrast with his rather younger rival (Demosthenes was now fiftyfour) who, as a youth, had neglected the ordinary physical education. With his splendid voice, his trained elocution, and his practice in the statuesque manner which best suited him, Aeschines must have had an advantage over his opponent in many accessories of effect. Near him in the court stood a group of men who came to speak for him or to support him by their presence;—‘oligarchs’, as the other side called them,—leading members of the Macedonizing party. Round Demosthenes were gathered friends and advocates of the opposite politics—chiefly generals or men distinguished in other offices of the State. The dikasts who formed the court were probably at least a thousand in number. There was, besides, a throng of Athenian and other Greek spectators.

Aeschines, as accuser of Ktesiphon, opens the ⁶⁹ case. He warns the court not to be influenced by the strength of the cabal on the other side. He shows that a crown could not be given to an official whose audit was pending. He argues that the proclamation could not lawfully be made in the theatre. Then he comes to the great point. Demosthenes is not a public benefactor. He reviews the conduct of Demosthenes in four periods—from the Amphipolitan war to the peace of Philokrates; from the peace to the renewal of war; from that renewed war to Chaeroneia; lastly, the present. It was only when Philip had passed Thermopylae, when the Phocians were ruined and Thebes strengthened, and when the makers of the peace began to be reproached, that Demosthenes became the opponent of Macedon. It was Demosthenes who brought on the new war; who was the cause of the Amphictyonic Council attacking Amphissa, and thereby of Philip being called in: and all this in face of divine portents:—⁷⁰

‘Did not the gods send us warnings and signs to be on our guard, aye, were they not eloquent with all but the voices of men? If ever I saw a city which the gods were seeking to save, and which certain talkers were bent on ruining, it was ours. Was not the occurrence at the Mysteries enough to enjoin watchfulness—the death of the initiated celebrants? Did not Ameiniades warn us to heed this, and to send to Delphi and ask the god what should be done, and did not Demosthenes object, pretending that the Pythian priestess ‘had Macedonian proclivities’—the ribald, the insolent, revelling in the license that you allowed him? Last of all, did he not send out the soldiers—before sacrifices had been consummated or accepted—to a peril which he foresaw? Yet the other day he hazarded the assertion that Philip's reason for not marching upon our territory was that the sacrifices had not been favourable. What do you deserve, then, Demosthenes, you who have the blood of Hellas upon your head? If the conqueror forbore to enter the country of the conquered because the sacrifices were against him, and you, when you could not tell what might happen, sent out the troops before the sacrifices had given a good omen, ought you to be crowned in honour of the city's disasters, or ought you long ago to have been cast beyond her borders?

‘And, accordingly, what paradox or what portent is there that has not come to pass in our time? Our days have not fallen on the common chances of the mortal life: we have been set to bequeath a story of marvels to posterity. Is not the king of Persia, he who cut through Athos and who bridged the Hellespont, he who demands earth and water from the Greeks, he who, in his letters, presumes to style himself lord of all men from the sunrise to the sunset, is he not struggling at this hour—no longer for authority over others—but for his own life? Do you not see the men who delivered the Delphian temple invested not only with that glory but with the leadership against Persia? While Thebes —Thebes, our neighbour city, has in one day been swept from the face of Greece,—justly, it may be, in so far as her general policy was erroneous, yet in consequence of a folly which was no accident, but the judgment of Heaven. The unfortunate Lacedaemonians, though they did but touch this affair, in its first phase, by their occupation of the temple,—they who once claimed the leadership of Greece,— are now to be sent to Alexander in Asia to give hostages, to parade their disasters, and to hear their own and their country's doom from his lips, when they have been judged by the clemency of the master whom they have provoked. Our city, the common asylum of the Greeks, to which of old embassies used to come from all Greece to obtain deliverance for their several cities at our hands—is now battling, no more for the leadership of Greece, but for the ground on which it stands. And these things have befallen us since Demosthenes took the direction of our policy. The poet Hesiod well interprets such a case. There is a passage, meant to educate democracies and to counsel cities generally, in which he warns us not to accept dishonest leaders. I will recite the lines myself,—the reason, I think, for our learning the maxims of the poets in boyhood is that we may use them as men:—

‘Oft hath the bad man been the city's bane, And scourged his sinless brethren for his sin; Oft hath the all-seeing Father vexed their town With dearth and death, and brought the people low, Slain their strong host, cast down their fencèd wall, Broken their ships upon the stormy sea.’

‘Strip these lines of their poetical garb, look at them closely, and I think you will say that these are no mere verses of Hesiod's;—they are a prophecy of the Demosthenes Administration; for, by that Administration's agency, our ships, our armies, our cities have been swept from the world.’

He then contends that Demosthenes is to blame for the league with Thebes, for the miseries of the present, and for the neglect of three successive opportunities to rise against Alexander: Demosthenes is ready to seek bribes, but not to do manly deeds:—

‘‘Oh, yes,’ it will be replied: ‘but then he is a friend of ⁷¹ the Constitution.’ If, indeed, you have regard only to his delicacy—which stops at words—you will be deceived, as you were before; but not if you look at his character and at the facts. I will help you to estimate the characteristics which ought to be found in ‘a friend of the Constitution,’ in a sober-minded citizen; I will oppose to them the character that may be looked for in an unprincipled revolutionist; then you shall draw your comparisons, and consider on which part he stands—not in his language, remember, but in his life. Now all, I think, will allow that these attributes should belong to ‘a friend of the Constitution,’—first, he should be of free descent by both parents, so that the disadvantage of birth may not embitter him against those laws which preserve the democracy; secondly, he should be able to show that some benefit has been done by his ancestors to the people, or, at the worst, that there has been no enmity between them which could prompt him to revenge the misfortunes of his fathers on the State. Thirdly, he should be virtuous and temperate in his private life, so that no profligate expense may lead him into taking bribes to the hurt of the people. Next, he should be sagacious and able to speak—since our ideal is that the best course should be chosen by the intelligence, and then commended to the hearers by the trained eloquence, of the orator—though, if we cannot have both, sagacity must needs take rank before eloquence. Lastly, he must have a stout heart, or he may play his country false in the crisis of danger or of war. The friend of oligarchy must be the opposite of all this. I need not repeat the points. Now consider—How does Demosthenes answer to to these conditions? The scrutiny shall be strictly just.’

In the passage which follows, the speaker's hatred breaks out with an intensity which betrays conscious weakness. By half his parentage, Demosthenes is ‘a Scythian, Greek in nothing but language, and hence showing, in his very wickedness, the character of the alien’:—

‘But in his private life, what is he? The trierarch sank, ⁷² to rise a pettifogger, a spendthrift ruined by his own follies. Then, having got a bad name in this trade too by showing his speeches to the other side, he bounded on the stage of public life, where his profits out of the city were as enormous as his savings were small. Now, however, the flood of royal gold his floated his extravagance. But not even this will suffice. No wealth could ever hold out long against vice. In a word, he draws his livelihood not from his own resources but from your dangers. What, however, are his qualifications in respect to sagacity and to power of speech? A clever speaker—an evil liver. And what is the result to Athens? The speeches are fair—the deeds are vile. Then, as to courage, I have a word to say. If he denied his cowardice, or if you were not aware of it, the topic might have called for discussion; but since he himself admits it in the assemblies, and you know it, it remains only to remind you of the laws on the subject. Solon, our ancient law-giver, thought that the coward should be liable to the same penalties as the man who refuses to serve, or who has quitted his post. Cowardice, like other offences, is indictable. Some of you will perhaps ask in amazement— Is a man to be indicted for his temperament? He is. And why? In order that every one of us, fearing the penalties of the law more than the enemy, may be the better champion of his country. Accordingly, the lawgiver excludes alike the man who declines service, the coward, and the deserter of his post, from the lustral limits of the marketplace, and suffers no such person to receive a wreath of honour or to enter places of public worship. But you, Ktesiphon, exhort us to set a crown on the head to which the laws refuse it: you, by your private edict, call a forbidden guest into the forefront of our solemn festival, and invite into the temple of Dionysos that dastard by whom all temples have been betrayed!’

The peroration is notable in the history of oratory:—

‘Remember, then, that the city whose fate rests with you ⁷³ is no alien city, but your own. Give the prizes of ambition by merit, not by chance; reserve your rewards for those whose manhood is truer and whose characters are worthier; look at each other and judge, not only with your ears but with your eyes, who of your number are likely to support Demosthenes. His youthful companions in the chase or the gymnasium? No, by the Olympian Zeus! He has not spent his life in hunting or in any healthful exercise, but in cultivating rhetoric to be used against men of property. Think of his boastfulness, when he claims, by his embassy, to have snatched Byzantium out of the hands of Philip, to have thrown the Acarnanians into revolt, to have astonished the Thebans with his harangue! He thinks that you have reached a point of fatuity at which you can be made to believe even this—as if your fellow-citizen were the Goddess of Persuasion, instead of a pettifogging mortal. And when, at the end of his speech, he calls as his advocates those who shared his bribes, imagine that you see on this platform, where I now speak before you, an array drawn up to confront their profligacy—the benefactors of Athens; Solon, who ordered the democracy by his glorious laws, the philosopher, the good legislator, entreating you, with that gravity which so well became him, never to set the rhetoric of Demosthenes above your oaths and above the law; Aristides,— who assessed the tribute of the Confederacy, and whose daughters, after his death, were dowered by the State,—indignant at the contumely threatened to Justice, and asking, Are you not ashamed? When Arthmios of Zeleia brought Persian gold to Greece, and visited Athens, our fathers wellnigh put him to death, though he was our public guest, and proclaimed him expelled from Athens and from all territory that the Athenians rule; while Demosthenes, who has not brought us Persian gold, but has taken bribes for himself, and has kept them to this day, is about to receive a golden wreath from you! And Themistokles, and they who died at Marathon and Plataea, aye, and the very graves of our forefathers—do you not think that they will utter a voice of lamentation, if he who covenants with barbarians to work against Greece shall be—crowned?’

This was the true climax. But Aeschines felt the pressure of the Attic rule. He must not end thus. The storm must be laid in a final harmony. And so he passed on to the most tremendous failure that ever followed so close upon a triumph:—

‘O Earth and Sunlight! O ye influences of Goodness, of Intelligence, of that Culture by which we learn to distinguish things beautiful or shameful— I have done my duty, I have finished. If the part of the accuser has been performed well and adequately to the offence, then I have spoken as I wished, —if defectively, yet I have spoken as I could. Judge for yourselves from what has been spoken or from what has been left unsaid, and give your sentence in accordance with justice and with the interests of Athens.’

Apart from all faults of form, the hearers must ⁷⁴ have felt that this speech had one signal fault of matter. Aeschines had not dared to show his colours. He had not dared to say—‘I maintain that it was expedient to be friendly with Macedon, and therefore I deny that Demosthenes was a patriot’. He had tried to save appearances. He had dealt in abuse and in charges of corruption. But he had left the essence of the Demosthenic policy absolutely untouched.

Ktesiphon, as ostensible defendant, introduced ⁷⁵ the defence. Demosthenes then spoke. He stands, he says, in a greater danger than Aeschines—his whole political existence is at stake. After noticing irrelevant changes made by his adversary, he draws a picture of Greece at the end of the Phocian war. The results of the Peace of Philokrates were due to Athens being misled by the Macedonian party. Having given the judges a firm basis for an estimate of his policy, he turns to the two legal points. Then he comes to the great point. Has he deserved well of Greece? He describes the Hellenic policy which he, on the part of Athens, had represented; he recalls the course of events down to the moment before Philip seized Elateia; and he proceeds:—

‘Having by these means brought the cities into such ⁷⁶ dispositions to wards each other, Philip, encouraged by these decrees and these replies, came in his strength, and seized Elateia—sure that, happen what would, we and the Thebans could never more conspire. Enough—you all know what a storm then awoke in the city. Yet listen to me for a moment, suffer me to give you the barest outline.

‘It was evening when a courier came to the presidents of the assembly with the news that Elateia had been seized. The presidents instantly arose from table—they were supping at the moment: some of them hastened to clear the marketplace of the shopmen, and to burn the wickerwork of the booths: others, to send for the Generals and order the sounding of the call to the Assembly. The city was in a tumult. At dawn next day the presidents convoked the Senate, you hurried to the Ekklesia, and before the Senate could go through its forms or could report, the whole people were in assembly on the hill. Then, when the Senate had come in, when the presidents had reported the news that they had received, and had introduced the messenger, who told his tale, the herald repeatedly asked, Who wishes to speak? But no one came forward. Again and again he put the question—in vain. No one would rise, though all the generals, though all the public speakers were present, though our Country was crying aloud, with the voice that comes home to all, for a champion of the commonwealth—if in the solemn invitation given by the herald we may truly deem that we hear our Country's summons. Yet, if they should have come forward who wished Athens safe, every man in this court, aye, every man in Athens, would have risen and moved towards the platform. Every man of you, I know well, wished the city to be saved. Or, if it was a time for the capitalists, there were our three hundred richest men; or if for the representatives of patriotism and wealth combined, there were the men who, a little later, proved at once their loyalty and their opulence by giving such large benevolences. But no—it seems that that crisis, that hour, demanded not merely a patriot, not merely a capitalist, but a man who had followed the train of events from the beginning, who had accurately reasoned out why and wherefore Philip was acting thus. A man who did not know this, who had not made it the subject of long and thorough research, might be ever so loyal, might be ever so rich, but he was not the man to see what should be done or to direct your course. Such a man was found that day in me. I came forward and spoke words to which, for two reasons, I now claim your attention; first, that you may see how I was the only one of the speakers or the statesmen who, in danger, did not desert the patriot's post, but brought myself to the proof by proposing and framing measures for your welfare in the very hour of panic; secondly, because this bestowal of a few moments will place you in a much better position for estimating the future of your entire policy.

‘What I said was this:—‘They who are so much alarmed by the belief that Philip has already got the Thebans do not, I think, comprehend the situation; I feel convinced that, if this was the case, we should have been hearing of him, not at Elateia, but on our frontiers. That he has come, however, to make things ready at Thebes, I am certain. Look (I said) how it stands. Every Theban that could be bribed or blinded has been made a tool by Philip: those who withstood him from the first, and who oppose him now, he can never win. What does he mean? Why has he seized Elateia? He means, by displaying his power and planting his camp close at hand, to cheer and embolden his own friends, and to strike terror into his opponents, so that they may either concede from fear what they now refuse, or may be compelled to the concession. Now, if we choose (I said) to make this a time for remembering any unpleasantness that the Thebans may have brought into their relations with us, and to distrust them as if they were to be classed with enemies, then, in the first place, we shall be doing what Philip would pray for; in the next, I am afraid that those who are now his adversaries may open their arms to him, and so, with one accord, they will all become Philip's men, and he and they will march on Attica together. If, however, you will listen to me, and will give yourselves to thinking, instead of wrangling, over my suggestions, I believe that I shall be pronounced to be in the right, and shall avert the danger impending over Athens. What, then, do I advise? First, that we should remit our present fear: next, that we should transfer it to another object, and tremble, as one man, for the Thebans—they are much nearer to the danger than we, and must bear its first brunt:—then, that you should march out to Eleusis, all of you that are of the age for service, as well as the Knights, and show the world that you, too, are in arms, so that your friends at Thebes may be at no disadvantage for making their protest on behalf of justice, but may know that, even as the men who are selling their country to Philip have a power hard by at Elateia to help them, so they who are ready to do battle for freedom are secure of prompt aid from you, if they are attacked. Next, I would have you elect ten ambassadors and empower them, in conjunction with the Generals, to fix the time and the strength of the expedition. The ambassadors once at Thebes, what line are they to take? Mark my words here. They must not ask the Thebans for anything—it would be discreditable at such a time— but must promise to afford aid if it should be required, since the Thebans are in extremities, and our view of what may come is less disturbed than theirs. Then, if the Thebans accept these offers and listen to us, we shall have compassed our own desires, and at the same time shall come before the world in an attitude worthy of Athens; or if, by any chance, the diplomacy should miscarry, they will have themselves to blame for any error they may commit now, and we shall stand guiltless of everything dishonourable or craven.’

‘Thus, or to this effect, I spoke, and left the platform. Everyone approved—there was not a dissentient; and what then? I did not make a speech and leave others to move a resolution. I did not move a resolution, and leave others to go on an embassy. I did not go on an embassy, and leave others to persuade the Thebans. No. I went through with the business from the beginning to the end; I gave myself to you without reservation in face of the perils that encompassed the city.—[Read me the decree that was made that day.] * * * * * * These were the first steps towards the adjustment of our relations to Thebes, at a time when enmity, hatred and distrust had been sown between our cities by yonder men.

‘The people gave their voice, and the danger that hung upon our borders went by like a cloud. Then was the time for the upright citizen to show the world if he could suggest anything better:— now, his cavils come too late. The statesman and the adventurer are alike in nothing, but there is nothing in which they differ more than in this. The statesman declares his mind before the event, and submits himself to be tested by those who have believed him, by fortune, by his own use of opportunities, by everyone and everything. The adventurer is silent when he ought to have spoken, and then, if there is a disagreeable result, he fixes an eye of malice upon that. As I have said, then was the opportunity of the man who cared for Athens and for the assertion of justice. But I am prepared to go further:—If anyone can now show a better course, or, in a word, can point out any precaution which was possible and which I did not adopt, I plead guilty. If anyone has had a new light as to something which it would have been expedient to do then, I protest that this ought not to be concealed from me. But if there neither is nor was any such thing; if no one to this very hour is in a position to name it; then what was your adviser to do? Was he not to choose the best of the visible and feasible alternatives? And this is what I did, Aeschines, when the herald asked, Who wishes to speak? His question was not, Who wishes to rake up old accusations? or, Who wishes to give pledges of the future? In those days, you sat dumb in the assemblies. I came forward and spoke. Come now—it is better late than never: point out what argument should have been discovered—what opportunity that might have served has not been used by me in the interests of Athens—what alliance, what policy was available which I might better have commended to our citizens?’

Having shown that the course taken by his party was the most advantageous open to loyal Athenians, the speaker goes on to take yet higher ground. This course failed. But it is not therefore to be regretted. By it alone could honour have been saved:—

‘As, however, he bears so hardly upon the results, I am ⁷⁷ ready to make a statement which may sound startling. I ask every man, as he fears Zeus and the gods, not to be shocked at my paradox until he has calmly considered my meaning. I say that, if the event had been manifest to the whole world beforehand, if all men had been fully aware of it, if you, Aeschines, who never opened your lips, had been ever so loud or so shrill in prophecy or in protest, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or for her past, or for the ages to come. Now, of course, she seems to have failed; but failure is for all men when Heaven so decrees. In the other case, she, who claims the first place in Greece, would have renounced it, and would have incurred the reproach of having betrayed all Greece to Philip. If she had indeed betrayed without a blow those things for which our ancestors endured every imaginable danger, who would not have spurned, Aeschines, at you? Not at Athens—the gods forbid!—nor at me. In the name of Zeus, how could we have looked visitors in the face if, things having come to their present pass—Philip having been elected leader and lord of all—the struggle against it had been sustained by others without our help, and this, though never once in her past history our city had preferred inglorious safety to the perilous vindication of honour? What Greek, what barbarian does not know that the Thebans, and their predecessors in power, the Lacedaemonians, and the Persian King, would have been glad and thankful to let Athens take anything that she liked, besides keeping what she had got, if she would only have done what she was told, and allowed some other Power to lead Greece? Such a bargain, however, was for the Athenians of those days neither traditional nor congenial nor supportable. In the whole course of her annals, no one could ever persuade Athens to side with dishonest strength, to accept a secure slavery, or to desist, at any moment in her career, from doing battle and braving danger for preeminence, for honour and for renown.

‘You, Athenians, find these principles so worthy of veneration, so accordant with your own character, that you praise none of your ancestors so highly as those who put them into action. You are right. Who must not admire the spirit of men who were content to quit their country, and to exchange their city for their triremes, in the cause of resistance to dictation; who put Themistokles, the author of this course, at their head, while as for Kyrsilos, the man who gave his voice for accepting the enemy's terms, they stoned him to death, yes, and his wife was stoned by the women of Athens? The Athenians of those days were not in search of an orator or a general who should help them to an agreeable servitude. No. They would not hear of life itself if they were not to live free. Each one of them held that he had been born the son, not only of his father and his mother, but of his country also. And wherein is the difference? It is here. He that recognises no debt of piety save to his parents awaits his death in the course of destiny and of nature. But he that deems himself the son of his country also will be ready to die sooner than see her enslaved. In his estimate, those insults, those dishonours which must be suffered in his city when she has lost her freedom will be accounted more terrible than death.

‘If I presumed to say that it was I who thus inspired you with a spirit worthy of your ancestors, there is not a man present who might not properly rebuke me. What I do maintain is that these principles of conduct were your own; that this spirit existed in the city before my intervention, but that, in the successive chapters of events, I had my share of merit as your servant. Aeschines, on the contrary, denounces our policy as a whole, invokes your resentment against me as the author of the city's terrors and dangers, and, in his anxiety to wrest from me the distinction of the hour, robs you of glories which will be celebrated as long as time endures. For, if you condemn Ktesiphon on the ground that my public course was misdirected, then you will be adjudged guilty of error: you will no longer appear as sufferers by the perversity of fortune.

‘But never, Athenians, never can it be said that you erred when you took upon you that peril for the freedom and the safety of all! No, by our fathers who met the danger at Marathon, no, by our fathers who stood in the ranks at Plataea, no, by our fathers who did battle on the waters of Salamis and Artemision, no, by all the brave who sleep in tombs at which their country paid those last honours which she had awarded, Aeschines, to all of them alike, not alone to the successful or the victorious! And her award was just. The part of brave men had been done by all. The fortune experienced by the individual among them had been allotted by a Power above man.’

The nobility of this great speech declares itself ⁷⁸ not least in this, that the inevitable recital of personal services never once sinks into self-glorification. It is held above that by the speaker's proud consciousness that he has wrought, not for himself, but for Athens and Greece, not for ambition, but for sacred things, for duty and for honour, and that he can show this by proofs the most triumphant. When, at the end, he offers himself for comparison with any other counsellor, his right to do so has been so luminously established that this is felt to be no vaunt by which his dignity is lowered. On the contrary, it is a self-vindication demanded by respect alike for himself and for those by whom his counsels had been adopted. In relation to the Attic theory of eloquence, it is most instructive to compare the perorations of Aeschines and Demosthenes. ⁷⁹ Aeschines, not being a true artist, stands in awe of the art. He does not venture to be original and to stop at his real climax. He must needs conform with the artistic usage of a final harmony; and he mars all. Demosthenes, the master, can make his art obey him. With true instinct, he feels this to be the rare case which the rule does not fit. The emotions of the hearers have been stirred beyond the point of obedience to the pulses of an ordered music. His intense appeal to the memories of his countrymen ends in a storm of imprecation and of prayer:—

‘Here is the proof. Not when my extradition was ⁸⁰ demanded, not when they sought to arraign me before the Amphictyonic Council, not for all their menaces or their offers, not when they set these villains like wild beasts upon me, have I ever been untrue to the loyalty I bear you. From the outset, I chose the path of a straightforward and righteous statesmanship, to cherish the dignities, the prerogatives, the glories of my country: to exalt them: to stand by their cause. I do not go about the marketplace radiant with joy at my country's disasters, holding out my hand and telling my good news to anyone who, I think, is likely to report it in Macedon; I do not hear of my country's successes with a shudder and a groan and a head bent to earth, like the bad men who pull Athens to pieces, as if, in so doing, they were not tearing their own reputations to shreds, who turn their faces to foreign lands, and, when an alien has triumphed by the ruin of the Greeks, give their praises to that exploit, and vow that vigilance must be used to render that triumph eternal.

‘NEVER, POWERS OF HEAVEN, MAY ANY BROW OF THE IMMORTALS BE BENT IN APPROVAL OF THAT PRAYER! RATHER, IF IT MAY BE, BREATHE EVEN INTO THESE MEN A BETTER MIND AND HEART; BUT IF SO IT IS THAT TO THESE CAN COME NO HEALING, THEN GRANT THAT THESE, AND THESE ALONE, MAY PERISH UTTERLY AND EARLY ON LAND AND ON THE DEEP: AND TO US, THE REMNANT, SEND THE SWIFTEST DELIVERANCE FROM THE TERRORS GATHERED ABOVE OUR HEADS, SEND US THE SALVATION THAT STANDS FAST PERPETUALLY.’

Two thousand years have challenged a tradition which lives, and will always live, wherever there is left a sense for the grandest music which an exquisite language could yield to a sublime enthusiasm— that, when Demosthenes ceased, those who had come from all parts of Greece to hear, that day, the epitaph of the freedom which they had lost, and a defence of the honour which they could still leave to their children, had listened to the masterpiece of the old world's oratory, perhaps to the supreme achievement of human eloquence. But this wonderful speech, though the greatest, is not the most characteristic work of its author. The speech On the Crown is a retrospect: Demosthenes was a prophet. His genius as an orator takes its ⁸¹ peculiar stamp from the concurrence of two conditions which have seldom been united with an equal completeness, which are not likely, perhaps, to be completely united again, but which, whenever they have so met, have made an epoch of poetry or of oratory. The first is that a free and highly civilised race should be threatened with the overthrow of its civil liberties; the second, that this political disaster should have, at the same time, the aspect of a religious defilement. When the national peril is also a menaced pollution, when the cause of altars and of hearths is not only formally or nominally, but in the inmost feelings of the people, one, then the two mightiest inspirations of humanity co-operate, and they who arise to warn, to counsel or to reprove seem both to others and to themselves most like the interpreters of Heaven. The Greeks were, in their own view, something even more than a chosen people; they were, as they conceived, a race primarily and lineally distinct from all the races of men, the very children of the gods, whose holy separation was attested by that deep instinct of their nature which taught them to loathe the alien. No one can ever understand Demosthenes who does not continually keep in mind how Demosthenes regarded Philip—not as the descendant of Herakles, not as a prince of the Argive house who, in a royal exile like that of Teukros, happened to reign over foreign highlanders, but as the personal embodiment of barbarian violence, as the type and the head of those aliens whose foul swarms threatened to break the pure circle of Hellas and to obliterate, or contaminate, everything which Greeks regarded as a sacred distinction of their life. If, as has been complained, his eloquence, instead of flowing, rushes, if his intensity is found monotonous, if he is perceived to be deficient in ease and clearness, let it be remembered that, Greek and artist as he is, things stronger than blood give him his affinity with Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Once only, perhaps, in the history of the world has a man of Indo-Germanic race, with something like the same gifts, stood in something like the mental attitude of Demosthenes, and this in the city which of all cities has most resembled his own. Florence, with its active and conscious citizenship, its intelligence and curiosity, its fickleness, its patriotism for Italy, was the Athens, as steady and somewhat rigid Venice was the Sparta, of the Italian republics; and the Athens of Eubulos had more ignoble analogies with the Florence of Lorenzo⁸². When invasion was threatening from the North, when political freedom was in danger, and when it seemed that the Church also must be scourged before it could be regenerated, a prophet arose whose one hope was of a resurrection for the spirit of his people and whose passionate denunciations sought to burst, while there was time, the fatal bonds of a cynical lethargy. ‘O Italy! O Rome! I give you over to the hands of a people who will wipe you out from among the nations! I see them descending like lions. Pestilence comes marching hand in hand with war. The deaths will be so many that the buriers shall go through the streets crying out: Who hath dead, who hath dead? And one will bring his father and another his son. O Rome! I cry again to you to repent! Repent, Venice! Milan, repent!’⁸³ The soul of Demosthenes was among men when, in the Dome of Florence, above the sobs and wailings of a great multitude, the anguish of Savonarola went forth on words that were as flame.

The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos. Sir Richard C. Jebb. London. 1876.

Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.

Funding provided by National Endowment for the Humanities.

Current edition Perseus

The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos (English) (The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, author. London: Macmillan, 1876.)

Notes on the current edition

The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos

1. moulded on the Forensic and Epideictic.

2. Thuc. VIII. 68.

3. Vol. I. p. 211.

4. Reasons for this:

5. Rhet. I. 1.

6. Macaulay, observing that the rise of Athenian oratory was contemporaneous with the decline of Athenian character and power, argues that this division of labour was the chief cause. ( On the Athenian Orators: Miscellaneous Writings I 137 f.) As regards political oratory, it was certainly one of the chief causes. Macaulay's remark there, as to the silent and rapid downfall of Sparta having been due to the cultivation by others of scientific warfare, had been anticipated. The old advantage of Sparta in war and athletics —then lost—was due, says Aristotle, simply to Sparta studying these while her rivals did not: τῷ μόνον μὴ πρὸς ἀσκοῦντας ἀσκεῖν, Arist. Polit. V (VIII) iv § 4.

7. See Freeman, Historical Essays (Second Series) IV. ‘The Athenian Democracy,’ p. 138.

8. On Kallistratos, see Schäfer, Dem. I. 11 f. Dem. de falsa legat. § 297, πολλοὶ παρ’ ὑμῶν ἐπὶ καιρῶν γεγόνασιν ἰσχυροί, Καλλίστρατος, αὖθις Ἀριστοφῶν, Διόφαντος (the proposer of the decree in 352 for sending a force to hold Thermopylae): de Cor. § 219, πολλοὶ παρ’ ὑμῖν...γεγόνασι ῥήτορες ἔνδοξοι καὶ μεγάλοι πρὸ ἐμοῦ, Καλλίστρατος ἐκεῖνος, Ἀριστοφῶν, Κέφαλος, Θρασύβουλος, ἕτεροι μυρίοι.

9. A figure quoted by Arist. Rhet. II. 6 from the orator Kydias —who used it in dissuading the division of the lands at Samos, 350 B.C.—is very remarkable for being just in the boldly imaginative style of Perikles—not at all in the manner of Demosthenes or his contemporaries:— ἠξίου γὰρ ὑπολαβεῖν τοὺς Ἀθηναίους περιεστάναι κύκλῳ τοὺς Ἕλληνας, ὡς ὁρῶντας καὶ μὴ μόνον ἀκουσομένους ἃ ἂν ψηφίσωνται.

10. Deinarchos.

11. Dionys. de Dinarch. 1, μήτε εὑρετὴν ἰδίου γεγονέναι χαρακτῆρος τὸν ἄνδρα, ὥσπερ τὸν Λυσίαν, καὶ τὸν Ἰσοκράτην, καὶ τὸν Ἰσαῖον, μήτε τῶν εὑρημένων ἑτέροις τελειωτήν, ὥσπερ τὸν Δημοσθένην καὶ τὸν Αἰσχίνην καὶ Ὑπερείδην ἡμεῖς κρίνομεν . ib. c. 5. οὐδὲν οὔτε κοινὸν οὔτ’ ἴδιον ἔσχεν—‘no one stamp of his own—no distinctive trait’.

12. ib. c. 8 τούτων (= τῶν τὸν Δημοσθένη προχειρισαμένων ) ἄριστον ἄν τις θείη Δείναρχον γενέσθαι .

13. Deinarchos was called ὁ ἄγροικος Δημοσθένης, Dionys. l.c. c. 8. Also, ὁ κρίθινος Δημοσθένης, Hermog. περὶ ἰδ. B. 11, Speng. Rh. Gr. II. 413. This curious epithet has been taken to mean (1) ‘coarse’, as barley opposed to fine wheat, Schol. in Walz Rh. Gr. v. 560 = οὐ σίτινος: (2) ‘skittish’, like a κριθῶν πῶλος, Ruhnken, Hist. crit. Or Gr.: (3) ‘like beer compared with wine’, Donalds. contin. of Müller Hist. Gr. Lit. II. 369, comparing Aesch. Suppl 930,

ἀλλ’ ἄρσενάς τοι τῆσδε γῆς οἰκήτορας εὑρήσετ’ οὐ πίνοντας ἐκ κριθῶν μέθυ

. The last is probably right. Α κρίθινος Δημοσθένης is one whose strength is rougher, and who has neither the flavour nor the sparkle. As Hermog. says, l.c., he has τὸ τραχὺ καὶ γοργὸν καὶ σφοδρόν, ὥστ’ ἤδη τινές— and so they call him κρίθινος. Cf. hordearius.

14. Hermog. l.c. ἧττον ἐπιμελὴς ὁ λόγος αὐτῷ. The same critic, in allowing him ‘fiery earnestness’ and ‘vehemence’, observes, with truth, that the latter quality depends rather on his thoughts and method than on his diction.

15. The ταμίας τῆς κοινῆς προσόδου was appointed for one πενταετηρίς only. The twelve years of Lykurgos have been differently placed; I follow Schäfer, Dem. u seine Zeit, chronol. table to Vol. III.: cf. ib. II. 298—304.

16. [Plut.] vitt. X. oratt.

17. The negligence or caprice of actors had already begun to deprave the works of the great tragedians. It was Lykurgos, as is well known, who sought to arrest this process by the formation of those authoritative texts which afterwards passed into the library of Alexandria. This reverence for the elder dramatists—shown further by statues raised to Aeschylos, Sophokles and Euripides (337 B.C.)—is most characteristic of the man.

18. [Plut.] vitt. X. oratt.: (Lykurgos was so severe) ‘that some of the sophists said that he dipped his pen, not in ink, but in death, when he drew laws against evil-doers.’ Demâdes had said of Drakon ὅτι δἰ αἵματος, οὐ διὰ μέλανος τοὺς νόμους ἔγραψεν, Plut. Sol. 17; cf. Tzetzes chil. 5. V. 348 in Sauppe O.A. II 316.

19. His speech Against Leokrates

20. Character of his Oratory.

21. Dionys. vet. script. cens. V. 3 (after describing the power of Lykurgos), οὐ μὴν ἀστεῖος οὐδὲ ἡδύς, ἀλλ’ ἀναγκαῖος. The harshness of his diction, and his tendency to digress, Hermog. περὶ ἰδ. B. 11. Lykurgos was conscious of the last fault: κατὰ Αεωκρ. § 100.

22. Dionys. l.c., αὐξητικός...διῃρημένος...σεμνός...κατηγορικός...φιλαληθής...παρρησιαστικός.. τούτου χρὴ ζηλοῦν μάλιστα τὰς δεινώσεις. In Ep. I. ad Ammaeum 2 he names Lykurgos between Hypereides and Aeschines among the ἀγωνισταὶ λόγων ῥητορικῶν.

23. Two elements of his style

24. Extracts from the speech Against Leokrates: §§ 16—18.

25. §§ 39—42.

26. §§ 146—150.

27. Significance of the result

28. Ὑπερίδης ὁ ῥήτωρ ἔφη μὴ δύνασθαι καλῶς ζῆν, κ.τ.λ., Stob. append. florent. p. 41, frag. 239 in Sauppe, O. A. II. 305.

29. His relation to Isokrates.

30. His relation to Lysias.

31. Sympathies of Lysias and Hypereides with Comedy.

32. Vol. I. p. 184.

33. Quarterly Review, vol. 132, p. 447.

34. Style of Hypereides, as characterised (1) by Dionysios:

35. Dionys. vet. script. cens. V. 6.

36. Dionys. de Dinarch. 7.

37. (2) by Hermogenes:

38. Hermog. περὶ ἰδ. B. 11.

39. (3) by the author of the περὶ ὕψους.

40. [Long.] περὶ ὕψους c. 34.

41. Alluding to the lost Δηλιακός. From 422 to 346 there was a standing dispute between the Delians and the Athenians about the presidency of the Delian temple. In 346—5 Hypereides pleaded the Athenian cause before the Amphictyons, and prevailed. See Sauppe, O. A. II. 286 f.

42. Extant work of Hypereides.

43. Speech Against Euxenippos.

44. Col. XXX XXXIV (ed. Blass)

45. The Funeral Oration.

46. Col. V—VII.

47. Col. XIII— XIV.

48. Epilogue of the Epitaphios.

49. Lykurgos and Hypereides — Summary

50. compared with Andokides.

51. Aeschines the orator as conceived by himself.

52. At the end of his essay on the λεκτικὴ δεινότης of Demosthenes, Dionysios examines these aceusations made by Aeschines; cc. 55 —58. As to the particular examples cited by Aeschines ( ἀμπελουργεῖν τὴν πόλιν, and the rest), Dionys. says he cannot find one of them in the extant work of Demosthenes. The speeches falsely ascribed to Demosth.—e.g. κατ’ Ἀριστογείτονος β/, κατὰ Νεαίρας, &c. —are, sometimes, ἀηδεῖς, φορτικοί, ἄγροικοι. The charge against Demosthenes, however, he characterises as not only calumnious but amazing. Those who seem inclined to adopt it ought well to consider this testimony of Dionysios.

53. Aeschines untrained in Rhetoric.

54. Demetrios Phalcreus—Caecilius—Suidas: Schäf, Dem. I. 229.

55. His style.

56. In the scholia to Aeschines, Sauppe, O. A. II. p. 26

57. His training as an actor:

58. as a scribe.

59. Character of Aeschines as an orator.

60. τῇ τῶν λέξεων ἐκλογῇ πομπικὸς ἅμα καὶ δεινός, Dionys. vet. script. cens. v. 5: Cic. Orator § 110 says that the distinctions of Aeschines are

lēvitas et splendor verborum

61. Demosthenes —his place in the development

62. as viewed by Dionysios.

63. Dionys. Demosth. 1—46.

64. Dionysios is right, and by the right process.

65. Origin of the case against Ktesiphon.

66. The spurious ψήφισμα in Dem. De Cor. § 118 gives Pyanepsion 9 (beginning of Nov.) 337: on this error see Schäfer, Dem. III. 77 n. 2.

67. Extraordinary interest of the cause.

68. The antagonists.

69. Speech of Aeschines.

70. Aeschines in Ctes. §§ 130—134.

71. §§ 168—170.

72. §§ 173—176.

73. §§ 256—260.

74. Fatal weakness of the Speech.

75. Reply of Demosthenes.

76. Demosth. De Cor. §§ 168—191.

77. §§ 199—209.

78. Tone of the Speech.

79. The two perorations compared.

80. §§ 322—324.

81. The enthusiasm of Demosthenes— its character

82. See the ‘ Renaissance in Italy, Age of the Despots,’ by Mr J. A. Symonds, pp. 169 f.

83. ib. p. 448.

Sir Richard C. Jebb The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos 2.22