The Historians' History of the World 04

The father of this great orator was an Athenian by birth, and exercised the trade of an armourer, by which he acquired considerable wealth. He married the daughter of one Gylon who had settled upon the borders of the Euxine Sea and contracted an alliance with a rich heiress of the country.[15] At the age of seven Demosthenes was deprived of his father, who left him a fortune which entitled him to rank with the wealthiest citizens. Though guardians had been appointed to manage his estate and direct his education, they seem to have dilapidated the one, and neglected the other. Left at an early age entirely to himself, he launched out into expenses with all the extravagance and vanity of youth, acted as choregus or president of theatrical entertainments, and equipped a ship of war for the service of the republic. He spent the first part of his life without any fixed purpose or aim, indulging in such a state of indolence and effeminacy, as to have his name stigmatised by a term of reproach [Batalos]. But the seeds of genius, being either allowed to shoot up in wild luxuriance or to lie dormant through neglect, were soon to spring up with amazing vigour. He determined thenceforth to devote himself wholly to the study of eloquence. At that time learning of all kinds, but particularly philosophy and the art of rhetoric, was cultivated with great eagerness by the Athenian youth. Plato had established his school in the Academy, and was attended by a vast concourse. Demosthenes attended it with great assiduity, as well as that of Isæus the rhetorician. After these preparatory studies, he tried his strength against his guardians, whom he obliged to refund a part of his property. Emboldened by this success, he mounted the tribunal to harangue the people upon the state of affairs, but was heard with very little attention, and no signs of approbation. Not discouraged by this unfavourable reception, he made a second attempt and was equally unsuccessful.

As he retired, exceedingly depressed by his ill-success, and determined in his mind to relinquish a pursuit for which nature seemed to have rendered him unfit, by denying him the free use of the organs of speech, and a sufficient quantity of breath to articulate distinctly a sentence of moderate length, he was met by one of his friends, a comedian, who exhorted him to conquer the natural and acquired defects under which he laboured. He instantly set about correcting, with the greatest perseverance and most extraordinary means, his rapid and inarticulate pronunciation, ungraceful and awkward gestures in declaiming, and several natural defects under which he laboured.c

The anecdotes of Demosthenes’ struggle with his defects are remembered by many people to whom the very name of King Philip is obscure. These anecdotes rest upon the orator’s own authority. The reader need hardly be reminded of the hours he spent talking with his mouth full of pebbles, shouting against the roar of the stormy ocean, practising his gestures before a mirror, expanding his lungs by running and by declaiming as he climbed the steep hills of which Greece is made, shaving half his head to compel himself to keep indoors at his studies, and shutting himself up for months at a time in an underground room where he copied all Thucydides eight times, and polished his own phrases to incandescence.

Thus prepared, he undertook a losing battle in defence of that system of municipal isolation and jealousy which he thought of as freedom, but which had brought on Greece innumerable crimes and sorrows and kept the little peninsula always under the shadow of complete disaster before a larger foe. In a sense, Demosthenes may be compared with the advocates of States’ Rights in the United States before the Civil War, except that the Americans never dreamed of carrying their theories to such an extent. To put the two instances on a par, it would be necessary to imagine the Southerners of America demanding not merely that the states have no federation whatsoever, but that even the smallest town of each state should go its own petty way.

ÆSCHINES, THE RIVAL OF DEMOSTHENES