The Historians' History of the World 04

Heroic as the figure of Demosthenes is in many respects one must not forget to do justice to the opposition he met, not only from Macedonia but from within his own city. Posterity is likely to generalise too vigorously, and Æschines has suffered more than his due from the fact that he happened to be the opponent of Demosthenes. It is customary to think of Æschines as a traitor, a hypocrite, and the paid attorney of Philip in Athens. Yet it might be well to remember that if his advice had been taken and the Macedonians treated with welcome instead of warfare as preached by Demosthenes, the result would have been exactly the same except that much bloodshed would have been saved and a loathsome amount of intrigue and villainy avoided. When Demosthenes is praised for his determination and persistence in his one idea, Æschines must be praised for the same to the same degree. When sympathy is felt for Demosthenes in the enmity he met, it must be remembered that Æschines suffered exile and suffered it with dignity. Æschines was never proved guilty of accepting money from Macedonia, while Demosthenes gloated over the poverty of Æschines and boasted of his own riches. On the other hand it is known that Demosthenes accepted money from Persia. And, if one may be permitted to distinguish between degrees of guilt in bribery, one might feel that Persian money was far dirtier for a Grecian to handle than the semi-Grecian gold of Macedonia, coming from the hand of a king whose great ambition was to organise Greece into a federated monarchy and lead her against Persia.

Æschines claimed to have been of distinguished blood, and, while Demosthenes declared him to be of the lowest possible origin, and that dishonest, he certainly represented the aristocratic party. His friendship for Philip’s cause cannot be imputed to a cowardly desire for peace at any price, since he proved himself a brave soldier, while Demosthenes threw away his shield and fled from the very battle-ground of Chæronea to which his eloquence had summoned the Greeks. Æschines was a writer of great skill and the three of his orations still extant are rated almost as high as those of Demosthenes. Æschines seems to have had a far better voice and presence than the effeminate student whom posterity thinks of as a majestic thunderer. The good and ill in the character of the latter have been nowhere more briskly summarised than by Prévost-Paradold

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THE UNPOPULARITY OF DEMOSTHENES