by Demosthenes
The fact that the Council of Five Hundred, which acted as a standing committee of the people, and prepared business for the Assembly and was responsible for the details of measures passed by the Assembly in general form, was chosen by lot and changed annually, as did practically all the civil and the military officials (though the latter might be re-elected), was all against efficiency and continuity of policy.[5] After the system of election by lot, the most characteristic feature of the Athenian democracy was the responsibility of statesmen and generals to the law-courts.[6] Any citizen might accuse them upon charges nominally limited in scope, but often serving in reality to bring their whole career into question. Had it been certain that the courts would only punish incompetence or misconduct, and not failure as such, little harm would have resulted. But although there were very many acquittals in political trials, the uncertainty of the issue was so great, and the sentences inflicted upon the condemned so severe (commonly involving banishment at least), that the liability to trial as a criminal must often have deterred the statesman and the general from taking the most necessary risks; while the condemnation of the accused had usually the result of driving a really able man out of the country, and depriving his fellow countrymen of services which might be urgently required when they were no longer available.
The financial system was also ill adapted for the purposes of a people constantly liable to war. The funds required for the bare needs of a time of peace seem indeed to have been sufficiently provided from permanent sources of income (such as the silver mines, the rent of public lands, court fees and fines, and various indirect taxes): but those needed for war had to be met by a direct tax upon property, levied ad hoc whenever the necessity arose, and not collected without delays and difficulties. And although the equipment of ships for service was systematically managed under the trierarchic laws,[7] it was still subject to delays no less serious. There was no regular system of contribution to State funds, and no systematic accumulation of a reserve to meet military needs. The raising of money by means of loans at interest to the State was only adopted in Greece in a few isolated instances:[8] and the practice of annually distributing surplus funds to the people,[9] however necessary or excusable under the circumstances, was wholly contrary to sound finance.
An even greater evil was the dependence of the city upon mercenary forces and generals, whose allegiance was often at the call of the highest bidder, and in consequence was seldom reliable. There is no demand which Demosthenes makes with greater insistence, than the demand that the citizens themselves shall serve with the army. At a moment of supreme danger, they might do so. But in fact Athens had become more and more an industrial state, and men were not willing to leave their business to take care of itself for considerable periods, in order to go out and fight, unless the danger was very urgent, or the interests at stake of vital importance; particularly now that the length of campaigns had become greater and the seasons exempted from military operations shorter. In many minds the spread of culture, and of the ideal of self-culture, had produced a type of individualism indifferent to public concerns, and contemptuous of political and military ambitions. Moreover, the methods of warfare had undergone great improvement; in most branches of the army the trained skill of the professional soldier was really necessary; and it was not possible to leave the olive-yard or the counting-house and become an efficient fighter without more ado. But the expensiveness of the mercenary forces; the violent methods by which they obtained supplies from friends and neutrals, as well as foes, if, as often happened, their pay was in arrear; and the dependence of the city upon the goodwill of generals and soldiers who could without much difficulty find employment under other masters, were evils which were bound to hamper any attempt to give effect to a well-planned and far-sighted scheme of action.
It also resulted from the Athenian system of government that the general, while obviously better informed of the facts of the military situation than any one else could be, and at the same time always liable to be brought to trial in case of failure, had little influence upon policy, unless he could find an effective speaker to represent him. In the Assembly and in the law-courts (where the juries were large enough to be treated in the same manner as the Assembly itself) the orator who could win the people’s ear was all powerful, and expert knowledge could only make itself felt through the medium of oratory.
A constitution which gave so much power to the orator had grave disadvantages. The temptation to work upon the feelings rather than to appeal to the reason of the audience was very strong, and no charge is more commonly made by one orator against another than that of deceiving or attempting to deceive the people. It is, indeed, very difficult to judge how far an Athenian Assembly was really taken in by sophistical or dishonest arguments: but it is quite certain that such arguments were continually addressed to it; and the main body of the citizens can scarcely have had that first-hand knowledge of facts, which would enable them to criticize the orator’s statements. Again, the oration appealed to the people as a performance, no less than as a piece of reasoning. Ancient political oratory resembled the oratory of the pulpit at the present day, not only because it appealed perpetually to the moral sense, and was in fact a kind of preaching; but also because the main difficulty of the ancient orator and the modern preacher was the same: for the Athenians liked being preached at, as the modern congregation ‘enjoys’ a good sermon, and were, therefore, almost equally immune against conversion. The conflicts of rival orators were regarded mainly as an entertainment. The speaker who was most likely to carry the voting (except when a great crisis had roused the Assembly to seriousness) was the one who found specious and apparently moral reasons for doing what would give the audience least trouble; and consequently one who, like Demosthenes, desired to stir them up to action and personal sacrifices, had always an uphill fight: and if he also at times ‘deceived the people’ or employed sophistical arguments in order to secure results which he believed to be for their good, we must remember the difficulty (which, in spite of the wide circulation of authentic information, is at least equally great at the present day) of putting the true reasons for or against a policy, before those who, whether from want of education or from lack of training in the subordination of feeling to thought, are not likely to understand or to listen to them. Nor, if we grant the genuineness of Demosthenes’ conviction as to the desirability of the end for which he contended, can many statesmen be pointed out, who have not been at least as guilty as he in their choice of means. That he did not solve the problem, how to lead a democracy by wholly honest means, is the less to his discredit, in that the problem still remains unsolved.
It should be added that with an audience like the Athenian, whose aesthetic sensitiveness was doubtless far greater than that of any modern assembly, delivery counted for much. Aeschines’ fine voice was a real danger to Demosthenes, and Demosthenes himself spoke of delivery, or the skilled acting of his part, as the all-important condition of an orator’s success. But it is clear that this can have been no advantage from the standpoint of the public interest.
In the law-courts the drawbacks to which the commanding influence of oratory was liable were intensified. In the Assembly a certain amount of reticence and self-restraint was imposed by custom: an opponent could not be attacked by name or on purely personal grounds; and an appearance of impartiality was commonly assumed. But in the courts much greater play was allowed to feeling; and the arguments were often much more disingenuous, not only because the personal interests at stake made the speaker more unscrupulous, but also, perhaps, because the juries ordinarily included a larger proportion of the poorer, the idler, and the less-educated citizens than the Assembly. The legal question was often that to which the jury were encouraged to pay least attention, and the condemnation or acquittal of the accused was demanded upon grounds quite extraneous to the indictment. (The two court-speeches contained in these volumes afford abundant illustrations of this.) Personalities were freely admitted, of a k
ind which it is difficult to excuse and impossible to justify. To attempt to blacken the personal character of an opponent by false stories about his parentage and his youth, and by the ascription to him and his relations of nameless immoralities, is a very different thing from the assignment of wrong motives for his political actions, though even in purely political controversy the ancients far exceeded the utmost limits of modern invective. And this both Demosthenes and Aeschines do freely. There is also reason to suspect that some of the tales which each tells of the other’s conduct, both while serving as ambassadors and on other occasions, may be fabrications. The descriptive passages for which such falsehoods gave an opening had doubtless their dramatic value in the oratorical performance: possibly they were even expected by the listeners; but their presence in the speeches does not increase our admiration either for the speaker or for his audience.
All the force of Demosthenes’ oratory was unable to defeat the great antagonist of his country. To Philip of Macedon failure was an inconceivable idea. Resident during three impressionable years of his youth at Thebes, he had there learned, from the example of Epaminondas, what a single man could do: and he proceeded to each of the three great tasks of his life — the welding of the rough Macedonians into one great engine of war, the unification of Greece under his own leadership, and the preparation for the conquest of the East by a united Greece and Macedonia — without either faltering in face of difficulties, or hesitating, out of any scrupulosity, to use the most effective means towards the end which he wished at the moment to achieve; though in fact the charges of bad faith made against him by Demosthenes are found to be exaggerated, when they are impartially examined. Philip intended to become master of Greece: Demosthenes realized this early, and, with all the Hellenic detestation of a master, resolved to oppose him to the end. Philip was, indeed, in spite of the barbarous traits which revealed themselves in him at times, not only gracious and courteous by nature, but a sincere admirer of Hellenic — in other words, of Athenian — culture; the relations between his house and the people of Athens had generally been friendly; and there was little reason to suppose that, if he conquered Athens, he would treat her less handsomely than in fact he did. Yet this could not justify one who regarded freedom as Demosthenes regarded it, in making any concession not extorted by the necessities of the situation: his duty and his country’s duty, as he conceived it, was to defeat the enemy of Hellenic independence or to fall in the attempt. Nor was it for him to consider (as Isocrates might) whether or no Philip’s plans had now developed into, or could be transformed into, a beneficent scheme for the conquest of the barbarian world by a united Hellas, if the union was to be achieved at the price of Athenian liberty. It is because, in spite of errors and of the questionable methods to which he sometimes stooped, Demosthenes devoted himself unflinchingly to the cause of freedom, for Athens and for the Hellenes as a whole, that he is entitled, not merely as an orator but as a politician, to the admiration which posterity has generally accorded him. It is, above all, by the second part of his career, when his policy of antagonism to Philip had been accepted by the people, and he was no longer in opposition but, as it were, in office, that Demosthenes himself claims to be justified; and Aeschines’ attempt to invalidate the claim is for the most part unconvincing.
It is not easy to describe in a few paragraphs the characteristics of Demosthenes as an orator. That he stands on the highest eminence that an orator has ever reached is generally admitted. But this is not to say that he was wholly free from faults. His contemporaries, as well as later Greek critics, were conscious of a certain artificiality in his eloquence. It was, indeed, the general custom of Athenian orators to prepare their speeches with great care: the speakers who, like Aeschines and Demades, were able to produce a great effect without preparation, and the rhetoricians who, like Alcidamas, thought of the studied oration as but a poor imitation of true eloquence, were only a small minority; and in general, not only was the arrangement of topics carefully planned, but the greatest attention was paid to the sound and rhythm of the sentences, and to the appropriateness and order of the words. The orator had also his collections of passages on themes which were likely to recur constantly, and of arguments on either side of many questions; and from these he selected such passages as he required, and adapted them to his particular purpose. The rhetorical teachers appear to have supplied their pupils with such collections; we find a number of instances of the repetition of the same passage in different speeches, and an abundance of arguments formed exactly on the model of the precepts contained in rhetorical handbooks.[10] Yet with all this art nothing was more necessary than that a speech should appear to be spontaneous and innocent of guile. There was a general mistrust of the ‘clever speaker’, who by study or rhetorical training had learned the art of arguing to any point, and making the worse cause appear the better. To have studied his part too carefully — even to have worked up illustrations from history and poetry — might expose the orator to suspicion.[11] Demosthenes, in spite of his frequent attempts to deprecate such suspicion, did not succeed wholly in keeping on the safe side. Aeschines describes him as a wizard and a sophist, who enjoyed deceiving the people or the jury. Another of his opponents levelled at him the taunt that his speeches ‘smelt of the lamp’. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, one of the best of the ancient critics, says that the artificiality of Demosthenes and his master Isaeus was apt to excite suspicion, even when they had a good case. Nor can a modern reader altogether escape the same impression. Sometimes, especially in the earlier speeches to the Assembly, the argument seems unreal, the joints between the previously prepared commonplaces or illustrations and their application to the matter in hand are too visible, the language is artificially phrased, and wanting in spontaneity and ease. There are also parts of the court speeches in which the orator seems to have calculated out all the possible methods of meeting a particular case, and to be applying them in turn with more ingenuity than convincingness. An appearance of unreality also arises at times (again principally in the earlier speeches) from a certain want of imagination. He attributes feelings and motives to others, which they were really most unlikely to have entertained, and argues from them. Some of the sentiments which he expects Artaxerxes or Artemisia to feel (in the Speeches on the Naval Boards and for the Rhodians) were certainly not to be looked for in them. Similar misconceptions of the actual or possible sentiments of the Spartans appear in the Speech for the Megalopolitans, and of those of the Thebans in the Third Olynthiac (§ 15). The early orations against Philip also show some misunderstanding of his character. And if, in fact, Demosthenes lived his early years largely in solitary studiousness and was unsociable by disposition, this lack of a quick grasp of human nature and motives is quite intelligible. But this defect grew less conspicuous as his experience increased; and though even to the end there remained something of the sophist about him, as about all the disciples of the ancient rhetoric, the greatness of his best work is not seriously affected by this. For, in his greatest speeches, and in the greatest parts of nearly all his speeches, the orator is white-hot with genuine passion and earnestness; and all his study and preparation resulted, for the most part, not in an artificial product, but in the most convincing expression of his real feeling and belief; so that it was the man himself, and not the rhetorical practitioner that spoke.
The lighter virtues of the orator are not to be sought for in him. In gracefulness and humour he is deficient: his humour, indeed, generally takes the grim forms of irony and satire, or verges on personality and bad taste. Few of his sentences can be imagined to have been delivered with a smile; and something like ferocity is generally not far below the surface. Pathos is seldom in him unmixed with sterner qualities, and is usually lost in indignation. But of almost every other variety of tone he has a complete command. The essential parts of his reasoning (even when it is logically or morally defective) are couched, as a rule, in a forcible and cogent form;[12] and he has a striking power of close, sustain
ed, and at the same time lucid argumentation. His matter is commonly disposed with such skill that each topic occurs where it will tell most powerfully; and while one portion of a speech affords relief to another (where relief is needed, and particularly in the longer orations) all alike bear on the main issue or strengthen the orator’s position with his audience. Historical allusions are not (as they often are by Aeschines and Isocrates) enlarged out of proportion to their importance, but are limited to what is necessary, in order to illustrate the orator’s point or drive his lesson home. Add to these qualities his combination of political idealism with absolute mastery of minute detail; the intensity of his appeal to the moral sense and patriotism of his hearers; the impressiveness of his denunciation of political wrong; the vividness of his narrative, the rapid succession of his impassioned phrases, and some part of the secret of his power will be explained. For the rest, while there is in his writing every degree of fullness or brevity, there is no waste of words, no ‘fine language’ out of place. His language, indeed, is ordinarily simple — sometimes even colloquial; though in the arrangement of his words in their most telling order he shows consummate art, and his metaphors are often bold and sometimes even violent. In the use of the ‘figures of speech’ he excels; above all, in the use of antitheses (whether for the purpose of vivid contrast or of precise logical expression), and of the rhetorical question, used now in indignation, now in irony, now in triumphant conclusion of an argument: and at times there are master-strokes of genius, which defy all analysis, such as the great appeal to the men of Marathon in the Speech on the Crown.[13] He does not as a rule (and this is particularly true of the Speech on the Crown) cover the whole of the ground with the same adequacy; but so concentrates all his forces upon certain points as to be irresistible, and thus ‘with thunder and lightning confounds’[14] the orators who oppose him. It is no wonder that some of the greatest of English orators, and notably of those of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, borrow from him not only words and phrases, but inspiration and confidence in their cause, and look upon him as a model whom they may emulate, but cannot excel.