The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  With this force he was determined to unify Greece under his leadership; then, with the help of all Hellas, he proposed to cross the Hellespont and drive the Persians out of Greek Asia. At every step toward this end he found himself running counter to the Hellenic love of freedom; and in trying to overcome this resistance he almost forgot the end in the means. His first move brought him into conflict with Athens, for he sought to win possession of the cities that Athens had acquired on the Macedonian and Thracian coasts; these cities not only blocked his way to Asia, they also controlled rich gold mines and a taxable trade. While Athens was absorbed in the “Social War” that ended her second empire, Philip seized Amphipolis (357), Pydna, and Potidaea (356), and answered the protests of Athens with fine compliments to Athenian literature and art. In 355 he took Methone, losing an eye in the siege; in 347, after a long campaign of chicanery and bravery, he captured Olynthus. He now controlled all the European coast of the north Aegean, had an income of a thousand talents a year from the mines of Thrace,53 and could turn his thoughts to winning the support of Greece.

  To finance his campaigns he had sold thousands of captives—many of them Athenians—into slavery, and had lost the good will of Hellenes. It was fortunate for him that during these years the Greek states were exhausting themselves in a second “Sacred War” (356-46) over the spoliation of the Delphic treasury by the Phocians. The Spartans and Athenians fought for the Phocians, the Amphictyonic League—Boeotia, Locris, Doris, Thessaly—fought against them. Losing, the Amphictyonic Council besought the help of Philip. He saw his opportunity, came swiftly down through the open passes, overwhelmed the Phocians (346), was received into the Delphic Amphictyony, was acclaimed as the protector of the shrine, and accepted an invitation to preside over all the Greeks at the Pythian games. He cast his eyes upon the divided states of the Peloponnesus, and felt that he could win all of them except weakened Sparta to accept him as leader in a Greek Confederacy that might free all Greeks in the east and the west. But Athens, listening at last to Demosthenes, saw in Philip not a liberator but an enslaver, and decided to fight for the jealous sovereignty of the city-state, and the preservation of that free democracy which had made her the light of the world.

  VI. DEMOSTHENES

  The Vatican statue of the great orator is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic realism. It is a careworn face, as if every advance of Philip had cut another furrow into the brow. The body is thin and wearied; the aspect is that of a man who is about to make a final appeal for a cause that he considers lost; the eyes reveal a restless life, and foresee a bitter death.

  His father was a manufacturer of swords and bedframes, who bequeathed to him a business worth some fourteen talents ($84,000). Three executors administered the property for the boy, and squandered it so generously on themselves that when Demosthenes reached the age of twenty (363) he had to sue his guardians to recover the remains of his inheritance. He spent most of this in fitting out a trireme for the Athenian navy, and then settled down to earn his bread by writing speeches for litigants. He could compose better than he could speak, for he was weak in body and defective in articulation. Sometimes, says Plutarch, he prepared pleas for both the opposed parties to a dispute. Meanwhile, to overcome his impediments, he addressed the sea with a mouth full of pebbles, or declaimed as he ran up a hill. He worked hard, and his only distractions were courtesans and boys. “What can one do with Demosthenes?” his secretary complained. “Everything that he has thought of for a whole year is thrown into confusion by one woman in one night.”54 After years of effort he became one of the richest lawyers at the Athenian bar, learned in technicalities, convincing in discourse, and flexible in morals. He defended the banker Phormio against precisely such charges as he had brought against his guardians, took substantial fees from private persons for introducing and pressing legislation, and never answered the accusation of his colleague Hypereides that he was receiving money from the Persian King to stir up war against Philip.55 At his zenith his fortune was ten times as large as that which his father had left him.

  Nevertheless he had the integrity to suffer and die for the views that he was paid to defend. He denounced the dependence of Athens upon mercenary troops, and insisted that the citizens who received money from the theoric fund should earn it by serving in the army; his courage rose to the point of demanding that this fund should be used not to pay citizens to attend religious ceremonies and plays, but to organize a better force for the defense of the state.* He told the Athenians that they were degenerate slackers who had lost the military virtues of their progenitors. He refused to admit that the city-state had stultified itself with faction and war, and that the times called for the unity of Greece; this unity, he warned, was a phrase to conceal the subjugation of Greece to one man. He detected the ambitions of Philip from their first symptoms, and begged the Athenians to fight to retain their allies and colonies in the north.

  Against Demosthenes and Hypereides and the party of war stood Aeschines and Phocion and the party of peace. Very likely both sides were bribed, the one by Persia, the other by Philip,57 and both were sincerely moved by their own agitation. Phocion was by common consent the most honest statesman of his time—a Stoic before Zeno, a philosophical product of Plato’s Academy, an orator who so despised the Assembly that when it applauded him he asked a friend, “Have I not unconsciously said something bad?”58 Forty-five times he was chosen strategos, far surpassing the record of Pericles; he served ably as a general in many wars, but spent most of his life in advocating peace. His associate Aeschines was no stoic, but a man who had risen from bitter poverty to a comfortable income. His youth as a teacher and an actor helped him to become a fluent speaker, the first Greek orator, we are told, to speak extempore with success;59 his rivals wrote out their speeches in advance. Having served with Phocion in several engagements, he adopted Phocion’s policy of compromising with Philip instead of making war; and when Philip paid him for his efforts his enthusiasm for peace became an edifying devotion.

  Twice Demosthenes indicted Aeschines on the charge of receiving Macedonian gold, and twice failed to convict him. Finally, however, the martial eloquence of Demosthenes, and the southward advance of Philip, persuaded the Athenians to forego for a time the distribution of the theoric fund, and to employ it in war. In 338 an army was hastily organized, and marched north to face the phalanxes of Philip at Boeotian Chaeronea. Sparta refused to help, but Thebes, feeling Philip’s fingers at her throat, sent her Sacred Band to fight beside the Athenians. Every one of its three hundred members died on that battlefield. The Athenians fought almost as bravely, but they had waited too long, and were not equipped to meet so novel an army as the Macedonian. They broke and fled before the sea of lances that moved upon them, and Demosthenes fled with them. Alexander, Philip’s eighteen-year-old son, led the Macedonian cavalry with reckless courage, and won the honors of a bitter day.

  Philip was diplomatically generous in victory. He put to death some of the anti-Macedonian leaders in Thebes, and set up his partisans there in oligarchic power. But he freed the two thousand Athenian prisoners that he had taken, and sent the charming Alexander and the judicious Antipater to offer peace on condition that Athens recognize him as the general of all Greece against the common foe. Athens, which had expected harsher terms, not only consented, but passed resolutions showering compliments upon the new Agamemnon. Philip convened at Corinth a synedrion, or assembly, of the Greek states, formed them (except Sparta) into a federation modeled on the Boeotian, and outlined his plans for the liberation of Asia. He was unanimously chosen commander in this enterprise; each state pledged him men and arms, and promised that no Greek anywhere should fight against him. Such sacrifices were a small price to pay for his distance.

  The results of Chaeronea were endless. The unity that Greece had failed to create for itself had been achieved, but only at the point of a half-alien sword. The Peloponnesian War had proved Athens incapable of organizing Hellas, the aftermath had shown
Sparta incapable, the Theban hegemony in its turn had failed; the wars of the armies and the classes had worn out the city-states, and left them too weak for defense. Under the circumstances they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror, who proposed to withdraw from the scene of his victory, and leave to the conquered a large measure of freedom. Indeed Philip, and Alexander after him, watchfully protected the autonomy of the federated states, lest any one of them, by absorbing others, should grow strong enough to displace Macedon. One great liberty, however, Philip took away—the right of revolution. He was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property an indispensable stimulus to enterprise, and a necessary prop to government. He persuaded the synod at Corinth to insert into the articles of federation a pledge against any change of constitution, any social transformation, any political reprisals. In each state he lent his influence to the side of property, and put an end to confiscatory taxation.

  He had laid his plans well, except for Olympias; in the end his fate was determined not by his victories in the field but by his failure with his wife. She frightened him not only by her temper but by participating in the wildest Dionysian rites. One night he found a snake lying beside her in bed, and was not reassured by being told that it was a god. Worse, Olympias informed him that he was not the real father of Alexander; that on the night of their wedding a thunderbolt had fallen upon her and set her afire; it was the great god Zeus-Ammon who had begotten the dashing prince. Discouraged by such varied competition, Philip turned his amours to other women; and Olympias began her revenge by telling Alexander the secret of his divine paternity.60 One of Philip’s generals, Attalus, made matters worse by proposing a toast to Philip’s expected child by a second wife, as promising a “legitimate” (i.e., completely Macedonian) heir to the throne. Alexander flung a goblet at his head, crying, “Am I, then, a bastard?” Philip drew his sword against his son, but was so drunk that he could not stand. Alexander laughed at him: “Here,” he said, “is a man preparing to cross from Europe into Asia, who cannot step surely from one couch to another.” A few months later one of Philip’s officers, Pausanias, having asked redress from Philip for an insult from Attalus, and receiving no satisfaction, assassinated the King (336). Alexander, idolized by the army and supported by Olympias,* seized the throne, overcame all opposition, and prepared to conquer the world.

  CHAPTER XX

  Letters and Arts in the Fourth Century

  I. THE ORATORS

  THROUGH all this turmoil literature reflected the declining virility of Greece. Lyrical poetry was no longer the passionate expression of creative individuals, but a polite exercise of salon intellectuals, a learned echo of schoolday tasks. Timotheus of Miletus wrote an epic, but it did not accord with an argumentative age, and remained as unpopular as his early music. Dramatic performances continued, but on a more modest scale and in a lower key. The impoverishment of the public treasury and the weakened patriotism of private wealth reduced the splendor and significance of the chorus; more and more the dramatists contented themselves with unrelated musical intermezzi in place of choruses organically united with the play. The name of the choragus disappeared from public notice, then the name of the poet; only the name of the actor remained. The drama became less and less a poem, more and more a histrionic exhibition; it was an era of great actors and small dramatists. Greek tragedy had been built upon religion and mythology, and required some faith and piety in its auditors; it naturally faded away in the twilight of the gods.

  Comedy prospered as tragedy decayed, and took over something of the subtlety, refinement, and subject matter of the Euripidean stage. This Middle Comedy (400-323) lost its taste or courage for political satire precisely when politics most needed a “candid friend”; possibly such satire was forbidden or the audience was weary of politics now that Athens was ruled by second-rate men. The general retirement of the fourth-century Greek from public to private life inclined his interest from affairs of state to those of the home and the heart. The comedy of manners appeared; love began to dominate the scene, and not always by its virtue; the ladies of the demimonde mingled on the boards with fishwives, cooks, and bewildered philosophers—though the honor of the protagonists and the dramatist was saved by a marriage at the end. These plays were not coarsened by Aristophanes’ vulgarity and burlesque, but neither were they vitalized by his exuberance and his imagination. We know the names, and have none of the works, of thirty-nine poets of the Middle Comedy; but we may judge from their fragments that they did not write for the ages. Alexis of Thurii wrote 245 plays, Antiphanes 260. They made hay while the sun shone, and died with its setting.

  It was a century of orators. The rise of industry and trade turned men’s minds to realism and practicality, and the schools that once had taught the poems of Homer now trained their pupils in rhetoric. Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, Demades, Deinarchus, Aeschines, Demosthenes were oratorpoliticians, leaders of political factions, masters of what the Germans have called the Advokatenrepublik. Similar men appeared in the democratic interludes of Syracuse; the oligarchic states did not suffer them. The Athenian orators were clear and vigorous in language, averse to ornate eloquence, capable, now and then, of noble patriotic flights, and given to such dishonesty of argument and abusiveness of speech as would not be tolerated even in a modern campaign. The heterogeneous quality of the Athenian Assembly and the popular courts had a debasing as well as a stimulating effect upon Greek oratory, and through it upon Greek literature. The Athenian citizen enjoyed bouts of oratorical invective almost as much as he enjoyed a prize fight; when a duel was expected between such word warriors as Aeschines and Demosthenes, men came from distant villages and foreign states to hear them. Often the appeal was to pride and prejudice; Plato, who hated oratory as the poison that was killing democracy, defined rhetoric as the art of governing men by addressing their feelings and passions.

  Even Demosthenes, with all his vigor and nervous intensity, his frequent ascent to passages of patriotic fervor, his withering fire of personal attack, his clever and relieving alternation of narrative and argument, the carefully rhythmic quality of his language, and the overwhelming torrent of his speech—even Demosthenes strikes us as a little less than great. He laid the secret of oratory in acting (hypocrisis), and so believed this that he rehearsed his speeches patiently, and recited them before a mirror. He dug himself a cave and lived in it for months, practicing secretly; in these periods he kept one half of his face shaved to deter himself from leaving his retreat.1 On the rostrum he contorted his figure, whirled round and round, laid his hand upon his forehead as in reflection, and often raised his voice to a scream.2 All this, says Plutarch, “was wonderfully pleasing to the common people, but by well-educated persons, as, for example, by Demetrius of Phalerum, it was looked upon as mean, humiliating, and unmanly.” We are amused by Demosthenes’ histrionics, amazed by his self-esteem, confused by his digressions, and appalled by his ungracious scurrility. There is little wit in him, little philosophy. Only his patriotism redeems him, and the apparent sincerity of his despairing cry for freedom.

  The historic climax of Greek oratory came in 330. Six years before, Ctesiphon had carried through the Council a preliminary proposal to award Demosthenes a crown or wreath in appreciation not only of his statesmanship but of his many financial gifts to the state. To keep this honor from his rival, Aeschines indicted Ctesiphon on the ground (technically correct) of having introduced an unconstitutional proposal. The case of Ctesiphon, repeatedly postponed, finally came to trial before a jury of five hundred citizens. It was, of course, a cause célèbre; all who could came, even from afar, to hear it; for in effect the greatest of Athenian orators was fighting for his good name and his political life. Aeschines spent little time attacking Ctesiphon, but turned his assault upon the character and career of Demosthenes, who replied in kind with his famous speech On the Crown. Every line of the two orations still vibrates with excitement, and is hot with the hatred of enemies brought face to face i
n war. Demosthenes, knowing that offense is better than defense, charged that Philip had chosen the most corruptible of the orators as his mouthpieces in Athens. Then he etched in acid a life portrait of Aeschines:

  I must let you know who this man really is who embarks upon vituperation so glibly . . . and what is his parentage. Virtue? You renegade!—what have you or your family to do with virtue? . . . Where did you get your right to talk about education? . . . Shall I relate how your father was a slave who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck, or how your mother practiced daylight nuptials in an outhouse? . . . You helped your father in the drudgery of a grammar school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, holding the position of a menial. . . . After getting yourself enrolled on the register of your parish—no one knows how you managed it, but let that pass—you chose a most gentlemanly occupation, that of clerk and errand-boy to minor officials. After committing all the offenses with which you reproach other people, you were relieved of that employment. . . . You entered the service of those famous players, Simylus and Socrates, better known as the Growlers. You played small parts to their lead, picking up figs and grapes and olives, and making a better living out of those missiles than by all the battles you fought for dear life. For there was no truce or armistice in the warfare between you and your audience. . . .