Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

It was not only in delivery that he was great. His speeches were as convincing when read as when spoken. Fortunately, the great orators of those days prepared their speeches very carefully before delivery, and so it is that some of the best of the speeches of Demosthenes have come down to us and can be read by ourselves. The voice of the whole world pronounces these orations admirable, and they have been studied by every great orator since that day.

Demosthenes had a great theme for his orations. He entered public life at a critical period. The states of Greece had become miserably weak and divided by their jealousies and intrigues. Philip of Macedon, the craftiest and ablest leader of his time, was seeking to make Greece his prey, and using gold, artifice, and violence alike to enable him to succeed in this design. Against this man Demosthenes raised his voice, thundering his unequalled denunciations before the assembly of Athens, and doing his utmost to rouse the people to the defence of their liberties. Philip had as his advocate an orator only second to Demosthenes in power, Æschines by name, whom he had secretly bribed, and who opposed his great rival by every means in his power. For years the strife of oratory and diplomacy went on. Demosthenes, with remarkable clearness of vision, saw the meaning of every movement of the cunning Macedonian, and warned the Athenians in orations that should have moved any liberty-loving people to instant and decisive action. But he talked to a weak audience. Athens had lost its old energy and public virtue. It could still listen with lapsed breath to the earnest appeals of the orator, but had grown slow and vacillating in action. Æschines had a strong party at his back, and Athens procrastinated until it was too late and the liberties of ancient Greece fell, never to rise again, on the fatal field of Chæronea.

"If Philip is the friend of Greece we are doing wrong," Demosthenes had cried. "If he is the enemy of Greece we are doing right. Which is he? I hold him to be our enemy, because everything he has hitherto done has benefited him and hurt us."

The fall of Greece before the sword of its foe taught the Athenians that their orator was right. They at length learned to esteem Demosthenes at his full worth, and Ctesiphon, a leading Athenian, proposed that he should receive a golden crown from the state, and that his extraordinary merit and patriotism should be proclaimed in the theatre at the great festival of Dionysus.

Æschines declared that this was unconstitutional, and that he would bring action against Ctesiphon for breaking the laws. For six years the case remained untried, and then Æschines was forced to bring his suit. He did so in a powerful speech, in which he made a bitter attack on the whole public life of Demosthenes. When he ceased, Demosthenes rose, and in a speech which is looked upon as the most splendid master-piece of oratory ever produced, completely overwhelmed his life-long opponent, who left Athens in disgust. The golden crown, which Demosthenes had so nobly won, was his, and was doubly deserved by the immortal oration to which it gave birth, the grand burst of eloquence "For the Crown."