Demosthenes

• 1. Introduction

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  Demosthenes died on the 12th of October 322 BC by swallowing poison concealed in a reed, having pretended he wanted to write a letter to his family. As the poison took hold, he addressed Archias, the agent sent to arrest him: "Now, as soon as you please you may commence the part of Creon in the tragedy, and cast out this body of mine unburied." Then he passed by the altar, fell down, and died. For a man who spent his life trying to save Athens through the power of words, it was a fitting if terrible end. He had come from orphanhood and a stolen inheritance to become the voice of an entire civilisation fighting for its freedom. How did a stammering boy with a "delicate physique" become the orator whom Cicero called "the perfect orator" who lacked nothing? And what drove him, decade after decade, to stand against the most powerful military force the Greek world had ever seen?

• 2. The Orphan Who Sued His Guardians

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  Demosthenes was born in 384 BC, and his father died when he was seven years old. His father had been a wealthy sword-maker and left an estate of nearly fourteen talents, which has been estimated as roughly equivalent to about 220 years of a labourer's income at standard wages. Three guardians, Aphobus, Demophon, and Therippides, were entrusted with the boy and his inheritance. They mishandled both. When Demosthenes came of age in 366 BC, he demanded an accounting. What the account revealed, he said, was systematic plunder: his guardians had left nothing "except the house, and fourteen slaves and thirty silver minae." Thirty silver minae amounted to half a talent, a fraction of what his father had bequeathed. His response was to go to court. At the age of 20, he delivered five orations against his guardians, three Against Aphobus during 363 and 362 BC and two Against Onetor during 362 and 361 BC. The courts fixed his damages at ten talents. He recovered only a portion of it. But in trying to win back what was his, Demosthenes had discovered something more valuable than any inheritance: a talent for argument that would define his entire life. The preparation for those trials shaped him. He reportedly built an underground study where he practised speaking, shaved one half of his head so he could not go out in public, and recited verses while running or out of breath. He practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth. He stood before a large mirror, watching himself. What began as necessity became devotion.

• 3. Overcoming the Body

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  Aeschines, who would become Demosthenes's greatest political rival, mocked him throughout his career with a nickname: "Batalus." The name appears to have originated with his childhood tutors or the boys he played with. It corresponded to how someone with a particular variety of rhotacism would pronounce "Battaros," the name of a legendary Libyan king known for speaking quickly and in a disordered fashion. Rhotacism is the mispronunciation of the sound r as l, and it is now considered the likely explanation for what Plutarch described as "a perplexed and indistinct utterance and a shortness of breath, which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke." When Demosthenes first addressed the Athenian Assembly, the people derided him for a style "cumbered with long sentences and tortured with formal arguments to a most harsh and disagreeable excess." Dejected after being refused a hearing, he was encouraged by an old man named Eunomus who told him his diction resembled that of Pericles. On another occasion, an actor named Satyrus followed him home after a similar rejection and offered a different kind of counsel. Demosthenes undertook a disciplined programme covering diction, voice, and gesture. When asked to name the three most important elements in oratory, he reportedly replied: "Delivery, delivery and delivery." Whether or not that exchange actually happened, it captures something true about how he worked. Lucian records that Demosthenes made eight handwritten copies of Thucydides, the historian he most admired, presumably to absorb that prose rhythm into his own writing.

• 4. The Logographer's World

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  Before politics, Demosthenes made his living as a logographer, a professional speech-writer for hire, and as an advocate who spoke in court on another's behalf. The Athenian legal system created the conditions that made this profession both necessary and influential. Athenian juries were enormous, typically between 201 and 501 members. There was no judge to instruct them, no conferencing before a verdict, and little cross-examination during trial. Witnesses were distrusted because they could be secured by force or bribery. The result was that cases depended heavily on questions of probable motive, and artfully constructed speeches held enormous weight. Demosthenes could adapt to almost any client, including wealthy and powerful men, and he probably continued writing speeches throughout his career even after he entered politics. One episode became notorious. In 350 BC he reportedly wrote a speech for Phormion, a wealthy banker, and then communicated its contents to Apollodorus, who was bringing a capital charge against Phormion. Plutarch recorded that Demosthenes "was thought to have acted dishonourably." Some scholars have argued that the alleged deception was part of a political arrangement, whereby Apollodorus secretly pledged support for reforms Demosthenes was pursuing in the public interest, including the diversion of the Theoric Fund to military purposes. The nature of Athenian political life made such distinctions difficult to draw. Politicians routinely indicted each other for breaches of the statute laws, and accusations of bribery and corruption were ubiquitous. As the scholar J. H. Vince put it, "there was no room for chivalry in Athenian political life."

• 5. Against Philip

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  In 354 BC, Demosthenes delivered his first public political speech, On the Navy. Within a few years, he had identified the subject that would consume the rest of his career: the expanding power of Philip II of Macedon. In the First Philippic, delivered around 351-350 BC, he warned his fellow citizens that their passivity was Philip's greatest ally. "For a free people there can be no greater compulsion than shame for their position," he told them. He proposed a rapid-response military force in which each hoplite would receive only ten drachmas per month, two obols per day, less than the average pay for unskilled labourers, with the implicit understanding that the soldiers would make up the difference through looting. He called for the reform of the Theoric Fund, the public allowance that paid for Athenians to attend dramatic festivals, redirecting it toward military preparations. Philip, he insisted, was a menace to the autonomy of all Greek cities, and yet he was a monster of Athens's own creation: "Even if something happens to him, you will soon raise up a second Philip." When Philip attacked Athens's ally Olynthus in 349 BC, Demosthenes delivered three further orations, the Olynthiacs, urging Athens to intervene. He insulted Philip directly by calling him a "barbarian." Athens ultimately failed to prevent Olynthus from falling. In 343 BC, Demosthenes prosecuted Aeschines for high treason over the Peace of Philocrates negotiations. Aeschines was acquitted, but only by the narrow margin of thirty votes from a jury that may have numbered as many as 1,501 members. In 342 BC, Demosthenes delivered the Third Philippic, widely regarded as the finest of his political orations, demanding resolute action and telling the Athenians it would be "better to die a thousand times than pay court to Philip."

• 6. Chaeronea and Its Aftermath

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  In 338 BC, Demosthenes secured the alliance that he believed Athens needed most: Thebes. Philip had sent his own delegation to the Boeotian city, but Demosthenes outmanoeuvred him. The price of the alliance was significant: Athens would pay two thirds of the campaign's costs, and Thebes would command on land while the two cities shared command at sea. What followed undid all of it. Philip drew the Athenian and Theban forces into a plain near Chaeronea and defeated them. Demosthenes fought in the battle as a common hoplite. According to Diodorus Siculus, Philip sneered at Demosthenes's misfortunes after the victory. The statesman Demades responded with a rebuke: "O King, when Fortune has cast you in the role of Agamemnon, are you not ashamed to act the part of Thersites?" Philip was said to have immediately altered his demeanour. Philip imposed harsh punishment on Thebes but made peace with Athens on lenient terms. Demosthenes was chosen by the Assembly to deliver the Funeral Oration for those who had fallen. When Philip was assassinated in 336 BC at the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra of Macedon to King Alexander of Epirus, Demosthenes celebrated openly. According to Aeschines, he put on a white garland and white raiment though the ceremonies of mourning for his own daughter, who had died just days before Philip, were not yet completed. In 335 BC, when Alexander was campaigning in the north against the Thracians and the Illyrians, Demosthenes spread a rumour, reportedly producing a bloodstained messenger as evidence, that Alexander and his entire expeditionary force had been killed by the Triballians. The Thebans and Athenians rose up once more, financed in part by Darius III of Persia. Alexander was very much alive. He razed Thebes to the ground.

• 7. On the Crown and the Harpalus Affair

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  In 336 BC, the orator Ctesiphon proposed that Athens honour Demosthenes with a golden crown for his services to the city. Aeschines prosecuted Ctesiphon on charges of legal irregularities, but waited until 330 BC to bring the case. Demosthenes's response, On the Crown, is regarded as his masterpiece. He defended not only Ctesiphon but his own entire political career, insisting that his constant aim had been the honour and supremacy of Athens, and that he had preserved his loyalty on every occasion and in every phase of fortune. He defeated Aeschines so thoroughly that his rival left Athens and never returned. In 324 BC a different kind of crisis arrived in the form of Harpalus, the man to whom Alexander had entrusted vast treasures and who had absconded with them, seeking refuge in Athens. Demosthenes had initially advised against admitting him. Eventually Harpalus was imprisoned, and the money was entrusted to a committee presided over by Demosthenes himself. When the committee counted the treasure, they found only half of what Harpalus had declared. Harpalus escaped. The Areopagus investigated and charged Demosthenes with mishandling twenty talents. He was tried before an unusually large jury of 1,500, found guilty, and fined fifty talents. Unable to pay, he went into exile and returned to Athens only nine months later, after Alexander's death. The reception he received from his countrymen was described as one "such as had never been accorded to any returning exile since the days of Alkibiades." Whether he was genuinely guilty has never been settled. George Grote argued he was innocent and that the charges were politically motivated. The historian Mogens Hansen countered that many Athenian leaders made fortunes through bribery, and that Demosthenes fit the pattern.

• 8. Legacy and Rhetorical Inheritance

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  Quintilian called Demosthenes lex orandi, the standard of oratory. Longinus compared him to a blazing thunderbolt and credited him with having "perfected to the utmost the tone of lofty speech, living passions, copiousness, readiness, speed." Cicero said that among all orators "he excels alone" and also called him "the perfect orator" who lacked nothing, though in a now-lost letter he did admit that Demosthenes occasionally "nods." Cicero was so shaped by Demosthenes that, according to Professor of Classics Cecil Wooten, he ended his own career trying to imitate Demosthenes's political role. Cicero's speeches against Mark Antony were even titled the Philippics, in direct homage. Plutarch drew out the parallels between the two men's lives: both rose from obscurity, both contested kings and tyrants, both lost daughters, were driven from their countries and returned with honour, were seized by enemies, and died with the liberty of their countrymen still unresolved. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Demosthenes was read more than any other ancient orator. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau idealised him and wrote a book about him. Friedrich Nietzsche composed his own sentences according to the paradigms of Demosthenes's style. The authors of The Federalist Papers, the 85 essays arguing for ratification of the United States Constitution, drew inspiration from him. Sixty-one orations attributed to Demosthenes survived to the present day, though some are pseudonymous. Modern editions rest on four manuscripts dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. The Athenians, years after his suicide on Kalaureia, erected a statue in his honour and decreed that the state should provide meals to his descendants in the Prytaneum. The inscription engraved on the base of that statue read: "Had you for Greece been strong, as wise you were, the Macedonian would not have conquered her."