John Frederic Dobson

“ For to brave men the prizes of war are freedom and valour; for both of these the dead may possess. And further, we may not say that our defeat was due to them, whose spirits never quailed before the terror of the enemy’s approach; for to those who fall nobly in battle, and to them alone, can no man justly ascribe defeat; for fleeing from slavery they make choice of a noble death. The valour of these men is a proof, for they alone of all in Greece had freedom in their bodies; for as they passed from life all Greece passed into slavery ”

“ In the Macedonian era a distinguished stranger had more prospect not only of appreciation but of material advancement in one of the royal cities than in a city-state which had become little better than a minor satrapy in one of the great empires, and traded only on the fading memories of its former magnificence. Life in the great cities was very different, too, from life in democratic Athens. From the time of Pericles to that of Demosthenes, all citizens had at least a strong corporate feeling; all citizens knew each other. ”

“ He can speak of himself with dignity, of his family with true feeling; careful argument succeeds to lucid narrative; crisp interrogation, reinforced by powerful sarcasm, to masterly exposition. He can awaken his hearers’ interest by an indication of the course which he intends to follow, and this interest is sustained by all the resources of an eloquence which, though at times sophistical, and though disfigured by occasional blemishes, has more of naturalness and shows less traces of scholastic elaboration, than that of any other great orator. ”

“ But my prayer is, firstly, that if my tongue leads me into error, you will be merciful, and consider that my error is due to inexperience rather than guilt; and secondly, that if I should in any point express myself well, you will attribute such expression not to any cleverness of mine but to the inherent power of truth; for justice demands that a man guilty in his actions should not win salvation by his speech, and, equally, that one righteous in his actions should not for his speech be brought to ruin; for an error in speech is the tongue’s fault—an error in action is a fault of the heart. ”

“ Isocrates could see behind the glowing colours in which the glories of the Periclean age are sometimes painted, and equally with Demosthenes he realized, and did not shrink from noticing, the weakness of Athens in his own days. But his advice, though noble, is unpractical. He failed, in spite of his knowledge of history, to fathom the depth of Greek selfishness. No State that relied solely or chiefly on moral worth could have a voice in the council of Greece, far less dominate its policy. ”

“ There is nothing striking or original in this peroration, which recalls the fragment of the funeral speech of Gorgias, especially in the forced and repeated contrasts between ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal.’ In manner and in substance it is infinitely inferior to the famous speech of Pericles, which, with all its extravagances of style, has a note of true feeling. The Epitaphios of Lysias rings hollow; it is feeble in imagery, it contains very little reference to the dead, and holds out no hope of comfort to the living. ”

“ No orator could rise at the Olympic Festival to summon all Greeks to brotherhood in arms; no funeral speech could move a people to tears or exalt them to enthusiasm when battles [312] were waged by mercenaries and war declared not by a nation but by a foreign prince. The art of rhetoric was still practised, but already Aristotle, by going back to first principles, had composed the first and last scientific treatise on this subject, and shown that it must be put into its true place as a branch of philosophy, to be studied in combination with its counterpart, Dialectic. ”

“ We cannot make all men orators, but we can give them culture.
‘Others assert that our philosophy has an immoral tendency. I shall not defend all who claim to be educators, but only those who have a right to the name. We have nothing to gain by making men immoral; on the contrary the greatest satisfaction for a Sophist is that his pupils should become wise and honourable men, respected by their fellows. ”

“ If Athens or Sparta were now, as once, predominant, nothing could be done; but all the great cities are now practically on a level. No enmities are so deep-seated that they cannot be overcome: Athens has at different times been allied with both Thebes and Sparta. Sparta, Argos, and Thebes all desire peace; Athens has come to her senses before the others, and already made peace. ”

“ Antiphon is not singular among prose writers in introducing poetical words; Plato, the greatest master of Attic prose, is in some cases more poetical than the poets themselves, though his genius is sufficient to obviate any sense of harshness or incongruity. But to an orator such harshness might on occasion be a positive advantage for producing a particular effect; an unusual word must, at the worst, attract attention; at the best it lends dignity to an otherwise pedestrian sentence. ”

“ After enumerating the points in which either of the writers excels or falls short, he describes his own feelings:
‘When I read a speech of Isocrates, I become sober and serious, as if I were listening to solemn music; but when I take up a speech of Demosthenes, I am beside myself, I am led this way and that, I am moved by one passion after another: suspicion, distress, fear, contempt, hate, pity, kindliness, anger, envy—passing successively through all the passions which can obtain a mastery over the human mind ”

“ If we read the tetralogies of Antiphon, excellent as they may be in showing the writer’s grasp of the technique of his trade, and turn from them to one of the real speeches, the Herodes, for instance, we feel at once how great a gain it is to have the human interest before us. A speech in which real persons are concerned must always have this advantage over a declamatory exercise. ”

“ Foremost among the men of the peace party was Phocion, an aristocrat by instinct if not by birth; a man admired alike for ability and integrity, so that, though he was no great orator, his speeches always commanded respect. He aspired, like Pericles, to be both a statesman and a general, and in the former capacity had at times to speak in the assembly. Various anecdotes in Plutarch point to his efforts to attain a conciseness which was almost laconic. His utterance was as trenchant as it was brief—Demosthenes called him ‘the knife that cuts my speeches down’ ”

“ Those who refuse to await their trial practically stand self-condemned, so that you may reasonably pass on them the sentence which they have passed on themselves; but as for those who wait to stand their trial in the confidence that they have done no wrong, you have a right to hold the same opinion about them which they have held about themselves, and not decide, without a hearing, that they are in the wrong.... ”

“ His personal dignity is as remarkable in his manner as in the formalities of style. As we turn back to him from Demosthenes or Aeschines, who lowered the tone of forensic pleading to suit contemporary taste, we are surprised to find that he hardly ever condescends to ridicule, never to scurrilous invective. His judicial adversaries are not necessarily persons of discreditable parentage, immoral character, and infamous occupation. They may perhaps be liars, for one’s own statement of the case must be assumed to contain the whole truth, and consequently the other side must depend on falsehood ”

“ Demosthenes seems to discard metaphor in his most solemn moments. In a spirit of sarcasm he can use such expressions as those quoted above about the disorderly scene in prison, and in an outburst of indignation he can speak of rival politicians as ‘Fiends, who have mutilated the corpses of their fatherlands, and made a birthday present of their liberty first to Philip, and now again to Alexander; who measure happiness by their belly and their basest pleasures’; [343] but on grave occasions, whether in narrative or in counsel, he reverts to a simplicity equal to that of Lysias. ”

“ Any young aspirant to literary fame might now learn from him to write fluent easy prose, which would have been impossible to Thucydides or Antiphon. If the style seems on some occasions to have been so over-elaborated that the subject-matter takes a secondary place, that was the fault not so much of the artist as of the man. Isocrates never wrote at fever-heat; his greatest works come from the study; he is too reflective and dispassionate to be a really vital force. ”

“ This Greek of a late Hellenistic age thoroughly grasped the Athenian spirit, which demanded artistic composition and was yet suspicious of any man who was too obviously clever, a spirit against which we find Antiphon, the earliest of the orators, contending, when he makes his characters protest their own inexperience and insinuate that their opponents seem strong only because they have that same discreditable skill to make the worse cause appear the better. ”

“ Our modern demagogues are merely self-seeking, and their covetousness reduces not only the state but the citizens to penury.
‘Peace, at the price I have indicated, is the only remedy. We must deliver Greece, not despoil her. Athens should hold among Greek States the position that the kings occupy in Sparta; they are not tyrants; they have a higher standard of conduct than any private person, and are held in such respect that any man who would not throw away his life for them in the field is reckoned meaner than a deserter.’
There is much truth in the invectives aimed at the old empire ”

“ No doubt some record of verdicts was kept, but the Athenians had no great respect for precedent, or at any rate could not make full use of it in the lack of professional judges who should be experts in such matters. Thus there were great opportunities for a man like Isaeus, who combined a minute knowledge of law and procedure with skill in applying his knowledge; who could quote at will either the law or precedent for departing from its letter, and, where the wording of the law left any room for ambiguous interpretation, could twist the meaning to one side or the other to suit his case. ”

“ Andocides, on the other hand, was not a trained orator, except in so far as every Athenian was trained in youth in the elements of speaking. He was not either a professional pleader or a frequent speaker in public—indeed, from the fact that he lived long in exile he cannot have had many opportunities of appearing either in the law-courts or the assembly. Possessing a convenient fluency of speech and a thorough command of the language of daily life, he finds in it a satisfactory means of expression. ”

“ In most cases he seems to have by nature what Lysias obtained by art—a clear and direct way of expressing his thoughts, a simplicity of language in which nothing strained or unfamiliar strikes the ear. On the other hand, there are inconsistencies in his style; there are times when, apparently without premeditation, he does use words or phrases slightly foreign to the speech of common life. ”

“ Though we modern students cannot expect to rival him in these peculiar gifts, it is still possible for us to sympathize with his feelings. We cannot fail, in reading a speech like the Third Philippic, for instance, to appreciate how fully Demosthenes realizes the Platonic ideal, expressed in the Gorgias, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion. We need not pause to analyse the means by which he attains his end; he may resemble Lysias at one moment in a simple piece of narrative, at another he may be as involved and antithetical as Thucydides, or even florid like Gorgias ”

“ But even in the unimportant private speeches Lysias has not one method only, and we feel that he varied his style of sentence-construction to suit the character of the speaker for whom he wrote. Thus the youth Mantitheus is nearly as simple in speech as he is ingenuous in thought, while the cripple, whom we feel to be a plausible rascal, glibly produces strings of neat antitheses, such as the following:
‘The rich with their money can buy exemption from danger, the poor are compelled by their indigence to practise moderation. ”

“ With the Greeks oratory was instinctive; in the earliest semi-historical records that we possess, eloquence is found to be a gift prized not less highly than valour in battle; the kings and princes are not only ‘renowned for their power,’ but are ‘leaders of the people by their counsels, ... wise and eloquent in their instructions’; strength and courage are the property of all, but the real leaders must be the counsellors, βουλήφοροι ἄνδρες. ”

“ The Sophists is really an attack on the methods of Isocrates, and is directed against the practice of laboriously composing written speeches, which are no real help to a man who wishes to be an orator, whether in the assembly or the law-courts. Certain so-called Sophists, he contends, who, while quite incapable of speaking, have practised writing, pride themselves on this accomplishment, and though they can call only [161] one small department of rhetoric their own, claim to be masters of the complete science. ”

“ In my speech I shall attempt to show that he is a liar, and that up to the present day my life has been one that should win praise rather than be exposed to jealousy, for I cannot think that he has brought me to trial from any other motive than jealousy. But if a man feels jealousy towards one whom all others pity, what baseness will he not sink to, do you suppose? ”

“ Aristotle finds the loose, running style tedious, because it has no artistic limit of length, and never gets to an end until it has finished what it has to say. To us it seems to have this slight advantage, that it can always stop when it has said what it means, and has no temptation to plunge itself into antithesis or lose its way at the cross-roads of chiasmus before it arrives at its destination ”

“ In various cities of Greater Greece there arose men of high intellectual attainment, conveniently classed together under the title of Sophists (educators) , who, neglecting abstract questions, undertook to prepare men for the higher walks of civic life by instruction of various kinds. The greatest, of these, Protagoras of Abdera, expressed his contempt for philosophy in the well-known dictum, ‘Man is the measure of all things—of what is, that it is; and of what is not, that it is not.’ He therefore devoted himself to the study of literature, and, in particular, of Homer. ”

“ Aeschines was apparently unmoved by these taunts; but he seems to have been deeply injured when Demosthenes compared him to the Sirens, whose voices charm men to their destruction. His indignation can find no repartee; he can only expostulate that the charge is indecent, and even if it were true, Demosthenes is not a fit man to bring it; only a man of deeds would be a worthy accuser; his rival is nothing but a bundle of words. Here, recovering himself a little, he delivers himself of the idea that Demosthenes is as empty as a flute—no good for anything if you take away the mouthpiece. ”

“ He is well equipped with intelligence, and is full of charm; he seems simple, but is no stranger to cleverness.’ [440]
The first sentence contrasts Hyperides once for all with his contemporary Lycurgus, who, while less sure of his aim, has a personal dignity which gives exaltation to every theme.
We have hardly enough of the work of Hyperides to enable us to form a first-hand judgment as to the merits of his diction compared with that of Lysias. He has, indeed, the same simplicity and naturalness, but hardly, so far as we can judge, the same felicity of expression. ”