William Jackson Brodribb

“ Therefore I would not hesitate to say that I think it better that all the Greeks should be your enemies with a popular government than your friends under an oligarchical. For with free men I consider you would have no difficulty in making peace when you chose; but with people under an oligarchy, even friendship I hold to be insecure. It is impossible that the few can be attached to the many, the seekers of power to the lovers of constitutional equality. ”

“ It made the rich feel that they must not use their riches merely for their own selfish enjoyment, but that it ought to be the glory of an Athenian citizen of fortune to put happiness and refinement within the reach of every member of the community. Pericles, in the famous funeral oration, the substance of which Thucydides has given us, had boasted how it was the peculiar genius of Athens to combine mirthfulness and gaiety with a strong sense of political responsibility. ”

“ The highest aspects of Greek life, and its best influences on the civilisation of the world, were intimately connected with Greece as existing according to his conception of what she ought to be. His eloquence is at its highest when he dwells on her fixed resolution in past days to resist to the death anything like foreign dictation or interference. Greece, in his view, was nothing if she once brought herself to endure it. ”

“ The danger is theirs before it is ours. Next, let all citizens of military age and all your cavalry march to Eleusis, and show yourselves to the world in arms, that the Thebans who are on your side may be as bold as their adversaries, and speak out in the cause of right, with the assurance that, if there is at Elateia a force at hand to support the party who have sold their country to Philip, your forces are no less at the disposal of those who would fight for freedom, and ready to succour them in case of attack. ”

“ Each of these peoples did get a certain advantage; but some of them have suffered what all the world knows; others will suffer whatever may hereafter befall them. As for you, I recount not all that has been taken from you, but how shamefully have you been treated and despoiled! Why is it that Philip deals so differently with you and with others? Because yours is the only state in Greece in which the privilege is allowed of speaking for the enemy, and a citizen taking a bribe may safely address the Assembly, though you have been robbed of your dominions. ”

“ My advice is, do not be over-alarmed at the war; neither be led to commence it. As far as I see, no other state of Greece has reason to fear it. All the Greeks know that so long as they regarded Persia as their common enemy, they were at peace one with another, and enjoyed much prosperity. But since they have looked on the King as a friend, and quarrelled about disputes with each other, they have suffered worse calamities than any one could possibly imprecate upon them. Should we fear a man whom both fortune and heaven declare to be an unprofitable friend and a useful enemy? ”

“ Both these men refused to believe that Greece could any longer be what she had been. Both were honest and conscientious thinkers; but we can never have quite the same feeling towards the man who is inclined to despair of a great cause as we have towards him who will persist in hoping against hope. It was this which Demosthenes did through life amid many discouragements; and this gives him a moral greatness which we believe posterity will always recognise. Such a man would be sure in his public speeches to appeal to conscience, to the moral sense, and to a lofty patriotism. ”

“ Yet how nobly and admirably did you consult the dignity of Athens, and undertook the war against them for the rights of Greece! Why do I mention this? To show and convince you that nothing, if you take precaution, is to be feared; nothing, if you are negligent, goes as you desire. Take, for examples, the strength of the Lacedæmonians, which you overcame by minding your duty; and the insolent ambition of this Philip now, which utterly confounds us through our neglect of our interest. ”

“ He who looks on himself as merely the child of his parents, awaits death in the ordinary course of nature; while he who looks on himself as the child also of his country, will be ready to lay down his life rather than see her enslaved, and will hold death itself less terrible than the insults and indignities which the citizens of a state in slavery to the foreigner must endure. ”

“ As many as thirty-two free Greek cities had utterly perished in a period of less than two years at the hands of a barbarian. Divided as the Greeks were among themselves, they would have all heartily responded to the sentiment of Demosthenes that "a barbarian should be submissive to Greeks." It must have shocked and shamed them to see with their own eyes troops of poor enslaved creatures, of both sexes and of Greek blood, passing through the streets of their cities. ”

“ Blame former doings as you may, know you also the future? Oh, but we are far from expecting anything of the kind, I trust we are; but being human, our language and our law should be such as not to shock religious sentiment; and while we look for good fortune, and implore heaven to grant it, we will regard all fortune as subject to human casualties. The future, I take it, is uncertain to all men, and small occasions are productive of great events. Therefore we will be moderate in prosperity, and show that we have an eye to the future. ”

“ Though Thebes soon fell back from the pre-eminence to which the genius of Epameinondas had lifted her, Sparta was never able to regain her ancient prestige.
Athens, from some cause or other, had much more elasticity and power of recovery than Sparta. There was a life and sprightliness about her citizens which made them quickly forget calamities and rise to new hopes and aspirations. So it was with them after Leuctra. Athens at once was fired with the ambition of winning back her old empire; and she actually succeeded in again becoming the head of a powerful confederacy. ”

“ The best and noblest eloquence must be the product of earnest political conviction, Cicero clung to the traditions of the old republic, and regarded the concentration of power in one man as equivalent to his country's degradation and fall. The Greek statesman could not imagine a worse calamity than that Greece should cease to exist as an aggregate of free, self-governing communities, and become a dependency on a foreign kingdom or empire. ”

“ Athens was forced into a miserably ignominious peace, and many of her citizens had stooped to the infamy of being the mere tools and paid agents of the "man of Macedon." Even Isocrates, true Greek as he was in all his sympathies, as well as thoroughly upright and high-minded, was now convinced that the best wisdom for Greece was to put itself under the leadership of this wonderfully successful prince, and allow him to conduct its united armies to the conquest of Persia. ”

“ Every man in Thebes whom money can buy, every man whom flattery can gain, has long ago been secured. But he is totally unable to prevail upon those who have withstood him from the beginning, and who are opposing him still. What, then, has brought Philip to Elateia? He hopes, by a military demonstration in your neighbourhood, and by bringing up his army, to raise the courage and confidence of his friends, and to strike terror into his enemies, so that they may be frightened or coerced into surrendering what hitherto they have been unwilling to concede. ”

“ It seems that people at Athens still talked about punishing Philip; and there were orators, no doubt, who flattered them into the notion that they could do so whenever they chose. "Such talk," says Demosthenes, "is founded on a false basis. The facts of the case teach us a different lesson. They bid us look well to our own security, that we be not ourselves the sufferers, and that we preserve our allies. There was, indeed, a time—and that, too, within my own remembrance—when we might have held our own, and punished Philip besides; but now our first care must be to preserve our own allies." ”

“ They know too well that no other people will bring things back to freedom; therefore they will wish to destroy a government from which they apprehend mischief to themselves. Ordinary wrong-doers you may regard as enemies to the sufferers; while they who subvert constitutions and transform them into oligarchies must be looked upon as the common enemies of all lovers of freedom."
In the opinion of Demosthenes it thus appears that oligarchy was in fact slavery, and wholly alien to the Greek genius. The memory of the Athens of Pericles was deeply impressed on his mind. ”

“ Eubœa, Tanagra, all Bœotia, Megara, Ægina, Cleonæ, every island on the coast. We had neither ships nor walls; we were in no want (had we chosen to remember the Decelean war) of grievances either against Corinth or Thebes. And yet the arms of Athens were seen at Haliartus, and in a few days after at Corinth. You had something better to do than to recall the injuries of the past. . . .
"The sacrifice in either case was not made for a benefactor, neither was it made without risk. You held that no reason for abandoning to their fate men who had thrown themselves on your compassion. ”

“ It is, of course, an immense advantage that a trained lawyer should preside over a court, and sum up the case, and point out to the jury the general principles by which they should be guided. It is probable that the want of this was often felt at Athens, and led occasionally to unfortunate results. Still, we may be sure that the average Athenian was a man of intelligence, and perfectly open to reason. Practice, too, made him tolerably well acquainted with his country's laws. It is the greatest mistake to conceive of Athens as "a fierce democracy." ”

“ But if he knows how to behave himself properly when he likes, and has adopted a different line of conduct by choice, surely it is quite evident that if he eludes justice now, he will again become the same Meidias that you know him for. You must not listen to him, then; you must not let the present occasion, when he is playing the hypocrite, have more weight and influence with you than the whole past of which you have had experience. ”

“ Are not the states of Eubœa now governed by despots, and Eubœa is an island near to Thebes and to Athens? Does he not expressly write in his epistles, "I am at peace with those who are willing to obey me"? Neither Greek nor barbaric land contains the man's ambition. And we, the Greek community, seeing and hearing this, instead of sending embassies to one another about it and expressing our indignation, are in such a miserable state, so entrenched in our separate towns, that to this day we can attempt nothing that interest or necessity requires; we cannot combine for succour and alliance ”

“ No public assembly could be more critical and fastidious than that of Athens. Demosthenes failed repeatedly. One of the old citizens found him on one of these occasions wandering about disconsolately in the Piræus, and tried to cheer him up by saying, "You have a way of speaking which reminds me of Pericles, but you lose yourself through mere timidity and cowardice." ”

“ Demosthenes is one of those men concerning whom, both as a statesman and an orator, there cannot be much difference of opinion. As a statesman, he is unanimously eulogised by modern historians of the first rank—such as Thirlwall, Grote, and Curtius. Every one who sees anything to esteem and admire in old Greek life, must esteem and admire Demosthenes. His political career was a consistent one. He clung to and worked for one idea. That idea was a free and independent Greece, of which his own Athens had, morally and intellectually, the right to be head. ”

“ Probably the last years of the Peloponnesian war, which were so disastrous to Athens, were favourable to Macedon, and enabled it to acquire an influence on the northern coasts of the Ægean, which previously Athens had possessed. Still, no doubt Archelaus deserves the credit of having steadily applied himself to the work of strengthening and consolidating his kingdom. At the same time, he did his best to civilise his people, and to bring them into connection with the Greek world. He cultivated the friendship of Athens, and sought to introduce its literature and art. ”

“ He craves glory—makes that his passion; is ready for any consequence of adventure and peril—preferring, as he does, to a life of safety, the honour of achieving what no Macedonian king ever did before. They have no share in the glorious result: ever harassed by these excursions, they suffer and toil without ceasing; they have no leisure for their employments or private affairs, and cannot so much as dispose of their hard earnings, the markets of the country being closed on account of the war. We may easily infer from all this what is the general Macedonian feeling towards Philip. ”

“ This is his answer to those who persisted in saying that it was Philip—Philip alone—who had brought all their troubles on them:—
"Do not go about repeating that Greece owes all her misfortunes to one man. No, not to one man, but to many abandoned men distributed throughout the different states, of whom, by earth and heaven, Æschines is one. If the truth were to be spoken without reserve, I should not hesitate to call him the common scourge of all the men, the districts, and the cities which have perished; for the sower of the seed is answerable for the crop. ”

“ It could also no doubt be plausibly argued that exemptions had been granted too freely, and now and then to thoroughly unworthy persons. Many a man not particularly rich would think himself aggrieved, when he saw some one far richer than himself altogether exempt. The favoured few were sure to be envied, and might almost be said to be defrauding the State of what they owed it. The object, in fact, of the law of Leptines was, it might be contended, to insure for Athens the due performance of services which she had a right to claim from every citizen of ample means. ”