DEMOSTHENES AND ÆSCHINES
There was however a party there, which did not dissemble the interest it felt in the success of the Macedonian arms. Before the battle of Issus, when Alexander was commonly believed to be in great danger, and Demosthenes was assured by his correspondents that he could not escape destruction, Æschines says, that he was himself continually taunted by his rival, who exultingly displayed the letters that conveyed the joyful tidings, with the dejection he betrayed at the prospect of the disaster which threatened his friends. Æschines was the active leader of the macedonising party: all his hopes of a final triumph over his political adversaries were grounded on the Macedonian ascendency. But Phocion, though his motives were very different, added all the weight of his influence to the same side. His sentiments were so well known, that Alexander himself treated him as a highly honoured friend; addressed letters to him from Asia, with a salutation which he used to no one else except Antipater, and repeatedly pressed him to accept magnificent presents. Phocion indeed constantly rejected them; and when Alexander wrote that their friendship must cease if he persisted to decline all his offers, was only moved to intercede in behalf of some prisoners, whose liberty he immediately obtained.
Urns and Vases
[337-325 B.C.]
The disaster of Chæronea (337 B.C.) had held out a signal to the enemies of Demosthenes at Athens, to unite their efforts against him. He had been assailed in the period following that event until Philip’s death, by every kind of legal engine that could be brought to bear upon him; by prosecutions of the most various form and colour. All these experiments had failed; the people had honoured him with more signal proofs of its confidence than he had ever before received: he had never taken a more active part, or exercised a more powerful sway, in public affairs. Yet it seems that after the Macedonian arms had completely triumphed, both in Asia and in Greece, Æschines thought the opportunity favourable for another attempt of the same nature. This trial, the most celebrated of ancient pleadings, the most memorable event in the history of eloquence throughout all past ages, deserves mention here, chiefly for the light it throws on the character and temper of the Athenian tribunals, at a time when the people is supposed to have been verging towards utter degeneracy, so as to be hardly any longer an object of historical interest—a time, it must be remembered, when the rest of Greece was quailing beneath the yoke of the stranger, and his will, dictated to the so-called national congress at Corinth, was sovereign and irresistible.
The occasion of this prosecution arose out of two offices with which Demosthenes had been entrusted, in the year, it seems, after that of the battle of Chæronea. He had been appointed by his tribe to superintend the repairs which, according to a decree proposed by himself, the city walls were to undergo, the work being equally distributed among the ten tribes. At the same time he filled another post—the treasurership of the theoric fund, which involved a large share in the general control and direction of the finances. In both offices he had made a liberal contribution out of his own property to the service of the state. On this ground, but more especially as a mark of approbation for his public conduct on all occasions, a decree was passed, on the motion of his friend Ctesiphon, that he should be presented with a golden crown. For this decree Æschines had indicted Ctesiphon as having broken the law in three points: first, because it was illegal to crown a magistrate before he had rendered an account of his office; next, because it was forbidden to proclaim such an honour, when bestowed by the people, in any other place than the assembly-ground in the Pnyx, but particularly to proclaim it, as Ctesiphon had proposed; and, lastly, because the reason assigned in the decree, so far as related to the public conduct of Demosthenes, was false, inasmuch as he had not deserved any reward. The question at issue was, in substance, whether Demosthenes had been a good or a bad citizen. Hence the prosecutor, after a short discussion of the dry legal arguments, enters, as on his main subject, into a full review of the public and private life of Demosthenes; and Demosthenes, whose interest it was to divert attention from the points of law, which were not his strong ground, can scarcely find room for them in his defence of his own policy and proceedings, which, with bitter attacks on his adversary, occupies almost the whole of his speech.
His boast is that throughout his political career he had kept one object steadily in view: to strengthen Athens within and without, and to preserve her independence, particularly against the power and the arts of Philip. He owned that he had failed; but it was after he had done all that one man in his situation—a citizen of a commonwealth—could do. He had failed in a cause in which defeat was more glorious than victory in any other, in a struggle not less worthy of Athens than those in which her heroic citizens in past ages had earned their fame. In a word, the whole oration breathes the spirit of that high philosophy which, whether learned in the schools or from life, has consoled the noblest of our kind in prisons, and on scaffolds, and under every persecution of adverse fortune, but in the tone necessary to impress a mixed multitude with a like feeling, and to elevate it for a while into a sphere above its own. The effect it produced on that most susceptible audience can be but faintly conceived. The result was that Æschines not only lost his cause, but did not even obtain a fifth part of the votes, and consequently, according to law, incurred a small penalty. But he seems to have felt it insupportable to remain at the scene of his defeat, where he must have lived silent and obscure. He quitted Athens, and crossed over to Asia, with the view it is said of seeking protection from Alexander, through whose aid alone he could now hope to triumph over his adversaries.
When this prospect vanished, he retired to Rhodes, where he opened a school of oratory, which produced a long series of voluble sophists, and is considered as the origin of a new style of eloquence, technically called the Asiatic, which stood in a relation to the Attic not unlike that of the composite capital to the Ionic volute, and was destined to prevail in the East wherever the Greek language was spoken, down to the fall of the Roman Empire. He died at Samos, about nine years after Alexander, having survived both his great antagonist and his friend Phocion.