Fortunately, his feeble effort had been heard by a friend who was a distinguished actor, and was able to tell Demosthenes what he lacked. "You must study the art of graceful gesture and clear and distinct utterance," he said. In illustration, he asked the would-be orator to speak some passages from the poets Sophocles and Euripides, and then recited them himself, to show how they should be spoken. He succeeded in this way in arousing the boy to new and greater efforts. Nature, Demosthenes felt, had not meant him for an orator. But art can sometimes overcome nature. Energy, perseverance, determination, were necessary. These he had. He went earnestly to work; and the story of how he worked and what he achieved should be a lesson for all future students of art or science.
There were two things to do. He must both write well and speak well. Delivery is only half the art. Something worth delivering is equally necessary. He read the works of Thucydides, the great historian, so carefully that he was able to write them all out from memory after an accident had destroyed the manuscript. Some say he wrote them out eight separate times. He attended the teachings of Plato, the celebrated philosopher. The repulse of Isocrates did not keep the ardent student from his classes. His naturally capable mind became filled with all that Greece had to give in the line of logical and rhetorical thought. He not only read but wrote. He prepared orations for delivery in the law courts for the use of others, and in this way eked out his small income.
In these ways he cultivated his mind. That was the lightest task. He had a great mind to begin with. But he had a weak and incapable body. If he would succeed that must be cultivated too. There was his lisping and stammering voice, his short breath, his low tones, his ungraceful gesture,—all to be overcome. How he did it is a remarkable example of what may be done in self-education.
To overcome his stammering utterance he accustomed himself to speak with pebbles in his mouth. His lack of vocal strength he overcame by running with open mouth, thus expanding his lungs. To cure his shortness of breath he practised the uttering of long sentences while walking rapidly up-hill. That he might be able to make himself heard above the noise of the assembly, he would stand in stormy weather on the sea-shore at Phalerum, and declaim against the roar of the waves. For two or three months together he practised writing and speaking, day and night, in an underground chamber; and that he might not be tempted to go abroad and neglect his studies he shaved the hair from one side of his head. Dread of ridicule kept him in till his hair had grown again. To gain a graceful action, he would practise for hours before a tall mirror, watching all his movements, and constantly seeking to improve them.
Several years passed away in this hard and persistent labor. He tried public speaking again and again, each time discouraged, but each time improving,—and finally gained complete success. His voice became strong and clear, his manner graceful, his delivery emphatic and decisive, the language of his orations full of clear logic, strong statement, cutting irony, and vigorous declamation, fluent, earnest, and convincing. In brief, it may be said that he made himself the greatest orator of Greece, which is equal to saying the greatest orator of the world.
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.