How to Master the Spoken Word / Designed as a Self-Instructor for all who would Excel in the Art of Public Speaking

by Edwin Gordon Lawrence

Let none of you, by Hercules, be apprehensive lest this high-souled citizen, this distinguished warrior, from loss of this reward should on his return home take his life. The man who rates so low your consideration as to make a thousand incisions on that impure and mortgaged head which Ctesiphon proposes against all law to honor with a crown, makes money of his wounds by bringing actions for the effects of his own premeditated blows. Yes, that crown of his so often battered, that perhaps even now it bears upon it the marks of Meidias’ anger, that crown which brings its owner in an income, serves both for revenue and head! . . .

And can it be that he whom you have thought worthy by your decree, of the honor of this crown, is so unknown to the public which has been so largely benefited by him that you must procure assistance to speak in his behalf? Ask of the jurors whether they know Chabrias, Iphicrates and Timotheus, and learn from them why they have honored and erected statues to them? Will they not proclaim with one voice that they rendered honor to Chabrias for his naval victory near Naxos; to Iphicrates for having cut off a Spartan corps; to Timotheus for his expedition to Corcyra; to other heroes for their many glorious achievements? Ask them now why Demosthenes is to be rewarded. Is it for his venality, for his cowardice, for his base desertion of his post in the day of battle? In honoring such an one will you not dishonor yourselves and the gallant men who have laid down their lives for you in the field? whose plaintive remonstrances against the crowing of this man you may almost seem to hear. Strange, passing strange, does it seem, Athenians, that you banish from the limits of the state the stocks and stones the senseless implements which have unwittingly caused death by casualty; that the hand which has inflicted the wound of self-destruction is buried apart from the rest of the body; and that yet you can render honor to this Demosthenes, by whose counsels this last fatal expedition in which your troops were slaughtered and destroyed was planned! The victims of this massacre are thus insulted, in their graves, and the survivors outraged and discouraged when they behold the only reward of patriotic valor to be an unremembered death and a disregarded memory! And last and most important of all consequences, what answer shall you make to your children when they ask you after what examples they shall frame their lives? Is it not, men of Athens—you know it well—is it not the palaestra, the seminary, or the study of the liberal arts alone, which form and educate our youth. Of vastly greater value are the lessons taught by these honors publicly conferred. If a man proclaimed and crowned in the theatre for virtue, courage, and patriotism when his irregular and vicious life belies the honor, the young who witness this are perverted and corrupted! In a profligate and a pander, such as Ctesiphon, sentenced and punished, an instructive lesson is given to the rising generation. Has a citizen voted in opposition to justice and propriety, and does he, on his return to his house, attempt to instruct his son; disobedience surely follows, and the lesson is justly looked upon as importunate and out of place. Pronounce your verdict then, not as simple jurors, but as guardians of the State, whose decision can be justified in the eyes of their absent fellow citizens who shall demand a strict account of it. Know ye not, Athenians, that the people is judged by the ministers whom it honors; will it not be disgraceful, then, that you shall be thought to resemble the baseness of Demosthenes, and not the virtues of your ancestors?

How, then, is this reproach to be avoided? It must be to distrusting the men who usurp the character of upright and patriotic citizens, which their entire conduct gainsays. Good will and zeal for the public interest can be readily assumed in name: oftentimes those who have the smallest pretensions to them by their conduct seize upon and take refuge behind these honorable titles. When you find, then, an orator desirous of being crowned by strangers and of being proclaimed in presence of the Greeks, let him, as the law requires in other cases, prove the claim which he asserts by the evidence of a life free from reproach, and a wise and blameless course. If he be unable to do this, do not confirm to him the honors which he claims, and try at least to preserve the remnant of that public authority which is fast escaping from you. Even now, strange as it should seem, are not the Senate and the people passed over and neglected, and despatches and deputations received by private citizens, not from obscure individuals, but from the most important personages of Europe and Asia? Far from denying that for which under our laws the punishment is death, it is made the subject of open public boast; the correspondence is exhibited and read; and you are invited by some to look upon them as the guardians of the constitution, while others demand to be rewarded as the saviors of the country. The people, meanwhile, as if struck with the decrepitude of age and broken down by their misfortunes, preserve the republic only in name and abandon to others the reality of authority. You thus retire from the Assembly, not as from a public deliberation, but as from an entertainment given at common cost where each guest carries away with him a share of the remnants of the feast. That I speak forth the words of truth and soberness, hearken to which I am about to say.

It distresses me to recur so often to our public calamities, but when a private citizen undertook to sail only to Samos to get out of the way, he was condemned to death on the same day by the Council of Areopagus as a traitor to his country. Another private citizen, unable to bear the fear which oppressed him, and sailing in consequence to Rhodes, was recently denounced for this and escaped punishment by an equal division of the votes. Had a single one been cast on the other side, he would have been either banished or put to death. Compare these instances with the present one. An orator, the cause of all our misfortunes, who abandons his post in time of war and flies from the city, proclaims himself worthy of crowns and proclamations. Will you not drive such a man from your midst as the common scourge of Greece; or will you not rather seize upon and punish him as a piratical braggart who steers his course through our government by dint of phrases?

Consider, moreover, the occasion on which you are called upon to record your verdict. In a few days the Pythian Games will be celebrated, and the assembled Greeks will all be reunited in your city. She has already suffered much disparagement from the policy of Demosthenes: should you now crown him by your votes you will seem to share the same opinion as the men who wish to break the common peace. By adopting the contrary course you will free the state from any such suspicion.

Let your deliberations, then, be in accord with the interests of the city: it is for her, and not a foreign community, you are now to decide. Do not throw away your honors, but confer them with discernment upon high-minded citizens and deserving men. Search with both eyes and ears as to who they are among you who are today standing forth in Demosthenes’ behalf. Are they the companions of his youth who shared with him the manly toils of the chase or the robust exercises of the palaestra? No, by the Olympian Jove, he has passed not his life in hunting the wild boar or in the preparation of his body for fatigue and hardship, but in the exercise of chicane at the cost of the substance of men of wealth!

Examine well his vainglorious boasting when he shall dare to say that by his embassy he withdrew the Byzantines from the cause of Philip; that by his eloquence he detached from him the Acarnanians, and so transported the Thebans as to confirm them upon your side. He believes indeed that you have reached such a point of credulity that you are ready to be persuaded by him of anything he may choose to utter, as if you had here in your midst the goddess Persuasion herself, and not an artful demagogue.

And when, at the close of his harangue, Demosthenes shall invite the partakers of his corruption to press round and defend him, let there be present in your imagination upon the platform from which I am now speaking the venerable forms of the ancient benefactors of the state, arrayed in all their virtue, to oppose these men’s insolence. I see among them the wise Solon, that upright lawgiver who founded our popular government upon the soundest principles of legislation, gently advising you with his native moderation not to place your oaths and the law under the control of this man’s discourse. And Aristides, by whose equity the imposts upon the Greeks were regulated, whose daughters, left in poverty through his incorruptible integrity, were endowed by the state, Aristides is seen complaining of this outrage upon justice, and demanding whether the descendants of the men who fought worthy of death and actually banished from their city and country Arthmius the Zelian, then living in their midst and enjoying the sacred rights of hospitality for merely bringing Persian gold into Greece, are now going to cover themselves with disgrace by honoring with a crown of gold the man who has not simply brought higher the stranger’s money, but is enjoying here the price of his treason. And Themistocles and the men who fell at Marathon and Plataea, think you that they are insensible to what is taking place? Do not their voices cry out from the very tombs in mournful protests against this perverse rendering of honor to one who has dared to proclaim his union with the barbarians against the Greeks?

As for me, O Earth and Sun, O Virtue, and thou, Intelligence, by whose light we are enabled to discern and to separate good from evil, as for me, I have directed my efforts against this wrong. I have lifted up my voice against this injustice! If I have spoken well and loftily against this crime, I have spoken as I should have wished; but if my utterances have been feeble and ill-directed, still they have been according to the measure of my strength. It is for you, men of Athens and jurors, to weigh carefully both what has been spoken and what has been left unsaid, and to render such a decision as shall not only be upright but for the advantage of the State.

demosthenes