Not merely in Athens, but also among the Peloponnesian allies of Sparta, the resident citizens had contracted the like indisposition to military service. In the year 431 B. C., these Peloponnesians (here too we have the concurrent testimony of Perikles and Archidamus[587]) had been forward for service with their persons, and only backward when asked for money. In 383 B. C., Sparta found them so reluctant to join her standard, especially for operations beyond sea, that she was forced to admit into her confederacy the principle of pecuniary commutation;[588] just as Athens had done (about 460-450 B. C.) with the unwarlike islanders enrolled in her confederacy of Delos.[589]
Amidst this increasing indisposition to citizen military service, the floating, miscellaneous bands who made soldiership a livelihood under any one who would pay them, increased in number from year to year. In 402-401 B. C., when the Cyreian army (the Ten Thousand Greeks) were levied, it had been found difficult to bring so many together; large premiums were given to the chiefs or enlisting agents; the recruits consisted, in great part, of settled men tempted by lucrative promises away from their homes.[590] But active men ready for paid foreign service were perpetually multiplying, from poverty, exile, or love of enterprise[591]; they were put under constant training and greatly improved, by Iphikrates and others, as peltasts or light infantry to serve in conjunction with the citizen force of hoplites. Jason of Pheræ brought together a greater and better trained mercenary force than had ever been seen since the Cyreians in their upward march[592]; the Phokians also in the Sacred War, having command over the Delphian treasures, surrounded themselves with a formidable array of mercenary soldiers. There arose (as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in modern Europe) Condottieri like Charidemus and others—generals having mercenary bands under their command, and hiring themselves out to any prince or potentate who would employ and pay them. Of these armed rovers—poor, brave, desperate, and held by no civic ties—Isokrates makes repeated complaint, as one of the most serious misfortunes of Greece.[593] Such wanderers, indeed, usually formed the natural emigrants in new colonial enterprises. But it so happened that few Hellenic colonies were formed during the interval between 400-350 B. C.; in fact, the space open to Hellenic colonization was becoming more circumscribed by the peace of Antalkidas—by the despotism of Dionysius—and by the increase of Lucanians, Bruttians, and the inland powers generally. Isokrates, while extolling the great service formerly rendered to the Hellenic world by Athens, in setting on foot the Ionic emigration, and thus providing new homes for so many unsettled Greeks—insists on the absolute necessity of similar means of emigration in his own day. He urges on Philip to put himself at the head of an Hellenic conquest of Asia Minor, and thus to acquire territory which might furnish settlement to the multitudes of homeless, roving, exiles, who lived by the sword, and disturbed the peace of Greece.[594]
This decline of the citizen militia, and growing aversion to personal service, or military exercises—together with the contemporaneous increase of the professional soldiery unmoved by civic obligations—is one of the capital facts of the Demosthenic age. Though not peculiar to Athens, it strikes us more forcibly at Athens, where the spirit of self-imposed individual effort had once been so high wrought—but where also the charm and stimulus[595] of peaceful existence was most diversified, and the activity of industrial pursuit most continuous. It was a fatal severance of the active force of society from political freedom and intelligence breaking up that many-sided combination, of cultivated thought with vigorous deed, which formed the Hellenic idéal—and throwing the defence of Greece upon armed men looking up only to their general or their paymaster. But what made it irreparably fatal, was that just at this moment the Grecian world was thrown upon its defence against Macedonia led by a young prince of indefatigable enterprise; who had imbibed, and was capable even of improving, the best ideas of military organization[596] started by Epaminondas and Iphikrates. Philip (as described by his enemy Demosthenes) possessed all that forward and unconquerable love of action which the Athenians had manifested in 431 B. C., as we know from enemies as well as from friends; while the Macedonian population also retained, amidst rudeness and poverty, that military aptitude and readiness which had dwindled away within the walls of the Grecian cities.
Though as yet neither disciplined nor formidable, they were an excellent raw material for soldiers, in the hands of an organizing genius like Philip. They were still (as their predecessors had been in the time of the first Perdikkas,[597] when the king’s wife baked cakes with her own hand on the hearth), mountain shepherds ill-clothed and ill-housed—eating and drinking from wooden platters and cups—destitute to a great degree, not merely of cities, but of fixed residences.[598] The men of substance were armed with breastplates and made good cavalry; but the infantry were a rabble destitute of order,[599] armed with wicker shields and rusty swords, and contending at disadvantage, though constantly kept on the alert, to repel the inroads of their Illyrian or Thracian neighbors. Among some Macedonian tribes, the man who had never slain an enemy was marked by a degrading badge.[600] These were the men whom Philip on becoming king found under his rule; not good soldiers, but excellent recruits to be formed into soldiers. Poverty, endurance, and bodies inured to toil, were the natural attributes, well appreciated by ancient politicians, of a military population destined to make conquests. Such had been the native Persians, at their first outburst under Cyrus the Great; such were even the Greeks at the invasion of Xerxes, when the Spartan King Demaratus reckoned poverty both as an inmate of Greece, and as a guarantee of Grecian courage.[601]
Now it was against these rude Macedonians, to whom camp-life presented chances of plunder without any sacrifice, that the industrious and refined Athenian citizen had to go forth and fight, renouncing his trade, family, and festivals; a task the more severe, as the perpetual aggressions and systematized warfare of his new enemies could only be countervailed by an equal continuity of effort on his part. For such personal devotion, combined with the anxieties of preventive vigilance, the Athenians of the Periklean age would have been prepared, but those of the Demosthenic age were not; though their whole freedom and security were in the end found to be at stake.
Without this brief sketch of the great military change in Greece since the Peloponnesian war—the decline of the citizen force and the increase of mercenaries—the reader would scarcely understand either the proceedings of Athens in reference to Philip, or the career of Demosthenes on which we are now about to enter.
Having by assiduous labor acquired for himself these high powers both of speech and of composition, Demosthenes stood forward in 354 B. C. to devote them to the service of the public. His first address to the assembly is not less interesting, objectively, as a memorial of the actual Hellenic political world in that year—than subjectively, as an evidence of his own manner of appreciating its exigencies.[602] At that moment, the predominant apprehension at Athens arose from reports respecting the Great King, who was said to be contemplating measures of hostility against Greece, and against Athens in particular, in consequence of the aid recently lent by the Athenian general Chares to the revolted Persian satrap Artabazus. By this apprehension—which had already, in part, determined the Athenians (a year before) to make peace with their revolted insular allies, and close the Social War—the public mind still continued agitated. A Persian armament of three hundred sail, with a large force of Grecian mercenaries—and an invasion of Greece—was talked of as probable.[603] It appears that Mausôlus, prince or satrap of Karia, who had been the principal agent in inflaming the Social War, still prosecuted hostilities against the islands even after the peace, announcing that he acted in execution of the king’s designs; so that the Athenians sent envoys to remonstrate with him.[604] The Persians seem also to have been collecting inland forces, which were employed some years afterwards in reconquering Egypt, but of which the destination was not at this moment declared. Hence the alarm now prevalent at Athens. It is material to note—as a mark in the tide of events—that few persons as yet entertained apprehensions about Philip of Macedon, though that prince was augmenting steadily his military force as well as his conquests. Nay, Philip afterwards asserted that during this alarm of Persian invasion, he was himself one of the parties invited to assist in the defence of Greece.[605]
Though the Macedonian power had not yet become obviously formidable, we trace in the present speech of Demosthenes that same Pan-hellenic patriotism which afterwards rendered him so strenuous in blowing the trumpet against Philip. The obligation incumbent upon all Greeks, but upon Athens especially, on account of her traditions and her station, to uphold Hellenic liberty against the foreigner at all cost, is insisted on with an emphasis and dignity worthy of Perikles.[606] But while Demosthenes thus impresses upon his countrymen noble and Pan-hellenic purposes, he does not rest content with eloquent declamation, or negative criticism on the past. His recommendations as to means are positive and explicit; implying an attentive survey and a sagacious appreciation of the surrounding circumstances. While keeping before his countrymen a favorable view of their position, he never promises them success except on condition of earnest and persevering individual efforts, with arms and with money: and he exhausts all his invention in the unpopular task of shaming them, by direct reproach as well as by oblique insinuation, out of that aversion to personal military service, which, for the misfortune of Athens, had become a confirmed habit. Such positive and practical character as to means, always contemplating the full exigencies of a given situation—combined with the constant presentation of Athens as the pledged champion of Grecian freedom, and with appeals to Athenian foretime, not as a patrimony to rest upon, but as an example to imitate—constitute the imperishable charm of these harangues of Demosthenes, not less memorable than their excellence as rhetorical compositions. In the latter merit, indeed, his rival Æschines is less inferior to him than in the former.
In no one of the speeches of Demosthenes is the spirit of practical wisdom more predominant than in this his earliest known discourse to the public assembly—on the Symmories—delivered by a young man of twenty-seven years of age, who could have had little other teaching except from the decried classes of sophists, rhetors, and actors. While proclaiming the king of Persia as the common and dangerous enemy of the Grecian name, he contends that no evidence of impending Persian attack had yet transpired, sufficiently obvious and glaring to warrant Athens in sending round[607] to invoke a general league of Greeks, as previous speakers had suggested. He deprecates on the one hand any step calculated to provoke the Persian king or bring on a war—and on the other hand, any premature appeal to the Greeks for combination, before they themselves were impressed with a feeling of common danger. Nothing but such common terror could bring about union among the different Hellenic cities; nothing else could silence those standing jealousies and antipathies, which rendered intestine war so frequent, and would probably enable the Persian king to purchase several Greeks for his own allies against the rest.
“Let us neither be immoderately afraid of the Great King, nor on the other hand be ourselves the first to begin the war and wrong him—as well on our own account as from the bad feeling and mistrust prevalent among the Greeks around us. If indeed we, with the full and unanimous force of Greece, could attack him unassisted, I should have held that even wrong, done towards him, was no wrong at all. But since this is impossible, I contend that we must take care not to give the king a pretence for enforcing claims of right on behalf of the other Greeks. While we remain quiet, he cannot do any such thing without being mistrusted; but if we have been the first to begin war, he will naturally seem to mean sincere friendship to the others, on account of their aversion to us. Do not, therefore, expose to light the sad distempers of the Hellenic world, by calling together its members when you will not persuade them, and by going to war when you will have no adequate force; but keep the peace, confiding in yourselves, and making full preparation.”[608]