The Athenians had become a pampered, ease-loving people. They still cherished a cheap admiration for the great achievements of their fathers. Stirring appeals to the glories of Marathon and Salamis would arouse them to—pass patriotic resolutions. Any suggestion of self-sacrifice, of service on the fleet or in the field, was dangerous. A law made it a capital offense to propose to use, even in meeting any great emergency, the fund set aside to supply the folk with amusements. They preferred to hire mercenaries to undergo their hardships and to fight their battles; but they were not willing to pay their hirelings. The commander had to find pay for his soldiers in the booty taken from their enemies; or failing that, by plundering their friends. It must be admitted, however, that the patriots at home were always ready and most willing to try, to convict, and to punish the commanders upon any charge of misdemeanor in office.
There were not wanting men of integrity and true patriotism, and of great ability, as Isocrates and Phocion, who accepted as inevitable the decline of the power of Athens, and advocated a policy of passive non-interference in foreign affairs, unless it were to take part in a united effort against Persia. But the mass of the people, instead of offering their own means and their bodies to the service of their country, deemed it rather the part of the State to supply their needs and their amusements. They considered that they had performed, to the full, their duty as citizens when they had taken part in the noisy debates of the Assembly, or had sat as paid jurymen in the never-ending succession of court procedures of this most litigious of peoples. Among men even in their better days not callous to the allurements of bribes judiciously administered, it was a logical sequence that corruption should now pervade all classes and conditions.
Literature and art, too, shared the general decadence, as it ever must be, since they always respond to the dominant ideals of a time and a people. To this general statement the exception must be noted that philosophy, as represented by Plato and Aristotle, and oratory, as represented by a long succession of Attic orators, had developed into higher and better forms. The history of human experience has shown that philosophy often becomes more subtle and more profound in times when men fall away from their ancient high standards, and become shaken in their old beliefs. So oratory attains its perfect flower in periods of the greatest stress and danger, whether from foreign foes or from internal discord. Both these forms of utterance of the active human intellect show, in their highest attainment, the realization of imminent emergency and the effort to point out a way of betterment and safety.
Not only the condition of affairs at home was full of portent of coming disaster. The course of events in other parts of Greece and in the barbarian kingdom of Macedon seemed all to be converging to one inevitable result,—the extinction of Hellenic freedom. When a nation or a race becomes unfit to possess longer the most precious of heritages, a free and honorable place among nations, then the time and the occasion and the man will not be long wanting to co-operate with the internal subversive force in consummating the final catastrophe. "If Philip should die," said Demosthenes, "the Athenians would quickly make themselves another Philip."
Throughout Greece, mutual jealousy and hatred among the States, each too weak to cope with a strong foreign foe, prevented such united action as might have made the country secure from any barbarian power; and that at a time when it was threatened by an enemy far more formidable than had been Xerxes with all his millions.
The Greeks at first entirely underrated the danger from Philip and the Macedonians. They had, up to this time, despised these barbarians. Demosthenes, in the third Philippic, reproaches his countrymen with enduring insult and outrage from a vile barbarian out of Macedon, whence formerly not even a respectable slave could be obtained. It is indeed doubtful whether the world has ever seen a man, placed in a position of great power, more capable of seizing every opportunity and of using every agency, fair or foul, for accomplishing his ambitious purposes, than was Philip of Macedon. The Greeks were most unfortunate in their enemy.
Philip understood the Greek people thoroughly. He had received his early training among them while a hostage at Thebes. He found in their petty feuds, in their indolence and corruptibility, his opportunity to carry into effect his matured plans of conquest. His energy never slept; his influence was ever present. When he was far away, extending his boundaries among the barbarians, his money was still active in Athens and elsewhere. His agents, often among the ablest men in a community, were busy using every cunning means at the command of the wonderful Greek ingenuity to conceal the danger or to reconcile the fickle people to a change that promised fine rewards for the sale of their liberty. Then he began to trim off one by one the outlying colonies and dependencies of the Greek States. His next step was to be the obtaining of a foothold in Greece proper.
The chief obstacle to Philip's progress was Athens, degenerate as she was, and his chief opponent in Athens was Demosthenes. This Philip understood very well; but he treated both the city and the great statesman always with a remarkable leniency. More than once Athens, inflamed by Demosthenes, flashed into her old-time energy and activity, and stayed the Macedonian's course; as when, in his first bold march towards the heart of Greece, he found himself confronted at Thermopylæ by Athenian troops; and again when prompt succor from Athens saved Byzantium for the time. But the emergency once past, the ardor of the Athenians died down as quickly as it had flamed up.
The Social War (357-355 B.C.) left Athens stripped almost bare of allies, and was practically a victory for Philip. The Sacred War (357-346 B.C.) between Thebes and Phocis, turning upon an affront offered to the Delphian god, gave Philip the eagerly sought-for opportunity of interfering in the internal affairs of Greece. He became the successful champion of the god, and received as his reward a place in the great Amphictyonic Council. He thus secured recognition of his claims to being a Greek, since none but Greeks might sit in this council. He had, moreover, in crushing the Phocians, destroyed a formidable power of resistance to his plans.
Such were the times and such the conditions in which Demosthenes entered upon his strenuous public life. He was born most probably in 384 B.C., though some authorities give preference to 382 B.C. as the year of his birth. He was the son of Demosthenes and Cleobule. His father was a respectable and wealthy Athenian citizen, a manufacturer of cutlery and upholstering. His mother was the daughter of Gylon, an Athenian citizen resident in the region of the Crimea.