“Demosthenes was of the aristocracy; the aristocracy of money, it is true, but it is sufficient to read Aristophanes to feel that this aristocracy was the heaviest to bear, when one had the misfortune to belong to it. Demosthenes was rich, the son of riches, and he boasted about it with perilous intemperance. In the Discourse on the Crown he opposed his fortune to the poverty of Æschines, with a disgust and hardness contrary to the Athenian spirit.
“Add to so many causes of unpopularity, the natural inconsistency of the people, the sacrifices Demosthenes claimed from them, the dangers and the reverses of his politics, and one will be surprised at the lasting power of this great man. The explanation thereof is entirely in the strength and clearness of his wonderful genius. Every day he showed his prodigious eloquence, which consisted in raising his audience above its ordinary intelligence, communicated for a moment to the crowd the generosity of a great soul and the divination of a superior mind. He made the people capable of feeling what was noble in politics, and understanding what was necessary. He showed them in this policy the natural result of the Athenian destiny. He identified his work with the work of that superior power against which all complaint is useless and all anger ridiculous, the work of Necessity.”
But perhaps the most satisfactory claim Demosthenes has on the memory of all time is to be found in that inevitable beauty which surrounds a losing battle fought to the end. Professor Jebb[e] has said, “As a statesman, Demosthenes needs no epitaph but his own words in the speech On the Crown: ‘I say that, if the event had been manifest to the whole world beforehand, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or for her past, or for the ages to come.’”
PHILIP’S BETTER SIDE
But finally, while we are endeavouring to be judicial, it is appropriate to think of the better side of King Philip. He, too, had obstacles to overcome, and he suffers from the pathetic consequences of success; for we forgive the weaknesses and vices and the underhand measures of the one who fails, but we are prone to impute the success of the man who succeeds, purely to the evil of his ways. Once more we may quote Prévost-Paradol[d]:
“Philip had closely observed Greece, with its incurable and daily augmenting weaknesses, and he had foreseen, as a magnificent future, the reunion of these powerless and divided people, under his sovereign authority. He had understood that the Grecian empire, defended by mercenaries and void of citizens, belonged to those who could put in the ranks the greatest number of trained soldiers, and that patriotism had no longer any part to play in this supreme struggle. The instinct and passion of craftiness, patience, the art of bribery, made him eminently suitable for those corrupting and lying manœuvres, which divide the enemy and prepare victory. And to these precious gifts were added an unrestrained ambition, sufficiently strong so as not to draw back in the face of any danger, sufficiently enlightened only to seek opportune contests, and to become great only through success. It is because Philip always saw ahead of his actions, and hoped for great things, that they were always appropriate and useful, and that he did them with such terrible activity. He gave himself up entirely to intrigues, to battles, to the formation of his army, to the subjection of Greece, and to vast hopes.
“It is with a sort of terror that Demosthenes saw and described him as being consumed by desires always greater, and carried away by a hidden strength from enterprise to enterprise. ‘I saw Philip with one eye put out, one shoulder broken, a crippled hand, a wounded thigh, abandon to fortune without ceremony or hesitation all that it wished to take of his body, provided the rest remained powerful and honoured.’ Who does not see that his unchecked activity followed a more elevated aim than the submission of Greece and that this great man, in a hurry to have finished, was afraid of seeing life suddenly fail his ambition? What could Greece do to such a genius, sustained by such a character?”
Ruins of the Gate of the Propylea of Athens