movement and cadence, make me forget that this is not my beloved
poetry; for Homer too abounds in contrast and parallel, in figures
startling or simple. It is a provision of nature, I suppose, that each
faculty should have its proper equipment attached to it. How should I
scorn your Muse? I know her powers too well.
'None the less, I consider my task of a Homeric encomium twice as
difficult as your praise of Demosthenes; not because it must be in
verse, but from the nature of the material; _I_ cannot lay down a
foundation of fact to build the edifice of praise upon; there is
nothing but the poems themselves. Everything else is uncertain--his
country, his family, his time. If there had been any uncertainty about
them,
Debate and strife had not divided men;
but as it is, they give him for a country Ios or Colophon or Cumae,
Chios, Smyrna, or Egyptian Thebes, or half a hundred other places; his
father may be Maeon the Lydian, or he may be a river; his mother is now
Melanope, and now in default of satisfactory human descent a dryad; his
time is the Heroic Age, or else perhaps it is the Ionic. There is no
knowing for certain whether he was before or after Hesiod, even; and no
wonder, considering that some object to his very name, and will have
him Melesigenes instead. So too with his poverty, and his blindness.
However, all these questions are best left alone. So you see the arena
open to my panegyric is extremely limited; my theme is a poet and not a
man of action; I can infer and collect his wisdom only from his verses.
'_Your_ work, now, can be reeled smoothly off out of hand; you have
your definite known facts; the butcher's meat is there, only needing to
be garnished with the sauce of your words. History supplies you with
the greatness and distinction of Demosthenes; it is all known; his
country was Athens, the splendid, the famous, the bulwark of Hellas.
Now if _I_ could have laid hands on Athens, I might have used the
poet's right to introduce the loves and judgements and sojourns there
of the Gods, the gifts they lavished on it, the tale of Eleusis. As
for its laws and courts and festivals, its Piraeus and its colonies,
the memorials set up in it of victory by land and sea, Demosthenes
himself is the authority for saying that no words could do justice to
them. My material would have been inexhaustible; and I could not have
been accused of hanging up my true theme; the formula of panegyric
includes the arraying of the man in the splendours of his country. So
too Isocrates ekes out his _Helen_ by introducing Theseus. It is true
that poets have their privileges; and perhaps _you_ have to be more
careful about your proportions; there must not be _too_ much sack to
the proverbial halfpennyworth of bread.
'Well then, let Athens go; but your discourse at once finds another
support in his father's wealth--that "golden base" which Pindar
likes--; for to be responsible for providing a war-ship was to be
among the richest Athenians in those days. And though he died while
Demosthenes was quite a child, we are not to count his orphan state a
disaster; it led to the distinction that brought his splendid gifts
into notice.
'Tradition gives us no hint of how Homer was educated or developed his
powers; the panegyrist must plunge straight into his works, and can
find nothing to talk about in his breeding and training and pupilage;
he has not even the resource of that Hesiodic sprig of bay which could
make a facile poet out of a shepherd. But think of _your_ abundance
in this branch of the subject. There is Callistratus and all the
mighty roll of orators, Alcidamas, Isocrates, Isaeus, Eubulides. Then
again, at Athens even those who were subject to paternal control had
countless temptations to indulgence, youth is the susceptible time, a
neglected ward could have lived as irregular a life as he chose, and
yet the objects that Demosthenes set up for himself were philosophy and
patriotism, and the doors they took him to not Phryne's, but those of
Aristotle and Theophrastus, Xenocrates and Plato.
'And so, my dear sir, your way is open to a disquisition upon the two
kinds of human love, the one sprung of a desire that is like the sea,
outrageous, fierce, stormily rocking the soul; it is a true sea wave,
which the earthly Aphrodite sets rolling with the tempestuous passions
of youth; but the other is the steady drawing of a golden cord from
heaven; it does not scorch and pierce and leave festering wounds; it
impels towards the pure and unsullied ideal of absolute beauty, and is
a sane madness in those souls which "yet hold of Zeus and nurse the
spark divine."
'Love will find out the way, though that way involve a shaven head,
a cavern dwelling, a discouraging mirror and punitive sword, a
disciplining of the tongue, a belated apprenticeship to the actor's
art, a straining of the memory, a conquest over clamour, and a
borrowing of night hours to lengthen toilsome days.[19] All this your
Demosthenes endured, and who knows not what an orator it made of
him? his speech packed with thought and terse of language, himself
convincing in his knowledge of human nature, as splendid in the
elevation as mighty in the force of his sentiments, the master and not
the slave of his words and his ideas, ever fresh with the graces of
his art. He is the one orator whose speech has, in the bold phrase of
Leosthenes, at once the breath of life and the strength of wrought iron.
'Callisthenes remarked of Aeschylus that he wrote his tragedies in
wine, which lent vigour and warmth to his work. With Demosthenes it was
otherwise; he composed not on wine but on water; whence the witticism
of Demades, that most men's tongues are regulated by water,[20] but
Demosthenes's pen was subject to the same influence. And Pytheas
detected the smell of the midnight oil in the very perfection of the
speeches. Well, there is much in common between your subject and mine,
so far as this branch of them is concerned; on Homer's _poems_ I was no
worse off than you are.
'But when you come to your hero's acts of humanity, his pecuniary
sacrifices, his grand political achievements' (and he was going on
in full swing to the rest of the catalogue, when I interrupted, with
a laugh: 'Must I be dowsed with the remainder of your canful, good
bath-man?' 'Most certainly,' he retorted, and went straight on),
'the public entertainments he gave, the public burdens he assumed,
the ships, the wall, the trench he contributed to, the prisoners he
ransomed, the girls he portioned, his admirable policy, the embassies
he served on, the laws he got passed, the mighty issues he was
concerned in--why, then I cannot but laugh to see your contracted
brows; as if a recital of the exploits of Demosthenes _could_ lack
matter!'
'I believe you think, my good man,' I protested, 'that I have never had
the deeds of Demosthenes drummed into me; I should be singular among
rhetoricians, then.' 'It was on the assumption,' he said, 'implied by
you, that we want assistance. But perhaps your case is a very different
one; is the light so bright that you cannot manage to fix your eyes on
the dazzling glory of Demosthenes? Well, I was rather like that about
Homer at first. Indeed, I came very near turning mine away, thinking I
could not possibly face my subject. However, I got over it somehow or
other; became gradually inured, as it were, superior to the weakness of
vision that would have condemned me for a bastard eagle and no true son
of Homer.
'But now here is another great advantage that I consider you have over
me. The poetic faculty has a single aim; from which it follows that
Homer's glory must be laid hold of at once and as a whole. You on the
other hand, if you were to attempt dealing with the whole Demosthenes
all at once, would never know what to say; you would waver and not be
able to set your thoughts to work. You would be like the _gourmand_
at a Sicilian banquet, or the aesthete who has a thousand delightful
sights and sounds presented to him at once; they do not know which
way to turn for their conflicting desires. I suspect that you too are
distracted and find concentration impossible; all round you are the
varied attractions--his magnanimity, his fire, his orderly life, his
oratorical force and practical courage, the endless opportunities of
gain that he scorned, his justice, humanity, honour, spirit, sagacity,
and each of all his great services to his country. It may well be that,
when you behold on this side decrees, ambassadors, speeches, laws, on
the other, fleets, Euboea, Boeotia, Chios, Rhodes, the Hellespont,
Byzantium, you are pulled to and fro among these too numerous
invitations, and cannot tell which to accept.
'Pindar once found himself in a similar difficulty with an
over-abundant theme:
Ismenus? Melia's distaff golden-bright?
Cadmus? the race from dragon's teeth that came?
Thebe's dark circlet? the all-daring might
Of Heracles? great Bacchus' merry fame?
White-armed Harmonia's bridal?--Ay, but which?
My Muse, we're poor in that we are too rich.
You, I dare say, are in the same quandary. Logic and life, rhetoric and
philosophy, popularity and death--ay, but which?
'The maze is quite easy to escape from, though; you have only to take
hold of one single clue, no matter which--his oratory, if you will, so
that it is taken by itself--, and stick to that one throughout your
present discourse. You will have ample material; his oratory is not of
the Periclean type. Pericles could lighten and thunder, and he could
hit the right nail on the head; so much tradition tells us; but we
have nothing to judge for ourselves by, no doubt because, beyond the
momentary impression produced, there was in his performances no element
of permanence, nothing that could stand the searching test of time. But
with Demosthenes's work--well, that it will be your province to deal
with, if your choice goes that way.
'Or if you prefer his character, or his policy, it will be well to
isolate some particular detail--if you are greedy you may pick out two
or three--which will give you quite enough to go upon; so great was he
at every point. And for such specializing we have Homer's example; the
compliments he pays his heroes are attached to parts of them, their
feet, their heads, their hair, even their shields or something they
have on; and the Gods seem to have had no objection to poets' basing
their praises merely on a distaff, a bow, or the aegis; a limb or a
quality must pass still more easily; and as for good actions, it is
impossible to give an exhaustive list of them. Demosthenes accordingly
will not blame you for confining your eulogy to _one_ of his merits,
especially as to celebrate the whole of them worthily would be beyond
even _his_ powers.'
When Thersagoras had finished this harangue, I remarked: 'Your
intention is plain; I am to be convinced that you are more than a good
poet; so you have constructed your prose Demosthenes as a pendant to
your verse Homer.' 'No, no,' he said; 'what made me run on so long was
the idea that, if I could ease your mind by showing how light your
task was, I should have secured my listener.' 'Then let me tell you
that _your_ object has not been furthered, and _my_ case has only been
aggravated.' 'A fine doctor I seem to be!' he said. 'Not knowing where
the difficulty lies,' I continued, 'you are a doctor who mistakes his
patient's ailment and treats him for another.' 'How so?'
'You have been prescribing for the troubles that would attend a first
attempt; unfortunately it is years and years since I got through that
stage, and your remedies are quite out of date.' 'Why, then,' he
exclaimed, 'the cure is complete; nobody is nervous about a road of
which he knows every inch.'
'Ah, but then I have set my heart upon reversing the feat that
Anniceris of Cyrene exhibited to Plato and his friends. To show what
a fine driver he was, he drove round the Academy time after time
exactly in his own track, which looked after it as if it had only been
traversed once. Now my endeavour is just the opposite, to _avoid_ my
old tracks; and it is by no means so easy to keep out of the ruts.'
'Pauson's is the trick for you,' he said. 'What is that? I never heard
of it.'
'Pauson the painter was commissioned to do a horse rolling. He painted
one galloping in a cloud of dust. As he was at work upon it, his
patron came in, and complained that this was not what he had ordered.
Pauson just turned the picture upside down and told his man to hold
it so for inspection; there was the horse rolling on its back.' 'You
dear innocent!' I said; 'do you suppose I have kept my picture turned
the same way all these years? It has been shifted and tilted at every
conceivable angle, till I begin to have apprehensions of ending like
Proteus.' 'And how was that?' 'Oh, I mean the issue of his attempts to
evade human observation; when he had exhausted all shapes of animals
and plants and elements, finding no metamorphosis left him, he had to
be Proteus again.'
'You have more shifts than ever Proteus had,' he said, 'to get off
hearing my poem.'
'Oh, do not say that,' said I; 'off goes my burden of care, and I am
at your service. Perhaps when you have got over your own pains of
child-birth you will show more feeling for my delicate state.'
He liked the offer, we settled down on a convenient stone step, and
I listened to some excellent poetry. In the middle of reading he was
seized with an idea, did up his tablets, and said: 'You shall have your
hearer's fee, as well deserved as an Athenian's after a day in court or
assembly. Thank me, please.' 'I do, before I know what for. But what
may it be?' 'It was in the Macedonian royal archives that I came across
the book; I was delighted with it at the time, and took considerable
trouble to secure it; it has just come into my head that I have it
at home. It contains, among details of Antipater's management of the
household, facts about Demosthenes that I think you will find worth
your best attention.' 'You shall have payment on the spot,' I said,
'in the shape of an audience for the rest of your verses; and moreover
I shall not part with you till your promise is fulfilled. You have
given me a luscious Homer birthday dinner; and it seems you are to be
at the charges of the Demosthenes one too.'
He read to the end, we stayed long enough for me to give the poem its
meed of praise, and then adjourned to his house, where after some
search the book was found. I took it away with me, and on further
acquaintance was so much impressed by it that I shall do no editing,
but read it you _totidem verbis_. Asclepius is not less honoured if his
worshippers, in default of original compositions, have the hymns of
Isodemus or Sophocles performed before him; there is a failure nowadays
in the supply of new plays for Dionysus; but those who produce the
works of old masters at the proper season have the credit all the same
of honouring the God.
This book, then (the part of the state records that concerns us is the
conversation I shall give you)--the book informs us that Archias's
name was announced to Antipater. In case any of my younger hearers
should not know the fact already, this Archias had been charged with
the arrest of all exiles. In particular, he was to get Demosthenes from
Calauria into Antipater's presence, but rather by persuasion than by
force. Antipater was excited about it, hoping that Demosthenes might
arrive any day. So, hearing that Archias was come from Calauria, he
gave orders for his instant admittance.
When he entered--but you shall have the conversation as it stands.
_Archias. Antipater_
_Ar._ Is it well with you, Antipater?
_Ant._ It is well, if you have brought Demosthenes.
_Ar._ I have brought him as I might. I have the urn that holds his
remains.
_Ant._ Ha? my hopes are dashed. What avail ashes and urns, if I have
not Demosthenes?
_Ar._ The soul, O King, may not be prisoned in a man's own despite.
_Ant._ Why took you him not alive?
_Ar._ We took him.
_Ant._ And he has died on the way?
_Ar._ He died where he was, in Calauria.
_Ant._ Your neglect is to blame; you took not due care of him.
_Ar._ Nay, it lies not at our door.
_Ant._ What mean you? These are riddles, Archias; you took him alive,
and you have him not?
_Ar._ Was it not your charge that we should use no force at first? Yet
indeed we should have fared no better if we had; we did intend it.
_Ant._ You did not well, even in the intention; it may be your violence
killed him.
_Ar._ No, we killed him not; but if we could not persuade him, there
was nothing for it but force. But, O King, how had you been the better
off, if he had come alive? you could have done no more than kill him.
_Ant._ Peace, Archias! methinks you comprehend neither the nature of
Demosthenes, nor my mind. You think there is no more in the finding of
Demosthenes than in the hunting down such scoundrels as Himeraeus or
Aristonicus or Eucrates; these are like swollen torrents--mean fellows
in themselves, to whom a passing storm gives brief importance; they
make a brave show while the disturbance lasts; but they are as sure to
vanish soon as the wind to fall at evening. The recreant Hyperides is
another--a selfish demagogue, who took no shame to curry favour with
the mob by libelling Demosthenes, and make himself its instrument for
ends that his dupes soon wished they had never attained; for the libels
had not long borne their fruit before the libelled was reinstated
with more honour than Alcibiades himself. But what recked Hyperides?
he scrupled not to use against what had once been dearest to him the
tongue that he deserved, even by that iniquity, to lose.
_Ar._ How? was Demosthenes not our enemy of enemies?
_Ant._ Not in the eyes of one who cares for an honourable nature, and
loves a sincere consistent character. The noble is noble, though it be
in an enemy; and virtue has no country. Am I meaner than Xerxes? he
could admire Bulis and Sperchis the Spartans, and release them when
they were in his power. No man that ever lived do I admire more than
Demosthenes; twice I was in his company at Athens (in hurried times, it
is true), and I have heard much from others, and there is his work to
judge by. And what moves me is not his skill in speech. You might well
suppose so; Python was nothing, matched with him, and the Attic orators
but babes in comparison with his finish and intensity, the music of
his words, the clearness of his thoughts, his chains of proof, his
cumulative blows. We found our mistake when we listened to Python and
his promises; we had gathered the Greeks to Athens to see the Athenians
confuted; it was Demosthenes who confuted _us._ But no words of mine
can describe the power of his eloquence.
Yet to that I give but a secondary place, as a tool the man used. It
was the man himself I marvelled at, his spirit and his wisdom, and
the steadiness of soul that steered a straight course through all the
tempests of fortune with never a craven impulse. And Philip was of
my mind about him; when a speech of his before the Athenian assembly
against Philip was reported, Parmenio was angry, and made some bitter
jest upon him. But Philip said: _Ah, Parmenio, he has a right to say
what he pleases; he is the only popular orator in all Greece whose name
is missing in my secret service accounts, though I would far rather
have put myself in his hands than in those of clerks and third-rate
actors. All the tribe of them are down for gold, timber, rents, cattle,
land, in Boeotia if not in Macedonia[21]; but the walls of Byzantium
are not more proof against the battering-ram than Demosthenes against
gold_.
_This is the way I look at it, Parmenio. An Athenian who speaking in
Athens prefers me to his country shall have of my money, but not of
my friendship; as for one who hates me for his country's sake, I will
assault him as I would a citadel, a wall, a dock, a trench, but I have
only admiration for his virtue, and congratulations for the State that
possesses him. The other kind I should like to crush as soon as they
have served my purpose; but him I would sooner have here with us than
the Illyrian and Triballian horse and all my mercenaries; arguments
that carry conviction, weight of intellect, I do not put below force of
arms._
That was to Parmenio; and he said much the same to me. At the time of
the Athenian expedition under Diopithes, I was very anxious, but Philip
laughed at me heartily, and said: _Are you afraid of these town-bred
generals and their men? Their fleet, their Piraeus, their docks, I snap
my fingers at them. What is to be looked for from people whose worship
is of Dionysus, whose life is in feasting and dancing? If Demosthenes,
and not a man besides, had been subtracted from Athens, we should have
had it with less trouble than Thebes or Thessaly; deceit and force,
energy and corruption, would soon have done the thing. But he is ever
awake; he misses no occasion; he makes move for move and counters every
stroke. Not a trick of ours, not an attempt begun or only thought of,
but he has intelligence of it; in a word he is the obstacle that stands
between us and the swift attainment of our ends. It was little fault of
his that we took Amphipolis, that we won Olynthus, Phocis, Thermopylae,
that we are masters of the Hellespont._
_He rouses his reluctant countrymen out of their opiate sleep, applies
to their indolence the knife and cautery of frank statement, and little
he cares whether they like it or not. He transfers the revenues from
state theatre to state armament, re-creates with his navy bill a fleet
disorganized to the verge of extinction, restores patriotism to the
place from which it had long been ousted by the passion for legal fees,
uplifts the eyes of a degenerate race to the deeds of their fathers and
emulation of Marathon and Salamis, and fits them for Hellenic leagues
and combinations. You cannot escape his vigilance, he is not to be
wheedled, you can no more buy him than the Persian King could buy the
great Aristides._
_This is the direction your fears should take, Antipater; never mind
all the war-ships and all the fleets. What Themistocles and Pericles
were to the Athens of old, that is Demosthenes to Athens to-day, as
shrewd as Themistocles, as high of soul as Pericles. He it was that
gained them the control of Euboea and Megara, the Hellespont and
Boeotia. It is well indeed that they give the command to such as Chares
or Diopithes or Proxenus, and keep Demosthenes to the platform at home.
If they had given into his hands their arms and ships and troops, their
strategy and their money, I doubt he would have put me on my mettle to
keep Macedonia; even now that he has no weapon but his decrees, he is
with us at every turn, his hand is upon us; the ways and means are of
his finding, the force of his gathering; it is he that sends armadas
afar, he that joins power to power, he that meets our every change of
plan._
This was his tone about Demosthenes on many other occasions too; he
put it down as one of his debts to fortune that armies were never led
by the man whose mere words were so many battering-rams and catapults
worked from Athens to the shattering and confounding of his plans. As
to Chaeronea, even the victory made no difference; he continued to
impress upon us how precarious a position this one man had contrived
for us. _Things went unexpectedly well; their generals were cowards
and their troops undisciplined, and the caprice of fortune, which has
so often served us well, brought us out victorious; but he had reduced
me to hazarding my kingdom and my life on that single throw; he had
brought the most powerful cities into line, he had united Greece,
he had forced Athens and Thebes and all Boeotia, Corinth, Euboea,
Megara--the might of Greece, in short--to play the game out to its end,
and had arrested me before I reached Attic soil._
He never ceased to speak thus about Demosthenes. If any one told him
the Athenian democracy was a formidable rival, 'Demosthenes,' he would
say, 'is my only rival; Athens without him is no better than Aenianes
or Thessalians.' Whenever Philip sent embassies to the various states,
if Athens had sent any one else to argue against his men, he always
gained his point with ease; but when it was Demosthenes, he would tell
us the embassy had come to naught: there was not much setting up of
trophies over speeches of Demosthenes.