FOOTNOTES:

his anti-Persian policy.

Let us begin with Isocrates, whose pamphlets, though written with far too much attention to style, and intended as rhetorical masterpieces, nevertheless tell us a great deal of what filled the minds of thoughtful men in his day. He sees plainly that the Greeks were wearing themselves out with internecine wars and perpetual jealousies, and he opined, shrewdly enough, that nothing but a great external quarrel would weld them together into unity, and make the various States forget their petty squabbles in the enthusiasm of a common conflict against a foreign foe. He saw plainly enough that the proper enemy to attackwas the power of Asia. For it was ill-cemented and open to invasion; it was really dangerous to the liberty even of the Hellenic peninsula,—almost fatal to that of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and moreover so full of wealth as to afford an enormous field for that legitimate plunder which every conqueror then thought his bare due at the hands of the vanquished.

No large ideas of spreading Hellenic culture.

Isocrates had not the smallest idea of raising the Asiatic nations, or of civilizing them[132:1]. No Greek down to Aristotle, nay, not even Aristotle himself, ever had such a notion, though he might concede that isolated men or cities could possibly, by careful and humble imitation of Hellenic culture, attain to a respectable imitation of it. Isocrates' plain view of the war policy against Persia was simply this: first, that the internal quarrels of Greece would be allayed; secondly, that a great number of poor and roving Greeks would attain wealth and contentment; thirdly, 'the Barbarians would learn to think less of themselves[132:2].'

Who is to be the leader of Greece?

His first proposal was that Athens and Sparta, the natural leaders of Greece, should combine in this policy, divide the command by a formal treaty,and so resume their proper position as benefactors and promoters of all Hellenedom.

But as years went on, the impotence and the strife of these powers made it only too plain that this was no practical solution; so he turns in an open letter to Philip of Macedon, who was gradually showing how to solve the problem of Hellenic unity, and advises him to use his power, not for the subjugation of the Greeks, but to lead them in a victorious campaign into Asia.

But in Philip they had already found that common enemy against whom they should have united, if voluntary union was ever again possible among them; and their miserable failure to do so showed plainly that the days of independent States throughout Greece were numbered, and that the first neighbouring power with organization and wealth was certain to pluck the over-ripe fruit of Hellenedom.

Demosthenes another ideal figure in this history.

§ 55. This brings us by natural transition to Demosthenes, on whose life and policy it is very necessary to say a few words, seeing that they have been, like so many other topics in Greek history, distorted by the specialists, and made the ground of sentimental rhetoric instead of being sifted with critical care. To utter anything against Demosthenes thirty years ago was almost as bad as to say a word in old Athenian days against the battle of Marathon. This battle was so hymned and lauded by orators and poets that had you suggested its importance in the campaign to be overrated, had you said that you believed the alleged numbers of thePersians to be grossly exaggerated, you would have been set down as an insolent and unpatriotic knave. In the same way the scholars have laid hold of Demosthenes; they have dwelt not only upon the matchless force of his eloquence, but upon the grammatical subtleties of his Greek, till they are so in love with him that whatever is said in his favour is true, and whatever appears to be against him is false.

As I have not spent the whole of a long life either in commenting on this great author or in vindicating for him all the virtues under heaven, I may perhaps be better able than greater scholars to give a fair estimate of his political merits.

He sees the importance of a foreign policy for Athens

against Persia

or Macedonia.

Demosthenes at the outset of his career saw plainly, like Isocrates, that a foreign policy was necessary to give not only dignity, but consistency, to the counsels of Athens; and he too at the outset, misconceiving the real power of Philip, thought that Persia was the serious foe[134:1], and should be the object of most importance to Athenian politicians. Darius Ochus, the last vigorous king of Persia, had made such military preparations for the reconquest of his rebellious provinces as to alarm all the Asiatic Greeks and conjure up the phantom of a new Persian war. But presently the real danger set aside this bugbear; the activity and military skill of Philip, added to his discovery or utilization of the Thracian gold mines, made him clearly thefuture lord of the Hellenes if he could prevent them from combining against him for a few years.

Grote on Demosthenes.

The narrative of this famous struggle, carried on mainly by the eloquence of Demosthenes on one side, and the diplomacy of Philip on the other, forms one of the most attractive pages in history; and nowhere is it better told than in the eleventh volume of Grote's work. The cause of Demosthenes naturally attracted the Radical historian[135:1], who sees in the power of Macedon nothing but the overthrow of democracy, of discussion, of universal suffrage; and hence the relapse of society into a condition worse and less developed than what had been attained by all the labours of great and enlightened reform.

A. Schäfer on Demosthenes.

The cause of Demosthenes also attracted Arnold Schäfer, who having chosen the orator and his works for his own speciality, spent years in gradually increasing admiration for this choice, till Demosthenes became for him a patriot of spotless purity and a citizen of such high principle that all charges against him are to be set down as calumnies. This enthusiasm has reached so far that if in the collection of law speeches which the orator composed for pay, and often to support a very weak case, there are found illogical arguments or inconsistencies with other speeches on analogous subjects, such flaws are set down as evidence that the particular speech is spurious, and cannothave emanated from so noble a character as Demosthenes[136:1].

Very different estimate of the ancients.

§ 56. This estimate is totally at variance with the judgment of the ancients, his contemporaries and immediate successors, who openly accused, and indeed convicted, him of embezzling money in his public capacity, as well as of accepting briefs and fees from both sides in a private litigation.

Conditions of the conflict

made Philip's victory certain.

To this question of his private character I shall revert. But as regards the struggle which he carried on for years, not so much against Philip as against the apathy of his fellow-citizens, it must have been plain from the beginning that he was playing a losing game. The dislike of military service in what is called by Grote the 'Demosthenic Athenian' was notorious; the jealousies of parties within, and of other States without, hampered any strong and consistent line of action. The gold of Philip was sure to command, not only at Athens, but at Thebes, at Argos, in Arcadia, partisans who, under the guise of legitimate opposition, would carry adjournments, postponements, limitations, of all vigorous policy. Mercenary troops, which were now in fashion, if not amply paid and treated with regard to their convenience,became a greater scourge to their own side than to the enemy. It was therefore quite plain that Philip must win, though none of us can fail to appreciate and to admire the persistent and noble efforts of Demosthenes, who is never weary of urging that if the free States, especially Athens, would do their duty, and make some sacrifices for the good of Greece, the impending foreign domination would be indefinitely postponed. But this only means that if the Athenians had changed their character, and adopted that of another generation or another race, the issue of the contest might have been different[137:1].

Demosthenes fights a losing game.

This is the sort of up-hill game that Demosthenes played for twenty years. At first Athens seemed quite the stronger to superficial observers. But because she was so strong it seemed unnecessary to act with full vigour. Presently she begins to lose, and Philip to make way. Even still she can win if she will rouse herself. But soon he makes further advances, and she is involved in difficulties. Then the faint-hearted begin to fear, and the disloyal to waver. It is not till the very end of the struggle, when Athens is in direct danger of immediate siege, that the whole population wakes up, the traitors are silenced, and the city, in conjunction with Thebes, makes a splendid struggle. But the day for victory had long gone by, and Demosthenes has the bitter satisfaction of at last attaining his full reputation for wisdom and patriotism because his gloomiest prophecies are fulfilled.

The blunders of his later policy.

Compared with Phocion.

§ 57. It is from this time onward[138:1]that his publicacts seem to me hardly consistent with common-sense, or with that higher idea of patriotism which seeks the good of the State at the sacrifice of personal theories or prejudices. Grote has observed of the other leading Athenian of that time, the general Phocion, that while his policy of submission and despair was injurious, nay, even fatal, up to the battle of Chæronea, this tame acquiescence when the struggle was over was the practical duty of a patriot, and of decided advantage to his country. Grote ought to have insisted with equal force that the policy of resistance and of hope, while highly commendable and patriotic up to the same moment, was deeply mischievous to the conquered people, and led them into many follies and many misfortunes. And yet this was the policy which Demosthenes hugged to the last, and which cost the lives and fortunes of hundreds of Athenians.

Old men often ruinous politics.

I have spoken elsewhere[139:1]of the peculiar mischief to a nation of having her fortunes at a great crisis intrusted tooldmen. Demosthenes was indeed only fifty years of age when the genius of Alexander showed itself beyond any reasonable doubt. But at fifty Demosthenes was distinctly an old man. His delicate constitution, tried by the severest early studies, had been worn in political conflicts of nearly thirty years' duration; and we may therefore pardon him, though we cannot forget the fatal influence he exercised in keeping both Athens and the other Greek cities from joining heartily in the great newenterprise of the Macedonian king. All the Attic politicians were then past middle life, with the exception of Hypereides.

Hellenism despised.

So then the old republican glories of Athens, the old liberties of the Greeks, which had been tried and found wanting, were praised and hymned by all the orators, and the great advent of a new day, the day ofHellenism, was cursed as the setting of the sun of Greece. Modern scholars, led, as usual, by literary instead of political greatness, have in general adopted this view; and so strongly do they feel that the proper history of Greece is now over that they either close their work with the battle of Chæronea, or add the conquests of Alexander and the wars of the Diadochi as a sort of ungrateful and irrelevant appendix. On this subject I have already spoken in connection with the work of Grote[140:1].

The author feels he is fighting a losing game against democracy and its advocates.

The love of political liberty, and the importance attached to political independence, are so strong in the minds of the Anglo-Saxon nations that it is not likely any one will persuade them, against the splendid advocacy of Grote, that there may be such losses and mischiefs in a democracy as to justify a return to a stronger executive and a greater restriction of public speech. Nevertheless, the conviction derived from a life-long study of Greek history is so strong in me on this question that I feel compelled to state my opinions. It is all the more a duty as I hold that one of the greatest lessons of ancient history is to suggestguiding-posts and advices for the perplexities of modern life. So far is mankind the same in all places and countries, that most civilized peoples will stumble upon the same difficulties and will apply the same experiments to their solution.

The education of small free States.

Machiavelli and Aristotle.

§ 58. There is no one more convinced than I am that this complex of small, independent cities, each forming a separate State in the strictest sense of the term, each showing modifications of internal constitution, each contending with the same obstacles in varied ways,—this wonderful political Many-in-one (for they were one in religion, language, and general culture) afforded an intellectual education to Greek citizens such as the world has not since experienced. ThePoliticsof Aristotle is a summary of the theoretical side of that experience, which could find no parallel till the days of Machiavelli, whose scheme, if completed by the promisedRepubblica, would have been very similar. For hisPrincipeis plainly suggested by the then re-discoveredPoliticsof Aristotle, which naturally struck the Florentine statesman with its curiously close and various analogies to the history of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages.

Greek democratic patriotism.

Even far more deeply did the lessons of Athenian political life act upon the practical character of the citizen, and train him to be a rational being submitting to the will of the majority, to which he himself contributed in debate, taking his turn at commanding as well as obeying, regarding the labours of office as his just contribution to thepublic weal, regarding even the sacrifices he made as a privilege,—the outward manifestation of his loyalty to the State which had made him in the truest sense an aristocrat among men. Even when he commanded fleets or armies he did so as the servant of the State; and any attempt to redress private differences by personal assertion of his rights, other than the law provided, was regarded as essentially a violation of his civility and a return to barbarism. To carry arms for personal defence, to challenge an adversary to mortal combat, to take forcible possession of disputed property,—these things were greater outrages and greater violences to civilization at Athens than they are in most of the civilized countries of the nineteenth century.

Its splendid results

To have attained this high level, four centuries before Christ, without the aid of a really pure system of State religion, without the aid of that romantic sentiment which is so peculiar to Northern nations, is to have achieved a triumph which no man can gainsay. Had the Greeks not been subjected to this splendid training, which radiated from politics into art and letters, and which stimulated, though it did not create, that national genius that has since found no rival, all the glories of Hellenism, all the splendours of Alexander's successors, all the victories over Western barbarism would have been impossible.

appear to be essentially transitory,

from internal causes.

§ 59. But when all this is said, and however fully and eloquently it may be urged, the fact remains that the highest education is not all-powerful inproducing internal concord and external peace. There seems, as it were, a national strain exercised by a conquering and imperial democracy, which its members may sustain for a generation or two, but which cannot endure. The sweets of accumulated wealth and domestic comfort in a civilized and agreeable society become so delightful that the better classes will not keep up their own energy. All work, says Aristotle, to which men submit, is for the purpose of having leisure; and so there is a natural tendency in the cultivated classes to stand aside from politics, and allow the established laws to run in their now accustomed grooves. Hence the field of politics is left to the poorer, needier, more discontented classes, who turn public life into a means of glory and of gain, and set to work to disturb the State that they may satisfy their followers and obtain fuel to feed their own ambition. To such persons either a successful war upon neighbours, or an attack upon the propertied classes at home, becomes a necessity.

The case of America.

Let me state a modern case. The natural resources of America are still so vast that this inevitable result has not yet ensued. But whenever a limit has been reached and the pinch of poverty increases, we may expect it to arise in the United States. Even the Athenian democracy, when its funds were low and higher taxes were threatened, hailed with approval informations against rich citizens, in the hope that by confiscations of their property the treasury might be replenished.

The demagogue.

This is the heyday of the demagogue, who tells the people—the poorer crowd—that they have a right to all the comforts and blessings of the State, and that their pleasures must not be curtailed while there are men of large property living in idle luxury. Such arguments produce violences instead of legal decisions; the demagogue becomes a tyrant over the richer classes; the public safety is postponed to private interests; and so the power of the democracy as regards external foes is weakened in proportion as the harmony among its citizens is disturbed.

Internal disease the real cause of decadence.

The Greek States all in this condition,

Such are the changes which Greek theorists regarded as inevitable in a democracy, and as certain to bring about its ultimate fall. Whatever may be the case with the great States of modern days, this prognosis was thoroughly verified in Greek history. It may safely be said that no State was ever crushed by external adversaries at the period of its perfection. In every case internal decay has heralded the overthrow from without. There is no reasonable probability that, had there never been a Philip or an Alexander, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, or Argos would have risen into a glorious future and revived the splendours of Leonidas or of Pericles. We may deeply regret that the maintenance of such prosperity should seem impossible; we may laud in the strongest words the condition of things which had once made it actual: but the day for this splendour was gone by; and far better than the impotence of anunjust mob, and the chicanery of an unprincipled leader, is the subjection of all to external control, even with the impairing or abolishing of universal suffrage.

as Phocion saw,

This was evidently the opinion of Phocion, an honourable and experienced man, whose contempt for the floods of talk in Athens, leading to waste of time and delay in action, made him the persistent opponent of Demosthenes, but nevertheless trusted and respected even by the mob whom he openly despised. We may indeed feel glad that his policy did not earlier prevail,—we should have lost the speeches of Demosthenes; and to the after world this loss would not have been compensated, had the Athenians merely escaped their troubles and lived in peaceful submission.

but which Demosthenes ignored.

Demosthenes says proudly, in a famous passage of his immortalDe Corona, that even in presence of his life's failure, even after all he had attempted had been wrecked by circumstances, he would not recall one act of his life, one argument in his speeches, no, not by the heroes that stood the brunt of battle at Marathon, by the memory of all those who died for their country's liberty!

The dark shadows of his later years.

§ 60. We may all applaud this noble self-panegyric, but not the irritating agitation which he had adopted and continued for fifteen years against the Macedonian supremacy, and which involved his country in further distresses, and cost him and his brother-agitators their lives. For the very means he used to carry on his policy of revolt were more thandoubtful in their honesty, and have thrown a dark shade upon his memory. The fact is, as I have already said, that while Phocion, the enemy of the democratic policy, is above all suspicion, both contemporaries and survivors had their doubts about Demosthenes.

His professional character as an advocate.

I need not discuss here the allegation that he made speeches for money on opposite sides in the successive trials of the same case. The fact appears to me clear enough, for it is only evaded by his panegyrists with their stock expedient of declaring one of such opposing speeches, though accepted by the best ancient critics, to be spurious. But the morals of the bar from that day to this are so peculiar—I will not say loose—as to make the layman hesitate in offering an opinion. That a man should take fees for a case in which he cannot appear, or retain them when he is debarred by lucrative promotion from appearing for his client, seems to be consistent with the morality of the modern bar. Why then try Demosthenes by a severer standard?

The affair of Harpalus.

But a larger question arises when we find him arraigned for embezzling a sum of money brought to Athens by a fugitive defaulter from Alexander's treasury, and moreover convicted of the embezzlement. The chorus of modern critics, with a very occasional exception, cry out that of course the accusation was false, and the verdict simply a political move to escape the wrath of the formidable Macedonian. But the facts remain, and this moreoveramong them, that the principal accuser of Demosthenes was his brother-patriot Hypereides, who afterwards suffered death for the anti-Macedonian cause[147:1].

Was the verdict against Demosthenes just?

The evidence left to us seems to me not sufficient to overthrow the Athenian verdict on political grounds, and is certainly not such as to justify us in acquitting Demosthenes without further consideration. The real ground, however, which actuates modern historians is quite a different one from that of the evidence adduced, and is, I think, based on a historical misprision, a false estimate of the current morals of the day. I think it well to state the case here; for it is a test case, andaffects many of our judgments of other Greek politicians as well as of Demosthenes.

The modern ground of acquittal.

§ 61. The modern ground of acquittal urged is this, that we cannot for a moment conceive a pure and high-souled patriot, who had risked all for the national cause, to have been guilty of taking bribes or embezzling money. Schäfer indeed distinctly says[148:1]that his judgment is determined by his estimate of the moral character of its hero; and so not only weak and illogical speeches, but immoral or dishonest acts, are simply to be set aside as inconceivable in so lofty and unsullied a nature. Whether this be a sensible way of writing history, I leave the reader to decide. What I am now going to urge is this, that in the morality of Attic politics, taking money privately was not thought disgraceful, but was, with certain restrictions, openly asserted to be quite justifiable.

Morality of politicians expounded by Hypereides.

Hypereides puts it plainly in his speech in this very case. Seeing that it was not the practice at Athens to pay salaries to politicians for their services, the public, he says, was quite prepared that they should make indirect profits and receive money privately for their work; the one thing intolerable was that they should take it from the enemies of their country or to prejudice Athenian interests.

Modern sentiment at least repudiates these principles.

In England we have had the good fortune to find rich men of high traditions to carry on the affairs of the nation, and even where we do not,or used not, to give salaries, it has been long thought disgraceful to make politics the source of private gain. How far it was done or not, in spite of this feeling, we need not inquire. There can be no doubt that now, at all events, there are large numbers of men supporting themselves by a parliamentary career; and it is usually said of America also, that politics are there regarded as a lucrative profession, and that the men who spend their lives in politics from mere ambition or from pure patriotism are very rare indeed. Still I think modern sentiment, theoretically at least, brands these indirect profits as disgraceful; nor do I think any modern advocate would describe such a practice as perfectly excusable in the way that Hypereides expresses it.

We are dealing, therefore, with a condition of public morality in which taking bribes, to put it plainly, was not at all considered a heinous offence, provided always that they were not taken to injure the State. You might therefore be a patriot at Athens, and yet make that patriotism a source of profit.

As regards practice we have Walpole

This combination of high and sordid principles seems so shocking to modern gentlemen that I must remind them of two instances not irrelevant to the question in hand. In the first place men who were thoroughly honourable and served their country faithfully, as, for example, Sir Robert Walpole, have thought it quite legitimate to corrupt with money those under them and thoseopposed to them. Though they would scorn to receive bribes, they did not scruple to offer them; and they have left it on record that they found few men unwilling to accept such bribes in some indirect or disguised form.

and the Greek patriots of our own century.

Again, if the reader will turn to the narratives of the great War of Liberation in Greece, which lasted some ten years of this century (1821-1831), and will study the history of the national leaders who fought all the battles by sea and land, and contributed far more than foreign aid to the success of that remarkable Revolution, he will find that on the one hand they were actuated with the strongest and most passionate feelings of patriotism, while on the other they did not scruple to turn the war to their own profit[150:1]. They were klephts, bandits, assassins. They often took bribes to save the families of Turks, and then allowed them to be massacred. They made oaths and broke them, signed treaties and violated them. And yet there is not the smallest doubt that they were strictly patriots, in the sense of loving their country, and even shedding their blood for it.

Analogous to the case of Demosthenes.

The end justified the means.

§ 62. Let us now come back to the case of Demosthenes. At the opening of his career hewould have gladly obtained money and men from Macedon to use against Persia; for Persia then seemed a danger to Greece. Later on, his policy was to obtain money from Persia to attack Macedon; and we are told that in the crisis before Chæronea he had control of large funds of foreign gold, which he administered as he chose. The one great end was to break the power of Macedon. And so I have not the smallest doubt that if he thought the gold of Harpalus would enable him to emancipate Athens, he was perfectly ready to accept it, even on the terms of screening Harpalus from any personal danger, provided this did not balk the one great object in view. Thus the telling of a deliberate lie, which to modern gentlemen is a crime of the same magnitude as taking a bribe, is in the minds of many of our politicians justified by urgent public necessity[151:1]. It is hardly worth while to give instances of this notorious laxity in European public life. Is it reasonable, is it fair, to try Demosthenes by a far higher standard?

This is why I contend that it is illogical and unhistorical to argue that because Demosthenes was an honourable man and a patriot, therefore hecould not have done what he was convicted of doing by the Areopagus[152:1].

Low average of Greek national morality.

At no time was the average morality of the Greeks very high. From the days of Homer down, as I have shown amply in mySocial Life in Greece, we find a low standard of truth and honesty in that brilliant society, which is gilded over to us by their splendid intellectual gifts. As Ulysses in legend, Themistocles in early, Aratus in later history are the types which speak home to Greek imagination and excite the national admiration, so in a later day Cicero, in a remarkable passage, where he discusses the merits and demerits of the race[152:2], lays it down as an axiom that their honesty is below par, and will never rank in court with a Roman's word.

Demosthenes above it.

Exceptions there were, such as Aristides, Socrates, Phocion; but they never enlisted the sympathy, though they commanded the respect, of the Greek public. Nay, all these suffered for their honesty. I do not believe Demosthenes to have been below the average morality of his age,—far from it; he was in all respects, save in military skill, much above it: but I do not believe he wasat all of the type of his adversary, Phocion, who was honest and incorruptible in the strictest modern sense.

Deep effect of his rhetorical earnestness.

The perfection of his art is to be apparently natural.

The illusion has here again been produced by the perfect art of Demosthenes, whose speeches read as if he spoke the inmost sentiments of his mind and laid his whole soul open with all earnestness and sincerity to the hearer. I suppose there was a day when people thought this splendid, direct, apparently unadorned eloquence burst from the fulness of his heart, and found its burning expression upon his lips merely from the power of truth and earnestness to speak to the hearts of other men. We know very well now that this is the most absurd of estimates. Every sentence, every clause, was turned and weighed; the rythm of every phrase was balanced; the very interjections and exclamations were nicely calculated. There never was any speaking or writing more strictly artificial since the world of literature began. But as the most perfect art upon the stage attains the exact image of nature, so the perfection of Greek oratory was to produce the effect of earnestness and simplicity by the most subtle means, adding concealed harmonies of sound, and figures of thought, by which the audience could be charmed and beguiled into a delighted acquiescence. This is the sort of rhetorician with whom we have to deal, and who regarded the simple and trenchant Phocion as the most dangerous 'pruner of his periods.' To many persons such a schoolof eloquence, however perfect, will not seem the strictest school for plain uprightness in action; and they will rather be surprised at the eagerness of modern historians to defend him against all accusations, than at the decisive, though reluctant, condemnation which he suffered at the hands of his own citizens[154:1]. All the life of Demosthenes shows a strong theatrical tendency, even as he is said to have namedὑπόκρισις(the art of delivery) as the essence of eloquence. It is in this connection that Holm justly finds fault with the modern critics, who reject indeed the ribaldry of Æschines as mendacious, but set down that of Demosthenes as a source of sober history. The scandalous accusations made by all these orators against their opponents have one distinct parallel in earlier history—the sallies of the Old Comedy. This kind of political play died out with the rise of dramatic oratory, which was fully as libellous. Holm's remark is also worth repeating in this connection, that the dialectical discussions of the later tragedy were appropriated by the philosophers, whose dialogues satisfied the strong taste of the Athenians for this kind of intellectual exercise.

[132:1]He says indeed in one place (Panegyr.p. 51) that Hellenedom is rather a matter of common culture, than of common race. But nowhere does he ever acknowledge that foreign races as such can attain this culture, and he shows the respect of every old-fashioned Hellene for the Spartans, who belonged to the race, but were devoid of this culture.

[132:2]The texts are all cited in myHistory of Greek Literature, ii. 215, when treating of Isocrates.

[134:1]Cf. the texts in myGreek Lit.ii. 2, pp. 87, 105.

[135:1]As it did Niebuhr, who was brought up in the great struggle of Germany with Napoleon.

[136:1]This absurd feeling has gone so far as to lead Demosthenes' admirers to blacken the character of all those who opposed him, not only of Philip of Macedon, but of Eubulus and other Attic politicians. Holm has very well defended Eubulus (G. G. iii. 252sq.), and has also vindicated Philip from the usual accusations of treachery, cruelty, and tyranny (ibid.327).

[137:1]I cannot avoid citing a parallel from contemporary history, which is by no means so far-fetched as may appear to those who have not studied both cases so carefully as I have been obliged to do. The Irish landlords, a rich, respectable, idle, uncohesive body, have been attacked by an able and organized agitation, unscrupulous, mendacious, unwearied, which has carried point after point against them, and now threatens to force them to capitulate, or evacuate their estates in the country. It has been said a thousand times: Why do not these landlords unite and fight their enemy? They have far superior capital; they have had from the outset public influence far greater; they have a far stronger case, not only in law, but in real justice: and yet they allow their opponents to push them from position to position, till little remains to be conquered. Even after a series of defeats we tell them still that if they would now combine, subscribe, select, and trust their leaders, they could win. And all this is certain. But it is not likely that they will ever do it. One is fond of his pleasures, another of his idleness, a third is jealous of any leader who is put forward, a fourth is trying underhand to make private terms with the enemy. A small and gallant minority subscribe, labour, debate. They are still a considerable force, respected and feared by their foes. But the main body is inert, jealous, helpless; and unless their very character be changed, these qualities must inevitably lead to their ruin.

[138:1]Holm, in his remarkable estimate of the Greek policy of this time, goes so far as to say that Demosthenes' efforts even before Chæronea were mischievous, and that the idea he constantly puts forward, of making Athens great by weakening her old rivals Sparta and Thebes, is no better than supporting that old particularism which always made the Greeks inferior to any powerful or wealthy foreign State. Holm thinks that a larger and truer policy was that of Isocrates, who would have loyally accepted the hegemony of Philip, that he might lead the whole nation against a foreign enemy. We may be able to see things in that light now, yet I cannot blame Demosthenes, and the patriotic party at Athens, for neglecting the essay of Isocrates, and desiring to maintain Athens upon the old lines. But their effort was neither honestly nor persistently supported by the main body of the Athenians.

[139:1]Greek Life and Thought, p. 4.

[140:1]Above,§ 10.

[147:1]It is nevertheless not likely that Hypereides was personally intimate with Demosthenes, for he was not, as is usually stated, his contemporary, but a man of a younger generation, as I have argued in myGreek Lit.ii. 2, p. 371. I invite the critics either to refute or to accept the arguments there stated.I can now cite several scholars of the first magnitude whose estimate of Demosthenes agrees in almost every detail with what I had argued in myHistory of Greek Literature. They are H. Weil, in his admirable edition of Demosthenes (Paris, 1886), and Holm in the third volume of his History (1891), especially the passage (pp. 247-9), which shows that there is now a general tendency to judge Demosthenes less leniently than Grote and Schäfer have done. Beloch, Sittl, Spengel, and other considerable critics are quoted in his summary. It is no small satisfaction to me to see the opinions I put forth in the first edition ofSocial Life in Greece(1871), which were then treated as paradoxes, now adopted, quite independently, by a large body of the best critics. I do not, however, think that they have sufficiently appreciated the low standard of political honesty at Athens, as compared with ours. This affords the best apology for Demosthenes' faults. He was, after all, the child of his time.

I can now cite several scholars of the first magnitude whose estimate of Demosthenes agrees in almost every detail with what I had argued in myHistory of Greek Literature. They are H. Weil, in his admirable edition of Demosthenes (Paris, 1886), and Holm in the third volume of his History (1891), especially the passage (pp. 247-9), which shows that there is now a general tendency to judge Demosthenes less leniently than Grote and Schäfer have done. Beloch, Sittl, Spengel, and other considerable critics are quoted in his summary. It is no small satisfaction to me to see the opinions I put forth in the first edition ofSocial Life in Greece(1871), which were then treated as paradoxes, now adopted, quite independently, by a large body of the best critics. I do not, however, think that they have sufficiently appreciated the low standard of political honesty at Athens, as compared with ours. This affords the best apology for Demosthenes' faults. He was, after all, the child of his time.

[148:1]Demosthenes, iii. 239et passim: cf. Curtius, G. G. iii. 774 (note 44).

[150:1]Finlay even goes so far as to say that the islanders of Hydra, who were certainly the most prominent in the cause of patriotism, were actuated by no higher motives than despair at the loss of the lucrative monopoly they had enjoyed of visiting all the ports of Europe during the great Napoleonic wars under the protection of the neutral flag of Turkey! The patriotism of these people did not include gratitude.

Back to Index Next