The political career of Demosthenes, from his first direct contact with public affairs in 355 B.C. to his death in 322, has an essential unity. It is the assertion, in successive forms adapted to successive moments, of unchanging principles. Externally, it is divided into the chapter which precedes and the chapter which follows Chseronea. But its inner meaning, the secret of its indomitable vigour, the law which harmonizes its apparent contrasts, cannot be understood unless it is regarded as a whole. Still less can it be appreciated in all its large wisdom and sustained self-mastery if it is viewed merely as a duel between the ablest champion and the craftiest enemy of Greek freedom. The time indeed came when Demosthenes and Philip stood face to face as representative antagonists in a mortal conflict. But, for Demosthenes, the special peril represented by Philip, the peril of subjugation to Macedon, was merely a disastrous accident. Philip happened to become the most prominent and most formidable type of a danger which was already threatening Greece before his baleful star arose. As Demosthenes said to the Athenians, if the Macedonian had not existed, they would have made another Philip for themselves. Until Athens recovered something of its old spirit, there must ever be a great standing danger, not for Athens only, but for Greece, the danger that sooner or later, in some shape, from some quarter no man could foretell the hour, the manner, or the source barbarian violence would break up the gracious and undefiled tradition of separate Hellenic life.
What is the true relation of Athens to Greece? The answer which he gave to this question is the key to the life of Demosthenes. Athens, so Demosthenes held, is the natural head of Greece. Not, however, as an empress holding subject or subordinate cities in a dependence more or less compulsory. Rather as that city which most nobly expresses the noblest attributes of Greek political existence, and which, by her pre-eminent gifts both of intellect and of moral insight, is primarily responsible, everywhere and always, for the maintenance of those attributes in their integrity. Wherever the cry of the oppressed goes up from Greek against Greek, it is the voice of Athens which should first remind the oppressor that Hellene differs from barbarian in postponing the use of force to the persuasions of equal law. Wherever a barbarian hand offers wrong to any city of the Hellenic sisterhood, it is the arm of Athens which should first be stretched forth in the holy strength of Apollo the Averter. Wherever among her own children the ancient loyalty is yielding to love of pleasure or of base gain, there, above all, it is the duty of Athens to see that the central hearth of Hellas is kept pure. Athens must never again seek " empire " in the sense which became odious under the influence of Cleon and Hyperbolus, when, to use the image of Aristophanes, the allies were as Babylonian slaves grinding in the Athenian mill. Athens must never permit, if she can help it, the re-establishment of such a domination as Sparta exercised in Greece from the battle of Ægospotami to the battle of Leuctra. Athens must aim at leading a free confederacy, of which the members shall be bound to her by their own truest interests. Athens must seek to deserve the confidence of all Greeks alike.
Such, in the belief of Demosthenes, was the part which Athens must perform if Greece was to be safe. But reforms must be effected before Athens could be capable of such a part. The evils to be cured were different phases of one malady. Athens had long been suffering from the profound decay of public spirit. It was of the essence of a Greek commonwealth that the citizen, while perfectly free in his social life, should constantly set his duty to the city above private interests. If the state needs his service in war, he must not hire an inferior substitute to do the work. If the state requires funds, he must not grudge the money which in quiet times might have been spent on the theatre or the banquet. He must ever remember that, in the phrase of Sophocles, the state is the ship that bears us safe. It does not profit the passenger that his cabin is comfortable if the ship is going down.
Since the early years of the Peloponnesian war, the separation of Athenian society from the state had been growing more and more marked. The old type of the eminent citizen, who was at once statesman and general, had become almost extinct. Politics were now managed by a small circle of politicians. Wars were conducted by professional soldiers whose troops were chiefly mercenaries, and who were usually regarded by the politicians either as instruments or as enemies. The mass of the citizens took no active interest in public affairs. But, though indifferent to principles, they had quickly sensitive partialities for men, and it was necessary to keep them in good humour. Pericles had introduced the practice of giving a small bounty from the Treasury to the poorer citizens, for the purpose of enabling them to attend the theatre at the great festivals, in other words, for the purpose of bringing them under the concentrated influence of the best Attic culture. A provision eminently wise for the age of Pericles easily became a mischief when the once honourable name of "demagogue" began to mean a flatterer of the mob. Before the end of the Peloponnesian War the festival-money (" theoricon ") was abolished. A few years after the restora tion of the democracy it was again introduced. But until 354 B.C. it had never been more than a gratuity, of which the payment depended on the Treasury having a surplus. It had never been treated as an annual charge on the revenue, or guaranteed to the citizens as a dividend which they could claim by constitutional right. In 354 B.C. Eubulus became steward of the Treasury. He was an able man, with a special talent for finance, free from all taint of personal corruption, and sincerely solicitous for the honour o f Athens, but enslaved to popularity, and without prin ciples of policy. He sought to manage the citizens by humouring to the top of its bent their disinclination for personal sacrifice, and their preference for public show to public strength. More than any other one man, Eubulus represents that new, easy-going, improvident Athens in which the vigilant civic spirit was dead. His first measure was to make the festival-money a permanent item in the budget. Thenceforth this bounty was in reality very much what Demades afterwards called it, the cement ([Greek]) of the democracy.
Demosthenes had begun the work of his life, -the effort to lift the spirit of Athens, to revive the old civic loyalty, to rouse the city into taking that place and performing that part which her own welfare as well as the safety of Greece prescribed. His formally political speeches must never be considered apart from his forensic speeches in public causes. The Athenian procedure against the proposer of an unconstitutional law i.e., of a law incompatible with existing laws had a direct tendency to make the law-court, in such cases, a political arena. The same tendency was indirectly exerted by the tolerance of Athenian juries (in the absence of a presiding expert like a judge) for irrelevant matter, since it was usually easy for a speaker to make capital out of the adversary s political antecedents. But the forensic speeches of Demosthenes for public causes are not only political in this general sense. They are documents, as indispensable as the Olynthiacs or Philippics, for his own political career. Only by taking them along with the formally political speeches, and regarding the whole as eno unbroken series, can we see clearly the full scope of the
task which he set before him, a task in which his long
