HOW TO GET STRONG
to his other studies and exercises. Then he attacked his guardians and, as Thucydides says, "he had great opportunity to exercise his talent for the Bar." It was not without much pains and some risk that he gained his cause. But he had a weakness and stammering in his voice and a want of breath that caused such a distraction in his discourse that it was difficult for the audience to understand him. Immediately afterwards, wandering in a dejected condition in the Piræus, he was met by Eunous, who said: "You have a manner of speaking very like that of Pericles; yet you lose yourself out of mere timidity and cowardice. You neither bear up against the tumults of a popular assembly, nor prepare your body by exercise for the labor of the rostrum; but suffer your parts to wither away in negligence and indulgence."
Plutarch says that "Upon this he built himself a subterraneous study, which remained to our times. Thither he repaired every day, to form his action and exercise his voice. And he would often stay there for two or three months together, shaving one side of his head, that if he should happen to be ever so desirous of going abroad, the shame of appearing in that condition might keep him in.… As to his personal defects, Demetrius the Phalærean gives us an account of the remedies he applied to them, and he says he had it from Demosthenes in his old age.
"The hesitation and stammering of his tongue he corrected by practising to speak with pebbles in his mouth; and he strengthened his voice by running or walking uphill, and pronouncing some passage in an oration of a poem during the difficulty of breath which that caused.
"About this time the affair concerning the Crown came upon the carpet—it was the most celebrated cause that ever was pleaded."
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