I. The son of Demosthenes, a cabinet and sword manufacturer of wealth and station, and Cleobule, the daughter of an Athenian exile, Demosthenes inherited, on the death of his father b.c. 375, a considerable fortune. For ten years this remained in the hands of three guardians, who were called to account for neglect of trust when the heir, at the age of eighteen, attained his majority. The litigation in which he was then involved first called into action the oratorical powers of the young pleader. But if we may rely on an anecdote of Plutarch, which has a greater air of likelihood than the similar story regarding Thucydides, his ambition to excel in this direction was kindled at an earlier period, when he was admitted as a boy to witness one of the triumphs of Callisthenes. and fired with the applause of the multitude, resolved to devote himself to the study of eloquence. Demosthenes himself contrasts the advantages he received from a systematic education with the mean condition of his rival, Æschines. Various preceptors in the art of rhetoric have been assigned to him, and the desire to link great names together has connected his with the most famous of his own and the preceding age. Among these, that of Aristotle is decidedly out of place, nor have we good reason to suppose that he profited by the oral instruction, though he may have studied the writings, and sometimes emulated the style of Plato. There are passages in some of his speeches which recal the flowing periods of Isocrates, but their prevalent manner was as distinct as their policy, and the allusions of Demosthenes to the elder orator almost preclude the idea of their having ever stood to each other in the relation of teacher and pupil. The account of his being trained by Isæus is more reliable. In the conduct of his private-suit he certainly profited by the assistance of that eminent lawyer, and he must have for a considerable period attended his school, if he did not, as is reported, entirely monopolize his tuition. We learn that he made the historian Thucydides his great model in literature—copying his whole work eight times over, till at last he was able to repeat it. On the other hand, he appears to have neglected that part of education which the Greeks called Gymnastic, to the injury of a constitution already delicate. His feeble frame, weak voice, general want of vigour, and awkward delivery, were fatal to his success on his first appearance as a public speaker. He failed, and failed again. His carefully prepared harangues only earned him nicknames and ridicule. Without a little timely encouragement Athens might have lost her greatest orator; but as he was about to retire in despondency, his friend Eunomus and the actor Satyrus succeeded in persuading him that the causes of his failure were such as might be surmounted. The matter of his speeches, they said, was like the speech of Pericles: he only required his power of expression to become his successor. Thus reassured he bent all his mental energies to overcome his physical defects, set to remedy the weakness of his chest by exercise, and strove to attain by sedulous practice a better enunciation, a more graceful action, and greater fluency of speech. The various accounts of the methods he employed to secure this end—talking with pebbles in his mouth, toning his voice by the sea-shore, haranguing daily before a mirror, and living for three months underground, are perhaps exaggerations; but the triumph of his perseverance was conspicuous in the issue, and his fame as an orator came to rest as much on the manner as the matter of his orations. "How much more would you have said had you heard himself deliver it," was the generous remark of Æschines when his pupils in after years applauded the speech of his rival above his own. On again emerging from his self-imposed retirement, Demosthenes won the favour of the people, and rose in their esteem till he surpassed his competitors; but he had still to struggle with opponents whom personal enmity or political differences set in his way. There is an oration extant which was written (353 b.c.) in consequence of his being publicly assaulted, while serving as choregus at the Dionysia, by Meidias, a friend of one of his guardians; but he withdrew the accusation on the receipt of a solatium of thirty minæ. After becoming deeply involved in public affairs, Demosthenes ceased to appear as a pleader in private causes, and only continued his practice as a lawyer by composing, for a fair remuneration, speeches which were probably delivered by other advocates. He held in the course of his career several important offices besides that of choregus. He was a trierarch shortly after his majority. In 354 b.c. he was elected among the βουλευται. In the following year he was appointed chief conductor of the theoria to the Nemean festival. On another occasion he held the post of commissioner for the public works of the city. He served in many of the campaigns, and was employed in most of the important state embassies which were sent out from Athens during his lifetime.
II. At the time when Demosthenes entered upon his career as a statesman, there was a party in Greece, represented in Athens by the orator Isocrates, who, holding by the traditions of a former age, kept still foremost in their fears the power of the Persian court. It was on occasion of a panic excited, 354 b.c., by the warlike preparations of Artaxerxes, that he delivered his first public address, remarkable for the practical wisdom and grasp of mind which it displays; representing that the safety of Greece must depend on the conjoint action of the various states, and advising the Athenians not to provke an attack, which they might be left to resist alone. In the following year he came forward with his advice on a question of inter-Hellenic policy. The Lacedæmonians, desiring to profit by the Phocian war to recover Messene and reverse the organization of Epaminondas in Arcadia, sent envoys to Athens to solicit her support. Demosthenes threw his weight mainly on the side of the question represented by the rival embassy from Megalopolis, but advised the Athenians to substitute their own influence in the Peloponnesus for that of the Thebans. It was not until 352 b.c. that he began to offer that consistent opposition to the encroachments of the Macedonian power to which he consecrated the best years of his life. The disorganized condition of Greece, the decline of her vigour, the substitution in most of the states of mercenaries for citizen soldiers, their mutual jealousies, the want of foresight in their counsels, or of any leader to direct effectively their military resources, afforded an opportunity for the advancement of a young and warlike tribe upon the ruins of the old civilization, which was sure not to be neglected by a prince so enterprising and ambitious as Philip. Commencing his career of aggression by an attack upon some of the border towns and outposts of Hellas, he found an early occasion to interfere in her internal affairs. The seizure of Amphipolis in 558 b.c. (see Philip), was followed by the capture of Pydna, Potidæa, Mettrone. He espoused the cause of the Thebans in the Phocian war; and after some vicissitudes, confirmed his influence in central Greece by the victory of 353 b.c. In the same year he completed the conquest of Thessaly, and was preparing to carry the war beyond Thermopylae, when the Athenians, at last awakened to their danger, sent out an expedition to oppose his passage. The success of this effort served to encourage a fatal confidence The Athenians were no longer the restlessly ambitious and enterprising race which they had been in the days of Pericles. Content to live in peace in the midst of their speculative or mercantile pursuits, to enjoy domestic comforts, and amuse themselves at the public games, they were not easily induced to undergo the hardships of distant service, or even to take the initiative of defence. Most of their leading advisers—some, like Phocion, from a conscientious but mistaken policy, others from more interested motives; some because they were blind to danger, others because they despaired of surmounting it—combined to foster this habit of mind. Demosthenes alone among them saw from the first the full extent of the hazard, conceived the hope of retrieving it, and energetically devoted himself to that end. The object of his first Philippic, delivered 352 b.c., was to arouse the Athenians to a sense of their position, to expose the insufficiency of their half measures, the folly of disunion in the face of a watchful enemy, and to show the necessity of each individually undertaking a portion of the toil and expense of defending themselves. Philip's attack on Olynthus, 350 b.c., and the alliance of that city with Athens, called forth the three Olynthiac orations of Demosthenes, urging the immediate duty of rescuing so important a post. Meanwhile a revolt had broken out in Eubœa. An army was sent out under Phocion, which obtained a victory; a second expedition followed, in which Demosthenes took part, and, in accordance with his advice, part of the theoric fund was devoted to the pay of the soldiers; but the war was still lingering, when news arrived of the fall of Olynthus—an event which completed the ruin of the Chalcidic cities and spread dismay over Greece. Even the orators who had hitherto upheld the cause of Philip, were constrained to denounce him; and, in the spring of 347, Æschines himself was sent to stir up a coalition in the Peloponnesus against the
