issues to all Greece an arraignment of Philip's treacherous
diplomacy. Most of Demosthenes's public speeches have
the same absence of what we call rhetoric, the same great
self-forgetfulness. But something that was once nnrrow
in his patriotism is now gone, and there is a sense of im-
minent tragedv and a stern music of diction which makes
the Thii-d Philippic unlike anything else in literature.
War was declared in 340, and at first Athens was sue-



BEFORE CH^RONEA 359

cessful. It was a stroke of religious intrigue that turned
the day. The Locrians were induced to accuse Athens
of impiety before the Amphictyonic council. Impiety
was in Greece, like heresy afterwards, an offence of
which most people were guilty if you pressed the
inquiry. The Athenians had irregularly consecrated
some Theban shields. But the Locrians themselves
had profanely occupied the sacred territory of Kirrha.
^schines, who was the Athenian representative, con-
trived to divert the warlike bigotry of the council against
the Locrians. He is very proud of his achievement.
But either turn served Philip equally well : he only
desired a sacred war of some sort, in order that the
Amphictyons, who were without an army, might summon
him into Greece as defender of religion. Once inside
Thermopylae, he threw off the mask. Demosthenes
obtained at the last moment what he had so long sought,
an alliance between Athens and Thebes ; but the Mace-
donian generalship was too good, and the coalition of
Greece lay under Philip's feet at Cha^ronea in 338.

Athens received the blow with her usual heroism.
Lycurgus the treasurer was overwhelmed with volun-
tary offerings for the defence fund, and the walls were
manned for a fight to the death. But that was not
Philip's wish. He sent Demades the orator, who had
been made captive in the battle, to say that he would
receive proposals for peace. The friends of Macedon,
Phokion, ^schines, and Demades, were the ambassa-
dors, and Athens was admitted on easy terms into the
alliance which Philip formed as the basis of his march
against Persia. Then came a war of the law-courts,
the Macedonian party straining every nerve to get rid
of the war element. Hyperides had proposed, in the



36o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

fust excitement of the defeat, to arm and liberate all
slaves. This was unconstitutional, and he was prose-
cuted by Aristogeiton. His simple confession : "//
was the battle of Chczronea tliat spoke, not I . . . The arms
of Mace don took away my sight" — was enough to secure
his acquittal. A desperate onslaught was made against
Demosthenes ; Aristogeiton, Sosicles, Philocrates, Dion-
das, and Melanthus, among others, prosecuted him. But
the city was true to him. Some of the accusers failed to
get a fifth of the votes, and he was chosen to make the
funeral speech over those slain at Chjeronea.^ Then came
the strange counter-campaign of Lycurgus against the
Macedonian party. The man was a kind of Cato. Of
unassailable reputation himself, he had a fury for ex-
tirpating all that was corrupt and unpatriotic, and his
standard was intolerably high. The only speech of his
preserved to us is Against Leocrates, a person whose
crime was that he had left the city after Chaeronea,
instead of staying to fight and suffer. The penalty de-
manded for this slight lack of patriotism was death, and
the votes were actually equal.

This shows the temper of the city ; but resistance to
Macedon was for the time impossible. Athens was
content with an opportunist coalition directed by
Demosthenes and Demades. On Philip's murder a
rising was contemplated, but checked by Alexander's
promptitude. Soon after, on a rumour that Alexander
had been slain in Illyria, Thebes rebelled, and Demos-
thenes carried a motion for joining her. Army and
fleet were prepared, money despatched to Thebes, and
an embassy sent to the Great King for Persian aid, when
Alexander returned, razed Thebes to the ground, and

^ The extant speech is spurious.



AFTER CH.ERONEA 361

demanded the persons of ten leaders of the war party
at Athens, Demosthenes among them. Demades, the
mediator after Chaeronea, acted the same part now.
Alexander was appeased by the condemnation of the
general Charidemus ; the other proclaimed persons were
spared (335 B.C.).

These repeated failures made Demosthenes cautious.
He drew closer to the patient opportunism of Demades
and gradually alienated the extreme war party. This
gave his old enemies the opening for their most elabo-
rate attack. It was indirect and insidious in more ways
than one. A certain Ctesiphon — celebrated, according
to ^schines, as being the only man who laughed at
Demosthenes's jokes — had proposed soon after Chaero-
nea to crown Demosthenes in the theatre of Dionysus
in recognition of his public services, ^schines had
in the same year indicted Ctesiphon for illegality, but
for some reason the trial did not take place till 330.
The speech Against Ctesiphon rests on three charges :
it was illegal to crown an official during his term of
office, and Demosthenes held two offices at the time ;
secondly, it was against precedent to give crowns in
the theatre ; thirdly, Demosthenes was a bad citizen
and ought not to be crowned. Obviously, if the third
point was to be considered at all, the other two sank
into insignificance. The action was a set challenge to
Demosthenes, and he came forward as counsel for
Ctesiphon {On the Crown), to meet it by a full exposition
of his political life.

But here comes the insidiousness of ^schines's attack.
In the real points at issue between the two policies
the country was overwhelmingly on the side of De-
mosthenes. The burning question was whether the



362 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

Demosthenes of the last eight years was true to the
Demosthenes of the Philippics. -rEschines knows that
the issue of the trial lies with Hyperides and the radical
war p'-irty, and he plays openly for their support. He
emphasises Demosthenes's connection with the Peace
in the first part of his life. He has the audacity to
accuse him of having neglected three opportunities of
rising against Alexander in the last part ! It was well
enough for Alexander's personal friend and tried sup-
porter to use such accusations. Demosthenes could
only answer them by an open profession of treason,
which would doubtless have won his case, and have
sent him prisoner to Macedon. He does not answer
them. He leaves the war party to make its judgment
in silence on the question whether he can have been
false to the cause of his whole life, whether the tone
in which he speaks of Chaeronea is like that of a
repentant rebel. It was enough. ^Eschines failed to
get a fifth of the votes, and left Athens permanently
discredited. He set up a school in Rhodes, and it is
said that Demosthenes supplied him with money when
he was in distress.

But the hostile coalition was not long delayed. In
324 Harpalus, Alexander's treasurer, decamped with a
fleet and 720 talents — full materials for an effective
rebellion. He sought admission at Athens, and the
extremists were eager to receive him. But the time
was in other ways inopportune, and Demosthenes
preferred a subtler game. He carefully avoided any
open breach of allegiance to Alexander. He insisted
that Harpalus should dismiss his fleet, and only agreed
to receive him as a private refugee. When Alexander
demanded his surrender, Demosthenes w^as able to



CTESIPHON. HARPALUS 363

refuse as a matter of personal honour, without seriously
compromising his relations with the king. The Mace-
donians insisted that Harpalus should be detained,
and the treasure stored in the Parthenon in trust for
Alexander. Demosthenes agreed to both proposals, and
moved them in the Assembly himself. What happened
next is not known, but Harpalus suddenly escaped,
and the Macedonians insisted on having the treasure
counted. It was found to be less than half the original
sum. That it was going in secret preparations for war,
they could have little doubt. They would have liked a
state trial and some instant executions. Demosthenes
managed to get the question entrusted to the Areopagus,
and the report deferred. It had to come at last. The
Areopagus made no statement of the uses to which
the money was applied, but gave a list of the persons
guilty of appropriating it, Demosthenes at the head.
His intrigue had failed, and he had given the friends
of Macedon their chance. He was prosecuted by
Hyperides on the one side, Deinarchus on the other.
The latter, a Corinthian by birth, rose into fame by
this process, and nothing has survived of him except
the three speeches relating to it. Dionysius calls him
a 'barley Demosthenes,' whatever that may mean — the
suggestion is probably ' beer ' as opposed to ' wine ' —
and his tone in this speech is one of brutal exultation.
Very different, suspiciously different, is Hyperides, who
not only says nothing to make a permanent breach, but
even calls attention to Demosthenes's great position, to
the unsolved problem of what he meant to do with the
money, to the possibility that his lips are in some w^ay
sealed. For his own part, Hyperides talks frank treason
with a coolness which well bears out the stories of his



364 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

courage. Demosthenes was convicted, and condemned
to a fine of fifty talents. Unable to pay such an enor-
mous sum, he withdrew to Troizen.

Nine months after, Alexander died and Greece rose.
Demosthenes joined his accuser Hyperides in a mission
to rouse the Peloponnese, and was reinstated at Athens
amid the wildest enthusiasm. The war opened well.
The extant Funeral Speech of Hyperides was pronounced
after the first year of it. In 322 came the defeat at Cran-
non. The Macedonian general Antipater demanded the
persons of Demosthenes and Hyperides. Old Demades,
unable to mediate any more, now found himself drawing
up the decree sentencing his colleague to death. Demos-
thenes had taken refuge in the temple of Poseidon at
Calauria, where he was arrested, and took poison.
Hyperides is said to have been tortured, a statement
which would be incredible but for the flood of crime
and cruelty which the abolition of liberty, and the in-
troduction of Northern and Asiatic barbarism, let loose
upon the Greek world in the next centuries.

Demosthenes has never quite escaped from the stormy
atmosphere in which he lived. The man's own intensity
is infectious, and he has a way of forcing himself into
living politics. The Alexandrian schools were- mon-
archical, and thought ill of him. To Grote he was
the champion of freedom and democracy. To Niebuhr
(1804), Philip was Napoleon, and Demosthenes the ideal
protest against him. Since 1870, now that monarchical
militarism has changed its quarters, German scholars^
seem oppressed by the likeness between Demosthenes
and Gambetta, and denounce the policy of ' la revanche ';

^ E.g. Rohrmoser, Weidner, and even Beloch and Holm. The technical
critics are Spengel and Blass.



POLICY AND METHODS OF DEMOSTHENES 365

one of them is reminded also of 'the agitator Gladstone.'
In another way the technical critics have injured the
orator's reputation by analysing his methods of arrange-
ment and rhythm, and showing that he avoids the con-
course of more than two short syllables. There is a naif
barbarism in many of us which holds that great pains
taken over the details of a literary work imply insincerity.

It is not for us to discuss the worth of his policy. It
depends partly on historical problems, partly on the
value we attach to liberty and culture, and the exact
point of weakness at which we hold a man bound to
accept and make the best of servitude to a moral inferior.
Athens, when she had suffered the utmost, and when
the case for submission had been stated most strongly,
decided that it was well to have fought and failed.

As for his methods, the foolish tendency to take his
political speeches as statements of historical fact, has
produced a natural reaction, in which critics pounce
fiercely upon the most venial inaccuracies. Holm, for
instance, finds " three signal falsehoods " in " that master-
piece of sophistry, the third Philippic" : viz., the state-
ment that w^hen Philip took certain towns he had already
sw^orn the truce — whereas really he had only made the
other side sw^ear it ; the suggestion that Philip's rapid
movements were due to his using light-armed troops —
w'hich is true, but seems to ignore his heavy phalanx ;
and the charge that he came to the Phokians ' as an ally,'
w^hen in truth he had left his intentions designedly
ambiguous. The critic who complains of such misstate-
ments as these, must have somewhat Arcadian notions
of political controversy.

Demosthenes is guilty, without doubt, of breaches of
etiquette and convention. He prosecuted his fellow-
25



366 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

ambassadors. He appeared in festal attire on hearing
of Philip's assassination, though he had just lost his
only daughter. In the prelude to the last war, Philip's
action was often the more correct, as was that of
another Philip in dealing with William of Orange. In
Demosthenes's private speech-writing we are struck by
one odd change of front. In 350 he wrote for Phormio
against Apollodorus in a matter of the great Bank
with which they were both connected, and won his
case. Next year he wrote for Apollodorus, prosecuting
one of his own previous witnesses, Stephanus, for perjury,
and making a violent attack on Phormio's character.
The probability is that Demosthenes had made dis-
coveries about his previous client which caused him to
regret that he had ever supported him — among them,
perhaps, the discovery that Stephanus was giving false
evidence. The only external fact bearing on the problem
is the coincidence that in the same year Apollodorus, at
some personal risk, proposed the measure on which
Demosthenes had set his heart — the use of the Festival
Fund for war purposes — and that he remained afterwards
attached to Demosthenes. The Midias case is a clear
instance of the subordination of private dignity to public
interest. Midias was a close friend of Eubulus, and had
both persecuted and assaulted Demosthenes when he
was Choregus at the great Dionysia. Demosthenes pre-
pared to take action, and wrote the vehement speech
which we possess {Against Mtdias), in which he declares
that nothing will satisfy him but the utmost rigour of
the law. But meantime there arose the negotiations for
the peace of 346, and Demosthenes had to act in concert
with Eubulus. He accepted an apology and compensa-
tion, and let the matter drop.



THE SPIRIT OF THE TIME 367

We must never forget in reading Demosthenes and
^schines, that we are dealing with an impetuous
Southern nation in the agony of its last struggle. The
politenesses and small generosities of politics are not
there. There is no ornamental duelling. The men
fight with naked swords, and mean business. Demos-
thenes thought of his opponents, not as statesmen
who made bad blunders, but as perjured traitors who
were selling Greece to a barbarian. They thought
him, not, indeed, a traitor — that was impossible — but a
malignant and insane person who prevented a peaceful
settlement of any issue. The words ' treason ' and * bribe '
were bandied freely about ; but there is hardly any
proved case of treason, and none of bribery, unless the
Harpalus case can by a stretch of language be called so.
There are no treasury scandals in Athens at this time.
There is no legal disorder. There is a singular absence
of municipal corruption. The Athenians whom Demos-
thenes reproaches with self-indulgence, were living at
a strain of self-sacrifice and effort which few civilised
communities could bear. The wide suspicion of bribery
was caused chiefly by the bewilderment of Athens at
finding herself in the presence of an enemy far her
superior both in material force and in diplomacy. Why
was she so incomprehensibly worsted in wars, where she
won most of the battles ? Why were her acutest states-
men invariably outwitted by a semi-barbarous king ?
Somebody must be betraying her! Demosthenes on
this point loses all his balance of mind. He lives in a
world peopled by imaginary traitors. We hear how he
rushed at one Antiphon in the streets, and seized him
with his own hands. Happily the jurors did not lose
their sanity. There were almost no convictions. It was



368 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

very similar in Italy before and after 1848. People whose
patriotism was heroic went about accusing one another
of treason. The men of 404, 338, and even 262, will not
easily find their superiors in devotion and self-sacrifice.

Another unpleasant result of this suspicion and hatred
is the virulence of abuse with which the speakers of
the time attack their enemies. Not, indeed, in public
speeches. In those of Demosthenes no opponent is
even mentioned. But in the law-courts, which some-
times gave the coup de grace to a political campaign,
the attacks on character are savage. The modern
analogue is the raking up of more or less irrelevant
scandals against both witnesses and principals in cases
at law, which custom allows to barristers of the highest
character. The attack on .^schines in the De Corona
is exceptional. Demosthenes had a real and natural
hatred for the man. But he would never have dragged
in his father and mother and his education, if ^schines
had not always prided himself on these particular things
— he was distinctly the social superior of Demosthenes,
and a man of high culture — and treated Demosthenes
as the vulgar demagogue. Even thus, probably Demos-
thenes repented of his witticisms about the old lady's
private initiations and 'revivals.' It is to be wished
that scholars would repent of their habit of reading
unsavoury meanings into words which do not possess
them.

Demosthenes can never be judged apart from his
circumstances. He is no saint and no correct medio-
crity. He is a man of genius and something of a hero;
a fanatic, too, no doubt, and always a politician. He
represents his country in that combination of intellectual
subtlety and practical driving power with fervid idealism,



APPRECIATION OF DEMOSTHENES 369

that union of passion with art, and that invariable in-
sistence on the moral side of actions, on the Just and
the Noble, that characterises most of the great spirits
of Greek literature. To say with Ouintilian that Demos-
thenes was a ' bad man,' is like saying the same of Burke
or even of Isaiah. It implies either that noble words and
thoughts are not nobility, or else, what is hardly more
plausible, that the greatest expressions of soul in litera-
ture can be produced artificially by a dodge. Two
sentences of Demosthenes ring in the ears of those
who care for him, as typical of the man : " Never,
never, A thenians, can injustice and oath - breaking and
falsehood make a strong power. They hold out for once
and for a little ; they blossom largely in hopes, belike ;
but time finds them out and they wither where they stand.
As a house and a ship must be strongest at the lowest parts,
so must the bases and foundations of a policy be true and
honest ; which they ai^e not in the diplomatic gains of
Macedon." ^

^^ It cannot be, Athenians, that you did wrong when you
took upon you the battle for the freedom and safety of all.
No, by our fathers who first met the Mede at Marathon, by
the footmen of Platcea, by the sailors of Salamis and Arte-
misium, by all the brave men lying in our national sepul-
chres — whom the city has interred with honour, ^schines,
all alike, not only the successful or the victorious ! " ^
1 Olynth. 2. 10. 2 Crown, 208.



XVIII

THE LATER LITERATURE, ALEXANDRIAN

AND ROMAN

I

From the Death of Demosthenes to the
Battle of Actium

Among the many stereotyped compliments which we
are in the habit of paying to Greek Hterature, we are
apt to forget its singular length of life. From the
prehistoric origins of the epos to Paul the Silentiary
and Musaeus in the sixth century after Christ there is
not an age devoid of delightful and more or less original
poetry. From Hecataeus to the fall of Byzantium there
is an almost uninterrupted roll of historians, and in one
sense it might be held that history did not find its
best expression till the appearance of Polybius in the
second century B.C. Philosophy is even more obviously
rich in late times ; and many will hold that if the great-
est individual thinkers of Greece are mostly earlier than
Plato, the greatest achievements of speculation are not
attained before the times of Epictetus and Plotinus.
The literature of learning and science only begins at the
point where the present book leaves off. It may even
be said that the greatest factor in imaginative literature.

Love, has been kept out of its rights all through the

370



END OF FREE HELLENISM 371

Attic period, and that Mimnermus and Sappho have to
wait for Theocritus to find their true successor.

Yet the death of Demosthenes marks a great dividing
line. Before it Greek Hterature is a production abso-
lutely unique ; after it, it is an ordinary first-rate litera-
ture, like Roman or French or Italian. Of course it is
impossible to draw a strict line between creation and
adaptation ; but, in the ordinary sense of the words,
the death of Demosthenes forms a period before which
Greek poets, writers, thinkers, and statesmen were really
creating, were producing things of which there was no
model in the world ; after which they were only adapt-
ing and finishing, producing things like other things
which already existed.

That is one great division ; the other is similar to
it. We have seen how the crash of 404 B.C. stunned
the hopes of Athens, dulled her faith in her own mis-
sion and in human progress generally. Chaeronea and
Crannon stamped out such sparks as remained. Athens
and intellectual Greece were brought face to face with
the apparent fact that Providence sides with the big
battalions, that material force is ultimately supreme.
Free political life was over. Political speculation was of
no use, because the military despots who held the world
were not likely to listen to it. Even Aristotle, who had
been Alexander's tutor, and was on friendly terms with
him, treats him and his conquests and his system as
utterly out of relation to any rational constitution of
society. The events of the next two centuries deepened
this impression, and political aspirations as a motive in
life and literature came to an end for Greece. Of course
many ages and peoples have done very well without
any freedom in public action or speech or thought.



372 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

But these things were in the heart fibres of the Greek
race, and it pined when deprived of them.

The middle ages and the East made up for their
absence of pubHc interests by enthusiastic reHgious faith.
But this solace likewise was denied the later Greek.
The traditional religion was moribund among educated
men in the fifth century ; after the fourth it was hardly
worth attacking. People knew it was nonsense, but
considered it valuable for the vulgar ; and, above all,
they asked each thinker if he had anything to put in
its place. Much of the intellect of the fourth century
is thrown into answering this demand. On the one
hand we find Athens full of strange faiths, revived or
imported or invented ; superstition is a serious fact in
life. One could guess it from the intense earnestness
of Epicurus on the subject, or from the fact that both
Antiphanes and Menander wrote comedies upon The
Superstitious Man. But the extant inscriptions are
direct evidence. On the other hand came the great
philosophical systems. Three of these were especially
religious, resembling the sixth century rather than the
fifth. The Cynics cared only for virtue and the rela-
tion of the soul to God ; the world and its learning
and its honours were as dross to them. The Stoics and
Epicureans, so far apart at first sight, were very similar
in their ultimate aim. What they really cared about was
ethics — the practical question how a man should order
his life. Both indeed gave themselves to some science
— the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to logic and
rhetoric — but only as a means to an end. The Stoic
tried to win men's hearts and convictions by sheer
subtlety of abstract argument and dazzling sublimity of
thought and expression. The Epicurean was deter-



FOURTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY 373

mined to make Humanity go its way without cringing to