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DEMOSTHENES

Demosthenes was an ancient Greek orator. He was born in 382 or 385 BC at Athens and died in 322 BC. He was the son of a sword-cutler at Athens. His father left him a considerable fortune, of which his guardians attempted to defraud him. Demosthenes, at the age of seventeen, conducted a suit against them himself, and gained his cause. He then set himself to study eloquence, and though his lungs were weak, his articulation defective, and his gestures awkward, by perseverance he at length surpassed all other orators in power and grace. He thundered against Philip of Macedon in his orations known as the Phi lippics, and endeavoured to instil into his fellow-citizens the hatred which animated his own bosom. He laboured to get all the Greeks to combine against the encroachments of Philip, but their want of patriotism and Macedonian gold frustrated his efforts.

He was present at the battle of Chaeroneia in 380 BC in which the Athenians and Boeotians were defeated by Philip, and Greek liberty crushed. On the accession of Alexander in 336 Demosthenes tried to stir up a general rising against the Macedonians, but Alexander at once adopted measures of extreme severity, and Athens sued for mercy. It was with difficulty that Demosthenes escaped being delivered up to the conqueror.

In 324 he was imprisoned on a false charge of having received a bribe from one of Alexander's generals, but managed to escape into exile. On the death of Alexander next year he was recalled, but the defeat of the Greeks by Antipater caused him to seek refuge in the temple of Poseidon, in the island of Oalauria, on the coast of Greece, where he poisoned himself to escape from the emissaries of Antipater in 322 BC.

The character of Demosthenes is by most modern scholars considered almost spotless. His fame as an orator is equal to that of Homer as a poet. Cicero pronounces him to be the most perfect of all orators. He carried Greek prose to a degree of perfection which it never before had reached. Everything in his speeches is natural, vigorous, concise, symmetrical. We have under his name sixty-one orations, some of which are not genuine. The great opponent - and indeed enemy - of Demosthenes as an orator was AEschines.
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