Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

supper; their property was seized, and Polemarchus was taken to prison, where he was shortly after executed (B.C. 404). Lysias, by bribing some of the soldiers, escaped to Megara. He has given a graphic account of his escape in his oration against Eratosthenes, who had been one of the Thirty Tyrants. He died about B.C. 378.

A life of Lysias, attributed to Plutarch, mentions 425 of his orations, 230 of which were considered to be genuine. There remain only thirty-four, which are remarkable for purity, clearness, grace and simplicity, which caused him to be regarded as the chief master of the "plain" style. In the art of narration, Dionysius of Halicarnassus considers him superior to all orators in being distinct, probable and persuasive, but, at the same time he admits that Lysias's composition is better adapted to private litigation than to important causes. The masterpiece of Lysias is the funeral oration in the honor of those Athenians who died in battle in the expedition sent under the command of Iphicrates to the aid of Corinth.

ISOCRATES (B.C. 436-338), was the fourth of the ten Attic orators. His life, as well as a translation of his masterpiece, the Panegyric, are given in the following pages; both the biography and the translation are by J. H. Freese, M.A.

Sixty compositions ascribed to Isocrates were known to the ancients, but a number of them are undoubtedly spurious. Eleven letters and ten orations are extant. Six of the orations are on forensic subjects, and written to be delivered by others; the other four are political declamations. Isocrates paid special attention to the rhythm, or cadence, of his oratorical periods, and the choice of beautiful phrases and figures of speech. In this he influenced not only the style of Greek oratory, but also Greek prose in general. Cicero based his rhetoric on the periods of Isocrates, and so carried his influence not only into Roman literature, but into modern literary prose, which is largely modelled upon Cicero's style.

ISEUS (B.C. 420-328) was born at Chalcis, and came to Athens at an early age. He wrote judicial orations for others and established a rhetorical school at Athens, in which Demosthenes is said to have been his pupil. Eleven of his ora

tions are extant, all relating to questions of inheritance. They afford considerable information respecting this branch of the Attic law, of which he was a master, and are marked by intellectual acumen, clearness of statement, and vigor of style.

DEMOSTHENES (B.C. 383-322), was the sixth in time order, and the first in eminence of the ten Attic orators. His life, translated by Sir Thomas North, from the French version by Amyot of Plutarch's Lives, appears in the following pages, with a translation by Thomas Leland, D.D., of his oration in the famous debate with Eschines upon the motion of Ctesiphon that a crown of honor be given Demosthenes in recognition of his services to Athens.

Sixty-one orations ascribed to Demosthenes are extant, about half of which are spurious. Seventeen of the genuine orations are political, and twelve of these deal with the machinations of Philip of Macedon to subvert the Athenian power. Others are pleadings in private cases.

The style of Demosthenes was founded upon the best elements of his predecessors, together with those of the historian Thucydides, who composed speeches which he put in the mouths of Pericles and others. To these elements he added a force and vigor which were peculiarly his own, and thereby placed himself far in advance of all the Greek orators, and, in the estimation of many, at the head of all the orators of the world in modern times as well as in ancient. Certainly the only orator of antiquity that could be considered in his class was Cicero, who had the advantage of studying the Greek orator's speeches. Plutarch's Life of Cicero, and his comparison of Cicero and Demosthenes are presented in the pages following his Life of Demosthenes in order that the reader may have before him an estimate of the relative merits of these orators given by the ablest of ancient biographers.

ESCHINES, the opponent of Demosthenes, was born B.C. 389. He was the son of a schoolmaster. After service as a soldier he became a public clerk, which employment, however, he soon left to go upon the stage. Meeting here with little success he embarked upon a public career as a political speaker. After the fall of Olynthus (B.C. 348), he caught the favor of the public by advocating a general council of the

Greek States to concert measures against King Philip, and was appointed a member of the embassy which was sent to Arcadia to further the project. The embassy failed in its purpose, whereupon Æschines revealed his character by changing sides, becoming an adherent of the peace party, and as such procuring appointment on the famous embassy to Philip (B.C. 346) preliminary to the peace of Philocrates. Eschines was won over by Philip's flattery (Demosthenes boldly charges him with being bribed, and Philip afterward made no exception of him in his sweeping charge that he had found no ambassador but Xenocrates, the philosopher, whose favor he was unable to purchase) and advocated a close alliance with the Macedonian king as the safest course for Athens. Almost immediately after the conclusion of the peace, he was indicted by Timarchus, an adherent of Demosthenes, for treasonable conduct, but was triumphantly acquitted. A second accusation brought by Demosthenes himself in B.C. 343, was more nearly successful, and Æschines narrowly escaped conviction, after an able defence in which he was aided by the intercession of Eubulus and Phocion. Eschines next appears as one of the representatives of Athens at the Amphictyonic Council at Delphi in B.C. 339. Here, as he tells us, he was so enraged by an unjust complaint which the delegates from Amphissa brought against Athens, that he in turn made a vehement counter-attack on the Amphissians for their occupation of the sacred plain of Cirrha. So infuriated were the Amphictyons by his invective, that, after burning the buildings of the offending Amphissian settlers, they voted to hold a special meeting of the council to consider what further punishment should be inflicted. Athens and Thebes refused to send delegates to this assembly and thus became involved in war with Philip and the rest of the Amphictyons—a war which resulted in the fatal battle of Chæronea and the downfall of Athenian independence.

After the battle of Charonea, the party of Æschines naturally fell into disfavor. He does not figure prominently in public affairs again until B.C. 330, when he made a final effort to defeat his hated rival. An obscure politician named Ctesiphon had in B.C. 336 brought in a bill proposing to confer a

golden crown upon Demosthenes for his services to the State. Æschines raised objection to this on the score of illegality. The case did not come to trial till six years had elapsed, and then each of the orators exhausted every effort to crush the opponent. But Eschines was the weaker, both in genius and in merit, and not receiving the fifth part of the votes of the court, he was fined one thousand drachmas, and lost the right of appearing before the people in a similar capacity again. He left Athens and went first to Ephesus and afterwards to Rhodes, where he is said to have opened a school of oratory. He died at Samos at the age of seventy-five.

Only three orations of Æschines have been preserved, and all of these bear, directly or indirectly, on his quarrel with Demosthenes. Their titles are: Against Timarchus, On the Dishonest Embassy, and Against Ctesiphon; the occasion and subject of each have been noticed above. The second of them is generally considered the best. In natural gifts of oratory Æschines was inferior to Demosthenes alone among his contemporaries. He excelled particularly in brilliant narrative, and was also one of the first to win a reputation for extemporaneous speech. His chief deficiency was in moral character.

HYPERIDES was born in Athens about B.C. 390. He was a pupil of Plato and Isocrates, and early won distinction as a forensic and political orator in spite of scandals connected with his private life. At first he was the steadfast ally of Demosthenes in the struggle against the Macedonian party in Athens, but when Demosthenes was accused of taking bribes from Alexander's treasurer, Harpalus, he aided in the prosecution. When Athens was at Alexander's mercy after the destruction of Thebes (B.C. 335), the young conqueror demanded that he, Demosthenes and Lycurgus, as the inveterate enemies of Macedon, be given up to him, and it was with difficulty that the orators escaped. After the death of Alexander (B.C. 323), he stirred up the Lamian War, at the unfortunate conclusion of which he and Demosthenes (who had been reconciled to one another in the meantime) and other patriots were condemned to death by the Macedonian party. He fled for sanctuary to a temple in Ægina, but was dragged

away from it by force, and by order of Antipater was put to death at Corinth in 322 B.C.

Seventy-seven speeches were ascribed to Hyperides, only a few fragments of which were known until recent times; but in 1847, in a tomb at Thebes in Egypt, extensive fragments were found of his speech against Demosthenes, together with a speech of Lycophron, and the whole of his oration for Euxenippus. In 1856 there was a further discovery in Egypt of an important part of the funeral oration delivered in B.C. 322 over those who had fallen in the siege of Lamia. In 1889 M. Eugène Revillout announced the purchase by the Louvre of a papyrus containing portions of the first oration of Hyperides against Athenogenes.

While the speeches of Hyperides do not possess the force and moral earnestness of those of Demosthenes, they were skilful in construction and graceful in expression, being typical productions of the practiced professional pleader. Witty, ironical, urbane, he has been compared in relation to Demos thenes, to Lord Salisbury in relation to Mr. Gladstone. A better parallel would be of Rufus Choate to Daniel Webster.

LYCURGUS was another leader of the democratic party in the contest with Philip of Macedon. The time of his birth. is uncertain, but he was older then Demosthenes. Like Hyperides, he was a pupil of Plato and Isocrates, and entered in a similar fashion into politics. In B.C. 343 we find him a member of the Athenian ambassadors who succeeded in counteracting the designs of Philip against Ambracia and the Peloponnesus. He filled the office of treasurer of the public revenue for three periods of five years, and was noted for the integrity and ability with which he discharged the duties of his office-indeed, he seems to have been the only statesman of antiquity who had a real knowledge of the management of finance. He raised the revenue to twelve hundred talents, and also erected during his administration many public buildings, and completed the docks, the armory, the theater of Dionysus, and the Panathenaic course. In order that the public might know how its funds were administered, he had his accounts engraved on stone, and set up in a part of the wrestling school. So great confidence was placed in the honesty of Lycurgus

« ForrigeFortsæt »