The political career of Demosthenes, from his first direct contact with public affairs in 355 b.c. to his death in 322, has an essential unity. It is the assertion, in successive forms adapted to successive moments, of unchanging principles. Externally, it is divided into the chapter which precedes and the chapter which follows Chaeronea. But its inner meaning, the secret of its indomitable vigour, the law which harmonizes its apparent contrasts, cannot be understood unless it is regarded as a whole. Still less can it be appreciated in all its large wisdom and sustained self-mastery if it is viewed merely as a duel between the ablest champion and the craftiest enemy of Greek freedom. The time indeed came when Demosthenes and Philip stood face to face as representative antagonists in a mortal conflict. But, for Demosthenes, the special peril represented by Philip, the peril of subjugation to Macedon, was merely a disastrous accident. Philip happened to become the most prominent and most formidable type of a danger which was already threatening Greece before his baleful star arose. As Demosthenes said to the Athenians, if the Macedonian had not existed, they would have made another Philip for themselves. Until Athens recovered something of its old spirit, there must ever be a great standing danger, not for Athens only, but for Greece,—the danger that sooner or later, in some shape, from some quarter—no man could foretell the hour, the manner, or the source—barbarian violence would break up the gracious and undefiled tradition of separate Hellenic life.

What is the true relation of Athens to Greece î The answer which he gave to this question is the key to the life of Demosthenes. Athens, so Demosthenes held, is the natural head of Greece. Not, however, as an empress holding subject or subordinate cities in a dependence more or less compulsory. Rather as that city which most nobly expresses the noblest attributes of Greek political existence, and which, by her pre-eminent gifts both of intellect and of moral insight, is primarily responsible, everywhere and always, for the maintenance of those attributes in their integrity. Wherever the cry of the oppressed goes up from Greek against Greek, it is the voice of Athens which should first remind the oppressor that Hellene differs from barbarian in postponing the use of force to the persuasions of equal law. Wherever a barbarian hand offers wrong to any city of the Hellenic sisterhood, it is the arm of Athens which should first be stretched forth in the holy strength of Apollo the Averter. Wherever among her own children the ancient loyalty is yielding to love of pleasure or of base gain, there, above all, it is the duty of Athens to see that the central hearth of Hellas is kept pure. Athens must never again seek “empire” in the sense which became odious under the influence of Cleon and Hyperbolus,— when, to use the image of Aristophanes, the allies w ere as Babylonian slaves grinding in the Athenian mill. Athens must never permit, if she can help it, the re-establishment of such a domination as Sparta exercised in Greece from the battle of AEgospotami to the battle of Leuctra. Athens must aim at leading a free confederacy, of which the members shall be bound to her by their own truest interests. Athens must seek to deserve the confidence of all Greeks alike.

Such, in the belief of Demosthenes, was the part which Athens must perform if Greece was to be safe. But reforms must be effected before Athens could be capable of such a part. The evils to be cured were different phases of one malady. Athens had long been suffering from the profound decay of public spirit. It was of the essence of a Greek commonwealth that the citizen, while perfectly free in his social life, should constantly set his duty to the city above private interests. If the state needs his service in war. he must not hire an inferior substitute to do the work.

If the state requires funds, he must not grudge the money which in quiet times might have been spent on the theatre or the banquet. He must ever remember that, in the phrase of Sophocles, the state is the ship that bears us safe. It does not profit the passenger that his cabin is comfortable if the ship is going down.

Since the early years of the Peloponnesian war, the separation of Athenian society from the state had been growing more and more marked. The old type of the eminent citizen, who was at once statesman and general, had become almost extinct. Politics were now managed by a small circle of politicians. Wars were conducted by professional soldiers whose troops were chiefly mercenaries, and who were usually regarded by the politicians either as instruments or as enemies. The mass of the citizens took no active interest in public affairs. But, though indifferent to principles, they had quickly sensitive partialities for men, and it was necessary to keep them in good humour. Pericles had introduced the practice of giving a small bounty from the Treasury to the poorer citizens, for the purpose of enabling them to attend the theatre at the great festivals,—in other words, for the purpose of bringing them under the concentrated influence of the best Attic culture. A provision eminently wise for the age of Pericles easily became a mischief when the once honourable name of “demagogue” began to mean a flatterer of the mob. Before the end of the Peloponnesian War the festival-money (“theoricon ”) was abolished. A few years after the restoration of the democracy it was again introduced. But until 354 b.c. it had never been more than a gratuity, of which the payment depended on the Treasury having a surplus. It had never been treated as an annual charge on the revenue, or guaranteed to the citizens as a dividend which they could claim by constitutional right. In 354 b.c. Eubulus became steward of the Treasury. He was an able man, with a special talent for finance, free from all taint of personal corruption, and sincerely solicitous for the honour o f Athens, but enslaved to popularity, and without principles of policy. He sought to manage the citizens by humouring to the top of its bent their disinclination for personal sacrifice, and their preference for public show to public strength. More than any other one man, Eubulus represents that new, easy-going, improvident Athens in which the vigilant civic spirit was dead. His first measure was to make the festival-money a permanent item in the budget. Thenceforth this bounty was in reality very much what Demades afterwards called it,—the cement (κo'λλα) of the democracy.

Years before the danger from Macedon was urgent, Demosthenes had begun the work of his life,—the effort to lift the spirit of Athens, to revive the old civic loyalty, to rouse the city into taking that place and performing that part which her own welfare as well as the safety of Greece prescribed. His formally political speeches must never be considered apart from his forensic speeches in public causes. The Athenian procedure against the proposer of an unconstitutional law— i.e., of a law incompatible w ith existing laws—had a direct tendency to make the law-court, in such cases, a political arena. The same tendency was indirectly exerted by the tolerance of Athenian juries (in the absence of a presiding expert like a judge) for irrelevant matter, since it was usually easy for a speaker to make capital out of the adversary’s political antecedents. But the forensic speeches of Demosthenes for public causes are not only political in this general sense. They are documents, as indispensable as the Olynthiacs or Philippics, for his own political career. Only by taking them along with the formally political speeches, and regarding the whole as one unbroken series, can we see clearly the full scope of the task which he set before him,—a task in which his long resistance to Philip was only the most dramatic incident, and in which his real achievement is not to be measured by the event of Chaeronea.

A forensic speech, composed for a public cause, opens the political career of Demosthenes with a protest against a signal abuse. In 355 B.C., at the age of twenty-nine, he wrote the speech “Against Androtion.” This combats on legal grounds a proposal that the c out-going Senate should receive the honour of a golden crown. In its larger aspect, it is a denunciation of the corrupt system which that Senate represented, and especially of the manner in which the Treasury had been administered by Aristophon. In 354 b.c. Demosthenes composed and spoke the oration “Against Leptines,” who had. effected a slender saving for the state by the expedient of revoking those hereditary exemptions from taxation which had at various times been conferred in recognition of distinguished merit. The descendants of Harmodius and Aristogeiton alone had been excepted from the operation of the law. This was the first time that the voice of Demosthenes himself had been heard on the public concerns of Athens, and the utterance was a worthy prelude to the career of a statesman. He answers the advocates of the retrenchment by pointing out that the public interest will not ultimately be served by a wholesale violation of the public faith. In the same year he delivered his first strictly political speech. The Athenians, irritated by the support which Artaxerxes had lately given to the revolt of their allies, and excited by rumours of his hostile preparations, were feverishly eager for a war with Persia. Demosthenes urges that such an enterprise would at present be useless; that it would fail to unite Greece; that the energies of the city should be reserved for a real emergency; but that, before the city can successfully cope with any war, there must be a better organization of resources, and, first of all, a reform of the navy. The scheme of naval reform which he propounds has characteristic exactness of detail. We see how closely he has thought out the question. The same practical and luminous precision is a striking trait in every speech of Demosthenes which recommends a course of action.

Two years later he is found dealing with a more definite question of foreign policy. Sparta, favoured by the depression of Thebes in the Phocian war, was threatening Megalopolis. Both Sparta and Megalopolis sent embassies to Athens. Demosthenes supported Megalopolis. The ruin of Megalopolis would mean, he argued, the return of Spartan domination in the Peloponnesus. Athenians must not favour the tyranny of any one city. They must respect the rights of all the cities, and thus promote unity based on mutual confidence. In the same year Demosthenes wrote the speech “Against Timocrates,” to be spoken by the same Diodorus who had before prosecuted Androtion, and who now combated an attempt to screen Androtion and others from the penalties of embezzlement. The speech “Against Aristocrates,” also of 352 b.c., reproves that foreign policy of feeble make-shifts which was now popular at Athens. The Athenian tenure of the Thracian Chersonese partly depended for its security on the goodwill of the Thracian prince Cersobleptes. Charidemus, a soldier of fortune who had already played Athens false, was now the brother-in-law and the favourite of Cersobleptes. Aristocrates proposed that the person of Charidemus should be invested with a special sanctity, by the enactment that whoever attempted his life should be an outlaw from all dominions of Athens. Demosthenes points out that such adulation is as futile as it is fulsome. Athens can secure the permanence of her foreign possessions only in one way—by being strong enough to hold them.

Thus, between 355 and 352, Demosthenes had laid down the main lines of his policy. Domestic administration must be purified. Statesmen must be made to feel that they are responsible to the state. They must not be allowed to anticipate judgment on their deserts by voting each other golden crowns. They must not think to screen misappropriation of public money by getting partisans to pass new laws about state-debtors. Foreign policy must be guided by a larger and more provident conception of Athenian interests. When public excitement demands a foreign war, Athens must not rush into it without asking whether it is necessary, whether it will have Greek support, and whether she herself is ready for it. When a strong Greek city threatens a weak one, and seeks to purchase Athenian connivance with the bribe of a border-town, Athens must remember that duty and prudence alike command her to respect the independence of all Greeks. When it is proposed, by way of insurance on Athenian possessions abroad, to flatter the favourite of a doubtful ally, Athens must remember that such devices will not avail a power which has no army except on paper, and no ships fit to leave their moorings.

But the time had gone by when Athenians could have tranquil leisure for domestic reform. A danger, calling for prompt action, had at last come very near. For six years Athens had been at war with Philip on account of his seizure of Amphipolis. Meanwhile he had destroyed Potidaea and founded Philippi. On the Thracian coasts he had become master of Abdera and Maronea. On the Thessalian coast he had acquired Methone. In a second invasion of Thessaly, he had overthrown the Phocians under Onomarchus, and had advanced to Thermopylae, to find the gates of Greece closed against him by an Athenian force. He had then marched to Heraeon on the Propontis, and had dictated a peace to Cersobleptes. He had formed an alliance with Cardia, Perinthus, and Byzantium. Lastly, he had begun to show designs on the great Confederacy of Olynthus, the more warlike Miletus of the 'North. The First Philippic of Demosthenes was spoken in 351 b.c. The Third Philippic—the latest of the extant political speeches—was spoken in 341 b.c. Between these he delivered eight political orations, of which seven are directly concerned with Philip. The whole series falls into two great divisions. The first division comprises those speeches which were spoken against Philip while he was still a foreign power threatening Greece from without. Such are the First Philippic and the three orations for Olynthus. The second division comprises the speeches spoken against Philip when, by admission to the Amphictyonie Council, he had now won his way within the circle of the Greek states, and when the issue was no longer between Greece and Macedonia, but between the Greek and Macedonian parties in Greece. Such are the speech “On the Peace,” the speech “On the Embassy,” the speech “On the Chersonese,” the Second and Third Philippics.

The First Philippic, spoken early in 351 b.c., was no sudden note of alarm drawing attention to an unnoticed peril. On the contrary, the Assembly was weary of the subject. For six years the war with Philip had been a theme of barren talk. Demosthenes urges that it is time to do something, and to do it with a plan. Athens fighting Philip has fared, he says, like an amateur boxer opposed to a skilled pugilist. The helpless hands have only followed blows which a trained eye should have taught them to parry. An Athenian force must be stationed in the north, at Lemnos or Thasos. Of 2000 infantry and 200 cavalry at least one quarter must be Athenian citizens capable of directing the mercenaries.

Later in the same year Demosthenes did another service to the cause of national freedom. Rhodes, severed by its own act from the Athenian Confederacy, had since 355 been virtually subject to Mausolus, prince (δυvaστης) of Caria, himself a tributary of Persia. Mausolus died in 351, and was succeeded by his widow Artemisia. The democratic party in Rhodes now appealed to Athens for help in throwing off the Carian yoke. Demosthenes supported their application. No act of his life was a truer proof of statesmanship. He failed. But at least he had once more warned Athens that the cause of political freedom was everywhere her own, and that, wherever that cause was forsaken, there a new danger was created both for Athens and for Greece.

Next year an Athenian force under Phocion was sent to Eubaea, in support of Plutarchus, tyrant of Eretria, against the faction of Clitarchus. Demosthenes protested against spending strength, needed for greater objects, on the local quarrels of a despot. Phocion won a victory at Tamynae. But the “inglorious and costly war” entailed an outlay of more than <£12,000 on the ransom of captives alone, and ended in the total destruction of Athenian influence throughout Eubaea. That island was now left an open field for the intrigues of Philip. Worst of all, the party of Eubulus not only defeated a proposal, arising from this campaign, for applying the festival-money to the war-fund, but actually carried a law making it high treason to renew the proposal. The amusement of the citizens was thus officially declared to be more important than the protection of their properties or lives, and the expression of a different opinion was henceforth to be a crime. The degree to which political enmity was exasperated by the Eubaea n war may be judged from the incident of Midi as, an adherent of Eubulus, and a type of that opulent rowdyism which shows how curiously loose the hold of the state had now become on men who were not restrained by regard for their purses or their characters. Demosthenes was choragus of his tribe, and was wearing the robe of that sacred office at the great festival in the theatre of Dionysus, when Midias struck him on the face. The affair was eventually compromised. The speech written by Demosthenes for the trial was neither spoken nor completed, and...