the most celebrated of all orators, sought the chief uses of his eloquence in the public emergencies of his agitated time. Neither his personal history nor his literary character can be rightly estimated, till a just account is taken of his position as a statesman. He lived and acted in the last struggle which Greece maintained for freedom; and he died when the battle was lost, a sacrifice to the vengeance of the conquerors.

To observers tolerably impartial it cannot but appear, that the policy which for thirty years Demosthenes so energetically advocated, was in its outlines not only self-consistent, but adapted with very much practical sagacity for the attainment of its purpose. Nor (though the point is disputed more or less openly by several of our modern historians) is it really less certain, that the purpose itself was noble and desirable. We must set very little value on national independence, or be infected by more than a reasonable dread of popular influences, if we fail to convince ourselves that the continued existence of Greece as a group of republics would, notwithstanding its imperfect cohesion, and all other faults and dangers, have been a state of things infinitely better than that fettered and terrified subjection to which she was reduced by her monarchical neighbours. In the history of that interesting generation, the most doubtful question that suggests itself is the question, whether the struggle on which the Greeks ventured was prudent—whether it could be entered on with a reasonable likelihood of success; and on this question, it must be confessed, opposite views were at the time adopted by Greeks equally virtuous and patriotic. On the one hand, for instance, Phocion, despondent, somewhat misanthropic, keenly sensitive to the vices of a time when corruption and decay had begun to enfeeble the race, and indignantly contemptuous of the abuses which arose out of a democracy destitute of fit checks—Phocion, the purity of whose motives no man ever questioned—despaired of his country during the whole period of his public life, and never cherished any higher aim than that of making favourable terms with the masters whose sway he believed it impossible to escape from. He survived long enough to see his worst prophecies of evil lamentably fulfilled. Yet was there not only a more honourable and manly spirit, but perhaps also a more correct calculation of probable chances, in that course of active resistance which recommended itself to the more sanguine temper of Demosthenes. Greece could not but have fallen, sooner or later, unless the urgency of the crisis had breathed, as it promised to breathe more than once, a fresh flame of patriotic inspiration into the hearts of her people; unless her several states had thrown off their ancient hatreds and their subsisting jealousies of each other, as they did throw off these in one or two hours of imminent peril; unless the citizens in each of the states had sacrificed, not (as they did) in short fits of alarm or indignation, but with steady and life-long devotion, the love of luxury which made rich and poor alike slow to aid the finances of the commonwealth, and the habits of pacific indolence which devolved the battles of the Hellenic race on hordes of mercenary soldiers. But, fighting at every disadvantage, Greece would not have fallen when she did fall, if it had not happened that the enemy who attacked her, Philip, king of Macedon, was a man of extraordinary genius, both military and diplomatic. It was a fact which no man could have ventured to foretell, and which no Grecian statesman was entitled to assume in the earlier stages of the contest, that within a quarter of a century Philip should have raised a small, poor, and barbarous kingdom to a height of power, which not only laid Greece at its feet, but enabled his heroic son to found, by a few years of conquest, one of the great monarchies of the world. Even against adversaries thus formidable, the Greeks maintained a struggle which, at more crises than one, was decided against them by very narrow causes; and when, after the death of Alexander, they were again encouraged to rise, it was only, perhaps, by reason of the discouragement diffused by a generation of fruitless warfare, that this, the last act of the tragedy, did not issue in a different catastrophe.

The year of Demosthenes' birth has not been exactly ascertained. The authorities refer it to years ranging from 384 to 380 B.C.; the fixed point being, that it took place in the ninety-ninth Olympiad. His enemies used to taunt him with his barbaric pedigree. His maternal grandfather, Gylon, had been charged with betraying a fort in the Crimea (the Tauric Chersonesus), and, being driven into exile, had married a woman of foreign blood. The orator's father, whose name he inherited, was an Athenian citizen, extensively engaged in manufacture and commerce, and entered in the richest class on the tax rolls. Demosthenes was left an orphan between his fifth and his tenth year; and the affairs of himself and his sister were entrusted to three guardians, two of them kinsmen, from whom, after attaining his legal majority at the age of sixteen, he long endeavoured in vain to extort a reckoning. The property which in the end he was able to recover, saved him from being poor, but was not enough to make him by any means wealthy. He is said to have been first directed towards the study of oratory, by the necessity which he speedily foresaw of having to institute a law-suit against his guardians; for the Athenian forms of procedure did not, unless in cases of special exemption, allow litigants in private causes to plead in the courts otherwise than in person. At any rate, Demosthenes did so plead for himself in those matters, in three, or perhaps five, orations, still extant; besides delivering, long afterwards, in another personal suit, his energetic invective against Midias. The composition, also, for payment, of speeches to be delivered by litigants, was a part of the ordinary business of advocates or orators at Athens; and the state of his affairs, together, perhaps, with the desire of thus training himself better for political eloquence, led him to occupy himself much in this way, especially in the earlier part of his public life. Such occasions gave rise to a considerable number of the speeches which are preserved among his works. He gave instructions in oratory, likewise, as we gather from the sneers of Æschines.

Demosthenes accused his guardians of having thrown obstacles in the way of his education. But he was certainly, in his youth, instructed as fully and variously as any Athenian of that refined and well-informed time; and his feebleness and sicknessness of body, while it clung to him in mature years, and was a drawback on his efficiency as a public man, increased from boyhood his natural turn for reading and reflection. He studied regularly under the orator Isocrates; he benefited in one way or another from the teaching both of Isocrates and of Plato; he was a diligent student of Greek literature, especially in the history of Thucydides, which he is said to have copied till he had it by heart, and which was pronounced by his critical countrymen to have strongly affected the formation of his style; and his discourses exhibit a familiarity both with the details of business and with the principles of administration, which shows convincingly that, with all his zeal in mastering the art of communication, and amidst all the enthusiasm with which he contemplated the glory of the older Grecian times, he looked with a most observant eye on the concerns of actual and present life, and taught himself to glance from end to means with the coolest sagacity of a practical statesman. Yet we know enough to be fully assured, that he who was thus earnest in learning what to tell, employed, in learning how to tell it, an amount of labour never equalled by any other public speaker. Every one remembers the stories celebrating the indomitable perseverance with which, inspired by the lofty ambition of being a great orator in a time and country which made oratory the most honoured and powerful of all accomplishments, he toiled to overcome physical defects; how he shut himself up for months to write or to declaim; how he modulated his voice and strengthened his lungs for the din of the popular assemblies, by practising recitation in climbing steep hills, or in walking beside the stormy shore of the sea; how he received lessons from Satyrus the player, and went so far as to study attitudes before a mirror. By the sedulous use, in short, of all expedients available in a school of oratory more refined and elaborate than any other that the world has ever seen, he proved his deep sense of the truth and importance of his own sound maxim; that "good delivery" (for this, not "action" merely, is the right rendering of his phrase) is the first and greatest qualification of a public speaker. In spite of these exertions, it was not till after repeated failures that he attained that impressive force and dignity of elocution, which his adversaries themselves were compelled to acknowledge and admire, and which made the orations of Demosthenes, when they issued from his own lips, to be even mightier instruments of persuasion than they are when we read them in the quietness of the closet. As to the matter of his speeches, too, it is to be noted, that while Æschines and others of his contemporaries prided themselves on extemporaneous fluency, he never possessed much readiness of speech, and always shrunk from speaking publicly when he had not had full time for preparation.

The Orations which we have under the name of Demosthenes are sixty; or sixty-one, if those critics are right who divide the first Philippic into two. But no more than forty are universally admitted as genuine; and the evidence against a good many of the rest is quite conclusive. The collection, as it stands, falls into three classes: sixteen speeches delivered in the national assemblies (Δημογραφίαι); judicial speeches (Λειτουργικά), forty-two in number, of which thirty deal with private civil causes, the others involving questions of public interest; and two orations of display (Λειτουργικά Επιδειξιών), both of which are spurious. There is also a curious collection of fifty-four Proemia, or introductions to political discourses; the separate composition of which, to be used as occasion might occur, is a singular illustration of the carefully artificial character of Grecian eloquence in the hands of its greatest masters. Many of the Orations of Demosthenes are invaluable contributions to the history of his times, for some facts of which indeed they are our principal evidence; and the delivery of the leading ones, or the circumstances out of which they arose, mark almost all the most prominent epochs in the biography of the orator.

His public life may thus be distributed into four stages.

The first of these begins with the year B.C. 354, when he was somewhere between his twenty-seventh and his thirtieth year. Then, having sufficiently tried his powers, both by delivering the orations on his family-affairs and by composing several for other litigants, he stepped into the arena of the public assemblies. The period thus begun came to a close in B.C. 346. At its opening, the duty which he thought mainly incumbent on him was to urge, in the Oration on the Symmories, union among the Greeks, and self-denying zeal on the part of individual citizens, and to caution his countrymen against wasting their strength in needless attacks on their ancient enemy Persia. Next year, in the Oration for the Megalopolitans, the text was still the abandonment of jealousies between state and state. Within a year after this, Philip of Macedon was in the Propontis; and now, while the old themes are not forgotten, and practical measures are recommended with the same statesman-like acuteness as before, Macedon is denounced as the enemy against whom Grecian liberty must be protected most vigorously. These similar views furnish the matter of the First Philippic.

The Speech for the Rhodians followed; and next, while Philip was overrunning the Chalcidic peninsula, came the three noble Olynthiacs. The rash invitations of the discordant Greeks had now, in the Sacred War, brought Philip to the very gates of their country. Demosthenes himself, already the most active leader of the Anti-Macedonian party in Athens, was unable to make head against the general despondency; and in B.C. 347 he consented to be one of the envoys in that famous embassy to Philip, in which, not by him, Athens was betrayed, and her allies were sacrificed. The king of Macedon was allowed to occupy the pass of Thermopylae, admitted to the Amphictyonic League, and elected its chief.

The second period in the career of Demosthenes lasted about six years from B.C. 346. It was not fertile in great public events, but all the more so in great efforts of the orator, now in the years just before and after his fortieth. There was peace in name between Macedon and Athens. But Philip was using, by encroachments continually spreading, the footing which he had gained in Greece; and the Athenians were led, by Demosthenes and his party, into a series of indirect and isolated resistances to him, which ended, as they could not but end, in open warfare. The political speeches of this stage came in the following order: the second Philippic; the Oration on the Misconducted Embassy to Philip, delivered on the first of those two celebrated occasions which brought the character and the policy of Demosthenes into close comparison with those of Æschines, his eloquent rival and personal enemy; the masterly and impassioned Oration on the affairs of the Chersonese; and the third and fourth Philippics.

In autumn B.C. 340 began the third of our periods, the most eventful epoch in the times. A contest of five years, conducted by the Greeks with an energy which might have saved them if it had been exerted sooner, issued in a discomfiture which was total and proved to be irremediable. Demosthenes, now at the summit of his popularity and power, had in the meantime no opponent strong enough to call forth his eloquence; and his time was closely and anxiously occupied by discharging, amidst difficulties of which the worst was the worthlessness of his chief assistants and instruments, duties which have been described fairly when he is called the war-minister of Athens. After war was declared, he carried through valuable reforms in the administration of the fleet; and, in the panic and anger which were aroused when Philip had marched into the heart of Greece, he organized without opposition the generous proposals which brought about alliance between Athens and Thebes. But, in August B.C. 338, the fatal battle of Chaeronea laid the Greeks prostrate before their enemy; the endeavours of the Athenians to gain allies for a renewal of the war were fruitless; and a peace was concluded which really made Greece a province of Macedon. Philip was assassinated two years afterwards; but the dreams raised on his removal were dissipated by the unexpected vigour of his son. Alexander having carried his army to the Danube, the Thebans revolted, and were assisted by Athens with a subsidy received from Persia. The young king rapidly returned home, captured Thebes, and destroyed it.

Besides executing other bloody punishments, he demanded surrender of nine leaders of the war-party at Athens, Demosthenes being of course in the number. It is disputed whether his withdrawal of the demand was caused by the venal negotiations of the orator Demades, or by the more honourable intercession of Phocion. Thus, in B.C. 335, the last hopes of the Greeks seemed to be extinguished. Even during Alexander's absence in the East, their courage did not rise high enough to prompt any general revolt.

Accordingly, during the twelve years after B.C. 335, which were the closing stage in the great orator's life, he was a fallen man; fallen from power and popularity, and exposed to continual attacks from old and new very dangerous enemies. But he was still full of courage, not destitute of hope, and as vigorous of intellect as ever. His oratorical masterpiece, the Oration on the Crown, or for Ctesiphon, belongs to this period, the trial which gave opportunity for it taking place in B.C. 330, when he must have been somewhat past his fiftieth year. A public honour which, immediately after the defeat at Chaeronea, the Athenians had done honour to themselves by conferring on Demosthenes, was now made a ground of impeachment against Ctesiphon, on whose motion it had been granted. Demosthenes was the person really attacked; and a hostile survey of his whole political life makes, with a short notice of the question ostensibly at issue, the staple of the magnificent address in which Æschines supported the prosecution. This oration, and that of Demosthenes in answer, are the very finest monuments which the records of eloquence have to show. The proceedings which were challenged by Æschines, having been clearly irregular, the verdict of acquittal which was pronounced was certainly wrong in law. But it was creditable to the popular board which constituted the court, to have refused to pronounce a verdict of conviction which, though seemingly bearing only on the nominal defendant, would avowedly have been accepted as a condemnation of the most distinguished and patriotic citizen in the state, as well as of the whole line of policy by which the corrupted Athenians had in part reclaimed the ancient lustre of their name. A subsequent attack on Demosthenes, made in B.C. 324, was more successful. Harpalus, one of Alexander's satellites, deserted the province of which he had been made governor, sought shelter in Athens with large plunder, and endeavoured to prevail on his hosts to take up arms in his defence. In the course of the agitation thus excited, Demosthenes was accused of having been bribed by the refugee, was convicted, heavily fined, and thrown into prison, whence he escaped, and fled into exile. The question of his guilt or innocence has been warmly argued on both sides. The recorded evidence against him is extremely slight, and the presumption in his favour from antecedents almost impregnable strong; nor is it hard to believe that he was sacrificed to the terror of Alexander, which was felt by the coward citizens, and fostered by the intrigues and threats of the Macedonian partizans. His countrymen themselves revoked their sentence immediately on commencing preparations for a new rising, when, in B.C. 323, Alexander's death was heard of. Demosthenes, recalled by a national resolution, and having his fine paid out of the public exchequer, was again the most trusted of Athenian statesmen. But this was only a lightening before death—it did not endure many months. The campaign in Thessaly, usually described as the Lamian War, ended in the defeat of the allied Greeks by Antipater at Crannon. Alexander's general and successor repeated the demand for blood which had been made by his master; and there was now neither protection nor intercession. Demosthenes, solemnly reconciling himself with the orator Hyperides, another of the victors, sought, in the temple of Poseidon, in the islet of Calauria, a sanctuary which, he knew well, would not be respected. The exile-hunters pursued him to his retreat; and Demosthenes died before falling into their hands, having, as is commonly believed, poisoned himself. His death took place in the year B.C. 322, when his age was not less than fifty-eight or more than sixty-two.

The name of Demosthenes is written in the last of the four periods, which comprehend the brilliancy and purity of Grecian literature. In the period of epic poetry, Homer stands superior and apart; in the period of lyric poetry, a pre-eminence nearly as decided belongs to Pindar; in the next period came the historians, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, the four chiefs of the Attic drama, the early philosophers, Socrates and the sophists. Then followed the period of the Greek philosophers and orators; and in it, Plato and Aristotle do not project more sublimely beyond all other thinkers of the ancient world, than does Demosthenes beyond all its masters of eloquence. This, in truth, is far too little to say. Perhaps no literary judgment has been pronounced with fewer dissents, than that which has, in every enlightened generation during the last two thousand years, declared Demosthenes to be the greatest of all orators ancient or modern. The opinion has been clothed in such a multiplicity of forms, and has been expressed so finely by men themselves eloquent, that a respectful acquiescence in it is all that can now be called for. That reasons not only various, but sometimes not quite consistent with each other, should have been assigned in support of it, is a fact which, if rightly dissected, may be found to be really a proof of the diversity and profundity of the powers out of which the marvellous effect is generated. In comparing such criticisms, all of us shall often discover that, even where the several points of excellence do not seem to be either exhaustively apprehended or justly subordinated to one another, each brings to the surface something overlooked by the rest, and yet important for the right appreciation of the works; while, after we have endeavoured to collect into one focus the scattered rays of illumination, there rests on us a fixed impression that the deepest coils of the secret spring still remain undetected. Critical analysis is as incompetent to unveil the ultimate mysteries of a mighty soul worthily actuated, as is the dissector's knife to lay bare the principle of animal vitality. The law thus hinted at is valid for literature as much as for action, and for eloquence nearly as much as for poetry; the genius of Homer is scarcely further beyond the reach of lower intellects, than is the genius of Demosthenes: he who could completely fathom either, would be a Homer or a Demosthenes himself.

The praise of Demosthenes is by no one expressed more warmly, and by few more discriminatingly, than by the cautious David Hume. "Could his manner be copied, its success would be infallible over a modern assembly. It is rapid harmony exactly adjusted to the sense; it is vehement reasoning without any appearance of art; it is disdain, anger, boldness, freedom, involved in a continual stream of argument; and, of all human productions, the Orations of Demosthenes present to us the models which approach the nearest to perfection." Some of the orator's most striking peculiarities, and not a few of the methods by which his effects were attained, are analysed in the "Dissertation on the Eloquence of the Ancients," appended to the collected edition of Lord Brougham's speeches.

The older editions of Demosthenes, of which the most noted were those of Taylor and Reiske, have been superseded in the present century by that of Bekker. Bibliographical details are fully given in Westermann's Geschichte der Beredsamkeit. The biography of the orator may be studied best in the general histories of Greece, or in some historical works devoted to particular periods. The Macedonian side is taken up by Mitford with his usual keenness and spirit, and somewhat less decidedly by Droysen; a fairer estimate may be gathered from Thirlwall and Grote. (w.s.)

DEMOTIC or ENCHORIAL characters, in Egyptian Ar-

tiquities, are terms used synonymously to distinguish the alphabet used by the common people; in contradistinction to the Hieratic, or that used by the priests. The words are derived respectively from ἐγκόσμιος, 'belonging to the people,' and ἐγκόσμιος, 'indigenous,' or 'of the country.' See Hieroglyphics.