Demosthenes

He also employed Isaeus as his guide to the art of speaking, although Isocrates was lecturing at the time; either, as some say, because he was an orphan and unable to pay Isocrates his stipulated fee of ten minas,[*](Equivalent to about £40, or $200, with five or six times the purchasing power of modern money.) or because he preferred the style of Isaeus for its effectiveness and adaptability in actual use.

But Hermippus says that he once came upon some anonymous memoirs in which it was recorded that Demosthenes was a pupil of Plato and got most help from him in his rhetorical studies. He also quotes Ctesibius as saying that from Callias the Syracusan and certain others Demosthenes secretly obtained the rhetorical systems of Isocrates and Alcidamas and mastered them.

However this may be, when Demosthenes came of age he began to bring suits against his guardians and to write speeches attacking them. They devised many evasions and new trials, but Demosthenes, after practising himself in these exercises, as Thucydides says,[*](*kai\ e)mpeiro/teroi e)ge/nonto meta\ kindu/nwn ta\s mele/tas poiou/menoi (i.18, 3 of the Athenians and Lacedaemonians).) not without toil and danger, won his cause, although he was able to recover not even a small fraction of his patrimony. However, he acquired sufficient practice and confidence in speaking, and got a taste of the distinction and power that go with forensic contests, and therefore essayed to come forward and engage in public matters.

And just as Laomedon the Orchomenian—so we are told—practised long-distance running by the advice of his physicians, to ward off some disease of the spleen, and then, after restoring his health in this way, entered the great games and became one of the best runners of the long course, so Demosthenes, after applying himself to oratory in the first place for the sake of recovering his private property, by this means acquired ability and power in speaking, and at last in public business, as it were in the great games, won the first place among the citizens who strove with one another on the bema.

And yet when he first addressed the people he was interrupted by their clamours and laughed at for his inexperience, since his discourse seemed to them confused by long periods and too harshly and immoderately tortured by formal arguments. He had also, as it would appear, a certain weakness of voice and indistinctness of speech and shortness of breath which disturbed the sense of what he said by disjoining his sentences.