Demosthenes

Another circumstance, too, is made a proof of his lack of courage for an emergency, namely, that when he was interrupted by the clamours of the people, Demades often rose and spoke off-hand in his support, but he never rendered such a service to Demades.

How, then, some one might say, could Aeschines call him a man of the most astonishing boldness in his speeches?[*](See Aeschines, On the Crown § 152.) And how was it that, when Python of Byzantium[*](An envoy of Philip to the Athenian assembly, in 343 B.C. See Demosthenes, On the Crown § 136.) was inveighing with much boldness and a great torrent of words against the Athenians, Demosthenes alone rose up and spoke against him? Or how did it happen that, when Lamachus the Myrinaean had written an encomium on Kings Philip and Alexander, in which many injurious things were said of Thebes and Olynthus,

and while he was reading it aloud at Olympia,[*](In 324 B.C.)Demosthenes came forward and rehearsed with historical proofs all the benefits which the peoples of Thebes and Chalcidice had conferred upon Greece, and, on the other hand, all the evils of which the flatterers of the Macedonians had been the cause, and thereby so turned the minds of the audience that the sophist was terrified at the outcry against him and slunk away from the festival assemblage?