Demosthenis encomium

A little before noon on the sixteenth, I was walking in the Porch—it was on the left-hand side as you go out—, when Thersagoras appeared; I dare say he is known to some of you —short, hook-nosed, fair-complexioned, and virile. He drew nearer, and I spoke: ‘Thersagoras the poet. Whence, and whither?' ‘From home, hither,’ he replied. ‘Just a stroll?’ I asked. ‘Why, I do need a stroll too,’ he said. ‘I got up in the small hours, impressed with the duty of making a poetic offering on Homer’s birthday.’ ‘Very proper,’ said I; ‘a good way of paying for the education he has given you.’ ‘That was how I began,’ he continued, ‘and time has glided by till now it is just upon noon; that was what I meant by saying I wanted a stroll.

‘However, I wanted something else much more—an interview with this gentleman’ (and he pointed to the Homer; you know the one on the right of the Ptolemies’ shrine, with the hair hanging loose); ‘I came to greet him, and to pray for a good flow of verse.’ ‘Ah,’ I sighed, ‘if prayers would do it! in that case I should have given Demosthenes a worrying for assistance against his birthday. If prayers availed, I would join my wishes to yours; for the boons we desire are the same. ‘Well, I put down to Homer,’ he replied, ‘my facility of this night and morning; ardours divine and mystic have possessed me. But you shall judge. Here are my tablets, which I have brought with designs upon any idle friend I might light upon; and you, I rejoice to see, are idle.’

‘Ah, you lucky man!’ I exclaimed; ‘you are like the winner of the three miles, who had washed off the dust, and could

‘Ah, you probably consider Demosthenes of much less account than Homer. You are very proud of your eulogy on Homer; and is Demosthenes a light matter to me?’ ‘A trumped up charge,’ he exclaimed; ‘I am not going to sow dissension between these two mighty ones, though it is true my own allegiance is rather to Homer.’

‘Good,’ I said, ‘and you must allow me to give mine to Demosthenes. But, though you do not disqualify my subject, I am sure you think poetry the only real treatment; you feel about mere rhetoric what the cavalryman feels as he gallops past the infantry.” ‘I hope I am not so mad as that,’ he said, ‘though a considerable touch of madness is required of him who would pass the gates of poetry.’ ‘If you come to that, prose cannot do without some divine inspiration either, if it is not to be flat and common.’ He admitted that at once: ‘I often delight myself with comparing passages from Demosthenes and other prose writers with Homer in point of vehemence, pungency, fire. “ Flown with wine” I pair off against the revellings and dancings and debauchery of Philip; “ One presage that ne’er fails[*](Homer, Il. xii, 243. ‘One o.nen is best—to fight for our own country.')" finds its counterpart in “ It is for brave men, founding themselves upon brave hopes—"; “How would old Peleus, lord of steeds, repine—” is matched by “What a cry of lamentation woyld go up from the men of those days

‘I love too to study his feelings and moods and transitions, the variety with which he combats weariness, his resumptions after digression, the charm of his opportune illustrations, and the never-failing native purity of his style.

‘It has often struck me about Demosthenes—for I will tell the whole truth out—that that looser of the bonds of speech rebukes Athenian slackness with a dignity that is lacking in the “ Greekesses” used by Homer of the Greeks; and again he maintains the tragic intensity proper to the great Hellenic drama moreconsistently than the poet who inserts speeches at the very crisis of battle and allows energy to evaporate in words.

‘As often as I read Demosthenes, the balanced clauses, the rhythmic movement and cadence, make me forget that this is not my beloved poetry; for Homer too abounds in contrast and parallel, in figures startling or simple. It is a provision of nature, I suppose, that each faculty should have its proper equipment attached to it. How should I scorn your Muse? I know her powers too well.

‘None the less, I consider my task of a Homeric encomium twice as difficult as your praise of Demosthenes; not because it must be in verse, but from the nature of the material; I cannot lay down a foundation of fact to build the edifice of praise upon; there is nothing but the poems themselves. Everything else is uncertain—his country, his family, his time. If there had been any uncertainty about them,

‘Your work, now, can be reeled smoothly off out of hand; you have your definite known facts; the butcher’s meat is there, only needing to be garnished with the sauce of your words, History supplies you with the greatness and distinction of Demosthenes; it is all known; his country was Athens, the splendid, the famous, the bulwark of Hellas. Now df I could have laid hands on Athens, I might have used the poet’s right to introduce the loves and judgements and sojourns there of the Gods, the gifts they lavished on it, the tale of Eleusis. As for its laws and courts and festivals, its Piraeus and its colonies, the memorials set up in it of victory by land and sea, Demosthenes himself is the authority for saying that no words could do justice to them. My material would have been inexhaustible; and I could not have been accused of hanging up my true theme; the formula of panegyric includes the arraying of the man in the splendours of his country. So too Isocrates ekes out his Helen by introducing Theseus. It is true that poets have their privileges; and perhaps you have to be more careful about your proportions; there must not be too much sack to the proverbial halfpennyworth of bread.