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.

Well then, let Athens go; but your discourse at once finds another support in his father’s wealth—that “ golden base” which Pindar likes—; for to be responsible for providing a warship was to be among the richest Athenians in those days. And though he died while Demosthenes was quite a child, we are not to count his orphan state a disaster; it led to the distinction that brought his splendid gifts into notice.

‘Tradition gives us no hint of how Homer was educated or developed his powers; the panegyrist must plunge straight into his works, and can find nothing to talk about in his breeding and training and pupilage; he has not even the resource of that Hesiodic sprig of bay which could make a facile poet out of a shepherd. But think of your abundance in this branch of the subject. There is Callistratus and all the mighty roll of orators, Alcidamas, Isocrates, Isaeus, Eubulides. Then again, at Athens even those who were subject to paternal control had countless temptations to indulgence, youth is the susceptible time, a neglected ward could have lived as irregular a life as he chose, and yet the objects that Demosthenes set up for himself were philosophy and patriotism, and the doors they took him to not Phryne’s, but those of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Xenocrates and Plato.

‘And so, my dear sir, your way is open to a disquisition upon the two kinds of human love, the one’ sprung of a desire that is like the sea, outrageous, fierce, stormily rocking the soul; it is a true sea wave, which the earthly Aphrodite sets rolling with the tempestuous passions of youth; but the other is the steady drawing of a golden cord from heaven; it does not scorch and pierce and leave festering wounds; it impels towards the pure and unsullied ideal of absolute beauty, and is a sane madness in those souls which “ yet hold of Zeus and nurse the spark divine.”

‘Love will find out the way, though that way involve a shaven

'Callisthenes remarked of Aeschylus that he wrote his tragedies in wine, which lent vigour and warmth to his work. With Demosthenes it was otherwise; he composed not on wine but on water; whence the witticism of Demades, that most men’s tongues are regulated by water[*](Speeches in the law courts had a time limit appointed, which was measured by the water-clock or clepsydra, generally called simply ‘the water,’ ‘my water,’ ‘his water,’ etc.), but Demosthenes’s pen was subject to the same influence. And Pytheas detected the smell of the midnight oil in the very perfection of the speeches. Well, there is much in common between your subject and mine, so far as this branch of them is concerned; on Homer’s poems I was no worse off than you are.

‘But when you come to your hero’s acts of humanity, his pecuniary sacrifices, his grand political achievements’ (and he was going on in full swing to the rest of the catalogue, when I interrupted, with a laugh: ‘Must I be dowsed with the remainder of your canful, good bath-man?’ ‘Most certainly,’ he retorted, and went straight on), ‘the public entertainments

‘I believe you think, my good man,’ I protested, ‘that I have never had the deeds of Demosthenes drummed into me; I should be singular among rhetoricians, then.’ ‘It was on the assumption,’ he said, ‘implied by you, that we want assistance. But perhaps your case is a very different one; is the light so bright that you cannot manage to fix your eyes on the dazzling glory of Demosthenes? Well, I was rather like that about Homer at first. Indeed, I came very near turning mine away, thinking I could not possibly face my subject. However, I got over it somehow or other; became gradually inured, as it were, superior to the weakness of vision that would have condemned me for a bastard eagle and no true son of Homer.

‘But now here is another great advantage that I consider you have over me. The poetic faculty has a single aim; from which it follows that Homer’s glory must be laid hold of at once and as a whole. You on the other hand, if you were to attempt dealing with the whole Demosthenes all at once, would never know what to say; you would waver and not be able to set your thoughts to work. You would be like the gourmand at a Sicilian banquet, or the aesthete who has a thousand delightful sights and sounds presented to him at once; they do not know which way to turn for their conflicting desires. I suspect that you too are distracted and find concentration impossible; all round you are the varied attractions—his magnanimity, his fire, his orderly life, his oratorical force and practical courage, the endless opportunities of gain that he scorned, his justice, humanity, honour,

It may well be that, when you behold on this side decrees, ambassadors, speeches, laws, on the other, fleets, Euboea, Boeotia, Chios, Rhodes, the Hellespont, Byzantium, you are pulled to and fro among these too numerous invitations, and cannot tell which to accept.

‘Pindar once found himself in a similar difficulty with an overabundant theme:

You, I dare say, are in the same quandary. Logic and life, rhetoric and philosophy, popularity and death—ay, but which?

you have only to take hold of one single clue, no matter which—his oratory, if you will, so that it is taken by itself—, and stick to that one throughout your present discourse. You will have ample material; his oratory is not of the Periclean type. Pericles could lighten and thunder, and he could hit the right nail on the head; so much tradition tells us; but we have nothing to judge for ourselves by, no doubt because, beyond the momentary impression produced, there was in his performances no element of permanence, nothing that could stand the searching test of time. But with Demosthenes’s work—well, that it will be your province to deal with, if your choice goes that way.