when a great crisis had roused the Assembly to seriousness) was the one who
found specious and apparently moral reasons for doing what would give the
audience least trouble; and consequently one who, like Demosthenes, desired to
stir them up to action and personal sacrifices, had always an uphill fight: and
if he also at times 'deceived the people' or employed sophistical arguments in
order to secure results which he believed to be for their good, we must remember
the difficulty (which, in spite of the wide circulation of authentic
information, is at least equally great at the present day) of putting the true
reasons for or against a policy, before those who, whether from want of
education or from lack of training in the subordination of feeling to thought,
are not likely to understand or to listen to them. Nor, if we grant the
genuineness of Demosthenes' conviction as to the desirability of the end for
which he contended, can many statesmen be pointed out, who have not been at
least as guilty as he in their choice of means. That he did not solve the
problem, how to lead a democracy by wholly honest means, is the less to his
discredit, in that the problem still remains unsolved.

It should be added that with an audience like the Athenian, whose aesthetic
sensitiveness was doubtless far greater than that of any modern assembly,
delivery counted for much. Aeschines' fine voice was a real danger to
Demosthenes, and Demosthenes himself spoke of delivery, or the skilled acting of
his part, as the all-important condition of an orator's success. But it is clear
that this can have been no advantage from the standpoint of the public interest.

In the law-courts the drawbacks to which the commanding influence of oratory was
liable were intensified. In the Assembly a certain amount of reticence and self-
restraint was imposed by custom: an opponent could not be attacked by name or on
purely personal grounds; and an appearance of impartiality was commonly assumed.
But in the courts much greater play was allowed to feeling; and the arguments
were often much more disingenuous, not only because the personal interests at