stake made the speaker more unscrupulous, but also, perhaps, because the juries
ordinarily included a larger proportion of the poorer, the idler, and the less-
educated citizens than the Assembly. The legal question was often that to which
the jury were encouraged to pay least attention, and the condemnation or
acquittal of the accused was demanded upon grounds quite extraneous to the
indictment. (The two court-speeches contained in these volumes afford abundant
illustrations of this.) Personalities were freely admitted, of a kind which it
is difficult to excuse and impossible to justify. To attempt to blacken the
personal character of an opponent by false stories about his parentage and his
youth, and by the ascription to him and his relations of nameless immoralities,
is a very different thing from the assignment of wrong motives for his political
actions, though even in purely political controversy the ancients far exceeded
the utmost limits of modern invective. And this both Demosthenes and Aeschines
do freely. There is also reason to suspect that some of the tales which each
tells of the other's conduct, both while serving as ambassadors and on other
occasions, may be fabrications. The descriptive passages for which such
falsehoods gave an opening had doubtless their dramatic value in the oratorical
performance: possibly they were even expected by the listeners; but their
presence in the speeches does not increase our admiration either for the speaker
or for his audience.

All the force of Demosthenes' oratory was unable to defeat the great antagonist
of his country. To Philip of Macedon failure was an inconceivable idea. Resident
during three impressionable years of his youth at Thebes, he had there learned,
from the example of Epaminondas, what a single man could do: and he proceeded to
each of the three great tasks of his life--the welding of the rough Macedonians
into one great engine of war, the unification of Greece under his own
leadership, and the preparation for the conquest of the East by a united Greece
and Macedonia--without either faltering in face of difficulties, or hesitating,
out of any scrupulosity, to use the most effective means towards the end which