Demosthenes' Philippics (Archive Episode)

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Hello, in the 4th century BC in Athens, Demosthenes delivered speeches so powerful that he became famous as one of that democracy's greatest freedom fighters.

His target was the tyrant Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, who to Demosthenes appeared a growing threat.

In what became known as the Philippics, Demosthenes tried to persuade Athenians to act before it was too late, and eventually he succeeded, even if the Macedonians later prevailed.

With me to discuss Demosthenes' Philippics are Paul Cartlidge, A.

G.

LeMantis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College University of Cambridge, Catherine Tempest, reader in Latin literature and Roman history at the University of Brohampton, and John Hesk, reader in Greek and classical studies at the University of St.

Andrews.

John Hesk, what do we know of Demosthenes' early life?

Well, Demosthenes was born in 384 BC in classical Athens.

Athens is a democracy at this time, and he's born into an extremely wealthy family.

His father is called Demosthenes as well, Demosthenes Sr.

and his father owns a weapons factory making swords and knives.

His mother is from a well-known Athenian family as well, but later opponents of of Demosthenes would accuse her of actually having Scythian, that is, non-Athenian ancestry.

Scythians were a nomadic tribe in the north of the Black Sea.

We don't know for sure if that's true, it may just be a slur against Demosthenes because you were supposed to have pure Athenian parents.

But anyway, so Demosthenes is born into a world of privilege, but things take a turn for the worst for him quite quickly because at the age of seven, his father dies and he falls under the guardianship of his father's two nephews and a family friend.

And they are supposed to look after the family and marry his mother and his younger sister respectively.

But they actually

seem to have at best mismanaged the estate and at worst actually stolen from it.

So when Demosthenes comes of age,

in 366 BC, he actually launches a series of prosecutions.

There are five prosecution speeches, which he delivers himself in order to get his property back.

He doesn't get much back, but he does actually make a reputation for himself through those speeches.

Does this sort of kickstart his career?

Absolutely, yeah.

So

we can't be sure, but I think that probably he publishes those speeches in order to show everybody what a great speech writer he is, because he's lost a lot of money from his estate, so he needs to make money another way.

So what he does is he starts writing speeches for people.

But if you wanted to say something, Mathnos, you didn't go to a lawyer, you did it yourself.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

You had to deliver the speech yourself.

So what wealthy Athenians did is they hired a speech writer, and that's the career that Demosthenes starts.

How did he become so prominent?

Well, what he starts to do, as well as writing speeches for private cases to do with property and family law, he starts to write speeches for prominent politicians.

And those politicians often they often attack each other through the law courts.

So what they do is they accuse each other of having made illegal proposals to the assembly or of taking bribes and he starts writing speeches for prominent politicians.

What knowledge is essential for him to do this so well?

Well, I think partly, it's a really good question.

Partly he has a great rhetorical knowledge.

He clearly trained in rhetoric when he was a teenager, when he was a boy.

But partly he seems to very quickly have acquired an astute political understanding of both international affairs and also of contemporary internal politics in Athens.

At the start, he was thought to have to be a weak speaker with a weak voice and couldn't pronounce all of his words properly.

And that seemed changed, but how did he change it?

Well, I mean, there's this story, it's in Plutarch, who is a biographer in the Roman period.

There's this story that he actually had a lisp and that he had a very weak voice and that he would practice speaking by putting pebbles in his mouth.

Now, that story may or may not be true, but it's quite well attested.

Supposedly, a contemporary of Demosthenes, Demetrius of Phalaron,

told someone this, and then it goes to Plutarch.

And it may be that he put these pebbles in his mouth to alter the shape of his mouth in order to get rid of the lisp.

And there are other stories as well that he, you know, he built a kind of chamber for himself to practice in and not let himself out of the chamber until he sounded better and

also took advice from contemporary actors as well.

So there are all these stories and I think some of them are probably true, to be honest.

There does seem to be a lot of evidence,

contemporary evidence, where politicians accuse him of practicing and toiling away and pre-preparing and writing out his speeches.

So I think to compensate for a sense of weakness, he probably wrote his speeches out, practiced them, honed them, and that's where all these stories come from.

Excellent, thank you very much.

Catherine Tempest, why was the ability to give speeches so important?

So Athens at the time was very much an oral community and without the kind of media that we have today, it was really important to make a speech to get your point of view across.

Now there were...

Where did they make these speeches?

There were several places in which speeches were made.

One of them was the assembly, the assembly of every male citizen, which met probably about 40 times a year, would be a really important place to get your point across.

Now we know that there were regular speakers.

These are the men who engage in politics and Demosthenes at the first Philippic actually says I'm speaking first today.

So it is a very regular occurrence of someone to speak in the assembly.

There's also the council, the boule, on which adult male citizens would take it in turns to serve, a council of 500.

So you needed to get your view across there.

This was dealing with things about the finance of the city, looking after the orphans, you name it, daily business was conducted.

They would put the agenda out, the ecclesia, the assembly would meet to vote on those matters or to hear speeches.

And then, of course, as John has already alluded to, the law courts were a really important place because a man was expected to speak on his own behalf.

So, we've heard a little bit about how he learned to give speeches.

Do we know who his teacher was?

We hear about his teachers, yes.

Now, there are two aspects to Demosthenes' training.

One is the oratory, and one is the theory of rhetoric.

The theory of rhetoric had been taught taught from the middle of the 5th century BC.

And we know that Isocrates was a popular teacher at the time, but he couldn't afford the lessons of Isocrates, if Plutarch tells us.

No, never mind, he's got a bit richer later, didn't he?

He's got a bit richer later.

We know that he did have a tutor.

We hear of stories of him asking his tutor to smuggle him into trials.

We also hear that he learnt with Isaias, who would be an obvious candidate as a teacher because he is specialised in inheritance cases.

So we can see why he would have have turned to someone like Isaias to learn the art of rhetoric from.

But it links in with what was being said earlier about him working at it

again and again, working at that speech or those speeches and working rather interestingly.

I suppose it became known as too much of a swat.

We have a lot of evidence, as John suggested, that shows that he did work at his speeches.

Very interestingly, a collection of introductions to speeches survives that shows that he always wanted to make a really good first impression in the assembly.

So, these collections of Poiemia, the introductions to the speeches, survive.

So, we know that even when he was probably having to speak extemporaneously, he had always made sure he got in on a winning note

because he really liked to prepare.

Cicero is supposed to have been influenced by when was Cicero, how much later, and how was he influenced?

So, Cicero is operating in the period we call the Roman Republic, and he's living between the years of 106 BC to 43 BC.

A long time afterwards.

It's a long time afterwards.

We're talking several hundred years.

So, how did you know what he was talking about?

What were the records that he had at his disposal?

So, Demosthenes published his speeches.

Ah, good.

And these speeches have survived, along with other speeches from the Attic Orators, which people like Cicero learnt from.

Now, if you wanted to learn oratory and rhetoric in the Roman period, you still went to Athens.

It had become very customary even to take a gap year, as we'd call it today.

But you studied the speeches of Demosthenes.

These were the model and the template for good, effective oratory.

So, Cicero would have read the speeches, he certainly uses features from them in his own practice and then he adapts them to his own time.

They're wonderful speeches.

I mean I've read especially the third which I've been reading again this morning.

Extraordinary.

Extraordinary works aren't they?

Anyway we might come on to that and analyse it more.

Paul, Paul Cartlin.

Hello.

What were the political, major political instabilities facing Demosthenes in his youth?

Well that's a very good way of putting it because of course they were both internal and and external.

It's extremely complicated.

We're in the 300s, the 4th century, as we call it BC or BCE.

Roughly five political entities are of salience.

Four of them are Greek, one of them non-Greek, the Persian Empire.

And Demosthenes was born, as Catherine has said, in 384 BC, which is a couple of years into

what's called King's Peace, the first compact which affected typically all mainland Greek states, whether or not they had actually sworn an oath to abide by the terms.

It was presided over by Sparta, the then great power of mainland Greece, together with King Artaxerxes II, who, though at a great distance, was very interested in getting back the Greek cities that lay on his western frontier, that is, western Turkey today, on the shores of the Aegean, which he'd lost, his ancestors had lost in the fifth century.

That's two.

So we've had Sparta and we've had Persia.

The other three.

Athens, of course, a great power in the fifth century, utterly devastated by losing a major, major war at the end of the fifth century, recovering and desperate to get back to its naval empire, which had both on the one hand lubricated its democracy at home and also extended its power abroad and therefore increased its self-image and prestige.

Then we have also two others: Thebes, in between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century BC,

going to rise up because of Sparta and Athens still clashing in the fourth century BC, briefly having a moment of glory, being the most powerful single city in all mainland Greece until, and then this is why they called Philippics, because they are speeches by Demosthenes against Philip, Philip II, king of Macedon.

And Macedon's rise is the absolutely key feature of Demosthenes'

youth.

So, Demosthenes is born in 384, so when he first hits Philip, Philip is rising in the 350s.

Demosthenes is in his 20s.

How did Macedon become such a threat so quickly to Arthur?

Yeah,

partly.

I mean, one must.

I'm not myself, as a historian, a great believer in the great man theory of history, but

I was going to say some great men are greater than others, and Philip and his son Alexander were two of the greatest.

So,

Philip was exceptionally savvy.

His kingdom was fissile, fissiparis.

Very often, kings were murdered.

It was a combination of different cantons, so basically divided into two: upper, lower.

A predecessor of Philip had united them first, but still they were relatively weak.

Long comes Philip.

Combination of social, political, military, economic reforms.

He grabs territory with a new model army that then funds yet more army developments, yet more extension.

He funds technological developments, especially in siege warfare.

He's a brilliant diplomatist, i.e., crooked as hell, if I'm allowed hell.

He'll tell somebody, he'll tell the Athenians, I'm going to do this, and then he'll do the other.

Just to give you one example.

And Demosthenes, completely to his credit, recognises Philip's strength.

He doesn't belittle Philip.

He hates Philip, but he doesn't belittle him.

So, actually, reading Demosthenes' speeches, you learn quite a lot about why Macedon under Philip became great.

Yes.

All the things you said about Philip, the biggest thing was his sort of command of strategy in that area.

He just picked up city after city after city.

With the aim, it seemed to me, retrospectively, to encircle Athens with hostile cities.

Yeah, not quite encircled, though, of course.

You're right in championing Thebes against Athens.

that was getting very close to Athens.

One of Demosthenes' big shticks is, for goodness sake, Athens, if you don't go up north and stop him in his tracks up north that is, Maston's right at the northern shore of the Aegean, it spreads across to the Balkans, onto the very far west, it goes over onto the Adriatic, on the east it goes over eventually under Philip to the Black Sea.

I mean he's quite extraordinary.

So Demosthenes' first line is, get up there, Athens, to stop him coming further south.

But as you say, Meldin, he picks off, one by one, Athens' allies, and then, of course, sometimes Athens' enemies.

But nevertheless, mainly it's what the Athenians are worried about is, first of all, Amphipolis.

That is absolutely the key.

Then Olynthus.

These are the two big Greek cities in the north that matter most to Athens.

Thank you very much.

John Hask.

Let's look at his first speech.

First speech against Philip.

We've had the speech about him getting his money back.

What are its strengths?

That's a good question.

I'm glad you frame it as strengths because some people

point out that the speech didn't achieve what it aimed to.

Because what Demosthenes is trying to do is persuade the Athenians to create a massive, rapid reaction force based in Athens.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, no, it would, you know, 50 triremes, cavalry.

Trimes being being battleships.

Being battleships.

And of course, the context is this, that Athens can't really afford this.

But he proposes it anyway.

And

the other thing he suggests is a sort of standing force in the north, in the area, you know, near the areas that Paul was talking about, in order to sort of what we would now call interdict or harry or kind of provide a deterrent to Philip's sort of expansionist operations in the north.

And the Athenians don't go for that, but I think almost, I wonder whether Demosthenes actually knows that they're not gonna go for it but what he's doing is he's building up the the threat by saying this is this is what we need to counter him so he builds Philip

yeah and but at the same time as he builds Philip up he does a quite a clever job of saying to the Athenians the only reason why he's doing well is because you guys have been caught napping you haven't been thinking ahead you're sitting on your hands and if you just actually anticipate his moves you will actually be able to counter him and you know

pardon a good analogy oh yeah the boxing analogy well yeah i'm glad you've mentioned that melvin because i i'm going to read that bit out what he what he says is he says

those who wage war well those who wage war properly must anticipate events rather than follow them and then he accuses the athenians even though they've got all of these hot plights and cavalry and money he says you don't use them as you should but instead you wage war on Philip in the same way that a foreigner fights in a boxing match so when one of them is is struck, this is foreigners, he always moves his hand to the spot where he's just been struck.

And then when he's hit somewhere else, he moves his hand there.

So

this is a brilliant analogy because it's actually shaming the Athenians.

The Athenians hate non-Greeks, hate foreigners.

And he's saying, you are fighting Philip like a foreigner was.

You're acting like barbarians, not like great kind of leaders of Greek civilization like Athenians should be.

The interesting thing about the speech is, most of the way through, is that he somewhere between chides and scolds them, doesn't he?

And tries to shame them.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think that's another strength of the speech: that

he's trying to shame the Athenians, but he's also actually establishing himself as a politician who is fearless, who isn't afraid to criticise the people, to criticise the people that could potentially, you know,

move against him.

Why does he get away with it?

Well,

that's a really good question.

I think he gets away with it partly because he's not probably as lone a voice as he tries to make himself out to be.

So he stages himself as this sort of person with great foresight, the first person to really see the threat of Philip.

But what we know is actually there were other politicians who were worried about Philip, but some of them wanted to go about things in a different way, perhaps, you know, perhaps try and forge alliances with Philip, keep him contained and all the rest of it.

So he's perhaps not as lone a voice as he makes himself out to be.

Catherine, do you think he displays his oratorical skills from the beginning in that first Philippic?

We see a lot of features in Demosthenes' first Philippics that will carry over into the subsequent speeches.

For example, he really starts with a big paradox.

The worst aspect of your history, Athenians, actually holds out the best hope for the future.

And he says, What do I mean by that?

He says, Well, I'll tell you.

And this is a great way of engaging the audience's attention, right?

He says, As John has just explained, you've done nothing so far.

You've been caught napping.

But that's good, because had you actually been trying to fight Philip, you'd have done a terrible job.

So actually, and I'm broadly paraphrasing here, actually, this is a great thing because now if we fight, we can only get better.

So that is one of the ways in which he works anyway.

That seems to be a rather common way, not common, nothing common about democracy, but a regular way he chooses his arguments, doesn't he?

Absolutely.

He repeats that verbatim in the third Philippic, so he obviously liked it.

So we see him really showing that he can capture the audience's attention.

And what he also does in this speech, which he carries over, I think, from his forensic speeches, is he really focuses on a single argument.

Now, a lot of speeches in the fourth century had to sort of throw a number of arguments at something and something will stick.

Whereas what Demosthenes does is he goes back to sort of the versions of speeches he's read in his readings of Thucydides, for example, and he sees speeches that focused on expediency, what is to our advantage, and he really presses home that point.

And actually, that advantage becomes a necessity in his hands.

We need to fight Philip.

And that is a feature that will recur in his Philippics later on as well.

And we see this sort of the seeds of

the later rhetoric developing already in his first Philippic.

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Poor Paul Gadlich, in response to this first terrific speech, nothing happens.

No, nothing happens.

Well, that's partly because he's, remember, only 32, something like that, early 30s.

And the situation.

Is it them or him?

Sorry, is it them or him or him?

Well, the reason that nothing happens, is it his fault,

or are they now so sunk in

good estimation of themselves that they can't be moved by mere...

Well, there are counter-arguments, and Demosthenes, I think, was particularly foresighted, and most people typically aren't.

And therefore,

what he was immediately reacting to, I think there's a kind of conversion in Demosthenes around about 352 to 351.

This is the speech in 351 is the first Philippines, namely that Philip has suddenly, lightning speed, first of all gone far east to the Black Sea and threatening the Athenians' grain supply from actually Ukraine and Crimea of wheat.

On the other hand, having gone that far east, suddenly he's back and he's coming south and he's threatening Athens by going through the pass of Thermopylae in Phocis, which the Athenians did block.

So it's not the case the Athenians never did anything, but it's the case that Demosthenes is, as John was saying, enormous

armament that he's advocating in great detail.

He goes into precise figures in a way that he doesn't later, because by then he's established.

He doesn't need to demonstrate his command of the detail.

And so it doesn't have any effect.

And I think A40 or A, look forward forward a few years,

still when even more obviously Philip was threatening Athens' interests by destroying an ally of Athens up in the north, Olynthus, still they don't do anything.

So sort of A fortiori in 351, he doesn't yet have the critical mass of ordinary Athenians, the ones who are going to actually have to fight, on his side.

So there are counter-arguments, and there is, well, apathy is what Demosthenes calls it.

It's It's a little bit strong.

It's a sort of calculation that probably, yet, we don't absolutely need to do anything.

And if we did, we were taking a risk that was not worth taking.

Will you take that up?

Yeah, I mean, I think another reason possibly why they don't take it up is that in the first Philippic, one of the things that Demosthenes recommends, he says, don't just rely on one of your generals leading mercenaries, because that's normally how you do it.

You use foreign mercenaries, non-Athenian mercenaries, and Greeks, but you know,

and

he says, no, you need to mix yourselves in.

Actual Athenians need to be part of this fighting force.

And of course, that's potentially a kind of big commitment, a quite scary proposition that the Athenians themselves have to go up north and fight.

Catherine.

The other point in this proposal, which is fundamentally unworkable, is that A, Athens doesn't have the money.

But B, he suggests we'll just pay them expenses.

It's fine.

They can make up the rest of the money themselves, i.e., by plundering.

Without harming the allies, he's quick to sort of add in.

So the proposal that he's making is completely unworkable because they just don't have the money to pay.

Are they aware of their weakness?

Are they ashamed and embarrassed?

He plays on that quite a bit in his speeches.

Basically, he doesn't use this word, he uses much better words.

He's basically, you ought to be ashamed and embarrassed about yourselves.

Look at you sitting there not stirring at all.

You used to have free speech, you don't have really free speech anymore in politics.

In a quite, wonderfully elegant way, he elacerates them.

He does, although, I mean, I think

one thing he does as well is say, yes, you know, you're not getting your act together, you're not sort of anticipating Philip.

But he also actually,

he does this in the second Philippic.

He says, one reason why Philip is courting alliances with cities like Argos and Messina is that you, Athenians, he knows you, Athenians, have a reputation for standing up against invaders and tyrants, and he cites the Persian wars.

So in the fifth century Athens

leads the charge against the Persian invasion and he often brings this up.

So on the one hand he's saying you know you're not getting your act together but on the other hand he's saying look at your glorious history.

You can do this and actually Philip knows you can do this and this is why he's kind of subtly surrounding you.

You know in the first Philippic he says he's it's like he's surrounding you on all sides as if with nets while you you sit and wait.

So it's a balancing act.

It's berating them, but also trying to remind them of their past glories and their own cleverness.

He says, you're as clever as Philip, and you can do this.

Is there Paul?

You want to go?

I just wanted to add a little detail that Demosthenes, when actually delivering the real speech on which the written version is based, above him is the Acropolis.

And that's loaded with temples, extraordinarily wealthy, big, massive.

The Parthenon's the most famous, but the Erechtheon, the Athena, Niki, why are they there?

Because in the fifth century, Athens had the money to build them.

And so you look up there, and it's a little bit shaming.

And there are those who think that to have had a great past is not necessarily always the great thing.

Catherine, let's turn to the third Philippic, which is considered to be his greatest speech, and it's wonderfully written.

You can't imagine anybody writing a better speech about any political issue now, can you?

You really can't.

Hardly, that means it's brilliantly translated, but he had to be there in the first place.

It's terrific.

Was this a key speech in the debate between freedom and tyranny, between Athens and Macedon?

Was this particular speech that important?

The third Philippica is arguably his greatest oration, and arguably the best in history.

It is a phenomenal piece of craftsmanship and rhetoric, which really hits on all the themes that he's already touched on, but in an expanded version.

It has the most xenophobic attack on Philip that you could possibly imagine.

It's all punches are out

on these.

He talks about Macedon as being a place that you wouldn't even buy your slaves from, you know, and now here we are bowing to Philip.

He's very much seeing Philip as this foreign force, and he wants to make sure that he is distinguished as not Greek.

Now, the Macedonians certainly had a language of their own.

What that consisted of, I'm not sure we know in very good terms.

But Philip admired Greek culture.

He spoke Greek.

And he was charming.

And these are the threats that actually Demosthenes wants to counter the most.

So he portrays him as a foreigner of the worst type from the worst place.

And really what he wants to get across in this third Philippic is there's a difference between his words and his actions and it's the threat of tyranny.

And he uses example after example to expose this danger that Philip presents.

So he will do so with examples of when Philip has broken his word.

Then he'll do so with a concrete image.

Imagine siege weapons are at your wall.

Just because they're not firing doesn't mean you're not at war.

And then he'll go to an abstract principle.

If a man has got weapons ready by which he can capture me, he is at war with me.

Because he needs to convince the Athenians of the imminent danger that they are going to become the slaves of this foreign tyrant.

And he uses those similar strategies of shaming them, reiterating again and again the danger of Philip.

Takes a bit of nerve, doesn't he?

He stands up there on his own, a sort of middle-aged chap, and reducing it.

A great orator, stands up there as a great orator, and just goes for them.

I mean, this is an entire community, many richer, more powerful than he is, and so.

But he goes, John, do you want to add to what's been said on that one?

Yeah, I mean,

I think by,

you you know, by the third Philippic in 341, he's got his wind in his cells because Philip has

started to show himself to be treacherous, really, to, you know, what Philip does is go around the Greek world.

He talks about this in the second speech as well, actually, that Philip has a tendency to get friendly with cities and give them territory, look after them, and then turn on them and invade them.

And in the second speech, he says that this is what Philip does to Olynthus, one of these cities that Paul was talking talking about in the north and it's the same in the in the third Philippic but um the other thing about the second and the third Philippics that I think is important as well is that Demosthenes doesn't just build up a picture of Philip as a traitor, but he says we've got traitors amongst us.

So he implicitly accuses other politicians of actually being in Philip's pay, of being bribed by Philip, and therefore of giving advice, bad advice to the assembly,

which they follow and then then kind of you know, wrong foots them tactically, that actually there are agents of Philip within the democracy.

So he's actually playing on not just paranoia about Philip encircling Athens and wanting to dominate the whole of Greece, which is what he's saying by the third Philippine, but also that actually Philip has planted agents in every city, including Athens itself.

And of course, you know, one of his targets here is his great rival Aeschynes.

And Aeschynes and Demosthenes have a sort of parallel tussle in the law courts, which

starts in 343 with Demosthenes accusing Aeschynes of acting treacherously on this embassy that results in a temporary peace treaty with Philip, which in the end Demosthenes doesn't like.

So I think that's important as well.

It's not just about Philip the enemy, it's about the enemy within.

And that's very much coming across in both the second and the third speeches.

You've got something scribble on a bit of paper there.

Is there anything from the third Philippic which wouldn't be too long and would be telling?

Well, I mean, really, it's just to back up what one of them is just to back up what Catherine was saying about

the racism of the speech, in a sense.

You know, he says, you know, he says, Philip's not only not a Greek and in no way related to the Greeks, but he's not even a foreigner from a land which it's honourable to say one belongs.

And then he, you know, and all that.

But he also has this interesting image of: he says, look, with Sparta and Thebes and Athens, we've fallen out with each other, we've had our differences, but we're like the wayward sons, the squabbling sons of a family, whereas Philip is like a slave of that family, you know, and so it's very much again trying to sort of say, Well, look, we have our differences, but we're Greeks, but Philip is the kind of interloper or a slave in the family.

So, you know, there's a couple of

examples, but he also actually in the third Philippic

really, really contrasts a kind of the moral situation of Greece as a whole.

He says, Greece has now sold its values to the highest bidder through bribery and corruption.

And this is a contrast with the politicians of the fifth century who stood up to Persia, who wouldn't have sold their values for money.

So he brings that big contrast as well.

You've been getting encouraging chuckles from Paul all the way through what you said.

So

I think we should turn the chuckles into speech.

Well, I'll give you just another analogy.

Remember, you quoted from the first Olympic, the boxer analogy.

Well, as well as the one that John just mentioned, there's the ship of state analogy.

And so, what Demosthenes says to the Athenians: imagine a ship with in terribly rough water, and the water's already coming over the gunwales.

Well, it's too late, you know.

You've got to be prepared.

So, one thing perhaps we've missed out is that he's constantly emphasizing not only do your duty, i.e., serve, pay your taxes, but be prepared.

And, well, he argues in the third Philippic, we are prepared.

But

John mentioned the piece of Philocrates 346.

This is actually the diplomatic framework within which the third Philippic and the second Philippic and the trials of Aeschynes and of a supporter of Demosthenes.

And these are all happening in these five years.

So that's the diplomatic background.

Catherine,

was he thought of at the time when a lot of people would be giving speeches and orations as the outstanding man, was he the man to follow, the man to watch, the man to imitate?

He was always seen as one of the best,

but there were others who would compete for the rival claim of being the best orator, Demedes being one of them and who was seen as a supreme orator of his time.

I think where Demosthenes stands out was in the delivery.

He really had what later commentators call the thunderbolts.

He had the passion.

He really brought the emotional appeals home so that people would really really vote with their hearts.

We mentioned the hate speech that he whips up or the nationalistic pride.

He knew which buttons to press.

And I think in the assembly, he really started to get his way from the mid-340s onwards.

There's a massive anti-Macedonian revival.

And this really explains part of the greatness of the Third Philippic and its success was that people were now on board.

But you say buttons to press as if it's a kind of slightly, you didn't mean this, is my not interpretation, reaction, as if it was a sort of mechanical thing.

But he passionately believed in this I think that the passion in his speeches as far as I can tell from reading them is what matters as well as everything else I mean he he means it all the time you can tell can't you I mean you read plenty of speeches I do anyway

and

you think well a bit dead and like

but not with him no I mean he's out there to convert you absolutely and we might say he's exaggerating the threat of Philip to some extent

we want want you to change your exaggerate.

Exactly.

It's not just a rhetoric of crisis, it's a rhetoric that is seeking to instill a sense of crisis.

He is in large part creating the urgency because he's so frustrated with the speakers that are advising to hold off and the Athenians who are voting not to do much yet.

Or when they do decide to do something, it's inadequate.

So they're never quite supporting and they're never quite pushing far enough.

So he really does believe in it, but he's also hammering home these points with an urgency because he has to exaggerate and really fire people to act.

I think what Catherine says is absolutely right.

And I think another way in which he

we've talked a lot about the analogies and the imagery he uses.

And, you know, we sort of take that for granted, but actually, Demosthenes is, you know, particularly good at that because he's not coming out with metaphors and analogies all the time.

He picks that, he chooses them very carefully and he selects the moment when he's going to use them.

And of course, that's a great skill in political communication to sort of reduce a really complex sort of political and diplomatic situation and reduce it to saying, you know, actually, the ship is about to be overwhelmed, guys.

You know, so he's a consummate political communicator

through the use of these images, I think.

Yes, I mean, if orators are judged by the memorability of lines, he's way ahead of the field.

But we remember Churchill saying this and Robespierre saying that and so on.

But he did that in paragraph after paragraph, didn't he?

Yeah, I think that's right.

And of course, you know,

a lot of, you know,

there's a lot of quotes in the later biographies from what he's supposed to have said, which we don't actually have in the speeches because clearly there were many more speeches he gave than survive, you know.

So

he is a bit of a soundbite merchant, yeah.

How successful was he thought of in his own day?

I think one measure of the way he's seen in his own day is that despite the fact that in the end Athens loses to Philip at the Battle of Chironea, the Athenians at first don't seem to hold it against Demosthenes.

Demosthenes has encouraged this.

He's gone and got an alliance with Thebes.

Athens, it's a disaster.

Athens loses.

But

instead of blaming Demosthenes, the Athenians actually ask him to give the funeral speech over the war dead, which was a great honour.

And Demosthenes clearly was proud of it.

He talks about it in a later trial speech.

And he's awarded, both before Chironea and afterwards, he's awarded honorific crowns, which are, you know, which are a very prestigious thing to be awarded by the democracy.

And that's in recognition of, really, I think, recognising that, you know, at that point, the Athenians think, oh, my God, he was right.

So at that point, he's very much, I think, well regarded by the Athenians.

And not all that well regarded.

I mean,

he thought, well, you tell me, Russian do, Paul.

He thought he was going to be murdered, so he killed himself.

Right.

Well, then moving on.

So there's a long period before his death, so about 13 years.

But why did he decide to take his own life?

He decided because the Athenians resisted always Macedon, always resisted.

They refused ever to cooperate.

And when Alexander died unexpectedly early in 323 in Babylon, the Athenians actually mistakenly rose up in rebellion because they were in effect subjects of Macedon and they lost both on land and at sea.

Demosthenes therefore is going to be public enemy number one.

The Macedonians want revenge for all the trouble Demosthenes has caused them for the last, what, 15 years at least, 20 years, getting on.

We're into 322 BC.

He flees Athens, and he flees to an island called Caloria, which is modern Greek Poros.

And there, as you say, he takes his life.

And suicide in antiquity carried no stigma of a religious or moral kind.

He would have been cut to pieces by his Macedonian assassins.

He chose to die the way he wanted to do, in his own choice, in his own place and time, heroically.

Was his death at that time thought of in the terms you've just described?

It would have been, because not quite a martyr, but because Athens in 322 ceased to be a democracy, the Macedonians ended the Athenians' democracy, which is exactly what Demosthenes had warned the Athenians that the Macedonians would do.

They were therefore in a very bad position politically, and therefore any democrats such as Demosthenes were heroic martyrs.

Catherine, can you briskly, we're coming to the end now, tell us what impact Demosthenes has had on the succeeding orators.

We've mentioned Cicero.

Do you want to say more about him and then push on?

Sure.

Greek and Roman writers of rhetoric are united in seeing Demosthenes as the greatest orator of all times.

And they sought really to say what made his oratory so effective.

Now, one theory was very much about the style of his speech.

He could combine speaking clearly in the plain style with all the charm of rhetoric in the middle style, but he could bring out those passionate thunderbolts in the grand style.

And that seems to have been the consistent theme in later commentators' analyses, that he could really have that variety of speech, pull out all the stops, go between them really cleverly.

But he had that variety of speech, which he always had with a consistent message.

And so the clarity and the various ways in which he'd express it, going from passionate to very calm and rational, really stood out as something that later orators wanted to emulate.

And it's partly because of Cicero's championing of Demosthenes that later in sort of the fourth century AD, when you've got Martianus Capella trying to sort of create a whole encyclopedic knowledge of eloquence, that Demosthenes becomes a cinnamon for eloquence.

Along with Cicero, they are the two great voices.

One died as the last great voice of the Athenian democracy, Cicero died as the last great voice of Republicans.

I was just going to bring it up to the 19th century.

Because that was a century in which we Brits, i.e.

my wanted to be wanted to be classicists.

We are the classists, but so do the Germans.

So there's a sort of ding-dong.

But politically, the Germans, as far as the Brits were concerned, were, as it were, the Spartans of antiquity.

Whereas we, free, democratic, it's slightly contradictory with the Empire, but we'll let that pass.

We, the Brits, are the Athenians.

Now, what were we doing?

We were resisting tyrants.

And so we are terrific supporters of Demosthenes, and therefore he becomes a hero of the nations.

There was a Victorian English series of biographies called Heroes of the Nations.

Demosthenes was chosen to represent a...

There was no Greek nation, don't worry about that.

But Demosthenes was a hero.

Final word, John?

Yeah, oh, thank you.

Yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, he's also, Demosthenes is also really a hero of the American Revolution against

British rule.

So, all of the founding fathers, the American revolutionaries in the,

you know, in the 18th century.

You're joined about Lincoln, are we, as well?

Well, I'm probably Lincoln, yeah, yeah.

I was thinking of people like Jefferson and John Adams.

They all study, you know, when the American universities, the American colleges are founded, they all study Demosthenes at college, and then they really kind of see themselves as in the mold of Demosthenes fighting tyranny, in this case, the Brits.

King of Britain.

Yeah, because he was the tyrant, George III.

Well, thank you all very much.

That was great.

Thank you very much, Catherine Tempest, John Hesk, and Paul Cartlidge, and our studio engineer, Sue Mayo.

Next week is the Challenger Voyage of 1872 to 1876, a four-year round-the-world scientific expedition known as the Apollo mission of the Victorian era, known now as that.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

That was great.

Thank you very much.

Now, you can't go.

I can just sit back now.

I've done my bit.

I'll start off with you, Cousin.

What would you like to have said that you didn't say?

I was sort of thinking of what really made Demosthenes'

character so compelling in the speeches, and we were talking about how he sets himself up as this frank advisor to the Athenians and how the people must have reacted.

And it's interesting, I suppose, that in the first Philippic, he takes that really dangerous stance of criticising people, which he seems to backtrack on to sort of start giving them a more sense of pride in their history.

And I suppose, from my point of view, I always wonder: do you learn from your speeches?

What we don't get in the speeches of Demosthenes is actually how people reacted.

Sometimes in the law court speeches, we will get Aeschenes telling us that people reacted by booing or something along those lines.

And it's always really fun when you're reading a speech to try and work this out for yourself.

So, for example, that line from the first Philippic that he reuses in the third Philippic, clearly that word because he uses it again.

And yet, the strategy of shaming the people, that was the paradox of

what's our worst aspect in the past holds out our best best hope for improvement in the future.

It's almost cut and paste in modern violence.

And so that must have worked.

So we can inject a sort of sense of the audience must have loved that.

He must have figured out that that worked.

And likewise, did he realise that really alienating your audience and telling them off in quite such stark terms was not the way to get them on your side in future.

The next speeches make really clear that these are about Philip.

The first words in the speeches are Philip and they go in on the attack and he saves all of that harsh energy for Philip and then the pride for the Athenians.

And we see how he mixes those emotions.

The first Philip he is a bit frenzied.

You feel that he's kind of lost the plot.

By the second he reserves the emotion for an attack on Philip towards the end.

Whereas in the third, again, he's learnt to sort of introduce the emotions like ripples of waves throughout the speech.

And so it's really interesting, I always think, to sit back and reflect on what has he done differently from speech to speech, and what does that tell us about how the Athenians were actually reacting to what they heard?

Yeah, it's funny.

Catherine's talking there about, you know, thinking about Demosthenes as a kind of skilled orator over time.

And I think another question that

if we had more time, we could discuss is, well, what's...

Well, we have more time.

No, this is.

You know,

what's the relationship between writing a speech out, having a whole written speech, and a live debate?

Because

we don't have any of the surviving written assembly speeches other than Demosthenes's.

There's no other examples.

And,

you know, later biographers are interesting on this because...

He seems to have been criticised for that, but he also seems to have had a ripos.

So there's one quote where a politician called Pythias says, your speeches smell of the lamp, i.e.

you're burning the midnight oil.

And Demosthenes apparently kind of quipped back, well, you know, you burn the midnight oil, but for different reasons, i.e., you're kind of having illicit sex with someone in the middle of the night.

And so these speeches are very polished and they're long, but it sounds as if actually real debate would have involved a lot more kind of heckling and back and forth.

And we tend to think of these things as set pieces, but actually, there probably was in reality more back and forth, more real debate.

And I think Demosthenes was probably quite good at that because there's some evidence.

You know, Plutarch says, oh, he kind of prepared, but

he was also good at the one-liner, at the kind of responding to heckles and things like that.

I think we need to imagine a much more of a rough and tumble debate than necessarily these long polished speeches

give us an impression of.

Well, I imagine they must have been much shorter than their published version.

But I, as a

historian of ancient Thebes, would have liked much more chat about the role of Thebes in the first half of the fourth century leading into the fact that Demosthenes, who was the, as it were, diplomatic representative of Thebes in Athens, Thebes had become a democracy.

This is absolutely crucial.

He wouldn't have wanted to be allied with Thebes if Thebes had been an oligarchy.

And so Thebes having been top dog for ten years, Philip takes over.

And what we didn't quite bring out was that by the time of the second Philippic, by the time of the Peace of Philocrates, actually Philip was already the biggest player in Menagris.

He already was the most powerful single power in Menagree.

Therefore, Demosthenes was really up against it

in a different way from in the first Philippic.

He's saying, we've got to act, or Philip will become the biggest power.

By the time of the second Philippic, third Philippic, he is that.

So anyway, the great thing about Thebes was Philip turned against Thebes, having supported them first of all, and Thebes turned against Philip.

Demosthenes secures an alliance.

Now the Thebans, though they would not liked Philip, might well have thought, yeah, but he's got this fantastic army.

Yes, we've got good cavalry, but his is even better.

His numbers, because Macedon's huge by comparison with the territory of Thebes and Boeotia, a territory even of Athens, he's going to outnumber us.

They've been drilling professionally for nearly 20 years since he became king in 359.

We're going to get smashed.

That's what a sane Theban would have thought.

But against that, and if I'd been one of them, he's going to come down anyway.

Are we just going to roll over?

and allow him to steamroller us, or are we going to take him on?

And so they did, and it was a terrific battle, but it was a total victory for the Macedonians.

I suppose one question we, I mean, coming out of what Paul said there, one question we didn't get into is the bigger, you know, there's one view of Demosthenes that he was foresight, he was foresighted, and, you know, perhaps Athens

could have won if only the Athenians had sort of seen the writing on the wall quicker.

But, of course, there's a completely opposite view, which says that Demosthenes actually, you know, provokes Philip.

And, you know,

I think these are people who don't like Demosthenes because of what he stands for in other ways.

So in other words, then and still today, there are very conservative people today, I'm not going to name names nor political affiliations, but who see Demosthenes as a rabble-rouser, a demagogue, the wrong sort, whereas a sensible Democrat would have seen that Philip was not such a threat.

You shouldn't,

as it were, poke the bear because then the bear will behave in a way he wouldn't have behaved otherwise.

I think think Demosthenes was totally right.

Philip was going to do what he did.

And the question was how and when.

And that, I think, is why Demosthenes was given a free pass by the Athenian.

Two names just mentioned as names in the whole discussion.

First, did Plato have any connection?

I would say absolutely not.

I mean, partly because he was a radical anti-democrat.

He had a school which produced a number of people, including ones Demosthenes mentions, who'd pop up as tyrants.

And Philip may or may not have actually paid for them, but Demosthenes says they are pro-Philip tyrants in the Peloponnese on the island of Euboea, and therefore a direct threat to Athens and democracy.

So, you know, I think they're, as it were, congenitally and ideologically, completely at odds.

Demosthenes.

And then Alexander got one mentioned.

Was there any more to be said about that?

Oh, Alexander.

Well, I mean, Alexander's interesting because we've talked about how how um demostenes gets a free pass but there is this interesting um

there is this interesting thing that happens when when uh alexander takes you know uh takes over after philip's assassination which is that there's this treasurer of alexander called harpulus who defects to athens from babylonia from way out east yeah yeah why does he well yeah well and he comes to athens and and a lot of money and he's he's got loads of money with him.

And this causes real trouble in Athens because Demosthenes says, right, we'll keep hold of him and we'll put his money in the treasury and all of this.

But then suddenly, Demosthenes finds himself prosecuted because Demosthenes gets accused of basically misappropriating some of that money.

And that's the first time Demosthenes goes into exile.

So there's a sort of picture here.

We get a little glimpse here of the way in which politicians are...

are using an affair like that to really try and steal a march on each other.

And it's interesting, Hyperides is the guy that prosecutes Demosthenes.

Who had been an ally

of Demosthenes against Philip.

So

there's this thing where you get these very opportunistic political moves against the backdrop of

Alexander.

But did Alexander actually do anything when his father was going around winning everything?

Was he at his father's side learning?

That sort of thing.

Well, it's a bit of a

boy's own question.

Well, no, it's not a boy's own question because actually it sealed the fate of Hellas, that is the Greek world, insofar as Alexander then transforms it after Philip, which I don't think Philip would have done.

But Philip was often not in his capital, which was Pella.

He was often away.

And when Alexander was just 16, this is the occasion where Philip goes off and he leaves Alexander as regent, age 16, Alexander seizes the opportunity to take on a neighbouring non-Greek people, defeats them, and then where their capital city was, he transforms it into Alexandropolis, not modern Alexandropis, but just like Philip had named Crenides Philippi, he names a city after himself, age 16.

And so, when does he emerge on the Panhellenic stage at Chaeronea?

And there is a dispute exactly what role Alexander played.

I believe he probably was commander of the crack cavalry, which smashed the opposing Greek troops at the Battle of Caeronea.

But as I say, following Philip's lead, he was quite gentle to Athens, didn't

terminate the democracy, didn't impose a tyrant on Athens or a garrison.

All that happened when the Athenians revolted after Alexander's death, and then

Athens ceases to be a democracy, it becomes a cat's ball, a garrison town with a tyrant.

Anything more to say before you depart your several destinations?

I was just going to add that we haven't really sort of touched on Plutarch's life of Demosthenes in any great detail, and that's a great source for anecdotes.

Things like in the Harpalus affair, he talks about how Harpalus looks at Demosthenes eyeing up a golden cup, and he can tell someone's character by the way they look at gold.

And there's you really get a sense of a lot of the anti-Demosthenic rhetoric coming through because Plutarch had done his research, he had a lot of sources, and we get that other side of Demosthenes' character through a reading of Plutarch's lives.

The other side being in brief?

The people who hated him.

Yeah, that he was greedy, you know, that he's venal and greedy.

You know, there is this other so a hypocrite.

Yeah, there's this other tradition, you know, and actually the Tori, you know, in the 18th and 19th century, the Tories that don't want Britain to become a democracy pick up on this and they say Demosthenes is not a model.

You know,

democracy produced Demosthenes and he was a coward and greedy and all the rest of it.

Where does the coward come from?

Battle Battle of Chairnea, one of his enemies at the time, and he responds to this in the Crown speech, alleged he ran away when the battle was lost because he's 46.

I mean, that's getting on.

That's a fuse running away from people who are going to kill you.

He's going to murder you.

He was heading back to Athens to organise the defence of Athens.

There is a defence.

I mean, you think we would have fought better of him if he hadn't.

We said, no, I'm not going to run away and save myself and save Bethany.

I'm just going to stand here and being cut to pieces.

What would you have talked about then for?

Well, there was another speech which was a famous, actually, the most important Athenian politician we haven't yet mentioned after the Battle of Caerone was a man called Lycurgus.

And one of his speeches survives, and it's against a man whom he accused precisely.

The charge against him was Lipostratia, which is running away from the battlefield.

And so, Demosthenes is alleged running away.

It's not unimportant.

In other words, it's a good one to get at.

If you don't like Demosthenes, if you want to be nicer to Maston than Demosthenes wants you to be, then you have a go at Demosthenes on that charge because it's likely to have impact.

Well, I can see our producer pawing the ground outside.

Thank you all very much, and here comes Simon Sustin with his irresistible offer.

Does anyone want your coffee?

Yes, please.

Coffee, coffee, please.

I love tea, thank you very much, please.

Two coffees, two teas.

Thank you very much.

Thank you all very much.

Oh, wow, I'm starving.

Well, I had half a sandwich.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

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