Season 11: Demosthenes

History’s Great Speeches

Demosthenes is generally acknowledged as the greatest orator in history. Born to a sword maker and orphaned at 7, he overcame a stammer and the theft of his inheritance by his legal guardians to become as foundational to oratory as his contemporaries Plato and Aristotle are to philosophy.

Much like a major contemporary political figure, he overcame a stammer on his journey to greatness, with “inarticulate and stammering pronunciation.” He was known as “a water drinker”; a stern and serious presence at all times.

His great battle was against the waning of Athenian democracy, which slowly disintegrated into oligarchy and treason over his lifetime. As a legislator, ambassador, and leader he fought against the inexorable rise of Philip of Macedon and, later, Philip’s son Alexander. Fighting for the peace, democracy and equality that Athenian ancestors brought to all Greece, his tale ends in ruin as Athens finally falls, after more than thirty years trying to hold the line. In many ways, Demosthenes resonates with the figure of Cicero, who was a fellow great statesman three hundred years later in the Roman Republic, during it’s collapse and turn into the Empire. Both were animated by the state’s founding ideology, and horrified by the lassitude and corruption that had become endemic in their time.

The first speech is from when he was 30, and recognizing the immediate need for preparation. The navy has become toy and a sinecure for the wealthy, and Athens must professionalise before it is too late. This set the theme for the next few speeches, each of a different theme of Athenian ideals; helping a fellow Hellenic state caught between Sparta and Arcadia, preparing Athens for war, and railing against oligarchy and corruption of the senate and public sphere.

The next few speeches cover the need for war against Philip, and the need for haste in sending military aid to states besieged by Phillip. There follows a brief interregnum of a false peace, used to further corrupt the body politic, the central theme of On The Peace and the second and third Philippics.

After a prestigious career of public service, the tide turned against him, and in his greatness he lived long enough to see himself become the villain. An accusation of bribery leads to his most famous speech, On The Crown, delivered at 54. This defense of his career as the tides turned against him has been described as “the greatest speech of the greatest orator in the world.”

In his Funeral Oration forty years before, Pericles defined the height of the golden age of Athens; in the final speech, given by Dinarchus at Demosthenes’ trial for bribery, we see the final downfall of the once-great city-state. The man who strove to keep the city honourable and faithful to its past democracy was brought down by scurrilous accusations of corruption, and his actions in defence of the country described as an offence against ‘the will of the people’, a catchphrase second only to nationalism for the truly corrupted.

After his conviction, he escaped from prison and went on the run. He was exiled, brought back, then sentenced to death; eventually, fleeing the city again, this time to the island of Kalaureia (modern-day Poros). Discovered by Archias, he asked for time to write a letter to his family, and took poison from a reed.

His final words were "Now, as soon as you please you may commence the part of Creon in the tragedy, and cast out this body of mine unburied. But, O gracious Neptune, I, for my part, while I am yet alive, arise up and depart out of this sacred place; though Antipater and the Macedonians have not left so much as the temple unpolluted."

Eventually, the pendulum swung again, and the Athenians erected a statue of him, and provided meals for his descendants in the Prytaneum. By the rise of the Roman Republic, he was once again a legendary and paradigmatic stateman and orator.

In historical terms, many of the patterns, descriptions and arguments presented here will seem eerily familiar, like listening to Songs In The Key Of Life for the first time. Every part of it has been reused a thousand times by people ever since its creation, so you are intimately familiar with the style, even if you have never come across it before.

As history’s second greatest orator, Cicero was taught Demosthenes’ speeches as part of his own training and often mimicked their pattern and tone. Other Romans who adored him included Longinus, Caecilius, and Juvenal, who described him as "largus et exundans ingenii fons", or a large and overflowing fountain of genius. Plutarch even wrote a book about him.

In the middle ages, his name was invoked to describe especially eloquent speakers. Among his praise-singers in recent centuries have been Henry Clay, who mimicked Demosthenes' technique; through Clay, Demosthenes inspired the authors of The Federalist Papers. Georges Clemenceau wrote a book about him, and Friedrich Nietzsche also copied his style. Demosthenes is deeply and truly embedded in the DNA of western discourse and politics, his style, tactics and influence intimately familiar to people living twenty-four hundred years later.