Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 1.djvu/999

Rh DEMOSTHENES. with olives, fenced nearly round with a wall, where he was exposed to the missiles of the ene- my. Here he surrendered, towards evening, on condition of the lives of his soldiers being spared. His own was not. In confinement at Syracuse' Nicias and he were once more united, and were together nMieved by a speedy death. Such was the unworthy decree of the Syracusan assembly, against the voice, say Diodoms and Plutarch, of Hermocrates, and contrary, sjiys Thucydides, to the wish of Gylippus, wlio coveted the glory of conveying the two great Athenian commanders to Sparta. (Thuc. vii. 42—87 ; Diod. xiii. 10—33 ; Plut. Nii-uts, '20-2fi.) Tiraaeus, adds Plutarch, re- lated that Hermocrates contrived to apprize them of the decree, and that they fell by their own hands. Demosthenes may be characterized as an unfortu- nate general. Had his fortune but equalled his ability, he had achieved perhaps a name greater than any of the generals of his time. In the large- ness and boldness of his designs, the quickness and justice of his insight, he rises high above all his contemporaries. In Aetolia the crudeness of his first essay was cruelly punished ; in Acarnania and at Pylos, though his projects were even favoured by chance, yet the proper result of the one in the reduction of Ambracia was prevented by the jea- lousy of his allies ; and in the other his own indi- vidual glory was stolen by the shameless Cleon. In the designs against Megara and Boeotia failure again attended him. In his conduct of the second Syracusan expedition there is hardly one step which we can blame : with the exception of the night attack on Epipolae, it is in fact a painful exhibition of a defeat step by step eifected over reason and wisdom by folly and infatuation. It is possible that with the other elements of a great general he did not combine in a high degree that essential requisite of moral firmness and com- mand : he may too have been less accurate in attending to the details of execution than he was farsighted and fertile in devising the outline. Yet this must be doubtful: what we learn from history is, that to Demosthenes his country owed her superiority at the peace of Nicias, and to any rather than to him her defeat at Syracuse. Of his position at home among the various parties of the state we know little or nothing : he appears to have been of high rank : in Aristophanes he is described as leading the charge of the Hippeis upon Cleon {Equiies, 242), and his place in the play throughout seems to imply it. [A. H. G.] DEMO'STHENES {Avtiotrdeirns), the greatest of the Greek orators, was the son of one Demos- thenes, and born in the Attic demos of Paeania. Respecting the year of his birth, the statements of the ancients differ as much as the opinions of modern critics. Some of the earlier scholars acquiesced in the express testimony of Dionysius of Halicarnassus {Ep. Oil Amm. i. 4), who says that Demosthenes was bom in the year preceding the hundredth Olympiad, that is, 01. 99. 4, or b. c. 3»1. Gellius (xv. 28) states that Demosthenes was in his twen- ty-seventh year at the time when he composed his orations agtiiust Androtion and Timocrates, which belong to b. c. 355, so that the birth of Demos- thenes would fiiU in B. c. 383 or 382, the latter of which is adopted by Clinton. {F. H. ii. p. 426, &c., 3rd edit.) According to the account in the lives of the Ten Orators (p. 845. D.) Demosthenes was born in the archonship of Dexitheus, that is, b. c. DEMOSTHENES. 981 385, and this statement has been adopted by most modem critics, such as Becker, Bdckh, Wester- mann, Thirlwall, and others ; whereas some have endeavoured to prpve that B. c. 384 was his birth- year. The opinion now most commonly received is, that Demosthenes was born in b. c. 385. For detailed discussions on this question the reader is referred to the works mentioned at the end of this article. When Demosthenes, the father, died, he left behind him a widow, the daughter of Gylon, and two children, Demosthenes, then a boy of seven, and a daughter who was only five years old. (Plut. Dem. 4 ; Dem. c. Ap/iob. ii. p. 836 ; Aeschin. c. Ctesiph. $ 171 ; Boeckh, Coi-p. Inscript. i. p. 464.) During the last moments of his life, the father had entmsted the protection of his wife and children and the care of his property, partly capital and partly a large sword manufactory, to three guar- dians, Aphobus, a son of his sister Demophon, a son of his brother, and an old friend Therippides, on condition that the first should marry the widow and receive with her a dowry of eighty minae ; the second was to marrj"^ the daughter on her attaining the age of maturity, and was to receive at once two talents, and the third was to have the interest of seventy minae, till Demosthenes, the son, should come of age. (Dem. c. Aphob. i. pp. 814, 816, ii. 840.) But the first two of the guardians did not comply with the stipulations made in the will, and all three, in spite of all the remonstrances of the family, united in squandering and appropriating to themselves a great portion of the handsome pro- perty, which IS estimated at upwards of fourteen talents, and might easily have been doubled during the minority of Demosthenes by a prudent admi- nistmtion. But, as it was, the property gradually was so reduced, that when Demosthenes became of age, his guardians had no more than seventy minae, that is, only one twelfth of the property which the father had left. (Dem. c. Aphob. i. pp. 812, 832, 815, c. Onet p. 865.) This shameful coiiduct of his own relatives and guardians un- questionably exercised a great influence on the mind and character of Demosthenes, for it was probably during that early period that, sutFering as he was through the injustice of those from whom he had a right to expect protection, his strong feeling of right and wrong was planted and de- veloped in him, a feeling which characterizes his whole subsequent life. He was thus thrown upon his own resources, and the result was great self- reliance, independence of judgment, and his ora- tory, which was the only art by which he could hope to get justice done to himself. Although Demosthenes passed his youth amid such troubles and vexations, there is no reason for believing with Plutarch {Dem. 4), that he grew up neglected and without any education at all. The very fact that his guardians are accused of having refused to pay his teachers (c. Aphob. i. p. 828) shews that he received some kind of education, which is further confirmed by Demosthenes's own statement (de Coron. pp. 312, 315), though it cannot be supposed that his education comprised much more than an elementary course. The many illustrious personages that are mentioned as his teachers, must be conceived to have become con- nected with him after he had attained the age of, manhood. He is said to have been instmcted in philosophy by Plato. (Plut. Deni. 5, Vii. X OrnL