Isaeos and Demosthenes.
Now let us ask what is the meaning of that statement—so brief, so general, yet so strikingly emphatic—in which Dionysios embodies his reason for regarding the work of Isaeos, not as a mere result of Lysias, but as possessing a substantive and permanent interest. In what sense is it true that the oratorical power of Demosthenes took its ‘seeds and beginnings’ from Isaeos? The first point to observe is that, besides such special limitations of this statement as Dionysios himself elsewhere furnishes, there is a general qualification which from the outset we must supply for ourselves. Like other ancient critics
Criticism of Dionysios— subject to a reserve. |
less excellent in detail than he, Dionysios tends to test the criticism of oratory too much on literary grounds. To one who reads Lysias, Isaeos and Demosthenes successively, it must be manifest that, in certain important respects of literary development, Isaeos stands between the other two. This was the sense to which Dionysios—reading the orators, three centuries after they spoke, as literature—has given
expression in a phrase of which the emphasis is exaggerated by the vagueness; but of which it need not, perhaps, be very difficult to define the proper bearing.
Careers of Isaeos and Demosthenes.
Isaeos was, through life, a professional writer of speeches for the lawcourts, and this, so far as appears, almost exclusively in private causes. Demosthenes, after the lawsuit with his guardians, sought to repair the fortunes which they had brought low by working in the calling which such men as Antiphon, Lysias and Isaeos had followed before him. A host of private speeches, not his, are given to him in the collection of Kallimachos. But, to take those only of which the genuineness is tolerably certain, we have proof that he wrote for private causes from 361 to
Demosthenes engaged in Private Causes: |
345 B.C. After the two speeches Against Aphobos in 363 and the two Against Onetor in 362, we have, probably in 361, the speech Against Spudias (XLI.) and the speech Against Kallikles (LV.); in 356 (probably) the speech Against Konon (LIV.); in 352, the speech For Phormio (XXXVI.); in 350, the speech Against Boeotos concerning the Name (XXXIX.); in 345, the speech Against Pantaenetos (XXXVII.), and probably the speech Against Nausimachos (XXXVIII.)
1. But, meanwhile, he had another occupation, a higher,
and one which, for him, made a stepping-stone to the highest. During the years 355—350 B.C. he was concerned with four public causes—Against
Androtion, Against Leptines, Against Timokrates, Against Aristokrates,—the object in each case being to obtain the repeal of a new decree or law which had been carried by corrupt influences and which was dangerous to the public interests. Each of these four speeches is at once an interpretation of positive right and a vindication of political morality —a protest against the civic apathy which was suffering the resources of the State to be crippled, its powers to be abused for personal ends, its safeguards against foreign foes to be broken down. The same five years saw Demosthenes enter on that
direct participation in public life for which this concernment with public causes formed a preparation; his speech On the Navy Boards was delivered in 354, the First Philippic in 351. Thus, while continuing to exercise the profession of Isaeos, Demosthenes had already passed through a second phase of activity, and had even made trial of that crowning sphere in which the great work of his life was to be done. Almost from the first, therefore, Demosthenes
exerted his force under more liberal conditions than those prescribed by the narrow scope of the writer for private causes; almost from the first his natural intensity was free to ally itself with the oratorical
bent of the age, and, instead of refining on the art which hides itself, to wield the art which triumphs and commands. A comparison of the two orators cannot reach far; but, within its limits, it will serve to warn us against doing wrong to either.
Similarities between Demosthenes and Isaeos
As regards composition, the likeness consists in
Likeness of Demosthenes to Isaeos—in Composition: |
adaptation to real contests by the blending of terse, vigorous, and not too formal periods with passages of more lax and fluent ease
2; in vividness of presentment
3; and in that dramatic vivacity which is given by rhetorical question, by irony, and, in general, by the ‘figures of thought
4.’ As regards treatment of
in Treatment of Subject-matter: |
subject-matter, Demosthenes has borrowed the versatile arrangement of Isaeos; he shifts or interweaves the divisions according to the case; though his more temperate art nowhere copies his master in discarding the proem. That, however, in which the discipleship of Demosthenes to Isaeos is most surely and most strikingly seen is in his development and elaboration
of systematic proof — depending sometimes on a chain of arguments, sometimes on a single proposition illustrated and confirmed from several points of view, but always enforced by keen logic and apt law
5. Closely connected with this is the most distinctive single trait which the younger man took
from the elder, and which is the more noticeable because it is perhaps the chief Isaean lesson which Demosthenes was able to carry from the Forensic field into the Deliberative: what in Greek would be called
τὸ ἐναγώνιον, and in English might be paraphrased as ‘the art of grappling.’
The art of grappling.
It was the secret of waging an oratorical contest, not, in the more stately manner of an elder school, as from contrary stages, but at close quarters, with the grip as of wrestlers, with the instance of pleaders who urge their case, point by point, on critics as exact as themselves, with the intensity of a prosecutor or prisoner, a plaintiff or defendant, who knows that the imminent award will be given by men whom the habit of listening to acute discussion has led to set their standard high, for whom the detection of sophistry has become a pastime and its punishment a luxury, and whose attention can be fixed only by a demonstration that the speaker is in earnest. Since the time when Kleon
6 described that keen and brilliant fencing in the ekklesia at which the majority of the citizens delighted to assist as at a spectacle, the fitness for such encounter had been becoming more and more important to deliberative oratory: but its peculiar sphere was forensic, and in that sphere Isaeos was its earliest master. As an example of the ‘agonistic’ quality of Isaeos—the new manner of strenuous and cogent assault—take this passage, in which the speaker is
pressing home his argument
7:—“What, in the name
of heaven, are the guarantees of credibility for statements? Are they not witnesses? And what are the guarantees of credibility for a witness? Are they not tortures? Yes: and on what ground are the adversaries to be disbelieved? Is it not because they shrink from our tests? Assuredly. You see, then, that
I am urging this inquiry and bringing it to the touch of proof; the plaintiff is shifting them to a basis of slanders and hearsays—precisely the course that would be taken by a grasping adventurer. If he meant honestly, and was not trying to delude your judgments, obviously this was not the way for him to set to work: he ought to have given us figures and brought witnesses: he ought to have gone through each several item in the account, examining me thus—‘How many payments of wartax do your books show?’—‘So many.’—‘What sum was paid on each occasion?’—‘This.’—‘In accordance with what decrees?’—‘With these.’—‘Who received the money?’—‘Persons who are here to certify it.’— He ought to have examined the decrees, the amounts imposed, the amounts paid, the persons who collected them, and then, if all was satisfactory, he ought to have accepted my statement; or, if it was not, he ought
now to have brought witnesses regarding any false item in the outlay which I charged to my wards' account.” It is the same kind of close and vehement insistance that gives their stamp to such passages as
Example from Demosthenes. |
this in the Third Olynthiac
8: ‘What—do you
mean a paid army?’ I shall be asked. Yes—and the same arrangement forthwith for all, Athenians, that each, getting his dividend from the State, may be what the State requires. Is peace possible? Then you are better at home, removed from the temptation to act dishonourably under the stress of want. Is there such a crisis as the present? Better to accept such allowances as I have described, and to be a soldier, as you ought, in your country's cause. Is any one of you beyond the military age? What he now gets by an anomaly, and without doing any good, let him receive under a regular system in return for supervising and managing necessary affairs. In a word—without taking away anything or adding anything, but simply by abolishing anomalies, I bring the city into order, I establish a uniform system of remuneration for service in the army, for service on juries, for general usefulness in accordance with the age of each citizen and the demands of each occasion.’ It is a peculiarity of Isaeos that he loves to make the epilogue, not an
Agonistic Epilogue in Isaeos — Or. VI. |
appeal to feeling or to character, but the occasion for grappling with the adversary in a strict and final argument; there could scarcely be a better example of
τὸ ἐναγώνιον than this ending of the speech
On the Estate of Philoktemon:—
‘I ask you, then, judges,—in order that you may not be deceived,—to take note of the affidavit on which you have to give the verdict. Insist that his defence, like our plaint, shall be relevant to that affidavit. He has stated that Philoktemon did not give or bequeath the estate to Chaerestratos;
this has been proved to be a falsehood: he gave and bequeathed it, and those who were present are the witnesses. What more? He says that Philoktemon died childless. Now, in what sense was he ‘childless’ who had left his nephew as his adopted son and heir, an heir to whom the law allows the succession just as to the issue of the body? The provision in the law is express—that if a son is
born to a man who has already
adopted a son, both sons shall share alike in the inheritance. Let the defendant prove then, as anyone of you would prove, that his clients are legitimate. Legitimacy is not demonstrated by stating the mother's name, but by a proof that the statement is true, supported by the evidence of the kinsfolk, of those who knew the woman to be Euktemon's wife, of the demesmen and of the clansmen, to these points:—whether they have heard, or are aware, that Euktemon ever discharged a public service on account of his wife's property: where, or among what tombs, she is buried; who saw Euktemon performing the rites at her grave; whither her sons still repair with offerings and libations for the dead; and what citizen or what servant of Euktemon has seen it. These things together will give us—not abusive language, but—a logical test. If you keep him to this, if you bid him give his proof in conformity with his affidavit, your verdict will be religious and lawful, and these men will get their rights.’ The First and
Epilogues of the Speeches Against Onetor. |
Second Speeches Against Onetor were written just at the time when the influence of Isaeos on Demosthenes was probably most direct and mature. They
have no mark more specially Isaean than this, that both conclude, not, like the two earlier speeches Against Aphobos, with a peroration of the more ordinary type, but with a keen argument swiftly thrust home
9.
Demosthenes essentially manifold.
Isaeos influenced Demosthenes directly and decisively in the forensic province, and, through this, in the deliberative also. But Demosthenes himself is manifold; it is his very distinction that he is of no one character, the exclusive disciple of no one master
10; he excels the elder ‘lofty’ school in clearness, the ‘plain’ school in nerve, in gravity, in penetrating and pungent force, the ‘middle’ school in variety, in symmetry, in felicity, in pathos,—above all, in true propriety and in effectual strength
11; taught by nature and practice, he saw that the crowds who flow together to festivals or schools demand another style than the audiences in a law-court or in the ekklesia; that, for the former, there is need of glitter and of entrancement; for the latter, of exposition and help; that too much pedantry is as little suited to epideictic speaking, as a style too diffuse or too florid to practical oratory
12. Sometimes,
accordingly, he has slowly-moving and spacious periods; sometimes his periods are close and compact; sometimes he stings, sometimes he soothes, the mind of the listener, sometimes he appeals to êthos, sometimes to passion
13; in Deliberative Speeches, he makes most use of the ‘stately harmonies;’ in Forensic, of the ‘smooth;’ yet, here again, in differing measures according as it is a public or a private cause, and with this further discrimination, that simplicity and grace predominate in proem and narrative, dignity and more austere power in proof and epilogue
14. Even in that single field of private
Various colouring of his Private Speeches. |
causes which Isaeos and Demosthenes share, Demosthenes proves the compass of his resources. The logical fineness of the two speeches Against Onetor, the moral dignity of the defence For Phormio, the vivid delineations of character in the speeches Against Pantaenetos and Konon, could have met in no other man of the age.
