In the fourth century BC, the great orator Demosthenes gave a speech about democracy that still holds true today.
This week we turn to Demosthenes, who, like Pericles and Cicero, is one of those speakers who resound through the ages. Consider, for a moment, how rare that is—a statesman who died 300 years before Christ speaking to us across the millennia.
Most speakers these days seem barely able to speak across
a day or week.
Demosthenes became one
of the greatest orators in Athens in the fourth century BC by, among other
things, studying those who came before him, talking with pebbles in his mouth,
and running while reciting verse.
He also grasped the importance of
speaking simply and striking an emotional chord—both of which shine through in
the speech I want to focus on this week, “On the Chersonese.”
The historical context here is
complicated, so I will mention it in brief.
The Athenians had, for some time, been
interested in occupying the Thracian Chersonese,
now Gallipoli, because it was located along their corn ship route connecting
the Aegean Sea and what was then Byzantium (and became Constantinople and
later, Istanbul).
An array of Greek city-states had vied
for control of the territory for ages. After the so-called Social
War of 357—which pitted Athens against the less powerful city-states of
Chios, Rhodes, and a few others—the Athenians were once more in possession of
it.
But their rival, King
Philip of Macedon, was interested in it too—leading to a sort of historical
pileup not entirely dissimilar to the events leading up to World War I, in
which one event triggers another and another and another. (Among the many
events was the birth, in 356, of Philip’s son, who would become Alexander the
Great, and had a complicated relationship with Athenian democracy.)
First, the king of Thrace—a region that
encompassed the Chersonese—was assassinated. This was followed by a series of
treaties and territorial carve-ups, but the question of ultimate control was
left unsettled.
Meanwhile, the Athenians won over the
mercenary leader Charidemus,
and in 342 they sent troops to the Chersonese to reclaim their stake in the
territory. Philip attempted to play the role of arbitrator, gave up on that,
and sent his own troops into battle.
This prompted the Athenian general Diopeithes to
invade Thrace, which prompted Philip to demand of the Athenians that they
withdraw from Cardia, the largest town in the Chersonese.
I trust all this is clear. But if it
isn’t, then that is fine. It wasn’t entirely clear to the Greeks either.
Philip, after all, had many
sympathizers in Athens. Just as we’ve become accustomed to officeholders and
other so-called elites in the United States offering Kremlin talking points in
defense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or defending Hamas’s barbaric murder
of Jews, so too were there senators in ancient Athens who took the side of
Philip against Diopeithes—those who did not see things as clearly as we might
have hoped.
After all, it is certainly true that the Athenians—like present-day Americans—had their many problems. They had been led astray by war. There had been a coup, and then a restoration of the old polis, or democracy. But Athenians seemed exhausted, and they seemed to have lost sight of their founding ideals, why those ideals were so important, or what might replace them.
They seemed not to grasp that Philip posed a dire threat to
what was, at that point, the greatest experiment in self-government ever—the
same experiment that, a century before, had bequeathed to the world Socrates
and Plato and, more recently, Aristotle, among countless other writers, poets,
tragedians, historians, astronomers, mathematicians, and so forth, the people
who had literally led the world out of Plato’s allegorical cave of
darkness.
It is important to think about this
for just a moment: for tens of thousands of years, human beings had lived under
kingdoms and despots, and then, for a variety of historical, political, and
cultural reasons, along came Athens—and the birth of Western civilization. The
whole story of how we came to be is obviously more complicated than that, but
the starkness of that divide—before and after Athens—is truly remarkable.
Indisputably so.
Demosthenes, in any event, was not
confused about who was right and wrong, or what was at stake, offering an
extraordinary reply to Philip that we are lucky enough to have in full. This is
a miracle itself, when you think of all that was lost in libraries and places
of record between his time and ours.
In his
speech, he successfully argued to the Athenians that they should not
repudiate Diopeithes for standing up to Philip.
First, Demosthenes draws in his
audience by establishing his credentials, arguing that he can be trusted. “I
shall speak freely,” he says, “for indeed, I could not speak otherwise.”
He adds: “In Heaven’s name, when I am
pleading for your best interests, allow me to speak freely.”
Perhaps we have become jaded to such
appeals. Perhaps the Athenians were too. Nevertheless, there is an urgency and
a frankness about Demosthenes’ appeal.
But it is in the following passage
that Demosthenes truly hits his stride.
“Now there are some who think they confute a
speaker the moment they ask, ‘What then ought we to do?’ ” he says. “To these I will give
the fairest and truest answer: not what you are doing now.”
One can hear in his words the same
appeal to reason, the same sense of urgency, the same moral vision, that
informs those in the West watching what is unfolding in the former Soviet
Union, the Middle East, and the Taiwan Strait and wondering: When will the
grown-ups stand up? When will we do what must be done?
Demosthenes goes on: “I will not,
however, shrink from going carefully into details; only they must be as willing
to act as they are eager to question. First, men of Athens, you must fix this
firmly in your minds, that Philip is at war with us and has broken the peace.”
Ah, yes, just as Vladimir Putin is at
war with the Pax
Americana, just as the jihadists intend to overthrow Western civilization
from within and without, Philip was already at war with Athens—whether the
Athenians liked it or not. They could pretend otherwise. They could appease or
look away or hope for the best. Or they could fight.
“But if anyone thinks that all this
means great expense and much toil and worry, he is quite correct,” Demosthenes
concedes. Then, he comes in for the all-powerful blow: “But if he reckons up
what will hereafter be the result to Athens if she refuses to act, he will
conclude that it is to our interest to perform our duty willingly.”
And finally: “You must needs bear in
mind that this is a life-and-death struggle, and the men who have sold
themselves to Philip must be abhorred and cudgeled to death, for it is
impossible to quell the foes without, until you have punished those within your
gates.”