One man there was, and only one, in whom the freedom of many people and many ages found a defender: he was Demosthenes. Early a statesman, and earlier still an orator of all-surpassing powers, he, from the beginning of his public career, devoted himself to the protection of his countrymen against their common foe; 263 nor did he falter more than, in such times as his, was unavoidable, even in the noblest purposes of humanity. A few around him were honest, like Phocion; but by these he was too often thwarted and suspected, as by the same Phocion, to be ever cordially encouraged.264 Others, the larger number of the leading men, were corrupted 265 or indifferent; while the populace with whom the orator had to deal was rather to be baffled than to be trusted. Demosthenes was the last of the great dynasty of orators in Athens, the successor of Lysias and Isocrates, the rival of Eschines; but so much superior to the rest,266 that their glory merges in his own. tarch compares him to Cicero: 267 and whatever were the dissimilarities between the two, in this, at least, they were alike, that their eloquence and their patriotism were insufficient to save the liberties they loved as became their generous minds. Just as, in 263 Plut., Dem., 12. Aaßov TÊS πολιτείας καλὴν ὑπόθεσιν, τὴν πρὸς Φίλιππον ὑπὲρ τῶν Ἑλλήνων δικαιολoyiav. He was then twenty-nine years old, A. C. 356. See his own magnificent language: Philipp. I., Cap. II. et seq., ed. Væmel. This oration was delivered in 352. 264 Plut., Phoc., 9, 16, 17. Plu 265 See the oration of Demosthenes, De Corona, Cap. 60 et seq. 266 The reader will find a brief and vivid account of Demosthenes in J. A. St. John, Hellenes, Book II. ch. 10,- -a very readable work on Greece at large. 267 Plut., Dem., 3. Rome, the separation of the people and the licentiousness of the rich were more than Cicero could overcome; so, in Greece, the dishonesty and the dissension of his countrymen were evils before which Demosthenes was powerless. Faithful, nevertheless, in the midst of faithlessness, and warm in heart to every countryman he had, however coldly they returned his affection, Demosthenes labored, unwearied, for fourteen years, from the day of his first oration against Philip until the force and the ambition of the Macedonian prevailed against the weaknesses of the Greeks and the exhortations of their almost solitary freeman. The orator fled, at length, before the soldier; the civilized republic yielded to the uncivilized monarchy: and the defeat at Charonea was the end of liberty in Greece.268 Philip trampled, intoxicated, upon the corpses with which the battle-field was strewn,269 and for which, in contrast, the funeral rites were afterwards performed in the house of Demosthenes, who pronounced the eulogy of the slain.270 Two years later, Alexander succeeded, at the age of twenty, to the throne which Philip had established upon the mouldering independence of the Greeks. The son, after mourning, as he said, that he should have nothing left him to do, openly derided his father, as unfit to invade the Persian empire,271 of which he seemed to feel himself to be the destined destroyer. 268 A. C. 338. "Hic dies universæ Græciæ et gloriam dominationis et vetustissimam libertatem finivit." Justin., IX. 3. 269 Plut., Dem., 20. 270 Demosth., De Coron., Cap. 285, 287. Demosthenes lived sixteen years longer, till A. C. 322. 271 Plut., Alex. Mag., 5, 9. On his succession, some nerveless efforts were made amongst his Grecian subjects to recover their liberties; but one blow from him was enough to strike them down. He had no care for his father's conquests, compared with the hopes, as he called them, for which he turned his back on Greece and Macedonia; and as his power in the East grew with every year, so his ambition increased, as if the mountainheight were sought and gained only in order to behold how much of the world there yet remained unreached. The career to which Alexander was called could not have been intended to bring the East and the West together, or it would not so soon have been succeeded by the conflicts and the despoliations of his inheritors. But it may have been ordered that the Eastern world should be assailed in such way as to spare the strength of Rome, upon whose conquests was to devolve the general humiliation of antiquity. CHAPTER VII. THE JEWS. "In the division of the earth, He set a ruler over every people; but Israel is the Lord's por tion."- Ecclesiasticus, XVII. 17. THE cloudy pillar which moved before the Hebrew fugitives from Egypt was, perhaps, in tint, in depth, and even in form, like the vapors or the thicker gatherings familiar to their skies; but there never had been, and never was again, another cloud that blazed with fire through the night, nor ever another whose way across the heavens was similarly commanded and similarly followed. It was like an edge of the Divine garment, which men, the very blindest, could behold, and the very stubbornest stoop to touch or to adore. Yet other glimpses of Omnipresence are, to us at least, as clearly revealed amongst the most ancient nations and in the farthest lands; and it is necessary, in the outset, to deny that the Jewish people was the only one in antiquity whom God visited, or that its temperament, its composition, and its destiny were so utterly distinct from those of universal humanity, as to make it, on its own account, the holy nation' concerning which Moses was informed at Sinai. The peculiarity of the Jews consisted in the revelation they received. Without it, they would have been shepherds, slaves, or scourges upon the earth; faithful to it, they were independent; faithless to it, they were conquered; and for it, they were twice recalled from bondage. Like other ancient nations, they, too, were as a cloudy pillar; and it was the night of heathenism that changed them, as it were, to the shining light which has since been dimmed by Christian days. A time there may have been, as once before observed, when the creature remembered and worshipped the Creator. But the truth of the earliest ages became a dim and fearful memory in those which witnessed the guiltiness and the fall of man. Here and there, the dew and the small rain were found upon herbs more tender than the rest; and many a sterile place was visited from above with fruitful seasons, of which the abundance yet remains in witness of the Mercy that was and is the same for ever. The early history of the Jews was filled with holy memories. It extended back to a golden age, not here meaning that in which Eden reëchoed with morning and evening songs, but to times when the intercourse between God and men was open and continual. The worship of the Deity, denied to the rest of mankind, thus lingered amongst the Hebrew Patriarchs, whose simple lives upon the plains where 2 As Bossuet observes: -"Un peuple dont la bonne ou la mauvaise fortune dépendit de la piété." Hist. Univ., Ptie. II. ch. 1. So Proverbs, XIV. 34. |