1'UBLIC ADVICE OF DEMOSTHENES. 287 criticism on the past. His recommendations as to means are pos- itive and explicit ; implying an attentive survey and a sagacious appreciation of the surrounding circumstances. While keeping before his countrymen a favorable view of their position, he never promises them success except on condition of earnest and perse- vering individual efforts, with arms and with money : and he ex- hausts all his invention in the unpopular task of shaming them, by- direct reproach as well as by oblique insinuation, out of that aver- sion to personal military service, which, for the misfortune of Athens, had become a confirmed habit. Such positive and prac tical character as to means, always contemplating the full exigen cies of a given situation combined with the constant presenta- tion of Athens as the pledged .champion of Grecian freedom, and with appeals to Athenian foretime, not as a patrimony to rest upon, but as an example to imitate constitute the imperishable charm of these harangues of Demosthenes, not less memorable than their excellence as rhetorical compositions. In the latter merit, indeed, his rival JEschines is less inferior to him than in the former. In no one of the speeches of Demosthenes is the spirit of prac- tical wisdom more predominant than in this his earliest known dis- course to the public assembly on the Symmories delivered by a young man of twenty -seven years of age, who could have had little other teaching except from the decried classes of soph- ists, rhetors, and actors. While proclaiming the king of Persia as the common and dangerous enemy of the Grecian name, he contends that no evidence of impending Persian attack had yet transpired, sufficiently obvious and glaring to warrant Athens in sending round l to invoke a general league of Greeks, as previous speakers had suggested. He deprecates on the one hand any step calculated to provoke the Persian king or bring on a war and on the other hand, any premature appeal to the Greeks for combination, before they themselves were impressed with a feel- ing of common danger. Nothing but such common terror could bring about union among the different Hellenic cities ; nothing else could silence those standing jealousies and antipathies, which rendered intestine war so frequent, and would probably enable the 1 Demosthen. De Symmor. p. ISl.s. 14
