Demosthenes : (384-322 BC), considered greatest of Greek orators, he roused Athens to oppose Philip of Macedon & later, his son Alexander.
... intellectuals, “the grammarians”, would win the day and develop the “natural philosophy” we call science. There was also a third component in the Renaissance movement, the “emotional”. In Thucydides, Demosthenes and Pericles, as in Caesar, Cicero and Tacitus, the Renaissance men rediscovered the pride and glory of belonging, of patriotism, of “the general weal”, of the heartening inspiration of tradition ...
... bitterly not only for what they called our crude worship of the cudgel but also because, according to them, we had no intellectual forces on our side. These charlatans did not think for a moment that a Demosthenes could be reduced to silence at a mass-meeting by fifty idiots who had come there to shout him down and use their fists against his supporters.” “We, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a new ...
... what high-pitched voices they had and how graceful in movement! How was it possible to combine in a single voice such power and strength with so much sweetness! I had read about the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, heard the eulogies of France's Mirabeau and Danton, of Burke and Gladstone of England. But it was truly an experience to have heard with one's own ears a human voice of their calibre ...
... having in it meaning and power. Rhetoric is a word with which we can batter something we do not like; but rhetoric of one kind or another has been always a great part of the world's best literature; Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet and Burke are rhetoricians, but their work ranks with the greatest prose styles that have been left to us. In poetry the accusation of rhetoric might be brought against such lines ...
... in it meaning and power. Rhetoric is a word with which we can batter something we do not like; but rhetoric of one kind or another has been always a great part of the world's best literature; Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet and Burke are rhetoricians, but their work ranks with the greatest prose styles that have been left to us. In poetry the accusation of rhetoric might be brought against such lines ...
... Triballi, in a great battle. Then when the news reached him that the Thebans had revolted and were being supported by the Athenians, he immediately marched south through the pass of Thermopylae. "Demosthenes," he said, "called me a boy while I was in Illyria and among the Triballi, and a youth when I was marching through Thessaly; I will show him I am a man by the time I reach the walls of Athens... ...
... Triballi, in a great battle. Then when the news reached him that the Thebans1 had revolted and were being supported by the Athenians, 2 he immediately marched south through the pass of Thermopylae. "Demosthenes", he said called me a boy while I was in Illyria and among the Triballi, and a youth when I was marching through Thessaly; I will show him I am a man by the time I reach the walls of Athens." ...
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