Next in order comes the topic of figures; for these too, prepared in the right way, can be (as I said) no ordinary part of greatness. To go through them all in detail would be a long, indeed an unbounded, business; and so we shall traverse only a few of those most productive of grand expression, in support of our point. §1
Demosthenes presents a defence of his policy. What was its natural mode of statement? ‘You did not err, men of Athens, in taking up the contest for the freedom of Greece. You have homely instances of this near at hand: those at Marathon did not err, those at Salamis, those at Plataea did not err.’ But, as if suddenly inspired by a god and become Phoebus-touched, he uttered the oath of the heroic dead of Greece: ‘There is no way you erred, no, by those who took the lead of danger at Marathon!’ It is plain that, by the single figure of swearing — what I here call apostrophe — he has made the ancestors gods, by setting it forth that men so dead must be sworn by as gods; he has put into the judges the spirit of those who took the lead of danger; he has changed the nature of demonstration into supreme sublimity and pathos and the credibility of strange and supernatural oaths; and at the same time he has poured into the souls of his hearers a kind of healing and antidote-charm, so that, lifted up by the praises, they came to take the battle against Philip with no less pride than the victories at Marathon and Salamis. By all this he carried the audience away with him through the figure. §2
And yet they say that the seed of the oath is found in Eupolis: ‘For, by my fight at Marathon, no one of them shall vex my heart and rejoice.’ But the greatness lies not in any random swearing, but in where, and how, and on what occasions, and for what purpose. There is nothing more in Eupolis than a mere oath, and to Athenians still in good fortune and in no need of consolation; nor again did the poet, by swearing it, deify the men so as to plant in his hearers a fitting reverence for their valour, but he wandered off from those who took the lead of danger to a soulless thing, the battle. In Demosthenes the oath is wrought to address the defeated, that Chaeronea may no longer appear a misfortune to the Athenians; and at the same time, as I said, it is at once a proof that they did not err, an example, a sworn pledge, an encomium, an exhortation. §3
And since it lay open to the orator to be answered: ‘You speak of defeat as an act of policy, and then swear by victories,’ he therefore goes on to bring all by rule and by safety, even to nouns, teaching that even amid bacchic revelry one must be sober. ‘Those,’ he says, ‘who took the lead of danger at Marathon, those at Salamis, those who fought at sea off Artemisium, those who were arrayed at Plataea.’ Nowhere did he say ‘who conquered,’ but throughout he has stolen the word that names the result, since it was a happy result, and ran counter to the affair of Chaeronea. Hence he again forestalls the hearer at once by adding: ‘all of whom the city, Aeschines, buried at the public cost, not the victors only.’ §4