Demosthenes: an Encomium (1-5)

A little before noon on the sixteenth, I was walking in the Porch—it was on the left-hand side as you go out—, when Thersagoras appeared; I dare say he is known to some of you —short, hook-nosed, fair-complexioned, and virile. He drew nearer, and I spoke: ‘Thersagoras the poet. Whence, and whither?' ‘From home, hither,’ he replied. ‘Just a stroll?’ I asked. ‘Why, I do need a stroll too,’ he said. ‘I got up in the small hours, impressed with the duty of making a poetic offering on Homer’s birthday.’ ‘Very proper,’ said I; ‘a good way of paying for the education he has given you.’ ‘That was how I began,’ he continued, ‘and time has glided by till now it is just upon noon; that was what I meant by saying I wanted a stroll.

‘However, I wanted something else much more—an interview with this gentleman’ (and he pointed to the Homer; you know the one on the right of the Ptolemies’ shrine, with the hair hanging loose); ‘I came to greet him, and to pray for a good flow of verse.’ ‘Ah,’ I sighed, ‘if prayers would do it! in that case I should have given Demosthenes a worrying for assistance against his birthday. If prayers availed, I would join my wishes to yours; for the boons we desire are the same.

‘Ah, you lucky man!’ I exclaimed; ‘you are like the winner of the three miles, who had washed off the dust, and could

‘Ah, you probably consider Demosthenes of much less account than Homer. You are very proud of your eulogy on Homer; and is Demosthenes a light matter to me?’ ‘A trumped up charge,’ he exclaimed; ‘I am not going to sow dissension between these two mighty ones, though it is true my own allegiance is rather to Homer.’

‘Good,’ I said, ‘and you must allow me to give mine to Demosthenes. But, though you do not disqualify my subject, I am sure you think poetry the only real treatment; you feel about mere rhetoric what the cavalryman feels as he gallops past the infantry.” ‘I hope I am not so mad as that,’ he said, ‘though a considerable touch of madness is required of him who would pass the gates of poetry.’ ‘If you come to that, prose cannot do without some divine inspiration either, if it is not to be flat and common.’ He admitted that at once: ‘I often delight myself with comparing passages from Demosthenes and other prose writers with Homer in point of vehemence, pungency, fire. “ Flown with wine” I pair off against the revellings and dancings and debauchery of Philip; “ One presage that ne’er fails[*]" finds its counterpart in “ It is for brave men, founding themselves upon brave hopes—"; “How would old Peleus, lord of steeds, repine—” is matched by “What a cry of lamentation woyld go up from the men of those days