by heart.  But when he spoke at the public tribune he was received with shouts of laughter; his voice was too feeble and his breath too short.  For several years he labored to discipline his voice.  It is said that he shut himself up for months with head half shaved that he might not be tempted to go out, that he declaimed with pebbles in his mouth, and on the sea-shore, in order that his voice might rise above the uproar of the crowd.  When he reappeared on the tribune, he was master of his voice, and, as he preserved the habit of carefully preparing all his orations, he became the most finished and most potent orator of Greece.

The party that then governed Athens, whose chief was Phocion, wished to maintain the peace:  Athens had neither soldiers nor money enough to withstand the king of Macedon.  “I should counsel you to make war,” said Phocion, “when you are ready for it.”  Demosthenes, however, misunderstood Philip, whom he regarded as a barbarian; he placed himself at the service of the party that wished to make war on him and employed all his eloquence to move the Athenians from their policy of peace.  For fifteen years he seized every occasion to incite them to war; many of his speeches have no other object than an attack on Philip.  He himself called these Philippics, and there are three of them. (The name Olynthiacs has been applied to the orations delivered with the purpose of enlisting the Athenians in the aid of Olynthus when it was besieged by Philip.) The first Philippic is in 352.  “When, then, O Athenians, will you be about your duty?  Will you always roam about the public places asking one of another:  What is the news?  Ah!  How can there be anything newer than the sight of a Macedonian conquering Athens and dominating Greece?  I say, then, that you ought to equip fifty galleys and resolve, if necessary, to man them yourselves.  Do not talk to me of an army of 10,000 or of 20,000 aliens that exists only on paper.  I would have only citizen soldiers.”

In the third Philippic (341) Demosthenes calls to the minds of the Athenians the progress made by Philip, thanks to their inaction.  “When the Greeks once abused their power to oppress others, all Greece rose to prevent this injustice; and yet today we suffer an unworthy Macedonian, a barbarian of a hated race, to destroy Greek cities, celebrate the Pythian games, or have them celebrated by his slaves.  And the Greeks look on without doing anything, just as one sees hail falling while he prays that it may not touch him.  You let increase his power without taking a step to stop it, each regarding it as so much time gained when he is destroying another, instead of planning and working for the safety of Greece, when everybody knows that the disaster will end with the inclusion of the most remote.”