ng of substance, unthrifty and wastifull spending,
voluptuousness of life and palpable sensuality brought Pericles,
Callias, the sonne of Hipponicus, and Nicias not only to necessitie, but
to povertie and beggerie. Who, after their money waxed scant, and turned
to a very lowe ebbe, they three drinking a poysoned potion one to
another (which was the last cuppe that they kissed with their lippes)
passed out of this life (as it were from a banquet) to the powers
infernall.

AESCHINES

(389-314 B.C.)

The life and oratory of Aeschines fall fittingly into that period of
Greek history when the free spirit of the people which had created the
arts of Pindar and Sophocles, Pericles, Phidias, and Plato, was becoming
the spirit of slaves and of savants, who sought to forget the freedom of
their fathers in learning, luxury, and the formalism of deducers of
rules. To this slavery Aeschines himself contributed, both in action
with Philip of Macedon and in speech. Philip had entered upon a career
of conquest; a policy legitimate in itself and beneficial as judged by
its larger fruits, but ruinous to the advanced civilization existing in
the Greek City-States below, whose high culture was practically
confiscated to spread out over a waste of semi-barbarism and mix with
alien cultures. Among his Greek sympathizers, Aeschines was perhaps his
chief support in the conquest of the Greek world that lay to the south
within his reach.

[Illustration: AESCHINES]

Aeschines was born in 389 B.C., six years before his lifelong rival
Demosthenes. If we may trust that rival's elaborate details of his early
life, his father taught a primary school and his mother was overseer of
certain initiatory rites, to both of which occupations Aeschines gave
his youthful hand and assistance. He became in time a third-rate actor,
and the duties of clerk or scribe presently made him familiar with the
executive and legislative affairs of Athens. Both vocations served as an
apprenticeship to the public speaking toward which his ambition was
turning. We hear of his serving as a heavy-armed soldier in various
Athenian expeditions, and of his being privileged to carry to Athens, in
349 B.C., the first news of the victory of Tamynae, in Euboea, in reward
for the bravery he had shown in the battle.

Two years afterward he was sent as an envoy into the Peloponnesus, with
the object of forming a union of the Greeks against Philip for the
defense of their li