might. His success was
but partial, yet his patrimony, with what he earned, always kept him in
relative affluence, spite of his expensive tastes and great public and
private munificence. As a boy he was weak, and did not avail himself of
the physical training then usual among Greek youth of good families. He,
however, employed the best teachers in his studies and his mental
education was thorough. To Thucydides and the old rhetoricians he was
ardently devoted, and these, with personal instruction by the orator
Isaeus, did most to form his style.

The early years of Demosthenes's manhood were spent in preparing
speeches for sale, in instructing pupils in rhetoric, and in the severe
and painstaking education of himself as a public speaker. His resolution
in overcoming obstacles is much dwelt upon by ancient writers. He at
first lisped and stammered and had a weak voice. To cure these faults he
enunciated with pebbles in his mouth and declaimed while walking uphill
and by the roaring breakers of the sea-shore. He shut himself in an
underground study, which he constructed for the purpose, and practised
going through long trains of thought there alone. "When he went out
upon a visit or received one," says Plutarch, "he would take something
that passed in conversation, some business or fact that was reported to
him, for a subject to exercise himself upon. As soon as he had parted
from his friends, he went to his study, where he repeated the matter in
order as it passed, together with the arguments for and against it. The
substance of the speeches which he heard he committed to memory, and
afterward reduced them to regular sentences and periods, meditating a
variety of corrections and new forms of expression, both for what others
had said to him and he had addressed to them. Hence it was concluded
that he was not a man of much genius, and that all his eloquence was the
effect of labor. A strong proof of this seemed to be that he was seldom
heard to speak anything extempore, and though the people often called
upon him by name as he sat in the assembly, to speak to the point
debated, he would not do it unless he came prepared." It is related that
when in speaking he happened to be thrown into confusion by any
occurrence in the assembly, the orator Demades, the foremost extempore
speaker of the age, often arose and supported him in an extempore
address, but that he never did this for Demades. Demosthenes was not,
however, the sl