r and ability he had in speaking to labor and industry. He
was very rarely heard to speak off-hand, but though he were by name
frequently called upon by the people, as he sat in the assembly, yet he
would not rise unless he had previously considered the subject, and come
prepared for it. So that many of the popular pleaders used to make it
a jest against him; and Pytheas once, scoffing at him, said that his
arguments smelt of the lamp. To which Demosthenes gave the sharp answer,
"It is true, indeed, Pytheas, that your lamp and mine are not conscious
of the same things." To others, however, he would not deny it, but
would admit frankly enough, that he neither entirely wrote his speeches
beforehand, nor yet spoke wholly extempore. And he would affirm, that
it was the more truly popular act to use premeditation, such preparation
being a kind of respect to the people.

How then, some may say, was it, that Aeschines speaks of him as a person
much to be wondered at for his boldness in speaking? And, when Lamachus,
the Myrinaean, had written a panegyric upon king Philip and Alexander,
in which he uttered many things in reproach of the Thebans and
Olynthians, and at the Olympic Games recited it publicly, Demosthenes,
then rising up, and recounting historically and demonstratively what
benefits and advantages all Greece had received from the Thebans and
Chalcidians, and on the contrary, what mischiefs the flatterers of the
Macedonians had brought upon it, so turned the minds of all that were
present that the sophist, in alarm at the outcry against him, secretly
made his way out of the assembly. But Demosthenes, it would seem,
regarded the reserve and sustained manner of Pericles, and his
forbearing to speak on the sudden, or upon every occasion, as being the
things to which he principally owed his greatness, and this he followed,
and endeavored to imitate, neither wholly neglecting the glory which
present occasion offered, nor yet willing too often to expose his
faculty to the mercy of chance. For, in fact, the orations which were
spoken by him had much more of boldness and confidence in them than
those that he wrote. Eratosthenes says that often in his speaking he
would be transported into a kind of ecstasy, and Demetrius, that he
uttered the famous metrical adjuration to the people,

By the earth, the springs, the rivers, and the streams,

as a man inspired, and beside himself. One of the comedians calls him
a rhopoperp