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 liberties. But his mission was unsuccessful. Toward the end of the same year he served as one of the ten ambassadors sent to Philip to discuss terms of peace. The harangues of the Athenians at this meeting were followed in turn by a speech of Philip, whose openness of manner, pertinent arguments, and pretended desire for a settlement led to a second embassy, empowered to receive from him the oath of allegiance and peace. It was during this second embassy that Demothenes says he discovered the philippizing spirit and foul play of Aeschines. Upon their return to Athens, Aeschines rose before the assembly to assure the people that Philip had come to Thermopylae as the friend and ally of Athens. "We, your envoys, have satisfied him," said Aeschines. "You will hear of benefits still more direct which we have determined Philip to confer upon you, but which it would not be prudent as yet to specify."