In 346 BC. the Athenians negotiated a peace treaty with King Philip II of Macedon, but afterwards one of the Athenian ambassadors, Demosthenes, accused another, Aiskhines, of accepting a bribe from Philip to contrive that the terms of the treaty should be favourable to him. The case came to trial three years later, and On the False Embassy is the speech which Demosthenes prepared for the prosecution. It is one of the most famous pieces of ancient oratory, and it is (...) also one of the principal sources of information about the politics of its period. This volume is on the same lines as Professor MacDowell's previous edition of Demosthenes' speech Against Meidias. It includes an introduction concentrating especially on the historical circumstances, a revised Greek text based on fresh study of the manuscripts, an English translation on pages facing the text, and the first detailed commentary on the speech for over a hundred years. (shrink)

In speaking of Demosthenes' conduct in the period between his return to Athens after the peace agreement with Macedon and Philip's death Aeschines refers to only one specific incident, the attempt by Demosthenes to have himself elected What this position was has never been satisfactorily explained.

Demosthenes Orationes Vol. II. Part i (Orationes XX-XXVI.).

Ender's Game explains how Peter and Valentine Wiggin use their world's online nets to get weighty political influence. Peter and Valentine earn money from their online writing, get invited to important discussions, and learn more than the average citizen about political matters. And they continue to build the influence of Locke and Demosthenes, in a public arena. Anonymous is an Internet entity very much like Locke and Demosthenes in the sense that average users are listening to Anonymous without knowing whose (...) views Anonymous represents. The thread running through this chapter is that there's a larger problem than anonymity with virtual politics: it's how to maintain freedom in both worlds. Peter and Valentine used virtual identities on the net to end Earth's dangerous political situation in Ender's Game, but of course, that's only fiction. (shrink)

In 346 the Athenians were sadly deceived by Philip. The long war for Amphipolis had taken its toll and the people wanted relief, but the real motive of those who wanted peace in 346, both Philocrates with his principal abettor Demosthenes, and Eubulus and Aeschines, was to try to keep Philip out of Greece itself.2 In Elaphebolion the only debate was about means, whether, as Aeschines wanted, to try to get Phocis included in a Common Peace, or, as Demosthenes with (...) a clearer view of what Philip would accept urged, to make a separate peace and alliance and leave the salvation of Phocis to the future: he probably thought that, if Philip should afterwards attack Phocis, Athens could choose between her allies and, as in 352, rush to the aid of Phocis. (shrink)

In the course of Demosthenes' lifetime, indeed within a mere decade, the whole balance of power in the Greek world was destroyed. By 338 the city states were completely overshadowed by the national state of Macedon, and it is the concern of all students of Demosthenes to analyse this dramatic change. The task is not easy. The evidence is most unsatisfactory. None of the great historians of the age has survived in other than a few precious fragments, and in the (...) absence of Ephorus, Anaximenes, Theopompus, and the Atthidographers the pale reflections of some of them in Book XVI of Diodorus are poor consolation. It is on the Athenian orators that we have to rely, the very men most concerned in the politics of Athens, in the act of glossing over and denying their own share in the disaster and of misrepresenting that of their opponents. Memories were no longer then than they are today. In 343 both Demosthenes and Aeschines in discussing the events of a mere three years past denied all responsibility for the making of the Peace of Philocrates; one, at least, was lying, confidently. The formal documents were, generally speaking, merely heard, and only in part at that, and the orators were well practised in exploiting such material. If Aeschines and Demosthenes could lie so freely within three years of the events, what they had to say at a longer interval must be much more suspect. (shrink)

This passage has been very frequently discussed, but the deductions drawn from it have been so various and the exact meaning of the Greek has often been left so vague that it seemed to merit one more attempt at analysis.

Demosthenes' Philippic cycle conveys a satirical picture of Athenians trapped in a spiral of symbolic activity: to a demos nostalgic for great-power status but loath to energetic intervention, high-sounding resolutions substitute for low-level responses and by their character as official enactments create the illusion of meaningful engagement. This "syndrome" is a rhetorical scare-image subserving a political agenda. At a time when his influence was still limited, Demosthenes found it expedient to exaggerate the cautious approach of the "peace party" into a (...) "knowing-doing gap" in order to move the audience to accept his own hard line on the Macedonian question. (shrink)

In this book, William H. F. Altman turns to Demosthenes-universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity-and Plato's other Athenian students in order to add external and historical evidence for Plato's original curriculum.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our (...) human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato... has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). (1978, 1: 216) 2This article is an exercise in reclamation of the kind that Hannah Arendt describes. I wish to reclaim the cause for which Demosthenes struggled, the cause of democratic freedom, from the judgment of history expressed in the defeat of Athens and her allies at the hands of Philip of Macedon. Though politics is attenuated in the contemporary world, we can understand the peculiar characteristics of political action by reconstructing in our imagination those moments in the past when political life was richest. Here I am going to take up an aspect of political action that is particularly well-illuminated in Demosthenes' speech On the Crown: the role of time in the judgment of political action. 3We can approach Demosthenes' political career for a variety of purposes: The easiest to understand, because it is in many ways the most superficial, is with the motives of the humanist. We study the political speeches of Demosthenes in order to be inspired to value political freedom [End Page 77] and to learn how it can be defended. The trouble with this view is that it assumes that the conditions for political action are present for us, as they were for Demosthenes in the Athens of his time, and that political action is itself something serious men (and now women) ought to undertake. That these two assumptions are edifying and patriotic does not make them true.We can also approach Demosthenes as an exercise in historical science (that is, historische Wissenschaft). The scientific historian wants to learn the facts about the rise of Philip's hegemony over Greece. The scientific historian therefore prefers objectivity to edification. As George Cawkwell, a leading participant in the Demosthenesstreit in the '60s and '70s, wrote, "Moral edification and history can be kept separate" (1969, 166).I find this the most difficult purpose to understand, because it is unclear how this scientific-historical perspective can be connected with the human-all-too-human perspectives of the participants. When, for example, Cawkwell writes of the age of Demosthenes that "The central fact of the age is military, not moral—viz. the huge preponderance in military potential of the Macedonian state over the power of any Greek state," he cites a fact whose truth he himself perceives in part from Philip's victory over the Thebans and Athenians at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C.E. and Alexander's campaign against Thebes in 335. 4 Cawkwell does not trouble himself to explain how Demosthenes or anybody else could possibly have learned the fact of Philip's greater military strength and resources prior to these events. Nor does Cawkwell refute the claim that given Philip's failures before Perinthos and Byzantium in 340, at the very time that Demosthenes led the Athenians to war it was reasonable to suppose Philip much weaker than he had seemed, or seems to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1979, 491). 5 He does not even show how Philip could have known his own capabilities prior to his success. It is thus unclear what use historical-scientific judgment could be, since it is not clear how to relate historical-scientific judgment to the judgment of participants in human affairs.I should stop here, not least because I... (shrink)

It is well known that Athenian orators, when they made reference to the historical past, usually eschewed prolonged narrative in favour of brief allusions to familiar episodes from Athenian history. Perhaps the most striking exception to this custom is the long and detailed account of fifth-century Plataean history in the pseudo-Demosthenic speech Against Neaera . The main interest of this passage, however, lies not in its divergence from contemporary rhetorical practice, but in its clear reliance on Thucydides for its account (...) of the siege of Plataea during the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, it is unique in Attic oratory in the extent of its reliance on an identifiable historical work. Yet, considering its significance, this passage has received very little scholarly attention, and merits a closer reexamination. (shrink)

The speaker of Demosthenes 56 had lent money to a ship-owner Dionysodorus for a commercial voyage, and now is prosecuting him for breach of contract. The prosecutor is usually thought to be a metic. In the course of the speech he does not identify himself; but Libanius in his Argumenta of Demosthenes supplies a name, Darius: Arg. 54.1 Δαρεῖος καὶ Πάμφιλος Διονυσοδώρῳ δανείζουσι and 2 ὡς δὲ Δαρεῖος λέγει. The manuscripts of the Argumenta, which begin in the tenth century, are (...) numerous; Foerster and Dindorf/Blass cite no variant for the name. Libanius’ source for this information is unrecoverable. (shrink)

In Demosthenes’ speechOn the False Embassy(Oration 19), we read an obelized infinitive at §231, †εὐθενεῖσθαι†, ‘to be flourishing’, in an imaginary dialogue designed to captivate and persuade the judges through its striking antitheses and dramatic tone:— τί οὖν μετὰ ταῦτα.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient CommentatorsK. KapparisCraig A. Gibson. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. xii + 261 pp. Cloth, $55.This book aims to provide a comprehensive account of the ancient scholarship on Demosthenes. Gibson points out that Demosthenes was widely read in later antiquity, and this created the need for linguistic and historical commentaries (...) on his speeches. Of these, some have partially survived on papyrus, while excerpts have also been preserved in later lexicographers and the Byzantine scholia found in the margins of Demosthenic manuscripts. The purpose of Gibson's study is to clarify some confusing and difficult issues related to the ancient scholarship on Demosthenes and to provide the text and commentary on the main sources. [End Page 481]Gibson's introduction includes an informative outline of key parameters in the debate, such as the accuracy of excerption from an ancient commentary, the significance of date and place, and the intended readership of these commentaries. The first chapter discusses the form and transmission of ancient commentaries, their relation with lexicographic works, and their impact on the Byzantine scholia. Gibson convincingly argues that the scholia do not reveal direct dependency upon the surviving ancient commentaries but were compiled from lexicographic works such as Harpocration or the Suda, and possibly other works lost for us. The second chapter deals with the sources, critical agenda, and readership of the ancient commentaries. Here, Gibson provides a clear account of the purposes and guiding principles behind the composition of these works. He concludes that ancient commentators were familiar with interpretative problems of the Demosthenic text and tried to explain allusions and references to specific events, people, and places and also provide semantic, etymological and textual explanations of difficult or unusual terms. In this and the third chapter, Gibson discusses in considerable detail the scholarship on Didymus. He rejects the view that Didymus was merely a filter for a "golden era" of Alexandrian scholarship and argues that his prominent position as a commentator is due to the vast quantity of his work and its impact on later scholars. In sum, the first part of the study offers an informative account of ancient Demosthenic scholarship written in a clear and accessible style.The second part of the book contains the texts of ancient commentators of Demosthenes, with English translations, and also linguistic and historical commentary. In the translation, Gibson chooses to leave out many lines from the papyrus texts where only single words or fragments of words are legible; he translates only the most extant sections of the text. This is a valid choice, but readers should be aware of the fact that many important details may be hiding in the leftovers and fragments that have been omitted. Gibson does not provide the readily available text of P.Berol.inv. 9780, the most extensive surviving work of Didymus, while he cites the rest of the texts from reliable modern editions. In the commentary there are interesting discussions on the Spartan mora, the building of the Parthenon, the Helliastic courts, and many other topics noted by the ancient commentators on Demosthenes. An appendix presents and discusses P.Lond.Lit. 179, a prologue and commentary on Dem. 21. The reader will probably find useful the indexes and rich bibliography provided in the last part of this study.Gibson's commentary is certainly thorough but contains a number of errors in detail, and important bibliography is missing on individual topics. For example:Page 113: Gibson adopts the text of Pearson-Stephens. The adjective is, or, as here (later Greek),. Therefore the text should be (see LSJ s.v.).Page 120: Gibson has missed several important contributions to the issue of the theoric fund in recent years (M. H. Hansen, GRBS 17 [1976] 235-46; E. M. [End Page 482] Harris in E. M. Harris and R. Wallace, eds., Transitions to Empire: Essays in Greco-Roman History 360-146 B.C., in Honor of E. Badian [Norman, Okla., 1996]; C. Carey, Apollodoros Against Neaira [Warminster, 1992] 152-57). As a result, his note on P.Berol. 9780, Col. 8.32-44 is... (shrink)

The deliberative speech known by us asOn Organization(Περὶ συντάξεως) focusses on financial organization and political economy more than any other speech in the Demosthenic corpus. The assembly is to decide the fate of an unspecified sum of money (1). The speaker, who later identifies himself as Demosthenes (12), proposes that, instead of distributing the money as theoric subsidies, all citizens can instead be satisfied by embarking upon a scheme of τοῦ συνταχθῆναι καὶ παρασκευασθῆναι τὰ πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον ‘organization and equipment (...) for war’ (3). This scheme will distribute revenues amongst all as pay for useful service (1–5, 9). The speaker urges that this must be done if the city is once again to act as the arbiter of Greek affairs, and if the Atheniandēmositself is to break the power of self-interested orators and resume its proper control of thepolis(13–36). (shrink)