Aeschines of Athens
Aischines
Son of Atrometus, schoolmaster, and Glaucothea — both attacked by Demosthenes for low birth, the first stable trope of personal abuse in Attic forensic oratory. Began his career as actor and *grammateus* (clerk to the council) and entered politics as a member of the second embassy to Pella in 346 that negotiated the Peace of Philocrates with Philip. The three surviving speeches — *Against Timarchus* (346), *On the False Embassy* (343, defending himself against Demosthenes's prosecution for accepting Philip's bribes during the embassy), and *Against Ctesiphon* (330, the case for revoking the gold crown awarded to Demosthenes) — constitute the matched pro-peace counterweight to the *Philippics*. He survived the prosecution of 343 narrowly (acquitted by thirty votes); he lost the 330 BC case so badly — Demosthenes's *On the Crown* won by such a margin — that he could not raise the one-fifth of the votes required to avoid disenfranchisement, and went into exile at Rhodes where he founded a school of rhetoric that survived into the Roman period. The pairing of the two orators in the rhetorical canon (Quintilian, the *Lives of the Ten Orators*) made the Demosthenes-vs-Aeschines confrontation the type-case of the political-forensic clash for two thousand years of European education.