Demosthenes of Athens (the Orator)

Son of Demosthenes the sword-maker of the deme Paeania; born 384 BC, defrauded of his patrimony by his guardians in childhood, recovered through litigation in his early twenties (the *Against Aphobus* speeches that mark his entry into legal practice). Entered Athenian politics in the late 350s on the anti-Macedonian side. The four *Philippics* (351, 344, 341, 341 BC) and the three *Olynthiacs* (349/8) constitute the canonical sequence of speeches by which he argued, year on year, that Philip II was the existential threat to Athenian autonomy and that the failure to commit fleet, treasure, and citizen-hoplites in time would deliver Greece into Macedonian hegemony — as it did at Chaeronea in 338, where Demosthenes himself fought in the line. After Chaeronea he led the rebuilding of the Athenian fortifications and was awarded the gold crown that Aeschines unsuccessfully prosecuted Ctesiphon for proposing — the case argued out in 330 BC in the matched speeches *On the Crown* (Demosthenes) and *Against Ctesiphon* (Aeschines), where Demosthenes won by such a margin that Aeschines was disenfranchised and went into exile at Rhodes. After Alexander's death Demosthenes led the Athenian war against Antipater (the Lamian War, 323–322); at its defeat he fled to the temple of Poseidon on Calauria and took poison rather than be taken by Antipater's hunting-party under Archias the actor (Plut. *Dem.* 29). Distinct from his contemporary the Athenian general Demosthenes son of Alcisthenes (the strategos at Pylos in 425 and at Syracuse in 413), entered separately in the catalogue.

Associated Places