Athenian political rhetoric

This chapter examines how later authors rationalized contemporary realities by projecting them onto late classical Greece, including reshaping the images of famous Athenian leaders: a politically and personally corrupt Demades accentuated Demosthenes’s patriotism and Phocion’s morality. Despite their artificial nature, such views survived into modern works that juxtapose Demades’s cynical opportunism with Demosthenes’s righteous energy and Phocion’s noble simplicity. These and other characters were developed in multiple ways: supplying content substance for rhetorical exercises and literary works; accentuating the desired personal and professional virtues of pepaideumenoi ; and creating images of Demades and his contemporaries, which provided material to generations of students. The retrospective projection of later realities explains the topos of Demades’s tyranny at Athens, which has been the subject of numerous modern interpretations. As an uneducated parvenu, Demades could have held on to power only by flattery and force, relying on support from tyrannical Macedonian leaders.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Emperor · Etiquette · Flattery · Literature · Macedonian · Morality · Patriotism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions