Sometime in the late 340s B.C. in Athens, a feud between two powerful men, Apollodoros and Stephanos, culminated in the last of a series of lawsuits that the two had been bringing against each other for the better part of a decade. On one previous occasion, Stephanos took Apollodoros to court for a murder he obviously did not commit. Apollodoros was acquitted, but needless to say a murder charge is more than just a minor inconvenience. In this latest round of revenge lawsuits, however, the charge Apollodoros brought against Stephanos was even deadlier for the reputation of the accused. This case centered on his common-law wife, Neaira. Stephanos (the accusation goes) had been living with a formerly enslaved high-class sex-worker (hetaera) for decades, passing her off illegally as his wife. In a city where citizens could only marry citizens, this was bad enough. Worse yet, Stephanos participated in further fraud by passing off her children as Athenian citizens. Some religious transgressions ensued as a result, endangering the city’s standing even with the gods.
The accusation was read out in the form of a scandalous speech, which even my 21st-century college students find shocking to read whenever I’ve taught it, and was likely even more shocking for the original audiences—and that was certainly the speaker’s intent. The Athenian justice system was run by the citizens and for the benefit of the citizens of the Athenian democracy. Athenians were extremely proud of their court system and considered it the bulwark of their democracy, ever since the mythical founding of the law courts by none other than the city’s patron goddess, Athena—a tale presented dramatically in Eumenides, the concluding play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.
The Athenian law courts functioned quite differently from any justice system we’re familiar with today. Only citizens could bring lawsuits. There were no judges, only a jury of citizens, numbering in the hundreds, voting on the outcome of the case and then on the penalty. And there were no lawyers, but those involved in a lawsuit could hire a professional speechwriter to write the absolute best speech possible for their case, which the accuser or accused would then still deliver himself in court. Among the most famous of such speechwriters is the fourth-century orator Demosthenes. Common in speeches on any charge are character assassinations—generally emphasizing that one’s opponent was a threat not only to the other party in the suit but to the democracy as a whole. Such was clearly the aim of Apollodoros in this latest suit against Stephanos.
But this speech, preserved among the corpus Demosthenes’s speeches under the title “Against Neaira,” was most likely not written by the man himself. Apollodoros, modern scholars think, was the most likely author. Still, the speech’s brilliant ruthlessness and the fervent desire to protect the Athenian democracy, even while serving one’s own ambitious aims, are characteristics of Demosthenes’s own speeches and political career, as we see in James Romm’s new biography of the orator, Demosthenes: Democracy’s Defender.
This biography is part of the popular Ancient Lives series that Romm edits for Yale University Press. It exemplifies well the mission of this series:
Ancient Lives unfolds the stories of thinkers, writers, kings, queens, conquerors, and politicians from all parts of the ancient world. Readers will come to know these figures in fully human dimensions, complete with foibles and flaws, and will see that the issues they faced—political conflicts, constraints based in gender or race, tensions between the private and public self—have changed very little over the course of millennia.
Biographies, in other words, are valuable to read because they offer an illuminating window into a place and time through the story of one individual, even if that individual (as in the case of Demosthenes) was clearly extraordinary.
It is one thing for us today to think of the story of fourth-century Athens as a tale of rebuilding after the Peloponnesian War and then a prolonged and unsuccessful struggle against a Macedonian takeover. It is another to look at the story of this tumultuous century through the eyes of a participant in the events. Born in 384 B.C., Demosthenes experienced the short-lived Theban hegemony in Greece, then the entire struggle of the Greek city-states with Philip of Macedon as the latter was pursuing his conquest of Greece. Ultimately Demosthenes outlived Philip’s son, Alexander, by a year, dying in 322 B.C.
Ancient biographers, like Plutarch, considered not just political events but also the moral angle of their subjects’ lives: Biographies were a great way for readers to grow in the virtues by learning of both the accomplishments and the misdeeds of historical figures and drawing the correct lessons to apply personally. In other words, a good biography recounts events from the subject’s life, but events significant from a “big-picture” perspective may sometimes be less important for a biography than those that explain something key about the person on whom the book is focused. In the case of Demosthenes, what we see is the impact on the democracy of a great orator.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that in his Parallel Lives, Plutarch paired Demosthenes with Cicero, the greatest orator of the Roman Republic. It was Demosthenes’s skill as orator in both the law courts and the political sphere in Athens that made him so prominent in the events of the fourth century. And so, in his engaging biography, Romm sets out to tell the story of how one man could be so influential in a democracy on the verge of crisis entirely through his rhetorical talent. It is a story he is able to tell through Demosthenes’s own words, as 61 speeches attributed to him survive.
Demosthenes was, in many ways, an unlikely success story in a city that valorized excellent military commanders and individuals who had the right physical appearance and stature to at least look the part of great military heroes. As Romm explains: “His ambition had sought two very different goals: eloquence on the one hand and, on the other, the high esteem of the demos.” And yet he “possessed few of the traits that commanded that esteem. He was physically weak, short of stature, and prone to illness; growing up, he declined to take part in the rough-and-tumble athletics that were central to Greek male maturation and military training.” Making matters even worse, he may even have had a speech impediment—a stammer.
So how did Demosthenes manage to overcome these challenges and become one of the most prominent orators in the history of the Athenian democracy? Through extraordinary self-discipline, endless practice, and low-key brilliance. Romm tells the story of Demosthenes’s career through several key speeches and the reaction of the demos to them. We find that Demosthenes, while at times an opportunist who knew how to read a room, was nevertheless sincere in his adamant defense of democracy, not only in Athens but in the rest of the Greek world. That is the significance, Romm notes, of the early speech “On the Rhodians’ Freedom,” by which Demosthenes (unsuccessfully) tried to persuade the Athenians to support the democracy on the island of Rhodes from the encroaching pressure imposed by Persia.
Then in 351 B.C., Demosthenes was among the first to clearly articulate the danger Philip posed to Athens in a speech that later was dubbed the “First Philippic.” But the Athenian democracy, which Demosthenes so respected, was notoriously slow to act, even if significant portions of the citizenry agreed with him. By 346 B.C., Demosthenes’s predictions had begun to come true; nevertheless, he attempted to preserve peace with Philip and the rest of the Greek world. In “On the Peace,” Demosthenes accused the rest of the Athenians of allowing Philip to get too strong by their inaction. At this moment, however, he argued for peace with Philip, even as “he also held on to hopes that Athens would one day fight for the freedom of Greece.”
Demosthenes’s wish came true in 338 B.C., when Athens and the rest of the combined Greek forces faced Philip at the Battle of Chaeronea. But Demosthenes had zero military skills. So he
joined that army and prepared to fight as a hoplite, an infantry soldier. Despite his weak constitution and lack of combat experience, at age forty-six, at the height of his political sway, he brought out his spear and his armor and made ready to march to Boeotia. On his shield was painted the legend AGATHEI TYCHEI, “with good fortune”—expressing the hope that the good luck he claimed as his special asset would accompany him, and his city, into the coming battle.
But Athens didn’t have this wished-for luck. Philip’s army had the better “skill, training, weaponry, and tactics.” Remarkably, Demosthenes survived Chaeronea, but it was a blow to his reputation. After urging Athens for over a decade to fight against Philip’s autocracy, the democracy had lost. Many read the outcome of the battle as a judgment on Athenian democracy. Yet it is also a testament to Demosthenes’s reputation as democracy’s defender that, in a possibly apocryphal anecdote told by Plutarch, “in the aftermath of his victory, Philip got drunk and wandered among the Greek dead, chanting a mocking phrase: ‘Demosthenes of Paeania, son of Demosthenes, proposes…,’ the formula with which Demosthenes moved his Assembly decrees. Philip gave the words metrical stress as though they belonged to a comic play, to better belittle his beaten antagonist.”
Still, Philip did not annihilate Athens, offering peace on his own terms instead. But following the assassination of Philip in 336 B.C. and the ascension of Alexander to power, Demosthenes renewed his attempts to restore Athens to freedom. In 330 B.C., he delivered a tour de force speech, “On the Crown,” urging the Athenians to look forward to another attempt to fight for their freedom—and that of the rest of the Greeks. But the death of Alexander in 323 B.C., much wished for as it was, did not bring the freedom Demosthenes had hoped for. Instead, Alexander’s general Antipater ordered Demosthenes’s execution. If Plutarch’s account is to be trusted, Demosthenes dramatically committed suicide by sucking on poison hidden inside his stylus.
So what do we do with biographies like this one? Yes, it is an entertaining read, but there is more to it that is timely in ways that Romm perhaps did not anticipate when he began his project. In particular, reading a biography of a great orator in the age of ChatGPT hits in a different light. True, we can muse, the orator in question failed at the end. And yet—what if he had never tried? What would fourth-century Athens have been like without him? We can take the lesson from Romm’s biography that many readers have drawn from Plutarch’s biographies of both Demosthenes and Cicero and emphasize the importance of good rhetorical skills and good speakers for a healthy democracy. If there are no conversations between real people about the affairs of the people, democracy dies—not in darkness perhaps (as TheWashington Post motto proclaims), but in apathy.
