‘Demo-cracy’: energy/would possibly of the demos. ‘Demo-sthenes’: energy to/for/with the demos. Demosthenes’ father could have been unimaginative – he had himself been named ‘Demosthenes’ – however just like the well-known Pericles, father of the homonymous youthful Pericles, he knew what he was doing. He could have been super-rich (from his giant holding of slaves manufacturing both knives or couches), however he needed it marketed that he was a person of the individuals (demos): that he recognized with the poor majority of Athenian residents on the planet’s first grownup male suffrage democracy.
Demosthenes junior lived as much as, certainly far exceeded, all of the hopes loaded onto his title. Born in 384 BC, only a few years after one other misplaced struggle in opposition to a non-democratic Sparta aided by monarchist-imperial Persia, he received his oratorical spurs at a really younger age in Athens’ well-liked jury courts, persuading mass juries of his friends that he’d been performed out of his rightful inheritance by his father’s three unscrupulous and grasping executors. Attaching himself at first to the coat-tails of reasonable politicians corresponding to Euboulus, he struck out on his personal within the later 350s, because the rising politico-military menace of dynastic autocrat Philip II of Macedon, an enemy of Athens since 357, loomed giant over all mainland Greek affairs.
In 352/51 Demosthenes appears to have had a Damascus Street expertise. The scales dropped from his eyes as he noticed Philip for the anti-democratic tyrant he (now believed) he was. (Suppose George III and the rebellious American colonists within the 1770s.) From 351 Demosthenes waged an unremitting anti-Philip oratorical campaign. So highly effective have been his 4 public ‘Philippic’ orations that Cicero borrowed their title for his personal tirades in opposition to Mark Antony. No extra efficiently, nevertheless: Philip rose and rose to the purpose the place he was the ‘chief’ – really, lord and grasp – of all mainland Greece by 338.
In 336 Philip’s home assassination achieved what Demosthenes’ Athens had failed for greater than 20 years to impact. However nonetheless it didn’t topple Macedon. To that finish Demosthenes continued to try to evoke Athenians and different Greeks in opposition to Philip’s son and successor, Alexander III, to little, typically no, avail. Demosthenes remained to his considerably clouded finish, as James Romm labels him on this usually wonderful (minus some dodgy chronology) narrative biography, ‘democracy’s defender’. However in solely a short while after his loss of life by suicide in 322, that Athenian democracy of his was no extra, though democracies of assorted strengths and circumstances persevered or revived in Athens and elsewhere within the quickly to be Rome-dominated Japanese Mediterranean for a number of centuries to come back.
How ought to we decide Demosthenes and his profession? Was his, because the writer’s blurb would have us imagine, a ‘tragic’ story? Romm, famous biographer of Dionysius I, tyrant of Greek Syracuse, pins his colors to the mast. For him, the essence of Demosthenes’ life was to be a politikos – a full-time skilled politician – and one who didn’t merely function throughout the confines of a democratic regime of governance however absolutely embraced, and certainly exploited, that demokratia’s ideological mindset. The no-holds-barred world of Athenian politicking and political oratory was a murky medium by which Demosthenes swam effortlessly, taking up fiercely such conservative home opponents as ex-actor Aeschines, supporting those that supported him corresponding to Timarchus (topic, in 346, of a tirade by Aeschines which accused him of being unfit for public life due to a intercourse scandal), and persevering in an on-off comradeship with the extra mercurial Hyperides, a fellow orator and Athenian democratic patriot.
If we have been to think about at present’s social media prised from out of its comforting under-the-radar anonymity and projected onto the general public stage of Athenian democracy, we’d get a good concept of what uncooked supplies of untamed exaggeration, conspiracy principle, and outright lies Romm has handy – or to cope with – for his challenge of writing a good, balanced, however nonetheless insightful account of an distinctive politician dwelling at a fairly outstanding second in human historical past. Does he get the stability proper? One has to say that he makes greater than only a first rate fist of it. Above all, how does he apprehend what most of us assume to be the important thing strategic concern for a politician of Demosthenes’ unabashedly direct-democratic outlook: might Athens have handled Philip in a extra worthwhile manner than by continually poking the bear and finally taking him on in a disastrously failed pitched battle (Chaeronea)? Was there not maybe one thing greater than mere treachery to the recommendation of these ‘assimilationist’ (appeasing) counter-politicians corresponding to Aeschines, who argued for extra jaw-jaw and fewer war-war? Have been the allotted Athenian jurors of 330 BC proper to exonerate Demosthenes and award him the crown of individuals’s champion over Aeschines? Romm stays measured.
Posterity – each historic and fashionable – tends to talk with one voice on this, versus the contradictory judgements handed on Demosthenes whereas he was nonetheless alive and shortly after his loss of life. Famously in 280 BC, by when the outdated Greece of impartial citizen-states had been subsumed right into a courageous new world of territorial Macedon-derived-and-imposed monarchies, post-democratic Athens defiantly raised a nice bronze commemorative portrait-statue of Demosthenes, exactly as ‘defender of democracy’. It was erected in Athens’ agora, town’s ceremonial civic centre, and was one of many earliest to aim to render not solely the topic’s outward mien, but additionally his interior state.
Have been we to hunt a contemporary parallel, sadly not an altogether heartening one, to Demosthenes’ resistance to Macedon, it is perhaps President Zelensky of Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Putin’s Russia. In any respect occasions, Demosthenes lived on, and lives on, as a hero of his individuals, state, and political structure, and Romm, having handled his chequered life with all the eye and respect which can be its due, justly ends his work on an upbeat word.
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Demosthenes: Democracy’s Defender
James Romm
Yale College Press, 208pp, £18.99
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Tradition Emeritus on the College of Cambridge.
