Carey Christopher - Demosthenes: selected speeches

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SELECTED SPEECHES

DEMOSTHENES of Athens (384322 BC) is widely regarded as the best of the Attic orators, above all for his forcefulness and his professionalism. He was a master of all the available styles, so that he could adapt his writing and delivery to the circumstances of the speech, whether he was delivering it himself or had written it for a client. Demosthenes came from a wealthy family, but his father died young, and the orators first appearances in Athenian public life came with a series of private speeches attempting to recover his inheritance. Having earned a name for himself as a speech-writer, he then wrote speeches for others in both public and private cases, as well as some more for his own use in court cases. But he is best known for his political speeches, written in opposition to the growing power of Macedon in northern Greece, under first Philip II and then his son, Alexander the Great. Demosthenes saw through Philips imperialist machinations and spent his political career trying to warn the Athenians and other southern Greeks about the Macedonian menace. But his opponents were too strong for him, and in the end forced him to suicide. Sixty-one speeches are extant under his name, but the authenticity of about twenty of these is disputed.

ROBIN WATERFIELD is a writer, living in Greece. His previous translations for Oxford Worlds Classics include Platos Republic and five other editions of Platos dialogues, Aristotles Physics, Herodotus Histories, Polybius Histories, Plutarchs Greek Lives and Roman Lives, Euripides Orestes and Other Plays and Heracles and Other Plays, Xenophons The Expedition of Cyrus, and The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists.

CHRIS CAREY is Professor of Greek at University College London. He has published on Greek oratory, rhetoric, history, drama, lyric, and law.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

DEMOSTHENES

Translated by

ROBIN WATERFIELD

With Introductions and Notes by

CHRIS CAREY

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom

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Translation Robin Waterfield 2014
Editorial material Chris Carey 2014

First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2014

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Demosthenes life and times

DEMOSTHENES was born in 384 BC into a wealthy mercantile family. We are unusually well informed about the family wealth because of the litigation which followed the death of his father (also named Demosthenes). The estate (at least according to Demosthenes himself) was worth about 15 talents, in a society where a man with property of 3 talents counted as moderately wealthy. Despite his wealth, his fathers family was undistinguished. His mothers family, however, had a tradition of involvement in politics. Our contemporary source for the mothers family is his enemy Aeschines, Aeschines has Gylon marry a Scythian woman, that is, a member of one of the non-Greek nomadic tribes indigenous to the region. This kind of allegation was part of the rough-and-tumble of Athenian politics (a tough environment by any standards) and the slur cannot be literally true, since Demosthenes never faced a serious challenge to his citizen status. The allegation could be plucked out of the air; the distance from Athens to the Black Sea made it impossible in practice to test the claim and Athenian slander laws were sufficiently permissive to make the claim risk-free even if false. Or it may mean no more than that Gylons wife was of non-Athenian colonial Greek stock. From the middle of the fifth century a man needed two Athenian parents in order to be a citizen himself; but this law seems to have fallen into abeyance during the latter part of the Peloponnesian War (431404). Though it was reinstated after the restoration of democracy in 403, this was not retroactive, and provided that Demosthenes mother was born before 403 his citizen status would be unaffected.

Demosthenes first opportunity to put his training to the test came early. His father had died while Demosthenes was still a boy. Though his mother was still alive, he was in Athenian terms an orphanos and his fathers estate was managed by guardians appointed by his father in his will. The will arranged for the management of the property and also (in a manner not uncommon in Athens) for the marriage of his widow and his daughter, Demosthenes sister. Neither marriage eventually took place, and when on coming of age Demosthenes received the accounts from his three guardians for the management of the estate, the amount remaining was sufficiently low to convince him that he had been defrauded. This began a series of successful legal disputes with his guardians.

It may be at this time that he began work on training his voice. There were, of course, no microphones and the large numbers to be addressed either in the courts or in the Assembly placed a considerable demand on voice and breathing. According to a later biographer Demosthenes had a weak voice and a lisp. To overcome both he practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth, running or walking uphill. Ancient biographical traditions are rich in myth and one can never be quite sure of the reliability of statements they make; but this one has some claim to credibility, since it came from Demetrius of Phalerum,