DEMOSTHENES

A close look at the greatest orator of his time.

Romm, professor of classics at Bard College and author of Plato and the Tyrant, emphasizes that ancient Athens was a democracy but not a representative democracy. To govern, the entire electorate—hundreds or thousands of men—would gather, listen to speeches, and then vote. In courts, speakers for the prosecution and defense would present their cases and a huge, randomly chosen jury voted. Romm opens 40 years after Athens’ 404 B.C.E. defeat in the Peloponnesian War, when the city was working to restore its role as Greece’s most powerful city. At the same time, Philip, king of Macedon to the north, father of Alexander the Great, was flexing his muscles and snapping up nearby Greek territory. Fascinated by politics, Demosthenes (384-322 B.C.E.) trained obsessively to perfect his public speaking and became a person of influence who persistently warned of Philip’s threats. His audience listened, but wars were expensive and Philip was no slouch at diplomacy, so Athenian aid to threatened cities was slow arriving and never adequate. Finally, after 20 years of exhortation, in 338 B.C.E. an Athens-led coalition sent a huge army north; it was crushed in the battle of Chaeronea. Philip treated Athens leniently. When he was assassinated two years later, the city rebelled, but his son was also lenient. The untiring Demosthenes continued his denunciations, and after Alexander’s 323 B.C.E. death, his successor in Macedonia clamped down; Demosthenes fled and later killed himself. Romm knows his subject and writes well, but the reality is that ancient Athens was a clunky democracy whose citizens were no more articulate, learned, or compassionate than those of other cities. Athenians worshipped Demosthenes as a patriot, not a fighter for human rights, and the many speeches that have survived lack Churchillian eloquence; rather, like those of contemporaries, they are full of ad hominem attacks and insults.

Good if not uplifting history.