Demosthenes

Demosthenes was an Athenian statesman and orator who opposed the expansion of Macedon. His speeches urged resistance to Philip II and later made him a symbol of civic independence, though Athens was defeated at Chaeronea.

Demosthenes first made his reputation as a logographer and public speaker after pursuing legal claims against guardians who had mismanaged his inheritance. In the Philippics and other speeches he argued that Athens had underestimated the danger posed by Philip II of Macedon and worked to build resistance among the Greek cities. After Alexander the Great’s death he supported renewed revolt against Macedonian control and, pursued after its failure, took his own life in 322 BC.

Plutarch’s The Age of Alexander places Demosthenes among the major political personalities of fourth-century Greece, using paired lives to illuminate the struggle over Macedonian power and the erosion of independent city-state politics. Diodorus Siculus’s The Library, Books 16–20 provides the larger narrative in which his career belongs: Philip II’s rise, the Sacred War, Chaeronea and the Macedonian domination that Demosthenes opposed, followed by Alexander’s conquests and the wars of his successors.