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Demosthenes

Demosthenes

c. 384 BCE–c. 322 BCE · Athens

Demosthenes (384 – 322 BCE) was an Athenian statesman and orator regarded in the Alexandrian Canon as the foremost of the ten Attic orators. He began his public career as a logographos, writing forensic speeches for litigants in private suits, including those preserved as "Against Onetor" and "Against Lacritus," before turning to political oratory. He is best known for the "Philippics" and "Olynthiacs," a series of speeches urging Athens to resist the expansion of Philip II of Macedon, and for "On the Crown" (330 BCE), his defense of his own political record against Aeschines. After the defeat of the Greek cities in the Lamian War and Antipater's consolidation of Macedonian power, he fled to the island of Calauria and took his own life in 322 BCE to avoid capture.

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Stop 1 of 1384 BCE–322 BCELived

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Athens' greatest orator and statesman.

About Athens

The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.

In Athens at the same time

Gorgias of Leontini, Democritus, Antisthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, Alcidamas

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Demosthenes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Demosthenes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(52)