Demades the politician

This chapter analyzes how the images of Demades replicated the involvement of the pepaideumenoi in politics: an uneducated nouveau riche of obscure origins and an accidental politician, he proffered an example of the absolute nature of corruption. This image was constructed with the help of the metaphor of Demades consisting of “tongue and guts”—an expression that was retrospectively applied to different political figures—which indicated the selfish nature of his politics; and with stories of his bribe taking and proposing numerous honorific decrees for personal profit. These and other displays of Demades’s immorality, such as cheating and breaking oaths, turn out to have been popularly recycled rhetorical topoi. It was a short step from breaking promises to making illegal proposals. Later references to such proposals by Demades supplied material for progymnasmata exercises in the introduction of laws; these exercises focused on moving legal initiatives that did not comply with existing legislation.

Epilogue

The epilogue sums up the steps and ways in which Demades’s traditional image emerged and developed as a rhetorical construct reflecting the educational needs, social norms, and political realities of later centuries. His lack of rhetorical schooling—and method—meant that Demades’s oratory was successful only because of his flattery and subservience. All of this was entirely logical to the pepaideumenoi, who saw one’s oratorical style as corresponding to his moral character: Demades’s oratory, manners, politics, and looks were all thoroughly corrupt. This Demades was juxtaposed with Demosthenes and Phocion, whose images also underwent a rhetorical reinterpretation; each of them furnished students over many centuries with positive and negative examples, molding later perceptions of the past. The rhetorical Demades illustrates the limits of our vision of classical Greece, which we mostly know from much later literary texts that projected the values and interests of subsequent generations.

The rhetorical persona of Demades

This chapter reveals how Roman and Byzantine intellectuals reworked the figure of Demades for instructional and moralistic purposes. Demades’s presumed lack of education required pepaideumenoi to explain his rhetorical success by seeing his oratory as flattery, kolakeia, while contrasting it with truthful speech, or parrhesia, which, they said, was characteristic of Demosthenes. Since the style of oratory was an extension of the speaker’s personality, Demades provided material for speech-in-character exercises and illustrated the topos of juxtaposing fortune with virtue, or a natural gift of speaking with the moral integrity that came with education and toil. Demades’s fourteen speeches in the Codex Florentinus Laurentianus 56.1, a manuscript of the thirteenth century, were later rhetorical products that used Demosthenes’s real or alleged orations as hypotheseis—“subjects” or “plots of declamation.” Compilations of hypotheseis were circulated for use by aspiring orators, including, most famously, Lybanius’s collection of hypotheseis of Demosthenic speeches.

Introduction

The Introduction outlines the contradictions surrounding the figure of Demades: while he left no written transcripts of his speeches, and a handful of surviving sources from his lifetime tell us nothing about his appearance, disposition, or oratory, numerous literary texts from much later times offer surprisingly detailed information. They not only create a negative portrait of Demades—in spite of his well-documented excellent service to Athens and all of Greece—but also often contradict one another, supplying conflicting accounts and divergent descriptions of his looks, character, and oratory. Instead of weaving another narrative of Demades’s life, the book contextualizes the evidence within its social and cultural framework. This method determined the structure of the book: unlike most previous studies, it does not approach Demades chronologically but thematically, focusing on social life, political activities, and educational practices that prevailed during the centuries that produced most of our evidence about him.

Athenian political rhetoric

This chapter examines how later authors rationalized contemporary realities by projecting them onto late classical Greece, including reshaping the images of famous Athenian leaders: a politically and personally corrupt Demades accentuated Demosthenes’s patriotism and Phocion’s morality. Despite their artificial nature, such views survived into modern works that juxtapose Demades’s cynical opportunism with Demosthenes’s righteous energy and Phocion’s noble simplicity. These and other characters were developed in multiple ways: supplying content substance for rhetorical exercises and literary works; accentuating the desired personal and professional virtues of pepaideumenoi; and creating images of Demades and his contemporaries, which provided material to generations of students. The retrospective projection of later realities explains the topos of Demades’s tyranny at Athens, which has been the subject of numerous modern interpretations. As an uneducated parvenu, Demades could have held on to power only by flattery and force, relying on support from tyrannical Macedonian leaders.

The art of being earnest

This chapter assesses the methods of later authors who used Demades’s rhetorical images to illustrate relations between Greek cities and the people in power, by focusing on the famous story of Demades’s alleged address to the victorious Philip II after the battle of Chaeronea. Even though three vastly different surviving versions of that story accentuated specific aspects of this form of interaction, they all centered on the importance of properly applying rhetorical skills in the interests of political success, and developed the use of parrhesia, or frankness, as a rhetorical tool to cover what was, in fact, kolakeia, or flattery. The address of Demades exemplified the so-called rhetorical parrhesia, which actually was itself a form of flattery, although the two concepts continued to be juxtaposed with each other into late antiquity and beyond.

Texts and contexts

This chapter analyzes how rhetorical training and the literary culture used and abused historical evidence during the Roman imperial and Byzantine eras to maintain cultural continuity insofar as intellectual life and education (paideia) remained rooted in material from classical Greece. The largely uniform rhetorical curriculum helped to create a class of educated people, the pepaideumenoi, with similar social norms, cultural tastes, and intellectual expectations. While relying on real or alleged classical records, progymnasmata, or preliminary exercises in rhetoric, approached that material in a liberal fashion: students were expected to attain a more powerful effect by improvising; switching out the lead characters in the same situation or putting the same person in different settings; adding and molding direct speech; and combining different types of exercises. This imagined rhetorical past acquired a life of its own, concealing, obscuring, and effectively replacing the historical reality. This environment produced most of our evidence about Demades.

Paideia

This chapter elucidates how the fabricated images of Demades helped to affirm the importance of paideia—as education and moral instruction—for the socially privileged position of the pepaideumenoi. The figure of Demades accentuated the ethical and professional rewards of paideia, and especially rhetorical education, in more than one way. He became an example of a persuasive orator who was always able to come up with a witty retort, quickly capture and deftly manage the attention of the audience, and speak effortlessly on the spur of the moment. Many more excerpts, however, employ Demades as a negative example: a poor commoner who lacked paideia and moral integrity, he was the opposite of the students whose education entitled them to membership in the intellectual, social, and political élite of the city. Although they seem to be mutually exclusive, these images served the same educational purpose and coexisted within the context of rhetorical schooling.

History, rhetoric, and legends

This chapter examines the role of the rhetorical Demades in debates and interpretations of Homeric epics and the Persian Wars—as well as other less monumental episodes from Greek history. Homeric heroes and themes substantiated many types of progymnasmata exercises—including synkrisis, or comparison (between heroes, or between them and other characters), confirmation, laudation, and invective—and provided rich material for antilogia, approaching the same subject from opposite perspectives, a technique that was a sign of rhetorical mastery. The figure of Demades was employed to develop rhetorical themes on Homeric subjects—such as the Cyclops, Helen’s fleeing to Troy, and the Trojan Horse—which produced “wandering expressions” that were attributed to Demades and other historical characters. The liberal rhetorical approach put references to ancient Persia and its rulers in the mouth of Demades, who lived more than a century after the Persian Wars and who, according to other texts, allegedly lacked schooling and paideia.

Making sense of the evidence

The chapter juxtaposes about thirty inscriptional and literary sources purportedly from Demades’s lifetime (although the book suggests dating some of the literary sources to later times) with almost 250 references in the literary texts of different genres from the mid-first century B.C. to the late Byzantine empire, revealing a gap of nearly 300 years between the death of Demades and the time in which most of the available literary evidence about his politics, character, looks, and oratory was produced. Contradictions between inscriptional and literary sources, and between references in literary texts, cast doubts on both the credibility of the literary evidence about Demades and the suggested criteria for establishing its authenticity. The chapter proposes to explain his contradictory image as an artificial rhetorical construct that served the educational and social needs of the Greek-speaking intellectual élite during Roman and Byzantine times, long after Demades’s death.