classics digests, reflections and reviews
On the False Embassy and On the Crown are Demosthenes’ two most important speeches, both on a personal and political level. In the former, he accused his political enemy Aeschines of treason deserving the death penalty; in the latter, he defended his own political career against the accusations of Aeschines. Suffice to say, there was no love lost between these two gentlemen. Of all the legal and political battles Demosthenes […]
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Demosthenes was one of the most popular authors and the most influential orator in the ancient world, if the number of extant manuscripts is any indication, as I noted in a previous post. On the Crown is Demosthenes’ most popular oration, having thirty-two extant manuscripts, by contrast, Cicero’s prosecution speech In Verrem, which launched his remarkable political career, has six extant manuscripts. In his treatises on oratory, Cicero acknowledges Demosthenes […]
Read moreSublimity is the image of greatness of soul. The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. Skill in invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition, whereas Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays […]
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They say that when he was still a young man he withdrew into a cave and studied there, shaving half of his head to keep himself from going out; also that he slept on a narrow bed in order to get up quickly, and that since he could not pronounce the sound of R he learned to do so by hard work, and since in declaiming for practice he made […]
Read more“As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.” The Origin and History of Oratory In “Brutus“, Cicero traces the origin and history of oratory in ancient Greece and Rome, and provides a concise and astute critique of various classes of individual orators, ranking their achievements in the five components of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, diction/expression, action/delivery and memory). Demosthenes is considered the greatest among the […]
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