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Aeschines

Aeschines

c. 389 BCE–c. 314 BCE · Athens

Aeschines (c. 389 - c. 314 BCE) was an Athenian statesman and orator, one of the canonical "Ten Attic Orators." He is best known as the great political rival of Demosthenes, with whom he clashed over how Athens should respond to the rising power of Philip of Macedon. Three of his speeches survive, and together with Demosthenes' replies they preserve one of the most famous courtroom and political duels of the ancient world.

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Stop 1 of 1389 BCE–314 BCELived

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Athenian orator, rival of Demosthenes.

About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

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

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

See other sages who lived in Athens→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aeschines’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 Aeschines’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(3)