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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

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, Lysias, Isocrates, Alcidamas

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 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)