Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece

After a couple of centuries of warfare, the world-historical city state of Athens is spiritually staggering. Still, a generation after the great defeat by Sparta, risen like Germany, she once more is the most influential of the cities. Sadly, in a two year attempt to tighten control over her latest empire, by about 350 she has spent nearly a billion dollars on war! (Think of this as a prosperous American city and county of about 500,00 like Lancaster Pa, where I live blowing that amount in 2 years). Also she has privatized the state silver mines and they now produce much less revenue for the citizens. Citizen attempts to regain state control are futile. The rich are increasingly exempt from taxes and, again, attempts to eliminate exemptions are futile. Political quarrels abound. Meantime, up the road, the Macedonians are buying off their neighbors and investing heavily in new (weapons) technology and rethinking how an army might be organized. When Athens finally wakes up, she's flattened by King Phillip, almost as an afterthought.In fact, I don't really believe in history repeating itself like this. When I was young it was all about Spengler and the flabbiness of the West, a thesis now forgotten. Nonetheless, I found this book intersting reading, indeed. History doesn't repeat, said Twain, but it DOES rhyme. Many classical geeks besides me, I'll bet can't much fill in the historical details between the death of Socrate and Alexander except in broad outline. Alexander and his exploits are well covered and so's the defeat of Athens in the war with Sparta, but the intervening period where the mainland and the Pelloponese goes down to Phillip is much less known. This fills a lacuna in my knowledge, at least. And it's a good extra to get an education in Demosthenes at the same time, so I'm happy with this way of telling the story. Also, though I've got over 120 of the Loeb volumes collected and read through time, none of Demosthenes at all. So it's a good peek at him and the Athenian litigation at this time. I wasn't so interested, though, that I'd go out and buy and read his collected works for it's own sake.Speaking of the litigation, though I've got some sources on Athenian law, I think this book would have been helped by an introduction sketching the system, particularly as it is relevant to the sorts of cases Demosthenes was involved in rather than explaining it piecemeal as the story develops.P.S., I don't want to parse the criticism by another reviewer of the book as object. I was most pleased to find the footnotes at the bottom of the page as opposedto, as is now customary, at the inaccesable rear. The black and white illustrations are quite muddy, which is simply not necessary these days, if it ever was. The forensic reconstruction of Phillip's face based on the skull fragments which was fascinating, would have been even more so were it not so smudged. (Many academic presses give little thought to book quality and I'm going to digress to say that I just got John Updike's last art crit book for $35 which is treasure and that volume surely had much more royalties etc than Oxford UP with this one. Actually, Oxford and Cambridge are among the worst at book production. (Well, I wander....)

This book is worth reading and I recommend it for someone who wants to know about Demosthenes life or his speeches. Actually, probably the best part of this book is that it provides terrific background history on Ancient Greece in general, Macedonia, and the 4th century BC.There is a lot of historical details, plain facts, and easy to read writing. That is why it's a solid book.I'll mention a couple minor problems with the book. First of all, it's a bit long. I want to know about Demosthenes but I'm not obsessed with the guy. Shorter would have been better for me. It's easy to forget the overall arguments and greater points inside such a long book.Secondly, the author makes the peculiar decision to not let us know what his thesis is at the outset. He says we're going to explore whether Demosthenes was a patriot or an empty politician throughout the book... I mean, this is 2500 year old history, not sure this "thriller" approach is appropriate here.Third is that I don't think the author justifies his own argument. He says that Demosthenes was an opportunist. But his evidence seems to be that that Demosthenes took up cases that weren't directly tied to stopping Phillip the II and it's something consistent with an opportunist. I agree with that. But just because an opportunist would have done a couple of the actions Demosthenes does, doesn't mean that's why he did it. He's just guessing, using a negative perspective, and I didn't see the justification for that.Look at the last sentence of the book, "Arguably Demosthenes is ready for another political rehabilitation" - ? How timid is that! Arguably! It's like the author doesn't even know himself where he stands on Demosthenes character. That's fine... I'd take out all the judgments on Demosthenes and just turn it into a straight history book rather than a thesis judging Demosthenes; that's the books strong point anyway.

good service good book

It was a time of change in Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great was on the upswing and Athens was on the downward spiral. In that mix rose a group of orators, and politicians, that would usher in a new age; a period of time that they wanted to avoid. In this new work by Ian Worthington, which is written for a general audience, he takes us through the world of Demosthenes and his life and times. From his early childhood where his family spent all his money; to his slow rise through the law courts of Athens, and his eventual breakout in the political world. His early speeches advocated a sensible foreign policy, which would keep Athens away from disastrous wars. It was only with the rise of Philip, the father of Alexander, that he would change his stance. His surviving speeches all attack Philip, and put Athens on top of the mountain. But things could not stay the same forever, and eventually Philip won the day. But Demosthenes would live longer than either Philip or Alexander, only killing himself instead of being executed.Mr. Worthington acknowledges that this is not the easiest biography to write; with a lack of primary sources, and the few surviving ones are not exactly balanced and fair. But he does an excellent job of placing Demosthenes in his proper context in the larger world of geopolitical politics.