Demosthenes Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Demosthenes

With the possible exception of Cicero, no orator has given so much to the development of his art or achieved as much with it as Demosthenes. He was everywhere referred to simply as "the orator." Some of the best literary criticism in antiquity was directed at Demosthenes' speeches by such notable writers as Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Caecilius of Callacte, Quintilian, Hermogenes, and the author of the treatise On Style. In sixteenth-century England Roger Ascham regularly met with Queen Elizabeth to read the works of Demosthenes. Three centuries later a famous parliamentary orator, Henry, Lord Brougham, popularized Demosthenes through his studies and comments. In the nineteenth century two outstanding works of classical scholarship appeared - Arnold Schafer's Demosthenes und seine Zeit (Demosthenes and His Time, 1858) and Friedrich Blass's volume on Demosthenes in Die attische Beredsamkeit (Attic Oratory, 1893). In the early twentieth century Demosthenes became a rallying point for the voices of independence and democracy; Georges Clemenceau, premier of France, wrote a book eulogizing Demosthenes' ability to awaken his countrymen to their spiritual values.

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