The art of being earnest

Abstract

This chapter assesses the methods of later authors who used Demades’s rhetorical images to illustrate relations between Greek cities and the people in power, by focusing on the famous story of Demades’s alleged address to the victorious Philip II after the battle of Chaeronea. Even though three vastly different surviving versions of that story accentuated specific aspects of this form of interaction, they all centered on the importance of properly applying rhetorical skills in the interests of political success, and developed the use of parrhesia, or frankness, as a rhetorical tool to cover what was, in fact, kolakeia, or flattery. The address of Demades exemplified the so-called rhetorical parrhesia, which actually was itself a form of flattery, although the two concepts continued to be juxtaposed with each other into late antiquity and beyond.