The rhetorical persona of Demades

Abstract

This chapter reveals how Roman and Byzantine intellectuals reworked the figure of Demades for instructional and moralistic purposes. Demades’s presumed lack of education required pepaideumenoi to explain his rhetorical success by seeing his oratory as flattery, kolakeia, while contrasting it with truthful speech, or parrhesia, which, they said, was characteristic of Demosthenes. Since the style of oratory was an extension of the speaker’s personality, Demades provided material for speech-in-character exercises and illustrated the topos of juxtaposing fortune with virtue, or a natural gift of speaking with the moral integrity that came with education and toil. Demades’s fourteen speeches in the Codex Florentinus Laurentianus 56.1, a manuscript of the thirteenth century, were later rhetorical products that used Demosthenes’s real or alleged orations as hypotheseis—“subjects” or “plots of declamation.” Compilations of hypotheseis were circulated for use by aspiring orators, including, most famously, Lybanius’s collection of hypotheseis of Demosthenic speeches.