CHAPTER 6

Demosthenes, Chaeronea, and the Rhetoric

of Defeat

Max L. Goldman

Introduction

For years Demosthenes urged the Athenians to oppose the rising power of
Macedon, which had come to prominence in the second half of the fourth
century through the diplomatic and military efforts of its king, Philip II.1
Demosthenes finally convinced the Athenians and the Thebans to form an al-
liance, which faced Philip at Chaeronea in the late summer of 338 BCE. Philip’s
decisive victory in that battle had immediate consequences for the political
landscape of the Greek world and modern historical narratives tend to treat
Chaeronea as a turning point, as the moment when mainland Greece ceased to
engage in independent foreign policy actions.2 Although this turned out to be
the case, it was not immediately clear at Athens that the new order established
by Philip after the battle was irrevocable. When Demosthenes was selected to
deliver the funeral oration (logos epitaphios) for the Athenians who died at
the battle of Chaeronea, he faced a particularly challenging task because the
soldiers, whose deaths he needed to praise, had died fighting a losing battle,
a battle he had vigorously advocated for. In his funeral oration, Demosthenes
needed to discuss the defeat and his role in it in a way that created a sense of
continuity with the past, that minimized the potential disruption such a defeat
can inflict on a community, and that gave the Athenians a way to understand
their defeat and his role in it.
There can be no doubt that Demosthenes delivered the oration for the dead
of Chaeronea. He tells us as much himself in a judicial speech delivered eight

1  Philip II: Hammond (1994); Demosthenes’ opposition: Worthington (2013).

2  Political consequences of Philip’s victory: Ellis (1994) 782–85. Commemoration at Chaeronea:
Ma (2008). Sealey’s A History of the Greek City States (1976) concludes with the immediate
aftermath of Chaeronea in 338/7 BCE. Davis (1993) 235 sums up the change thus: “In 338
[Philip] did forcibly bring mainland Greece under his control in a way which his heirs and
successors and Macedonian kings managed to maintain till the early second century BC.” See
also Hornblower (1986) 174. All dates are BCE.

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124 Goldman

years after the battle (De cor. 18.285). It is not certain, however, that the speech
preserved in the orator’s corpus, number 60, genuinely reflects the speech
Demosthenes gave. Quite apart from the question of revision, its style has led
readers since antiquity to doubt that this funeral oration was composed by
Demosthenes.3 Dionysius of Halicarnassus was convinced that Demosthenes
could not have written such a “vulgar, trite, and childish funeral oration,” a style
he sensed was so uncharacteristic of the master (Dion. Hal. Dem. 44).4 It is
true that the transmitted speech follows the conventions of the genre, and
some readers may perhaps feel instinctively that a master of oratory would
strive for novelty. And yet aesthetic judgments based on generalized stylistic
values are rarely fully compelling arguments against authenticity, and noth-
ing in the content of the speech forbids taking it as authentic.5 Demosthenes’
funeral oration, admittedly, does not provide the same emotional impact as,
for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Nor does it provide the same intel-
lectually stimulating picture of Athenian democracy as Thucydides’ Periclean
funeral oration (Thuc. 2.35–46). At the same time, we should not underesti-
mate the power of traditional formulae and tropes in times of crisis and dis-
continuity. The conventions of the funeral oration provided Demosthenes
with a means not only to help his community come to terms with the defeat,
but more obliquely to situate himself in relation to that defeat.
Although following the generic conventions, Demosthenes elaborates upon
them in ways that allow him to reframe the defeat at Chaeronea as a species of
victory. He accomplishes this reframing in two main ways: first, he emphasizes
the role of fate and divinity in determining the outcome of any battle, and
second, he redefines victory in terms of individual hoplite valor. This hoplite
valor is a product of the polis, creator and source of the exceptional Athenian
citizen, whose behavior on the battlefield of Chaeronea is the true victory. This
conventional praise of the polis thus highlights the continuity in the face of
potentially destabilizing defeat. In this way, the explicit function of the funeral
oration—praise of the war dead—and its conventions provides Demosthenes
and his audience with a rhetoric for dealing with military defeat.
Without contemporary reports, it is almost impossible to evaluate the ef-
fectiveness of Demosthenes’ rhetoric of defeat in his funeral oration. The gen-
eral power of funeral orations can be deduced from Plato’s Menexenus: when
Plato’s Socrates discusses how funeral orations affect him, he uses terms that
give such a speech an almost magical power: even the ironizing philosopher

3  Revisions in Demosthenes: McDowell (2009) 7–8.

4  All translations by the author.
5  Herrman (2008), with further bibliography on the debate.