The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric by Sviatoslav Dmitriev (review).

This article reviews a scholarly study that critically reevaluates the historical figure of Demades, an Athenian orator traditionally portrayed as a pro-Macedonian politician after 338 BCE. The book challenges the reliability of most surviving literary sources about Demades, arguing that much of the evidence was fabricated or heavily shaped by later rhetorical education from the Hellenistic to Byzantine periods, which used Demades as a rhetorical and moral exemplar within their ideological framework. While this approach offers valuable insights into how rhetorical culture constructed and manipulated historical figures to serve educational and elite self-identity purposes, the reviewer notes that the author's extreme skepticism leads to the wholesale dismissal of many ancient testimonies, potentially overlooking the complex origins of some biographical material. The work thus serves both as a corrective to earlier biographies and as an introduction to the role of rhetorical schools in shaping classical Greek historical memory.