Making sense of the evidence

Abstract

The chapter juxtaposes about thirty inscriptional and literary sources purportedly from Demades’s lifetime (although the book suggests dating some of the literary sources to later times) with almost 250 references in the literary texts of different genres from the mid-first century B.C. to the late Byzantine empire, revealing a gap of nearly 300 years between the death of Demades and the time in which most of the available literary evidence about his politics, character, looks, and oratory was produced. Contradictions between inscriptional and literary sources, and between references in literary texts, cast doubts on both the credibility of the literary evidence about Demades and the suggested criteria for establishing its authenticity. The chapter proposes to explain his contradictory image as an artificial rhetorical construct that served the educational and social needs of the Greek-speaking intellectual élite during Roman and Byzantine times, long after Demades’s death.