SOURCE: “The Portrait of Aeschines in the Oration on the Crown,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 97, 1966, pp. 397-406.

In the following essay, Rowe contends that Demosthenes succeeded in his major attack on Aeschines by representing him as a comic impostor.

The separate techniques of character assassination employed by Demosthenes and Aeschines in their famous oratorical duel were distinguished by Ivo Bruns who, with obvious disapproval, noted that Demosthenes' portrait of his enemy had little factual basis; Aeschines, on the other hand, he praised for skilfully exploiting his opponent's weaknesses in such a way that his description, though unfavorable, was true in many respects to its object.¹ It is significant that this distinction of the two portraits harmonizes with the basic difference in tenor of the two orations. Aeschines' Against Ctesiphon makes telling use of strong factual evidence (e.g. the illegality of Ctesiphon's...