Overview

The tragic story of ancient Greece's last democratic leader and his doomed fight to save Athens from Macedonian domination In the spring of 340 BCE, news arrived that Philip of Macedon had seized a town in central Greece, a base from which he could march on Athens. In the fierce debates about how to respond to the rising threat in the north, Demosthenes, the greatest orator of his day, convinced the Athenian Assembly to confront Philip on the field of battle. Though that effort failed and Athens fell into the grip of Alexander the Great, Philip's son and successor, Demosthenes had established himself as one of history's most eloquent defenders of democracy. In this thrilling biography of the man who led the charge for Greek freedom, James Romm follows Demosthenes from his early career as a legal speech writer through his rise in politics, his fall from grace in a corruption scandal, and his desperate flight to the island of Calauria--where he took his own life rather than submit to Macedonian forces. As he brings to life the bare-knuckle, insult-filled verbal brawls of Athenian orators, Romm not only explores the mind of the man who took on the challenge of saving Greek freedom but also shows how democracies can be destroyed by infighting and internal division.

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James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press. He is the author of several other studies of Greek and Roman history, and his reviews and essays appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Review of Books. Joel Richards was the kid who did crazy things just to have a good story to tell afterward. On deciding to make his affection his profession, he received a BFA in acting and a BA in English from the University of Utah, and later an MA in oral storytelling from East Tennessee State University. He has narrated over 150 audiobooks (fiction and nonfiction) and continues to tell his original stories to live audiences.

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