Pseudo-Demosthenes
Sign in to saveThe speeches of Pseudo-Demosthenes are those preserved among the speeches of Demosthenes, but not thought to have been authored by him.
Wikidata facts
- Named after
- Demosthenes
- Gender
- male
- Occupation
- writer
- Languages spoken
- Ancient Greek
Show 3 more facts
- different from
- Demosthenes
- P13311
- Ard Schenk
- writing language
- Ancient Greek
via Wikidata · CC0
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
1 sectionsContents
- References
The speeches of Pseudo-Demosthenes are those preserved among the speeches of Demosthenes, but not thought to have been authored by him.
Among the Pseudo-Demosthenic works are six of those written for Apollodorus of Acharnae, (46, 49, 50, 52, 53, and 59), all of which seem to have been written by the same author. The author of these speeches has been identified as Apollodorus himself. Demosthenes' speech 45 also concerns Apollodorus, but seems to be genuine. Additionally, speech 47, though it does not concern Apollodorus, was probably written by the same author as these six, which Friedrich Blass considered to be evidence that the speeches were not in fact written by Apollodorus, but an otherwise unknown minor logographer. However, Kapparis considers that speech 46 can only have been composed by Apollodorus, as there is no reason that he would have hired two different logographers, one to compose his first speech and a second to draft his reply to the defence. Kapparis concludes that either speech 46 must be written by Demosthenes or Apollodorus, and as it is stylistically drastically different from Demosthenes' speeches and similar to the other speeches given by Apollodorus, Apollodorus himself must have been the author of these speeches.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Pseudo-Demosthenes” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.