‘Demo-cracy’: power/might of the demos. ‘Demo-sthenes’: strength to/for/with the demos. Demosthenes’ father may have been unimaginative – he had himself been named ‘Demosthenes’ – but like the famous Pericles, father of the homonymous younger Pericles, he knew what he was doing. He may have been super-rich (from his large holding of slaves manufacturing either knives or couches), but he wanted it advertised that he was a man of the people (demos): that he identified with the poor majority of Athenian citizens in the world’s first adult male suffrage democracy.

Demosthenes junior lived up to, indeed far exceeded, all the hopes loaded onto his name. Born in 384 BC, just a few years after another lost war against a non-democratic Sparta aided by monarchist-imperial Persia, he won his oratorical spurs at a very young age in Athens’ popular jury courts, persuading mass juries of his peers that he’d been done out of his rightful inheritance by his father’s three unscrupulous and greedy executors. Attaching himself at first to the coat-tails of moderate politicians such as Euboulus, he struck out on his own in the later 350s, as the rising politico-military menace of dynastic autocrat Philip II of Macedon, an enemy of Athens since 357, loomed large over all mainland Greek affairs.

In 352/51 Demosthenes seems to have had a Damascus Road experience. The scales dropped from his eyes as he saw Philip for the anti-democratic tyrant he (now believed) he was. (Think George III and the rebellious American colonists in the 1770s.) From 351 Demosthenes waged an unremitting anti-Philip oratorical crusade. So powerful were his four public ‘Philippic’ orations that Cicero borrowed their title for his own tirades against Mark Antony. No more successfully, however: Philip rose and rose to the point where he was the ‘leader’ – actually, lord and master – of all mainland Greece by 338.

In 336 Philip’s domestic assassination achieved what Demosthenes’ Athens had failed for more than 20 years to effect. But still it did not topple Macedon. To that end Demosthenes continued to strive to rouse Athenians and other Greeks against Philip’s son and successor, Alexander III, to little, sometimes no, avail. Demosthenes remained to his somewhat clouded end, as James Romm labels him in this generally excellent (minus some dodgy chronology) narrative biography, ‘democracy’s defender’. But in only a short time after his death by suicide in 322, that Athenian democracy of his was no more, although democracies of various strengths and conditions persisted or revived in Athens and elsewhere in the soon to be Rome-dominated Eastern Mediterranean for several centuries to come.

How should we judge Demosthenes and his career? Was his, as the publisher’s blurb would have us believe, a ‘tragic’ story? Romm, noted biographer of Dionysius I, tyrant of Greek Syracuse, pins his colours to the mast. For him, the essence of Demosthenes’ life was to be a politikos – a full-time professional politician – and one who did not merely operate within the confines of a democratic regime of governance but fully embraced, and indeed exploited, that demokratia’s ideological mindset. The no-holds-barred world of Athenian politicking and political oratory was a murky medium in which Demosthenes swam effortlessly, taking on fiercely such conservative domestic opponents as ex-actor Aeschines, supporting those who supported him such as Timarchus (subject, in 346, of a tirade by Aeschines which accused him of being unfit for public life because of a sex scandal), and persevering in an on-off comradeship with the more mercurial Hyperides, a fellow orator and Athenian democratic patriot.

If we were to imagine today’s social media prised from out of its comforting under-the-radar anonymity and projected onto the public stage of Athenian democracy, we’d get a fair idea of what raw materials of wild exaggeration, conspiracy theory, and outright lies Romm has to hand – or to contend with – for his project of writing a fair, balanced, but still insightful account of an exceptional politician living at a quite remarkable moment in human history. Does he get the balance right? One has to say that he makes more than just a decent fist of it. Above all, how does he apprehend what most of us think to be the key strategic issue for a politician of Demosthenes’ unabashedly direct-democratic outlook: could Athens have dealt with Philip in a more profitable way than by constantly poking the bear and ultimately taking him on in a disastrously failed pitched battle (Chaeronea)? Was there not perhaps something more than mere treachery to the advice of those ‘assimilationist’ (appeasing) counter-politicians such as Aeschines, who argued for more jaw-jaw and less war-war? Were the allotted Athenian jurors of 330 BC right to exonerate Demosthenes and award him the crown of people’s champion over Aeschines? Romm remains measured.

Posterity – both ancient and modern – tends to speak with one voice on this, as opposed to the contradictory judgements passed on Demosthenes while he was still alive and soon after his death. Famously in 280 BC, by when the old Greece of independent citizen-states had been subsumed into a brave new world of territorial Macedon-derived-and-imposed monarchies, post-democratic Athens defiantly raised a fine bronze commemorative portrait-statue of Demosthenes, precisely as ‘defender of democracy’. It was erected in Athens’ agora, the city’s ceremonial civic centre, and was one of the earliest to attempt to render not only the subject’s outward mien, but also his inner state.

Were we to seek a modern parallel, sadly not an altogether heartening one, to Demosthenes’ resistance to Macedon, it might be President Zelensky of Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Putin’s Russia. At all events, Demosthenes lived on, and lives on, as a hero of his people, state, and political constitution, and Romm, having treated his chequered life with all the attention and respect that are its due, justly ends his work on an upbeat note.

• Demosthenes: Democracy’s Defender
  James Romm
  Yale University Press, 208pp, £18.99
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at the University of Cambridge.