Reviewing a book that comprises 35 chapters and 510 pages is not an easy task. At the same time, one would expect nothing less of a handbook dedicated to Demosthenes, whose speeches not only define oratory and rhetoric until the present, but are also one of the main sources of historical evidence for fourth-century Athens and its ‘international’ relationships.

The large number of contributions, all produced by experts, guarantees variety and diversity in terms of topics and scholarly traditions. As Martin fairly notes (p. 3), ‘[a]s a consequence, existing controversies may lead to a different stance being taken on some issues by individual papers’. Thus, for instance, S. von Reden seems to adopt an anthropological reading of the lawcourts, viewing Athenian litigation as ‘agonistic rather than legalistic’ (p. 211), and J. Roisman's reading (p. 241) promotes a more flexible understanding of dispensing justice, while M. Canevaro's approach (p. 74) identifies justice with lawfulness. We also find contrasting suggestions in matters of authenticity: J. Trevett is inclined to accept Demosthenes’ Erotikos (p. 422), contrary to I. Worthington (p. 403). Such diversity is a virtue of this handbook: it provides the readership with an overview of the breadth of opinions on the subject matter and demonstrates the variety of tendencies in scholarship.

In spite of the number of contributions, Martin succeeds in putting together chapters that complement each other without overlapping. S. Schmidt-Hofner on ‘Visions of Attica’ complements R. Osborne on ‘City and Countryside’; N. Sawada and L. Gallo discuss Demosthenes’ allies and foes, the former focusing on politicians with transmitted speeches and the latter on those without transmitted speeches; L. Canfora, in one of the longest contributions, offers a very rich discussion of Demosthenes’ reception from antiquity to the Byzantine era, while A. Blanshard takes us on a fascinating journey through the modern reception of Demosthenes.

The volume is divided into six thematically organised parts, each comprising four to eight chapters that average ten pages. Collectively, the volume is of impressive quality as almost all chapters provide excellent discussions of their topic, each closing with a very useful and up-to-date bibliographical list. Some chapters (e.g. 10, 11, 12, 13) do not offer new readings but rather provide overviews of their subject. This is expected and in fact welcomed, given that the purpose of the handbook is to assist those who wish to study Demosthenes the man and the orator/politician as well as Demosthenes’ works either as texts of oratory and rhetorical style or as historical sources of his time.

Part 1, ‘General Matters’, provides solid surveys on scholarship and methodology. It offers accounts on how oratory has been and should be approached as evidence of history (A. Scafuro), as literature (G. Mader), as well as on the place of oratory in the context of the fourth century (K. Wojciech). T. Paulsen opens the volume effectively with a survey of Demosthenic scholarship, identifying different tendencies depending on the historical period that produced it.

Part 2 covers ‘The Institutional Context of Oratory’: K. Piepenbrink discusses public opinion and makes a useful distinction between views that may change ad hoc and more constant ones. Processes of transvaluing concepts, especially of aristocratic values that seem to have been democratised, could be something to add here, as Demosthenes’ rhetoric offers invaluable information on this; M. Gagarin offers a solid overview of legal procedures and arbitration; P. Hunt efficiently covers the topic of diplomacy. A reference to W. Mack, Proxeny and Polis: Institutional Networks in the Ancient Greek World (2015) would have been expected here since proxenia is discussed extensively.

Canevaro provides an excellent discussion on law and justice with a handy short summary of the scholarship on Athenian law and oratory (pp. 83–4). Canevaro stresses the idea that, when the law relevant to a trial was not discussed, this was so mainly because it was not needed as the judges had already heard the charge (pp. 74–6). This is a valid interpretation, but perhaps it should be noted that avoiding discussing the relevant law also provides the plaintiff with more flexibility in his approach, not to the law, but to the way he eventually constructs his case: avoiding a lengthy discussion of the relevant law enables the plaintiff to cast additional serious accusations (e.g. of hybris in Dem. 54). Canevaro notes that sometimes the laws are treated as one body to argue that the opponent's behaviour goes against the laws collectively (p. 80). The suggestion above could strengthen this point as arguments on ‘the spirit of the laws’ are necessarily more effective when the discussion is not limited to just one law.

S. Lape provides a rich discussion on elite visions of politics. Lape (pp. 105–6) makes a connection between Demosthenes’ earlier life and his trials against his guardians, and the way in which this allowed him to construct himself as a democratic everyman as well as a rich man. This is an interesting suggestion, but we need not assume that being rich and being non-rich are ‘two mutually exclusive social identities’ (p. 105): in Against Meidias (Dem. 21) Demosthenes constructs himself as a rich democratic individual as opposed to Meidias the rich undemocratic individual. This shows that we may be right to assume a broad spectrum of shared social values among the different strata that Meidias and people like him scorn, but other rich people could show to uphold with their (alleged) conduct.

Part 3 discusses the political context of Demosthenes’ time both at a practical level (P.J. Rhodes, E.M. Burke, L. Burckhardt, R.J. Nichols) and ideologically (G. Westwood, Schmidt-Hofner). Some contributions are more about Demosthenes’ time (and earlier) than about Demosthenes and his work, but this does not detract from their value: for example, Burke and Burckhardt provide historical overviews of their topic discussing developments in state finances and the military respectively, but nevertheless both manage to give valuable insights into Demosthenes’ take on these matters.

Part 4 moves to the social and cultural context with excellent discussions of: trade and credit (von Reden); the non-Athenian population (K. Kapparis); social and political values: Roisman (p. 244) reaches the important conclusion that different, even contradictory uses of identical values in Demosthenes’ rhetoric show not so much ‘cynical manipulation’ but that these concepts are ambivalent rather than static; neighbourhood and local communities (W. Schmitz); complicated matters of kinship (S.C. Humphreys); religion (H. Willey); city and countryside: Osborne offers satisfactory explanations for the relative absence of precise topographical descriptions in Demosthenes’ speeches (pp. 288–92). At the same time, taking Against Meidias as the best illustration of ‘Demosthenes’ reluctance to offer circumstantial detail’ (p. 289) should perhaps be qualified: sure, and strikingly so, Demosthenes does not describe the punching incident that led to the trial, but this does not mean that he ‘never tells any story’ (p. 289): the speech is full of all sorts of descriptions and short parallel narratives of hybris (e.g. Dem. 21.16–17, 36–41, 58–64, 71–4, 158) that cumulatively serve the purpose of constructing Demosthenes’ grand narrative of hybris.

Part 5 explores Demosthenes’ life: B.L. Cook examines the biographic tradition, giving useful insights into the different sources the various biographies draw on; I. Samotta provides a descriptive overview of Demosthenes’ early life with perhaps some notes of idealisation on the orator's character (e.g. p. 318); C. Karvounis offers a solid periodisation of Demosthenes’ political career reflective of developments in his political stance; Sawada and Gallo complement each other in discussing Demosthenes’ allies and foes. Perhaps one thing missing is a more extensive reference to Dinarchus given his involvement as logographer in the Harpalus trials.

Part 6 closes the volume fittingly with a discussion of the corpus Demosthenicum, reception and transmission: E.M. Harris offers an excellent overview of Demosthenes’ public speeches; Trevett provides a fair assessment on matters of authenticity, composition and publication of the corpus, while Worthington focuses on the Epitaphios, Erotikos, Prooimia and Letters; C.W. Wooten discusses Demosthenes’ style and technique, drawing on the accounts of ancient theorists and going beyond, being sensitive to different types of argumentation, and differentiating between earlier and later speeches; P. Cobetto Ghiggia focuses on speeches in private prosecutions and rightly draws attention to difficulties of categorisation (pp. 390–1). When discussing argumentation and the social context of the speeches, however, sometimes rhetoric is taken as fact, resulting in generalisations (e.g. pp. 395, 399).

There is perhaps a missed opportunity to stress the need to distinguish between the etiquette of the Assembly and the courtroom. A handbook of Demosthenes, the only Attic orator whose corpus includes both deliberative and forensic speeches (with the exception of Andocides’ ambivalent case), would provide the perfect opportunity for this. Yet it is only Harris who draws attention to it, while at the same time one can find remarks that conflate the rhetoric of the Assembly with the rhetoric of the courtroom. For instance, Hunt (p. 117) employs Demosthenes’ self-fashioning during the Elatea debate to argue that ‘political leaders such as Demosthenes and earlier Pericles were far less restrained in their pretensions in the Assembly than elite speakers in the law courts had to be’. But Demosthenes’ account of the Elatea debate is a reconstruction from a forensic speech, and therefore we need to be cautious if we are to draw from it any conclusions about the rhetorical habits of the Assembly. Roisman (p. 233) mentions that ‘Demosthenes’ references to social and political values are more frequent in his deliberative or public-action (graphê) speeches’ and goes on to give an excellent overview of honour and the importance of philotimia as a value (pp. 237–40). Yet it is left unnoticed that philotimia as a positive value is almost totally absent from Demosthenes’ deliberative speeches (cf. 8.71; 13.26). Identifying such tendencies could help us achieve a more nuanced context-specific understanding of the rhetoric of socio-political values in Demosthenes and beyond.

In a feat of ring composition, the volume opens with a short introduction and closes with a succinct chapter on transmission by Martin. All contributions are carefully edited with only a small number of spelling, formatting and referencing errors. All in all, this is an excellent guide to Demosthenes and to Demosthenic scholarship that will serve a broad base of readers, from experts on Demosthenes and fourth-century oratory to students who approach the orator and his work for the first time.