Overview
Dinarchus
(c. 360—290 bc)
Quick Reference
(c.360–c.290 bc),
the last of the Ten Attic Orators. Born at Corinth, he went to Athens to study rhetoric under Theophrastus and from 336/5 constantly and successfully practised the profession of speech‐writer. As a metic, he was barred from a political career, nor was he able himself to speak in court, but when after the Lamian War the leading orators of the age, Demosthenes (2) and Hyperides, had met their deaths, Dinarchus was left in unchallenged and lucrative supremacy, and the period of rule by Demetrius of Phaleron, his friend and patron, was his heyday. When Demetrius had to retire from Athens in 307/6, Dinarchus, suspect for his wealth and perhaps even more his friendship with ‘those who dissolved the democracy’, withdrew to Chalcis. He marks the beginning of the decline in Attic oratory.
