The texts in this volume were written in the tumultuous 4th century of our ancient ancestors. Yet, observe the irony they subtly convey: over 2,300 years ago, two Athenian orators indirectly address us, the modern Greeks. The decline of Athenian democracy indeed resembles the degeneration of our current post-dictatorial democracy. The Athens of Demosthenes and Isocrates is today's Greece. The same degradation of values and ideas, the same confusion and cacophony, the same passive turmoil. From the podium of an Athens of lost grandeur, the two kindred orators speak to today's Greeks, who are experiencing their own end of an era, lamenting and burying their heads in the sand, without memory, without hope, between hysteria and apathy. [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]