Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of the near absence of personal naming of opponents in speeches made in the classical Athenian Assembly, casting the phenomenon as a discursive strategy which allows the orator of the moment to recommend his own superior qualities and reject his opponents not as individuals but as an undifferentiated (and uniformly wrong) mass. The article then examines Demosthenes’s use (and the sincerity of his commitment to his use) of this strategy to pursue this pair of persuasive aims across his Assembly career, and as part of the rhetorical toolkit with which he manages his transition from “outsider” status in the late 350s and early 340s BCE to a position of steadily growing political influence from 346 BCE onwards.