The Erotic Essay (Ancient Greek: Ἐρωτικός) was one of the two surviving epideictic speeches (along with the Funeral Oration) attributed to the Athenian statesman and orator Demosthenes. Ian Worthington dates the speech to between the late 350s BC and 335 BC. Though part of the Demosthenic corpus, the Erotic Essay is not generally believed to be an authentic work of Demosthenes, and its real author is unknown. However, Robert Clavaud has argued that there are no strong arguments for the inauthenticity of the epideictic speeches, against almost unanimous scholarly consensus to the contrary.