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Demetrius of Phaleron ruled over the City of Athens from 317 to 307 BCE, and was honored with many statues. In contrast with the classical period, when such distinctions were granted sparingly by the Athenian people, this legislator saturated the civic landscape with effigies of himself, giving pride of place to new sculptural forms – such as the equestrian statue – and colonizing new civic spaces – the demes – while simultaneously limiting the construction of other monuments in public space. These new honorific effigies were imposed rather than negotiated; or at least, they were granted in a much less fastidious way by a commons that had been newly redefined and its numbers limited. Yet, as they gradually cluttered up public spaces, the statues were destroyed, modified or desecrated, as part of a process of retribution. These various modes of action allow us to define a genuine culture of outrage, which became established as a long-lasting phenomenon. Over and above the case of Demetrius of Phaleron, honorific statues are proved to be objects worthy of study, shedding light on their immediate context of political turning points and legislative reforms, but also on the broader histories of rituals and civic memory. Their study thus requires us to combine an anthropological approach with an institutional – or even procedural – perspective.