Sir Richard C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos

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Birth of Antiphon.

Antiphon was born about the year 480 B. C.¹, being thus rather younger than Gorgias, and some eight or nine years older than the historian Thucydides. He was of the tribe of Aiantis and of the deme of Rhamnus²; of a family which cannot have been altogether obscure, since it was made a reproach to him on his trial that his grandfather had been a partisan of the Peisistratidae³. The tradition that his father Sophilos was a sophist antedates by a generation the appearance of that class of teachers⁴, and may have been suggested simply by the jingle of the words⁵. Antiphon himself, as the style of his composition indicates, must have felt the sophistic influence; but there is no evidence for his having been the pupil of any particular sophist. He is allowed by general consent to have been the first

Antiphon the first λογογραφος.

representative at Athens of a profession for which the new conditions of the time had just begun to make a place, — the first λογογράφος, or writer of speeches for money⁶. With the recent growth of Rhetoric as a definite art, the inequality, for purposes of pleading or debating, between men who had and who had not mastered the newly-invented weapons of speech had become seriously felt. A rogue skilled in the latest subtleties of argument and graces of style was now more than ever formidable to the plain man whom he chose to drag before a court or to attack in the ekklesia: and those who had no leisure or taste to become rhetoricians now began to find it worth while to buy their rhetoric ready-made. Forensic speeches were, no doubt, those with which Antiphon most frequently supplied his clients. But Hermogenes⁷ describes him as ‘the inventor and founder of the political style’,—a phrase including deliberative as well as forensic oratory: and this exactly agrees with the statement of Thucydides that Antiphon was practised in aiding, not only those who had lawsuits, but debaters in the ekklesia⁸. Besides being a speech-writer, he was also a teacher of rhetoric, and, as the allusion in the Menexenos⁹ implies, the most fashionable master of Plato's time

Antiphon and Thucydides.

at Athens. The tradition that Thucydides was the pupil of Antiphon may have been suggested by the warmth and emphasis of the passage in which the orator is mentioned by the historian¹⁰; a passage which, in its sudden glow of a personal admiration, recalls two others in the History—the tribute to the genius of Themistokles, and the character of Perikles. In the tradition itself there is nothing improbable, but it wants the support of evidence. The special relation of master to pupil need not be assumed to account for a tone which congeniality of literary taste¹¹, common sufferings at the hands of the democracy, or perhaps personal friendship, would sufficiently explain.