The Education of Antiphon

A brief review of Antiphon’s style in 5th Century Athens

Antiphon was a political man. That he is the oldest preserved Attic orator is of great historical value, but his surviving writings and testimonies from Thucydides, Xenophon, and others reveal that there is much to be learned—as many ancient orators, politicians, and philosophers apparently testify—from a close study of his orations and writings (Gargarin, “Antiphon (1)”). Beyond being read simply for our historical understanding of ancient life, Antiphon is notable for his dramatic, educational style. While the dramatic setting of legal proceedings remains a topic of popular interest today—particularly on the modern performance stage, television—it is hard to identify the contemporary analog to Antiphon, who infused his legal opinions with tragedic interpretation.

And perhaps with good reason. As some have noted, the prudence of invoking Greek tragedy in legal cases is dubious at best (Wohl, “A Tragic Case of Poisoning”). Then, as now, education and law had a tenuous relationship. (Consider the rule of thumb that a lawyer should never ask a question to which he or she does not already know the answer.) Antiphon’s apparently educational rhetoric—which both begins from ἀπορία and “risks” returning his listeners/readers to a state of loss (Wohl, pg. 51)—seems to be engaged with a larger question than simply how best to persuade his audience of his argument. This “sophistical” style lends credence to the view that Antiphon the Orator and Antiphon the Sophist are one and the same. If, then, the author of Against Stepmother and Truth is this Antiphon, we should expect to see the same tension of nomos and phusis in Antiphon’s orations—and an orator perhaps uneasy with the supremacy of the nomos he apparently champions. As such, Antiphon lacks not only a modern analog, but perhaps an ancient one as well.

Works Cited

Gagarin, M. (2005). Antiphon (1). In The Oxford Classical Dictionary. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 16 Dec. 2019, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198606413.001.0001/acref-9780198606413-e-525.

Wohl, Victoria. “A Tragic Case of Poisoning: Intention Between Tragedy and the Law.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, Johns Hopkins University Press, 9 May 2010, muse.jhu.edu/article/380910/pdf.