Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law and Justice in the Age of the Sophists/Antiphon the Sophist: The Fragments

Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law and Justice in the Age of the Sophists, by Michael Gagarin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. x + 214 pp.

Antiphon the Sophist: The Fragments, ed. Gerard J. Pendrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 472 pp.

Thirteen years ago, in his Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle, Richard Enos noted that, "although Antiphon's seminal influence is recognized by both ancient and contemporary writers, little research has been done to synthesize his contribution" (102). Antiphon earned claim to "seminal influence" by leaving us the earliest sizable collection of Attic forensic oratory, being hailed by Thucydides as a leading mind of his time, and apparently also composing a number of philosophical tracts. It remains true that, although Antiphon was arguably as important a figure as Gorgias or Protagoras in the early history (or pre-history) of rhetoric, he has received far less attention than either, this despite the fact that far more surviving texts are attributed to him.

Two recent books, Michael Gagarin's Antiphon the Athenian and Gérard Pendrick's Antiphon the Sophist, attempt to provide the syntheses of Antiphon's contributions that Enos found lacking. In the process both books confront a question that has vexed every modern reader of Antiphon: Are the works attributed to Antiphon the product of one man named Antiphon or two? A certain Antiphon of the deme Rhamnus was praised by Thucydides as a man of great ability and identified as a member of the Four Hundred who briefly took power in Athens in 411 B.C.E. This man was probably the author of the three works called the Tetralogies, each of which is a series of four courtroom speeches, two by the prosecution, two by the defense. He also probably composed three stand-alone forensic speeches which are still extant: The Murder of Herodes, On the Choreutes, and Against the Stepmother. The Rhamnusian Antiphon is sometimes referred to as Antiphen the Orator. A man named Antiphon also was a prominent Sophist who composed several philosophical works, among them were On Truth (significant portions of which only came to light in the twentieth century), On Concord, and a book of dream interpretations. There has been a persistent question about whether these two Antiphons are in fact the same man.

Gagarin's Antiphon the Athenian and Pendrick's Antiphon the Sophist carry on the debate about the identity of Antiphon as they assess and interpret Antiphonian texts. These two books, it should be noted, take rather different forms. Gagarin, who holds the "unitarian" position that Antiphon the Orator is one and the same as Antiphon the Sophist, has written a treatise that considers, but does not provide the full text for, most of the oratorical and philosophical works attributed to Antiphon. Pendrick, who holds the "separatist" position that the philosophical works were written by a different Antiphon than the forensic speeches, has produced a critical edition of only philosophical works that bear Antiphon's name. Pendrick's book provides text in Greek (and in one case Arabic), English translations, and over two hundred pages of line-by-line commentary in small print, together with an introduction. Both books should be of interest to scholars working on the Sophists and/or fifth century oratory, for each makes a well-argued state-of-the-art case for its position regarding the identity of Antiphon, in addition to providing insight into specific texts by this understudied figure.

Gagarin's book helpfully lays out the main sources of evidence that bear on the question of Antiphon's identity. The earliest sources of evidence in this dispute are the fragments and speeches themselves, the passage from Thucydides (8.68), and an appearance by an Antiphon designated "the Sophist" in Xenophon's Memorabilia (1.6). The oldest source that clearly proposes a distinction between Antiphon the Sophist and Antiphon the Orator comes from the second century C.E. It is Hermogenes' treatise On Style, and in it the distinction between the two Antiphons is suggested, naturally enough, on the grounds that the style of the oratorical works is markedly different from the style of the philosophical works. Despite this, the second century C.E. lexicographer, Harpocration, together with most subsequent commentators, takes it for granted that there is only a single Antiphon.

In defense of the Unitarian position, Gagarin points out that Thucydides suggests both that the Antiphon of Rhamnus gave legal advice, which would fit the profile of Antiphon the Orator who wrote courtroom speeches, and that he had a reputation for cleverness (deinotes), which is a quality commonly associated with sophists. Taking issue with those who see Xenophon's use of the tag "the Sophist" to distinguish the figure in Memorabilia from Antiphon "the Orator," Gagarin argues that there is nothing in Thucydides' description of Antiphon of Rhamnus that would make it inappropriate to call him a Sophist. Finally, and most powerfully, Gagarin demonstrates that Hermogenes himself did not take the distinction between the two Antiphons as a certainty, and asserts that a tentative stylistic decision made seven hundred years after the fact is hardly firm ground for the proponents of the "separatist" position to take a stand. Furthermore, the fact that the oratorical and the philosophical works were presumably intended for very different audiences would naturally lead their author to vary his style.