Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law, and Justice in the Age of the Sophists

PREFACE

My interest in Antiphon was first awakened in a course taught by Tom Cole some forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford. At the time I put Antiphon aside to write a dissertation on Protagoras, and then went on to write on Aeschylus, justice, law, and rhetoric, which has now brought me back at last to this book on Antiphon. Another important stimulus came in 1977, when, while working on Athenian homicide law—and thus, naturally, encountering Antiphon again frequently—I had an opportunity to teach the Attic orators at Berkeley. I included a good bit of Antiphon in the course, and the students (a mixture of undergraduates and graduates) responded enthusiastically. I became convinced that Antiphon should be included in every Classics student’s reading, as he rarely was at that time. In the last two decades, as I have worked on other subjects, I have never strayed far from Antiphon, and the conviction has strengthened that his work is important for understanding the intellectual movement of the last half of the fifth century , and especially the origin and nature of forensic oratory. Antiphon’s various identities—logographer, Sophist, political adviser, political leader, even dream-interpreter—suggest not so much a multiplicity of persons with the same name living and working in roughly the same time and place, but rather a single individual with a wide-ranging mind, ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day. In this book I try to do what no one else has yet attempted: to bring together into a single, complete picture the many parts of this multidimensional fifth-century intellectual, Antiphon the Athenian. Not that scholars have not written about Antiphon before now. The first edition of his speeches, the Aldine, appeared in 1513. The first modern edition and commentary was produced by Maetzner in 1838, but a century and a half would pass before there was another commentary on all the speeches (Gagarin 1997). Other notable texts of all the speeches are the editions by Blass (later revised by Thalheim), Gernet, and Maidment. In addition, sevPREFACE 00-T1987-FM 1/31/02 10:04 AM Page ix eral books have been devoted to Antiphon’s three court speeches, beginning with the influential work of Solmsen (Solmsen 1931, Vollmer 1958, Due 1980, Heitsch 1984). Fewer scholars have interested themselves in the Tetralogies, where the question of authorship has dominated discussion, though Decleva Caizzi (1969) produced a good commentary on them. And the publication of the papyrus fragments in the early twentieth century stimulated many papers on “Antiphon the Sophist.” All these studies have isolated pieces of the work of Antiphon, and so have continued to foster the view that these were the products of more than one individual. In recent years, however, more and more scholars have been inclined to see Antiphon as a single person. Thus, the time seems ripe for a study that takes this unitarian premise as its starting point, and reassembles these pieces as the work of one man. To the extent that the resulting picture is coherent and interesting, it will help justify the premise from which this work begins. x preface 00-T1987-FM 1/31/02 10:04 AM Page x ...