Antiphon and Andocides

6. On the Chorus Boy

6. ON THE CHORUS BOY The speech On the Chorus Boy was delivered by an unknown Athenian who in 4191 was assigned the important (and expensive) public duty or liturgy (2.2.12n) of training a boys’ chorus to compete at the Thargelia, a festival held in the late Spring. This Choregus (‘‘chorus producer’’) recruited the fifty boys needed for the chorus representing two of the ten tribes and provided room in his house for them to train. Being busy with his other affairs (so he tells us), he assigned the duty of training the boys to his son-in-law and three other men. One day during his absence a boy named Diodotus was given a drug to drink, perhaps to remedy a sore throat. Instead it caused his death. Two days later the boy’s brother Philocrates formally charged the Choregus with unintentional homicide—specifically with ‘‘having killed the boy by planning his death’’ (6.16)2 —but the Basileus,3 the official who supervised homicide cases, refused to accept the suit. Almost two months later a new Basileus took office, and Philocrates submitted his case to this official about six weeks after that. This time it was accepted, leading to a trial at the Palladium, the court that heard cases of unintentional homicide. The penalty for unintentional homicide was exile (cf. Introduction to Ant. 3). The Choregus advances three main lines of argument: (1) he did everything required of him and more in overseeing the chorus’ training ; (2) he had nothing to do with Diodotus’ death and was not even 1 For the date, see 6.45n. 2 For this paradoxical charge, see below. 3 For the Basileus, see Series Introduction. present when he died; (3) the prosecutor only brought this case because he was bribed by the Choregus’ political enemies, whose motive was to force him to abandon his own legal attacks on them. The details and supporting arguments provided in the speech suggest that all three points may be valid; nonetheless, the prosecution could attack these claims in a number of ways, and their main arguments probably focused on some different issues. We may speculate that for argument1 they criticized the Choregus for not supervising the training himself and perhaps presented some evidence of specific faults or shortcomings in the arrangements or the people assigned to supervise the boys; for argument 2 they probably did not challenge the Choregus’ claim that he was not present at Diodotus’ death, since this fact could easily have been proved, but they presumably argued that as Choregus, he was responsible nonetheless, and they may have alleged that he told others to give the boy a drug; for argument 3 they may have argued that the Choregus aggressively initiated all the litigation and forced them to counter-sue in self-defense. The charge of ‘‘planning an unintentional homicide’’ on the surface seems self-contradictory. As early as Draco, the planner was considered just as responsible legally for a homicide as the actual killer, but this provision was probably intended and used primarily, if not solely, for the planner of an intentional homicide. Antiphon 6 is the only case we know where the charge is planning an unintentional homicide . Presumably this designates some degree of involvement in an accidental death, but any attempt to determine the precise meaning of the charge or to set clear guidelines for its use is futile. We do not know, and the Athenians themselves probably could not say, whether someone was considered legally liable for the actions of his subordinates . Rules for such cases could only be inferred from regular practice , not from the outcome (if we knew it) of one or two cases. Athenian law allowed considerable leeway in adapting existing procedures to different circumstances (as we see in Ant. 5), and a strict or ‘‘narrow ’’ interpretation of a statute would be difficult in any case, given the generality of the language of Athenian statutes. All we can say is that in this case the charge of planning an unintentional homicide was plausible enough for a Basileus to allow the case to proceed, and the Choregus takes the accusation seriously and does not question the legitimacy of the charge. 74 antiphon On the other hand, not much weight should be put on the fact that the first Basileus refused the case or that the second Basileus accepted...