The Other Eight Attic Orators: Antiphon

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’d like you to think a little about the types of writing you’ve done in the past, oh, let us say, year. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably written breezy email, stern syllabi, obscure academic texts and pun-based posts on Reddit that didn’t get nearly the number of upvotes as they deserve. Now what if a random, oh, say 12% of what you wrote was preserved and no one who knew you was around to testify you wrote it all? What would people think about your writing style? About your history? Would they even know you who were you?

This is precisely the mystery behind today’s Other Eight Attic Orator, Antiphon of Rhamnus. Like many of us, Antiphon may have written a variety of texts. He was a logographer, one of those professional legal speechwriters, so he probably wrote dozens of defenses for the rich and powerful in his social circle. He also attracted followers and students, so he wrote examples for them, imaginary legal cases with evenly balanced sides and arguments in weighted antithesis. He may have even written a treatise On Rhetoric, but we don’t have it, because, remember? Most of your writings--gone. We only have rumor of Antiphon’s rhetoric text. He also maybe wrote some abstract sophistic texts, On Truth and On Concord, which sure don’t sound like the pragmatic legal texts we know were his. Antiphon also lived in the real world, which, during this stormy period of Athenian politics, included a lot a hairy situations where Antiphon would have to rhetoric for his life.

All of this makes it hard to sort out what Antiphon really wrote and what, if any, style you would attribute to him--is he a cut-and-dry type-A arranger like his sample cases sound or did he play fast and loose with the traditional four parts of a speech like his court cases? He looks like both. Take those traditional four parts of a speech--prologue, narrative, proof or argument and epilogue, or in other words, set the stage, tell the story, supply the evidence, and sum it all up.

In one speech Antiphon goes on and on in the narrative. Why? Because he’s writing a speech for the prosecution and so it’s his job to plaint what happened. In this case, it’s about a step-mother poisoning a father, so it’s a very lurid narrative, too. The step-mother tricks a family’s friend’s mistress into thinking a poison was a love potion. “When they had finished dinner, ...they naturally began pouring libations...But while Philoneus’ mistress was pouring the libations...she was pouring in the drug. And she thought she would be clever and put more into Philoneus’ cup, on the theory that if she gave him more, he would love her more. She didn’t realize she had been deceived by my stepmother until the evil was already done.... When the men had poured out the libations, each took hold of his own murderer and drank it down--his last drink” (19-21). I mean--wow! That is shocking stuff. Of course the jury wants to hear more of it. The defense’s excuses of why she did it is almost irrelevant when there’s such a vivid narration. Even though Antiphon says he will “try to relate the rest of the story about giving the drug as briefly as possible,” (13) he knows that the story is the most convincing part and aside from this allegation...there’s not really a lot of evidence. In fact, not only is the evidence sparse, but the narrative is almost entirely fabricated. How could the plaintiff or Antiphon know what the cloistered women said to each other behind closed doors? How could he know what they were thinking when they poured the drinks? But with such a robust narration section, the argument looks compelling. This kind of playing with the order is seen in extreme cases where he even blends togethers evidence and narration.

But this is far from the case of his orderly Tetralogies. These school texts are so orderly that you might even call them...textbook cases. See what I did there? The 1st Tetralogy considers a man and his servent killed in the middle of the night in the street. Were they killed by a common criminal seeking valuable cloaks or by some violent drunk...or was it personal this time? The argument here iis very argumenty, and quite different from “Against the Step-mother”: “We know the whole city is polluted by the killer until he is prosecuted and that if we prosecute the wrong man, we will be guilty of impiety, and punishment for any mistake [the jury] makes will fall on us... no one who went so far as to risk his life would abandon the gain he had securely in hand”, and yet the victims were still in possession of their property when they were found (4)...and the whole thing goes on like that. Counter supposition and response. It’s chock full of evidence and the narration takes back seat, as is more typical.

The...