Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/359

ANTIPHON 33 5 Neaera is the work of some able and well-informed Athenian, and the speech On the Halonnese is perhaps by Hegesippus. Of Antiphox little is known beyond the narrative of Thucydides mentioned above (p. 198). He had worked all his life preparing for the revolution of 411. He led it and died for it, and made what Thucydides considered the greatest speech in the world in defence of his action in promoting it. We possess three real speeches of Antiphon, and three tetralogies. These latter are exer- cises in speech-craft, and show us the champion of the oppressed aristocrats training his friends for legal prac- tice, as Thucydides tells us he did. He takes an imagi- nary case, with as little positive or detailed evidence as possible, and gives us two skeleton speeches — they are not more — for the accusation, and two for the defence. Considering the difficulty of the game, it is well played. The arguments are necessarily inconclusive and often sophistical, but they could not be otherwise when real evidence was against the rules. Minute legal argument is also debarred. In fact the law contemplated in the tetralogies is not Attic, but a kind of common-sense system. It may be that Antiphon, like many of his party, was really trying to train the aristocrats of the subject states more than his compatriots. The real speeches are all on murder cases, the finest being the defence of Euxitheus (?) the Mitylenean on the charge of having murdered his shipmate Herodes. The first speech. On a Charge of Poisoning, deals with a singularly tragic story. A slave-girl was about to be sold by a ruffianly master, with whom she was in love ; a woman who wished to be rid of her own husband, induced the girl to give the two men, at a dinner which they had