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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...