B. οὗ δέ με δεῖ σωθῆναι μετὰ τῆς ἀληθείας εἰπόντα τὰ γενόμενα,
β. ἐν τούτῳ με βλάπτει ἡ τοῦ λέγειν ἀδυναμία.
Though there is no rhythmical correspondence here, and the syllabic lengths only correspond roughly, the ‘antistrophic’ structure is obvious.
Gorgias, if we may condemn him on the evidence of a single short fragment, seems to have affected rhyme—at any rate his collocation of γνώμην and ῥώμην cannot have been accidental—and the similar sound of the endings of the two clauses in the first passage quoted above proves that Antiphon at any rate took no pains to avoid such natural assonance. In an inflexional language, where there is always a strong probability that a rhyme will occur wherever we have to use an adjective agreeing with a noun, or two verbs in the same tense and person, some ingenuity has to be employed at times to avoid a rhyme, and Antiphon here, at any rate, did not choose to avoid it. The use of rhyme in verse seems to have been offensive to the Greek ear;[58] perhaps for that very reason it may have been at times desirable in prose, its harshness producing the same kind of effect which Antiphon elsewhere attains by the use of uncommon words.
Hiatus is of fairly common occurrence in Antiphon, and I cannot point to any certain instance of an attempt to avoid it by a change from the natural order of words.
Antiphon draws little from common speech; perhaps his dignity prevented him from enforcing a point by the use of those γνῶμαι—proverbial maxims—which Aristotle recommends; and he seldom has recourse to colloquialisms. We are inclined, however, to put in this class such a phrase as περιέπεσεν οἷς οὐκ ἤθελεν—‘he got what he didn’t want’—used of an unfortunate who has been accidentally killed through his own negligence.
Metaphors are rare, but telling when they do occur, as δίκη κυβερνήσειε—‘May justice steer my course’; ζῶντες κατορωρύγμεθα—‘I am buried in a living tomb,’ used by a man who lost his only son; or, again, the appeal of the prisoner to the jury not to condemn him to death—ἀνίατος γὰρ ἡ μετάνοια τῶν τοιούτων ἐστίν—‘Repentance for such a deed can never cure it.’
Some exaggeration of language is permitted to an orator. The defendant in the first tetralogy thus appeals for pity—‘An old man, an exile and an outcast, I shall beg my bread in a foreign land.’
The so-called ‘figures of thought’ (σχήματα διανοίας) such as irony and rhetorical questions, so frequent in Demosthenes, are scarcely used by Antiphon. There is no instance either of the hypocritical reticence (παράλειψις), also common in later orators, which by a pretence of passing over certain matters in silence hints at more than it could prove.
Greek oratory was much bound by conventions from which even the greatest speakers could not altogether escape. To some extent this may be attributed to the evil influence of the teachers of rhetoric, but by far the greater part of the blame must rest upon the Athenian audiences.