During the short rule of the Four Hundred he seems to have been one of the leaders of the extreme party, as opposed to the followers of Theramenes, who advocated measures of conciliation. He went, with Phrynichus and eight other envoys, to negotiate peace with Sparta in the hope of thus securing the oligarchical government. Shortly after the failure of this embassy came the murder of Phrynichus and the fall of the Four Hundred, and the democracy was ready for revenge. Most of the ringleaders fled to Deceleia; Antiphon and Archeptolemus remained, were prosecuted for treason to the people, condemned and executed. Their property was confiscated, their houses razed to the ground, their descendants disfranchised for all time, and their bodies refused burial in the soil of Athens or any of her allies.
On the occasion of his trial the orator, who had spent the best years of his life in pleading by the lips of others in causes which did not interest him, justified his renown and far surpassed all expectation, delivering what was, in Thucydides’ opinion, the finest speech of its kind ever heard up to that time. Aristotle preserves an anecdote telling how the poet Agathon congratulated the condemned man on his brilliant effort, and Antiphon replied that ‘he would rather have satisfied one man of taste than any number of common people’—οἱ τυγχάνοντες, a fine aristocratic term for great Athenian people.[45]
§ 2
At the time when Antiphon composed his speeches, Attic prose had not settled down into any fixed forms. The first of the orators was therefore an explorer in language; he was not hampered by traditions, and this freedom was an advantage; but on the other hand, the insufficiency of models threw him back entirely on his own resources.
Of his predecessors in prose-writing, the early historians were of no account as stylists. Herodotus wrote in a foreign dialect and a discursive colloquial manner which was unsuited to the needs of oratory; Gorgias, indeed, used the Attic dialect, but had hindered the growth of prose by a too copious use of florid poetical expression. Antiphon, therefore, had little to guide him, and we should expect to find in his work the imperfections which are natural in the experimental stage of any art.
So few of his works remain that we cannot trace any development in his style; it is only possible to guess at certain influences which may have helped to form it.
He must have been familiar with the methods of the best speakers in the assembly and the law-courts of the Periclean age; without great experience of procedure in both he could not have hoped for any success as a speech-writer. He must have been versed in the theories of the great Sophists, such as Protagoras and, more particularly, Gorgias; and the model discourses which they and others composed for their pupils’ instruction were, no doubt, accessible to him. The general influence of Sophistry is, however, to be traced more in the nature of his arguments than in his style.[46]
§ 3
As regards vocabulary, we are struck at once by the fact that Antiphon uses many words which, apart from their occurrence in these speeches, would be classed as rare or poetical; words, that is, which a maturer prose-style was inclined to reject. This was partly the result of circumstances; as has been noted, there was no canon of style and vocabulary, and the influence of Gorgias had been rather to confuse than to distinguish the dictions of prose and poetry, while the great importance attached to poetry in the sophistical education of the time increased the difficulties for any experimental writer who was unwilling to resort to the colloquial language. In many cases, however, we may give Antiphon credit for intention in the deliberate use of poetical words: the ‘austere’ style ‘is wont to expand itself,’ says Dionysius, ‘by means of big spacious words’;[47] and a store of such words is to be found in the poets, notably Aeschylus.[48]
Antiphon is not singular among prose writers in introducing poetical words; Plato, the greatest master of Attic prose, is in some cases more poetical than the poets themselves, though his genius is sufficient to obviate any sense of harshness or incongruity. But to an orator such harshness might on occasion be a positive advantage for producing a particular effect; an unusual word must, at the worst, attract attention; at the best it lends dignity to an otherwise pedestrian sentence. Dionysius classed Antiphon and Aeschylus together as masters of the ‘austere’ style, and some of the orator’s words and phrases, quite apart from his treatment of his subjects, have a certain touch of Aeschylean majesty.