Note 124 — Chapter LXII · TWENTY-FIRST YEAR OF THE WAR. — OLIGARCHY OF FOUR HUNDRED AT ATHENS. (continued 2)

It is given at length in Pseudo-Plutarch, Vit. x, Oratt. pp. 833, 834. It was preserved by Cæcilius, a Sicilian and rhetorical teacher, of the Augustan age; who possessed sixty orations ascribed to Antiphon, twenty-five of which he considered spurious.

Antiphon left a daughter, whom Kallæschrus sued for in marriage, pursuant to the forms of law, being entitled to do so on the score of near relationship (ἐπεδικάσατο). Kallæschrus was himself one of the Four Hundred, perhaps a brother of Kritias. It seems singular that the legal power of suing at law for a female in marriage, by right of near kin (τοῦ ἐπιδικάζεσθαι), could extend to a female disfranchised and debarred from all rights of citizenship.

If we may believe Harpokration, Andron, who made the motion in the senate for sending Antiphon and Archeptolemus to trial, had been himself a member of the Four Hundred oligarchs, as well as Theramenês (Harp. v. Ἄνδρων).

The note of Dr. Arnold upon that passage (viii, 68) wherein Thucydidês calls Antiphon ἀρετῇ οὐδενὸς ὕστερος, “inferior to no man in virtue,” well deserves to be consulted. This passage shows, in a remarkable manner, what were the political and private qualities which determined the esteem of Thucydidês. It shows that his sympathies went along with the oligarchical party; and that, while the exaggerations of opposition-speakers, or demagogues, such as those which he imputes to Kleon and Hyperbolus, provoked his bitter hatred, exaggerations of the oligarchical warfare, or multiplied assassinations, did not make him like a man the worse. But it shows, at the same time, his great candor in the narration of facts: for he gives an undisguised revelation both of the assassinations, and of the treason, of Antiphon.