Antiphon c. 480 BC – 411 BC

Antiphon was a Greek sophist of late fifth-century Athens, sometimes identified with Antiphon of Rhamnus, the celebrated orator and statesman of the same period. The two long fragments of his treatise On Truth, recovered on Egyptian papyri in the early twentieth century, contain the earliest surviving sophistical argument that justice as defined by law is at odds with what nature requires, and that, by nature, all human beings, Greek and barbarian, are alike. He also set up an early Athenian practice of philosophical consolation in which he is said to have eased grief by reasoned conversation. He was executed in 411 BC after the failure of the oligarchic coup.

Antiphon of Rhamnous was born in Attica around 480 BC and is the oldest of the canonical ten Attic orators. He served as Athens's first professional logographer, writing speeches for litigants who would themselves deliver them in court, and he is credited with the surviving Tetralogies — sets of model speeches in fictitious homicide cases — and three real courtroom orations, including the long defence On the Murder of Herodes. Thucydides describes him as the most intellectually capable man of his time and the secret architect of the oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 BC.

After the fall of the oligarchy he refused to flee Athens, delivered a defence speech that Thucydides judged the finest ever heard, and was nonetheless condemned and executed in 411 BC. The papyrus fragments published in the twentieth century of the works On Truth and On Concord, attributed to an Antiphon styled 'the Sophist', show a thinker concerned with the contrast between law (nomos) and nature (physis), the definition of justice, and the pursuit of self-interest where no one is watching.

Whether the orator and the sophist were the same man has been debated since antiquity; many recent scholars accept the identification on the strength of style and chronology. On either reading Antiphon stands as a pivotal figure: at once a master of forensic rhetoric, an early reformer of Athenian prose, a sophistic theorist of justice, and a casualty of his own oligarchic politics.