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.