Antiphon I and the Concept of Malice

Abstract The first speech in the corpus was once judged the best of Antiphon’s work for its portrayal of character. It is now generally regarded the worst of his efforts for the failings of its argument. It presents us with a set of problems not unlike the puzzle of the Tetralogies. The case involves a plot so convoluted that it was once thought to be an artificial scenario for demonstration: the plaintiff, having recently come of age, prosecutes a woman for the murder of her husband, the plaintiff’s father; the death occurred some years earlier when the young man was too young to prosecute; the wife allegedly brought about the victim’s death by poisoning at the hands of an unwitting accomplice—a concubine who belonged to a friend of the victim and administered the drug to both men. Antiphon’s authorship is again in question—though not, in this instance, on grounds of language or law. There are dramatic flourishes that seem out of character with Antiphon’s austere style: the plaintiff refers to his ‘stepmother’ as Clytemnestra and casts himself in the role of a latter-day Orestes. The arrangement of the speech is peculiarly disjointed: the proof (5-13) comes before the narrative (14-20); and after what appears to be the proper epilogue, there is yet a second, rather disconnected, closing statement (28-31).