SOURCE: Gagarin, Michael. “The Ancient Tradition on the Identity of Antiphon.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 31, no. 1 (spring 1990): 27-44.

In the following essay, Gagarin argues that, according to ancient tradition, Antiphon the Sophist and Antiphon of Rhamnus were one and the same person.

Among many Antiphons known from antiquity, two fifth-century figures are sometimes thought to be the same person: Antiphon of Rhamnus, an orator and a leader of the oligarchic coup in 411, and ‘Antiphon the Sophist’, one of Socrates' interlocutors in Xenophon (Mem. 1.6) to whom are often attributed the works On Truth, On Concord, and Politicus.¹ The separatist case has usually been based on the papyrus fragments of On Truth, but the most recent separatist argument, by Gerard Pendrick,² deals almost entirely with the ancient tradition. He concedes that “the majority of ancient opinion is unitarian” (59), but he accords this fact little weight and presents instead a...