Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/494

472 472 HISTORY OF THE existing between the accused and the deceased, the defendant maintains that he could certainly have had no hand in the murder, when it was obvious that the first suspicion would fall on himself. While the former sets great value on the evidence of the slave as the only one available to* his purpose, the latter maintains that slaves would not be tortured as they were, according to the Greek custom, unless their simple testimony had been considered insufficient. In answer to this the complainant urges, in his second speech, that slaves were tortured on account of theft, for the purpose of bringing to light some transgression which they concealed to please their master ; but that, in cases like the one in question, they were emancipated in order that they might be qualified to give evidence ;* and, in regard to the argument that the accused must have foreseen that he would be suspected, the fear of this suspicion would not have been suffi- cient to counterbalance the danger resulting from the loss of his cause. The accused, however, gives a turn to the argument from probability, by remarking, among other things, that a freeman would be restrained from giving a false testimony by a fear of endangering his reputation and substance ; but that there was nothing to hinder the slave at the point of death from gratifying the family of his master, by impeaching his master's old enemy. And after having compared all the arguments from probability, and drawn a balance in his own favour, he concludes aptly enough, by saying that he can prove his innocence not merely by probabilities t but by facts, and accordingly offers all his slaves, male, and female, to be tortured according to the custom of Athens, in order to prove that he never left his house on the night of the murder. We have selected these few points from many other arguments equally acute on both sides of the question, in order to give those readers who are not yet acquainted with Antiphon's speeches, some, notion, however faint, of the shrewdness and ingenuity with which the rhetoricians of that time could twist and turn to their own purposes the facts and circumstances which they were called upon to discuss. The sophistic art of strength- ening the weaker cause was in Antiphon's school connected with forensic oratory, the professor of which must necessarily be prepared to argue in favour of either of the parties in a law-suit. § 3. Besides these rhetorical exercises, we have three of Antiphon's speeches which were actually delivered in court— the accusation of a step -mother charged with poisoning, the defence of the person charged with the murder of Herodes, and another defence of a choregus, one slaves were compelled to give evidence by the torture. t In § 10, he says with great acuteness : " While they maintain on grounds of probability thai I am guilty, they nevertheless maintain that I am not probably but actually the murderer." Z. to dixavixov yivo;-
 * Personal freedom was indispensable for evidence (//MgrvgtTv) properly *o called :