Antiphon the most antique of the orators

Antiphon stands first among the orators of the Attic canon; and he claims this place not merely because he was born a few years earlier than any one of the rest. A broad difference separates him from those who were nearly his contemporaries hardly less than from men of the next century, from Ando-kides and Lysias as well as from Demosthenes and Hypereides. He represents older ideas and an older conception of the manner in which these ideas are to find expression. His successors, taken collectively, are moderns; compared with them, he is ancient.

The beginnings of Greek Prose

The outburst of intellectual life in Hellas during the fifth century before Christ had for one of its results the creation of Greek prose. Before that age no Greek had conceived artistic composition except in the form of poetry. The Ionians who had already recorded myths or stated philosophies in prose had either made no effort to rise above the ease of daily talk, or had clothed their meaning in a poetical diction of the most ambitious kind. As the mental horizon of Greece was widened, as subtler ideas and more various combinations began to ask for closer and more flexible expression, the desire grew for something more precise than poetry, firmer and more compact than the idiom of conversation. Two special causes aided this general tendency. The development of democratic life, making the faculty of speech before popular assemblies and popular lawcourts a necessity, hastened the formation of an oratorical prose.