Library › Greek: Oratory & Rhetoric › On the Revolution (Fragments)
On the Revolution was the speech Antiphon of Rhamnus gave in his own defence in 411 BC, when he was tried for his leading role in the oligarchic coup of the Four Hundred at Athens. He was condemned and executed. The speech is lost apart from quotations and the fragments preserved on a papyrus now in Geneva, first published by Jules Nicole in 1907, which are presented here. In them the speaker answers charges about his conduct and argues that he had no reason to favour oligarchy.
Thucydides judged it the finest defence on a capital charge made by anyone up to his time. Even in damaged form, the papyrus gives a rare first-hand voice from one of the leaders of the revolution of 411 BC and shows Antiphon's argument from probability at work.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: P.Genev. inv. 264bis + 267 (Nicole 1907)). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).