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He lived about the time of the Persian war and of Gorgias the rhetorician, being somewhat younger than he. And he lived to see the subversion of the popular government in the commonwealth which was wrought by the four hundred conspirators, in which he himself is thought to have had the chiefest hand, being sometimes commander of two galleys, and sometimes general, and having by the many and great victories he obtained gained them many allies, he armed the young men, manned out sixty galleys, and on all their occasions went ambassador to Lacedaemon at the time when Eetionia was fortified. But when those Four Hundred were overcome and taken down, he with Archeptolemus, who was likewise one of the same number, was accused of the conspiracy, condemned, and sentenced to the punishment due to traitors, his body cast out unburied, and all his posterity infamous on record. But there are some who tell us, that he was put to death by the Thirty Tyrants; and among the rest, Lysias, in his oration for Antiphon’s daughter, says the same; for he left a little daughter, whom Callaeschrus claimed for his wife by the law of propinquity. And Theopompus likewise, in his Fifteenth Book of Philippics, tells us the same thing. But this must have been another Antiphon, son of Lysidonides, whom Cratinus mentions in his Pytine as a rascal. But how could he be executed in the time of the Four Hundred, and afterward live to be put to death by the Thirty Tyrants? There is likewise another story of the manner of his death: that when he was old, he sailed to Syracuse, when the tyranny of Dionysius the First was most famous; and being at table, a question was put, what sort of brass was best. When others had answered as they thought most proper, he replied, That is the best brass, of which the statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton were made. The tyrant hearing this, and taking it as a tacit exhortation to his subjects to contrive his ruin, he commanded Antiphon to be put to death; and some say that he put him to death for deriding his tragedies.
