Nothing is directly known of Antiphon's political relations before the year 411 B. C.; but there are slight indications which agree well with his later hostility to the democracy. Harpokration has preserved the names of two speeches written by him, one for the people of Samothrace, on the subject of the tribute which they paid to Athens; another, on the same subject, for the people of Lindos in Rhodes ¹ . The oppression of the subject-allies by the demagogues, who extorted from them large sums on any pretence or threat, was a commonplace of complaint with oligarchs ² . The employment of Antiphon, afterwards so staunch an oligarch, by aggrieved allies, preparing to represent their grievances at the imperial city, was perhaps more than an accident of professional routine. The hostility of Antiphon to Alkibiades ³ , again, need not have had any political meaning; but it would have been especially natural in one who had shared the views, and who mourned the fate, of Nikias. At all events, the words of Thucydides give a vivid idea of the position held at Athens by Antiphon just before the Revolution of the Four Hundred. His abilities were acknowledged, but they were exerted only for others; he himself came forward neither in the assembly, nor—‘when he could help it ⁴ ’—in the law-courts; he lay under the suspicion of the people for ‘cleverness.’ The nature of the ‘cleverness’ ( δεινότης) for which Antiphon was distrusted and disliked is sufficiently illustrated by his Tetralogies. It was the art of fighting a cause which could hardly be defended on any broad ground by raising in succession a number of more or less fine points. The indignant bewilderment expressed by the imaginary prosecutor in the Second Tetralogy ⁵ on finding the common-sense view of the case turned upside-down represents what many a citizen of the old school must have felt when he encountered, in the ekklesia or the law-court, a client of the ingenious ‘speech-writer.’ Antiphon was a cautious, patient man. The comic poets could ridicule him for his poverty or his avarice ⁶ ; they could say that the speeches which he sold for great sums were ‘framed to defeat justice ⁷ ;’ but a carefully obscure life probably offered no hold to any more definite attack. Meanwhile he was quietly at work with the oligarchic clubs. According to Thucydides he was not merely the arch-plotter of the Revolution. He was the man who ‘had thought about it longest.’