The speech is twice cited without suspicion by Harpokration: it is also named as genuine by Photios ⁴ . The biographer of Andokides does not mention it; but, in its place, mentions a Defence in reply to Phaeax ⁵ . There are traces of its ascription in antiquity both to Lysias ⁶ and to Aeschines ⁷ . But an examination of the speech will show that it cannot have been spoken by Andokides, or written by him for the use of another; that it was probably not written by any one who lived at the time of which it treats; and that there is good reason for believing it to be the work of a late sophist.

That Andokides spoke this speech is inconceivable. The speaker says (§ 8) that he has been four times tried; and (§ 41) that he has been ambassador to Molossia, Thesprotia, Italy and Sicily. But elsewhere, excusing himself for acts committed in the very year in which this speech is supposed to have been delivered—in 415—Andokides pleads that he was young and foolish at the time ⁸ . Moreover, no writer mentions Andokides as having been in danger of ostracism at the same time as Nikias and Alkibiades.

Nor is it credible that Andokides wrote the speech for another person—Phaeax, for instance, as Valckenär ⁹ suggests. The style is strongly against this. It is far more artificial than anything by Andokides which we possess; it approaches, indeed, more nearly to the style of Isokrates. The formal antitheses in the proem (§§ 1—2) are a striking example of this character ¹⁰ .

Taylor ¹¹ and others have ascribed the speech to Phaeax himself. Plutarch names Phaeax, Alkibiades and Nikias as the three men over whom ostracism was hanging at the same time; and quotes from a speech against Alkibiades, with which the name of Phaeax is connected, a story which appears (in a different form) in our speech ¹² . Then it is known from Thucydides that Phaeax went on an embassy at least to Sicily and Italy ¹³ . Valckenär's and Ruhnken's ¹⁴ arguments against Taylor are inconclusive. If the speech was really written at the time of which it treats, it cannot be disproved, any more than it can be proved, that Phaeax was the author.

But an overwhelming amount of evidence tends to show that the speech is the work of a later sophist. First stand two general reasons; the supposed occasion of the speech, and the style of its composition.

As far as the nature of ostracism is known to us, ¹⁵ the whole speech involves a thorough misconception of it: it assumes a situation which could never have existed. Once every year the ekklesia was formally asked by its presidents whether, in that year, an ostracism should be held. If it voted affirmatively, a day was fixed. The market-place was railed in for voting, every citizen might write any name he pleased on the shell which he dropped into the urn; and if against any one name there were six thousand votes, the person so indicated was banished for ten— in later times, for five—years. The characteristic feature of the whole proceeding was the absence of everything like an open contest between definite rivals. The very object of ostracism was to get rid of a dangerous man in the quietest and least invidious way. No names were mentioned; far less was discussion dreamed of. The idea of a man rising in the ekklesia or other public gathering, and stating that he was one of three persons who were in danger of ostracism; then inveighing at great length and with extraordinary bitterness against one of the other two; and concluding with a vindication of his own consequence—would have probably seemed to Athenians of the days of ostracism incredibly indecent and absurd. In the first place, they would have been offended by his open assumption—whether true or not—that he was one of the citizens who had rendered the resort to ostracism necessary; secondly, they would have resented his attempt to prejudice the ballot; and if, in the end, he had escaped, his escape would probably have been due to their conviction that, as the poet Plato said of Hyperbolos, ‘it was not for such fellows that shells were invented ¹⁶ .’ But the speaker against Alkibiades does not only himself speak thus; he asserts that Alkibiades is about to address the house next, and to endeavour to move it by his tears ¹⁷ . ¹⁸

If the nature of the situation supposed were not enough, the style of the composition would in itself be almost decisive. The speaker begins with a formal statement of the matter in hand, evidently meant for a reader; and then goes on to string together all the tritest stories about Alkibiades. This —the body of the speech—has the unmistakable air of a compilation.

The arguments from the supposed occasion and from the style are confirmed by the evidence of particular misstatements. In §§ 22, 23 Alkibiades is said to have had a child by a Melian woman who came into his power after the capture of Melos; but the speech, as has been shown, can refer only to the spring of 415: and Melos was taken only in the winter of 416—415. In § 33 Kimon is said to have been banished because he had married his own sister. In § 13 the commander at Delium—a battle fought but nine years before the supposed date of the speech —is called Hipponikos instead of Hippokrates. The two last blunders would have been impossible for an Athenian of that age. On the whole there can be little doubt that in this speech we must recognize the work of a late rhetorician who saw, in the juxtaposition of Alkibiades, Nikias and Andokides, a dramatic subject; who had only an indistinct notion of how ostracism was managed in olden times; and who believed himself sufficiently prepared for his task when he had read in Plutarch all the scandalous stories relating to Alkibiades.