. "Against the Stepmother" is Antiphon's only surviving speech for the prosecution. The
plaintiff accuses his stepmother of having murdered his father while he was a child. The speech attempts to prove that the stepmother arranged for her husband to be given a drug with the intention of killing him. The case rests on the argument that the stepmother persuaded another woman, the mistress of her husband's friend Philoneus, to poison her husband. The speaker never explains how he came to learn of this conspiracy, and Victoria Wohl says that he may have made it up entirely. Aside from the assertion that the stepmother had previously attempted to poison her husband, the speaker provides no evidence of his claims. Instead, he appeals to the jurors' fear of betrayal by their wives, and compares his stepmother's actions to those of
Clytemnestra murdering
Agamemnon.
Esther Eidinow notes that the speech is also reminiscent of the story of
Medea, while Victoria Wohl draws comparison to the myth of
Deianira told in
Sophocles'
Women of Trachis. The speech also emphasises the contrast between the speaker and his step-family, claiming that he brought the case out of piety, while his stepmother behaved "godlessly" (
atheos) and "profanely" (
anosios) in killing her husband. As women were not allowed to represent themselves in court in classical Athens, the stepmother seems to have been represented by her sons. The speech for the defence does not survive, but it may have argued that the stepmother had not intended to kill her husband, merely to give him a love potion. The
Magna Moralia discusses a similar case where a woman was acquitted based on the defence that she was not trying to kill her husband, but was acting out of love. Additionally, Michael Gagarin suggests that the defence may have attempted to portray the stepmother as sympathetic, and the dead man as having treated her badly. The charge, brought many years after the event, may have been motivated by a dispute over inheritance. As with most surviving Athenian legal speeches, the outcome of the case is unknown. Scholars have generally considered the prosecution case to be extremely weak. Patricia A. Watson notes that the speaker fails to explain the stepmother's motive in poisoning her husband. However, Gagarin argues that though the prosecution case is generally agreed to be weak, the speech is Antiphon's best narrative, and might still have resulted in a successful prosecution. While Gagarin sees the speech's use of references to tragedy as "particularly effective", Wohl suggests that this strategy might have backfired if the tragic allusions in Antiphon's speech instead brought to mind a more sympathetic character, such as Deianira. ==See also==