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Athoa accompanies Theocritus as he returns to the house. The pair have just come from the courts, where Theocritus’ stepbrother Antiphon has served a petition demanding custody of Athoa and her fellow slave, Phylele.
Angrily, Theocritus tells Athoa that he instructed Antiphon to take his petition, fold it so that there were plenty of sharp edges, and shove it. Hearing this, Phylele gives a wail of relief, and Theocritus responds with a grim smile. Athoa knows that, if the situation merited it, Theocritus would torture the pair himself. But Antiphon is making a grab for the family inheritance, and Theocritus won’t see his valuable slaves damaged for another’s greed. Yet Athoa says nothing, for as she well knows, the danger has not yet passed.
Antiphon won’t give up. It will help his case that the family have refused to surrender their slaves to him for questioning, especially as he claims they were involved in a matter as serious as the death by poisoning of an Athenian citizen.
Fourteen years ago a man called Philoneos, a friend of the mother’s now-deceased husband, had stopped at the house before travelling abroad on business. Philoneos had a slave concubine called Dilitira, but he was bored with her. Before he departed from Athens, Philoneos intended to sell Dilitira to a brothel. That much everyone is agreed upon.
However, according to Antiphon, his stepmother passed on to Dilitira a message of hope. The slave woman, Phylele, would give Dilitira a vial of love potion that the mother had brewed herself. If Dilitira were to slip that philtre to Philoneos in his wine, he would immediately fall back in love with Dilitira, and she would be saved. Of course, since the husband would be sharing the wine from the same urn as Philoneos, he would be dosed also, but what wife minds her husband loving her more?
The mother shakes her head. ‘She didn’t get the potion from me. They – Philoneos and your father – were staying together at the Piraeus. If you remember, your father was about to travel to the island of Naxos on business, and Philoneos was going there to sacrifice anyway, so they went down to the port together.’
Everyone knows there are a dozen places in the Piraeus where you can get a love potion. Theocritus assumes that the desperate Dilitira probably asked some sorceress for the strongest dose possible. The important thing to know about most love potions is that the effects are cumulative. You add a drop to your victim’s food each day and his passion slowly grows.
But Dilitira didn’t have days. She was being sold the next day. So once she had the potion, from whatever source, when she served the wine after dinner she gave almost the entire dose at once to Philoneos. Then she poured what was left into the father’s drink. Philoneos died on the spot. The father lasted twenty days before he died, too.
Afterwards, Dilitira claimed that she acted alone. She was tortured after the killing and she did not implicate anyone else, even when they broke her bones. So there the matter rested for fourteen years. Now, during a dispute over the family inheritance, Antiphon has made his extraordinary claim that this stepmother was the source of the poison, and the slaves her accomplices. Furthermore, he claims that ‘love’ was never intended, but rather that the ‘love philtre’ had been simple poison.
It helps the family’s defence that the slaves are still here, fourteen years after the alleged poisoning. After all, a cold-blooded poisoner would have surely disposed of such inconvenient witnesses long before. The slaves are completely in the power of Theocritus’ mother, the alleged poisoner.
Antiphon’s deposition states that he intends to get the ‘truth’ out of the slaves by force. There’s no possibility that someone half out of her mind with terror and pain can lie consistently, so Antiphon wants the slaves tortured so that they will reveal their part in the foul deed. Of course, if the family actually do surrender the slaves and the slaves stick to their stories, that puts the mother in the clear.
Athoa imagines the tortures and is much less certain. It was fourteen years ago. Even with a clear head and an excellent memory she can’t remember something that precisely – and she knows that if it comes to that, she will indeed be half-mad with terror and pain.
And all Antiphon needs is to find something – anything – that Phylele and Athoa remember differently and he will use that as proof that they are lying, making way for further and more brutal tortures. In the end they might say whatever he wants to make the pain stop.
Athoa closes her eyes. She turns into a gibbering wreck if her owners so much as produce the whip. She can hardly imagine what she’ll be like at the sight of a branding iron. She forces herself to be silent, for fear of being thrown out of the room.
The mother wasn’t at the court for the deposition. As a woman she cannot represent herself – the law says that her sons have to defend her against the poisoning charge. So Theocritus now updates her. ‘According to Antiphon’s deposition, you confessed. While Father lay on his deathbed, you came to him and informed him that you had prepared the poison. You told him how you had taken advantage of the slave girl’s desperation and tricked her into thinking your vial of poison was a love potion.
‘In short, you admitted that you were the killer and that poor deceived girl was merely your agent. Oh, and you did all this gloating in front of Athoa.’
Athoa thinks back. They were indeed both there by the dying man’s bedside. They tended to him and did everything the doctor said. And Antiphon – he was a boy then – came up just once, maybe twice when he thought his father was only sick. He was there all the time when he thought he might lose his inheritance.
According to Antiphon, that’s when his father told him what his stepmother had confessed. Antiphon claimed before the judges that he was ordered by his dying father to bring his murderer to justice, and now he is a grown man, he is doing his solemn duty – much as it pains him to act against his own family.
After Theocritus has reported this, there is a thoughtful silence. Athoa wonders why, if the father was well enough to force such an oath from his son, he was not also well enough to order his son to bring a magistrate to witness him changing his will and disinheriting his wife. He could also have accused her on the spot. Yet oddly enough, he did none of these things.
A COURTESAN APPEARS BEFORE A TRIBUNAL
‘Ah,’ says Theocritus, who has been thinking on the same lines. ‘But Antiphon can claim that Mother prevented him from leaving the house. He was a minor at the time, remember?’
‘And the doctor?’ wonders Athoa. Could the mother also prevent the doctor from coming and going? Could she keep Antiphon from talking to the doctor, and the doctor from talking to the father? Hopefully all these questions will be raised by the defence. Of course, that’s why Antiphon came up with the mother’s ‘confession’ in front of Athoa. He’s desperate. If he can’t torture an admission out of the slaves, he has no case, and if the mother is not condemned, he has no inheritance.
‘It will come to court anyway,’ says Theocritus cynically. ‘Only one thing terrifies an Athenian householder more than the Spartans, and that’s his own wife. You’d think there was an epidemic of husbands dropping dead around Athens, there’s such an obsession with wives and poison. With the public mood as it is, the Archons will want a full public hearing.’
‘And I’ll be Nessus, as Philoneos is Herakles,’ remarks the mother wryly. In the well-known myth Herakles was slain by his wife, who – thinking she had been given a love potion – had been tricked by a scheming centaur called Nessus into administering poison to her husband.
Theocritus shakes his head. ‘No, he’s not going with that. The parallel is too exact – it might suggest to the jury that is where he got the idea. Judging from what he was ranting about in his deposition, Mother, you are going to be Clytemnestra.’
‘Clytemnestra?’ remarks the mother. ‘I could carry that off.’ She strikes a dramatic pose.
Athoa calls up her limited knowledge of mythology and makes the connection. Clytemnestra was the half-sister of the beauteous Helen of Troy, but that’s not what everyone remembers about her. While her husband was off fighting the Trojan War, Clytemnestra had an affair with her husband’s cousin. Most Athenian males can identify with that situation. They spend a good part of the year away with the army or the fleet, leaving their wives alone, supposedly, at home. When Clytemnestra’s husband finally returned, dusty from a long chariot ride, his loving wife prepared a bath and stabbed him to death while he was taking it.
Sure, apart from that illicit affair, Clytemnestra had plenty of reasons for wanting her husband dead. That husband had murdered Clytemnestra’s previous husband, raped and abducted her, then sacrificed her daughter at the altar to ensure a favourable wind to Troy.14 But that’s not what Athenian men remember. Mostly they remember Clytemnestra when their wives offer to draw them a bath.
Athoa knows that if Antiphon successfully identifies his stepmother with Clytemnestra in the jury’s minds, he will be halfway to getting a guilty verdict. If the jury finds the mother guilty, Antiphon gets the father’s entire inheritance. The sons of his second wife – that wife being the mother – also lose their share of the inheritance if the mother is condemned as a poisoner. They’ll lose the house, too.
Without the testimony of Athoa and Phylele, Antiphon has only wild and improbable accusations with nothing to support them. Doubtless he will exploit the suspicion every man harbours about his wife’s fidelity. There will be appeal after appeal to the heavens for ‘ justice’ and the pathos of a poor man lying on his deathbed, helpless to avenge himself on the gloating wife who killed him. He won’t get far with a jury, so the family expect that Antiphon will try to get himself a lynch mob.
Theocritus lays out his planned defence. He will start by explaining Antiphon’s motive. It’s not revenge for a murder a long time ago – a murder that didn’t happen anyway. It’s greed in the here and now. There are gaping holes in his allegations, and the mother is so evidently innocent that Theocritus is not going to have their slaves crippled for nothing. After fourteen years it is possible that anyone can accuse anyone of anything. The evidence is long gone, and memories have faded. What the jurors use as a criterion for justice today might be the basis for their own condemnation or innocence in the future.
The brother is unconvinced. ‘His appeals to emotion are so much stronger than our appeals to reason. Still, you are the older brother. I’ll follow your lead.’ Athoa and Phylele follow him out, but Athoa pauses outside the door to listen.
When Theocritus thinks he is alone with his mother, he quietly tells her, ‘I didn’t want to say in front of the slaves, in case they do something stupid like running off. But I talked to some friends after the deposition. Our refusal to hand the slaves over is definitely hurting our case. To guarantee an acquittal we might have to give the slaves up for questioning.’
‘No!’ says the mother, and the ferocity in her voice evidently takes Theocritus by surprise. Athoa is much less startled. She strains to hear the son’s muttered reply.
‘I didn’t know you were so concerned for them. We will have doctors, and the best care afterwards …’
‘You can’t,’ says the mother in a savage whisper. ‘Your father was tougher than I thought. He lasted hours after I told him and I couldn’t keep that little rat Antiphon away from him all that time. And yes, Athoa overheard me, curse her!’
The Facts of the Matter
The events in this chapter happened almost exactly as described. They are outlined in a text called Antiphon: Against the Stepmother for Poisoning. The date is uncertain, but it is one of fifteen surviving speeches by the Athenian orator Antiphon. Most experts put the date of this speech between 419 BC and 414 BC.
The argument is that when Antiphon became a successful orator, he finally became confident enough to reveal his family’s guilty secret. Or, alternatively, he became embroiled in an argument with his stepbrothers about the family inheritance, and cooked up a false charge against his stepmother.
Regrettably, we do not have the stepmother’s defence. Nor do we know what the jury decided. In the trial Antiphon did indeed lead with the refusal of the defendants to present their slaves for questioning. Otherwise his case is all unfounded allegations and bluster. No impartial jury would find against the stepmother on the basis of the charges he presents. Sadly, Athenian juries were sometimes far from impartial.
