Androtion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Androtion (c. 350 B.C.), Greek orator, and one of the leading politicians of his time, was a pupil of Isocrates and a contemporary of Demosthenes.

He is known to us chiefly from the speech of Demosthenes, in which he was accused of illegality in proposing the usual honour of a crown to the Council of Five Hundred at the expiration of its term of office. Androtion filled several important posts, and during the Social War was appointed extraordinary commissioner to recover certain arrears of taxes. Both Demosthenes and Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 4) speak favourably of his powers as an orator.

He is said to have gone into exile at Megara, and to have composed an Atthis, or annalistic account of Attica from the earliest times to his own days (Pausanias vi. 7; x. 8). It is disputed whether the annalist and orator are identical, but an Androtion who wrote on agriculture is certainly a different person. Professor Gaetano de Sanctis (in L'Attide di Androzione e un papiro di Oxyrhynchos, Turin, 1908) attributes to Androtion, the atthidographer, a 4th-century historical fragment, discovered by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. v.). Strong arguments against this view are set forth by E. M. Walker in the Classical Review, May 1908.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.