Cleophon
historical figure · 8 works · 8 mentions · 9 anchored passages
Cleophon the lyre-maker · Cleophon, the lyre-maker
in the texts
Against Ctesiphon
A politician invoked as a ruinous precedent for Demosthenes' conduct.
(whose statue, it seems, Pheidias wrought expressly that Demosthenes might have it to perjure himself by and to make profit of) that if any one should say that we ought to make peace with Philip, he would seize him by the hair and drag him to prison—in this imitating the politics of Cleophon, who, they tell us, in the time of the war against the Lacedaemonians, brought ruin to the state.
On the Embassy
An Athenian demagogue of the Peloponnesian War era, formerly a slave, who corrupted the people with bribes and threatened violence against anyone proposing peace.
And Cleophon, the lyre-maker, whom many remembered as a slave in fetters, who had dishonourably and fraudulently got himself enrolled as a citizen, and had corrupted the people by distribution of money, threatened to take his knife and slit the throat of any man who should make mention of peace.
On the Mysteries
Person said to have occupied the house of Andocides and Leogoras during Andocides' exile.
It was far more truly a disgrace during my exile, when Cleophon the lyre-maker occupied it.
Constitution of the Athenians
Popular leader and lyre-maker who introduced the dole and later blocked peace, condemned to death
After them, of the others, Theramenes son of Hagnon, and of the people Cleophon the lyre-maker, who first provided the two-obol dole;
then, when the Lacedaemonians wished to withdraw from Deceleia and make peace on the terms that each should keep what it had, some were eager for it, but the multitude would not consent, deceived by Cleophon, who prevented the peace from being made, coming into the Assembly drunk and wearing a breastplate, saying he would not allow it unless the Lacedaemonians gave up all the cities.
On the Commonwealth
Athenian demagogue named as a target of comic invective.
Granted, it injured popular men, wicked, seditious in the commonwealth—Cleon, Cleophon, Hyperbolus.
Stromata
Figure against whom Speusippus wrote a polemical work, mentioned only as the title's addressee.
For Speusippus, in the first book against Cleophon, seems to write the like to Plato through this:
On the Peace
A later Athenian popular leader used as a negative foil to earlier statesmen.
Now the polity as it was in the earlier time was as much better and stronger than that which obtained later as Aristides and Themistocles and Miltiades were better men than Hyperbolus and Cleophon and those who today harangue the people.
Hellenica
Athenian politician killed in a factional disturbance mentioned in the account of the episode's aftermath.
But when there broke out afterwards a factional disturbance, in the course of which Cleophon was put to death, these men escaped, before being brought to trial;