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There has been much debate in scholarship over the actual existence of torture (basanos) of innocent slaves for evidentiary purposes in the courts of classical Athens in the age of the orators. In the absence of direct evidence in the forensic speeches, scholars have pointed to a putative inconsistency between theory and practice regarding this institution. On the one hand, belief in the reliability of torture is evident in the works of the Attic orators, as well as challenges to evidentiary torture. Furthermore, rhetorical theory (in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Anaximenes’ Rhetorica ad Alexandrum) supposedly provides guidance to orators as if recourse to basanos was a real possibility and classifies torture under the category of artless or supplementary proofs. On the other hand, not even one of such challenges has evidently been accepted and actually carried out and the sources are silent as to the actuality of evidentiary torture …