Agnon was an ancient Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 rhetoric

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...

ian, who wrote a work against rhetoric, which Quintilian

Quintilian

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing...

 calls "Rhetorices accusatio." Some modern scholars have considered this Agnon to be the same man as the demagogue

Demagogy

Demagogy or demagoguery is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of the public—typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes...

 Agnonides

Agnonides

Agnonides was an ancient Athenian demagogue and sycophant, a contemporary of Theophrastus and Phocion. The former was accused by Agnonides of impiety, but was acquitted by the Areopagus, and Theophrastus might have ruined his accuser had he been less generous...

, the contemporary of Phocion

Phocion

Phocion was an Athenian statesman and strategos, and the subject of one of Plutarch's Parallel Lives....

, as the latter is in some manuscripts of Cornelius Nepos

Cornelius Nepos

Cornelius Nepos was a Roman biographer. He was born at Hostilia, a village in Cisalpine Gaul not far from Verona. His Gallic origin is attested by Ausonius, and Pliny the Elder calls him Padi accola...

 called Agnon. But the manner in which Agnon is mentioned by Quintilian shows that he is a rhetorician, who lived at a much later period than the 4th century BC suggested by an identification with Agnonides

Agnonides

Agnonides was an ancient Athenian demagogue and sycophant, a contemporary of Theophrastus and Phocion. The former was accused by Agnonides of impiety, but was acquitted by the Areopagus, and Theophrastus might have ruined his accuser had he been less generous...

. Whether however he is the same as the academic philosopher mentioned by Athenaeus

Athenaeus

Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...

is still a matter of some debate.