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The interest in the spatial inscription and practical operations of knowledge, at the core of the “places of knowledge”, offers a new approach to consider Athenian trials: if the courts are a place for the production of knowledge, how is the information useful in the cases presented to the jurors? The place of the practical modalities of knowledge is somewhat paradoxical in the forensic speeches, which are sources for actual practices. It is true that litigants insist on the use of evidence such as witnesses, decrees and laws. But they sometimes deny the relevance of the means of persuasion to inform the direct knowledge of the judges. Similarly, information already known by the audience can lead to a spatialisation of that knowledge through discussion among the jurors which the speakers encourage. But the litigants can also direct the thinking of those same jurors by imposing an interpretation of the laws and decrees. As such, orators appear to have special legal expertise. Yet they seek to erase their forensic abilities by pointing out their errors. Therefore, the comparison with other sources allows us to identify the apparatus of truth at work in the corpus of the ten Attic orators: it consists of bringing to light an openness of speech and thus of consigning to the shadows most of the practical modalities of knowledge-production, creating the fiction of an absence of materiality.