LYSIAS

born c. 445 BC died after 380, BC Greek professional speech writer, whose unpretentious simplicity became the model for a plain style of Attic Greek. Lysias was the son of Cephalus, a wealthy native of Syracuse who settled in Athens. Plato, at the opening of the Republic, had drawn a charming picture of Cephalus and his sons Lysias and Polemarchus. After studying rhetoric in Italy, Lysias returned to Athens in 412. It was possibly then that he taught rhetoric. In 404, during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, he and his brother Polemarchus were seized as aliens. Polemarchus was killed, but Lysias escaped to Megara, where he helped the cause of exiled Athenian democrats. On the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403, he returned to Athens and began writing speeches for litigants. His surviving forensic speeches often deal with crimes against the statemurder, malicious wounding, sacrilege, and taking bribes. A particularly delightful speech, For the Cripple, defends a cripple's right to a state pension. In this and other works Lysias displays his characteristic adaptability in suiting his composition to the character of the speaker; and, though the tone of his professional writing was quiet, he was capable of passionate oratory, as exemplified in his own longest and most famous speech, Against Eratosthenes, denouncing one of the Thirty Tyrants for his part in the reign of terror that followed the collapse of Athens in 404.