Lysias is as prominent a figure in the Greek rhetorical tradition and prose canon as he is a shadowy one. While surely among the most widely read Greek authors, we do not really know much about him and questions around the authorship of the so-called Lysianic corpus have troubled critics since antiquity. In fact, the large number of speeches that had been attributed to him by the first century bce prompted Dionysius of Halicarnassus to have a longer discussion of the methods of testing Lysianic authorship (Lysias 10–12).Footnote ¹ Throughout antiquity and until the mid-twentieth century, the absence of solid biographical information and of any conclusive evidence about the author did not prevent scholars from constructing full-scale narratives about Lysias’ life and works, mostly based on Lysias’ own speeches and possible reconstructed encounters with other contemporary intellectuals.Footnote ² It was the groundbreaking (and highly controversial) work by Kenneth Dover which brought about a change in Lysias studies.Footnote ³ He argued for a very different view of Lysias (and, as Usher noted,Footnote ⁴ implicitly of all Attic orators) by questioning the ability of the existing texts to point us towards the ‘actual’ speeches of the historical Lysias. In his skepticism, Dover’s work was very much in keeping with the contemporary preoccupations and literary theories of the 1960s. Dover argues that the attribution of works to Lysias and the building up of his corpus to the size that Dionysius reports by the first century bce was a process that had started already during the orator’s lifetime, and that there was probably a particular boost for literary forgeries to be passed off under Lysias’ name immediately after his death.Footnote ⁵ In other words, through the examination of chronology, ideology and artistry, Dover concluded that there is very little that we can say with full confidence about Lysias and, in particular, about Lysias’ authorship of the speeches in the corpus. The many stages that go into the emergence of a text, from the litigant to the speechwriter to the bookseller to publication, processes that we generally ignore for the sake of simplicity,Footnote ⁶ are all highly susceptible to modification and could easily cast a shadow on any comfortable attribution of texts to an author ‘Lysias’ whom we actually know very little about.

There are problems with this view that have since been highlighted by others. For example, Dover uses pervasively the concept of a ‘consultant’ for the Greek translation of λογόγραφος, which in itself clearly stands for someone writing the speech (rather than an advisor); in subsequent criticism, Lysias is regarded as the writer and author of these speeches, and we see no hint in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ treatment of Lysias for a view of Lysias as a consultant and not a prose artist.Footnote ⁷ Dover’s challenge, which was met with significant resistance upon its publication, has nevertheless been a productive one and has since pushed scholars further to explore the less visible elements of rhetorical practice.Footnote ⁸

Lysias’ corpus has since been fruitfully examined as a historical source for this extremely fascinating time period (c.403–380 bce) for which it provides valuable and unique information, thus offering a rare window into the actual lives of Athenians.Footnote ⁹ In this context, it has mattered less whether or not the author of these speeches is Lysias or somebody else trying to come off as Lysias, as long as the texts could be relatively securely dated to the fourth century bce. This approach would have been unusual for ancient critics, who looked at the orators primarily (if not exclusively) as masters of style and rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁰ The earliest moment of Lysias’ reception in Plato’s Phaedrus, which in many ways (as will be argued below) came to determine the orator’s name and reception for posterity, is a good example. This chapter will follow the figure of Lysias and his image that emerges through his own writings but in particular through his reception in the works of others. In other words, we will not try to establish historical information about the actual person Lysias who lived and wrote in Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, but rather examine the importance of the persona of Lysias, how this name ‘Lysias’ became significant in rhetorical studies, what kind of rhetorical tradition it was associated with, and how understanding and treatment of Lysias and his work changed from the fourth to the first century bce. This is no arbitrary choice, for the mentioned time frame captures the two crucial moments for the reception of Lysias and his corpus: the fourth century bce that marks Lysias’ activity as a speechwriter in Athens, and the first century bce when critics indicate that Lysias has become a chief representative of the tradition of rhetoric which is primarily concerned with style. Dover had once demonstrated our inability to get hold of the historical Lysias and to assess the authenticity of his corpus, but this chapter moves further and looks at what is left of τὸ Λυσιακόν (the ‘Lysianic’), taking therefore a closer and more cautious look at the figure of ‘Lysias’ and his shadow in his contemporary fourth century bce and later literary-rhetorical culture. Hence, without an ambition to tell a story of the practices and works of the historical person, this chapter will aim to ask (and answer) what is at stake in evoking the name (and author) Lysias.

1.1 Lysias …

Our primary evidence for Lysias’ life is limited to the following sources: Lysias’ speech 12 (Against Eratosthenes) and Against Hippotherses, Plato’s Phaedrus, Cleitophon and the Republic, and Apollodorus’ Prosecution against Neaira (§§21–3).Footnote ¹¹ Lysias’ speech 12 and Against Hippotherses (fr. 70 Carey), the latter of which survives in fragmentary form (we have roughly the last 200 lines of this speech), are generally taken to have been written by Lysias for his own court cases. The tone and first-person address make it highly likely that speech 12 was delivered by Lysias himself; Against Hippotherses, however, refers to Lysias in the third person which indicates that it had been delivered by someone else on his behalf.Footnote ¹² Which of the speeches was first, is unclear and depends on how we interpret the ambiguous and lacunous evidence of Lysias’ involvement in the restoration of democracy and – further – whether and how we look at the broader context of his career (including his possible literary ambitions).Footnote ¹³

The two speeches tell us that Lysias was a son of Cephalus, a wealthy Syracusan who moved to Athens at the invitation of Pericles and lived there as a metic when Lysias was born (12.4: οὑμὸς πατὴρ Κέφαλος ἐπείσθη μὲν ὑπὸ Περικλέους εἰς ταύτην τὴν γῆν ἀφικέσθαι […]).Footnote ¹⁴ The family suffered greatly under the Thirty (the main topic of both speeches), though probably not losing all its fortune, for Lysias seems to have been able to still give substantial support to the democrats after having fled and been deprived of his family property (fr. 70, 163 ff.). It is generally believed that after the Thirty Tyrants were overthrown in 403 bce, Lysias, in order to recover from financial difficulties, launched his career as a speechwriter.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, speech 12 Against Eratosthenes on the murder of his brother Polemarchus appears to be the earliest speech in the corpus, and certainly one of the outstanding moments to determine his writerly success. This speech is also one of our best sources for the events that took place in Athens under the Thirty, and the speech itself displays very strong democratic and anti-oligarchical language. We have no independent evidence of Lysias’ political views, and it is very probable that this ideological language can be explained by the fact that at the time when the speech was delivered it was common to appeal to democratic values and governance in order to secure the benevolence of juries.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, the fact that speech 12 exhibits these democratic sympathies in such vehement fashion and that these pro-democratic emotions come from one of the wealthiest metics in Athens might have played an important role for the subsequent image of ‘Lysias’.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, it is conceivable that the political implication of Lysias’ pro-democratic self-fashioning is also reflected in the reception of ‘Lysias’ in Plato and other philosophers.

The biographical tradition complicates the picture significantly in multiple ways. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the author of the earliest, and most reliable, biography. He adds that at the age of fifteen Lysias left Athens with his brother Polemarchus to join the colonists at the founding of Thurii in Magna Graecia (D. H. Lysias 1.2), but returned to Athens in 412/11 after being exiled for pro-Athenian activity (‘Atticism’, ἀττικισμός, 1.3). From this data, Dionysius adduces the birth date for Lysias to around 459/8 and death to around 379/8 or 378/7. Ps. Plutarch’s account of Lysias’ life is dependent on Dionysius’ and supplemented by information derived from Lysias’ speeches and other material. The most relevant, if also most problematic, addition is the association of Lysias with the teaching of Tisias and Nicias. The latter is an unknown name in Sicily, probably a textual corruption,Footnote ¹⁸ but Tisias is – of course – famously linked to the early beginnings of rhetoric. The ancient tradition after Dionysius, who does not mention Lysias’ possible connections to the Sicilian rhetoricians,Footnote ¹⁹ continues to make references to the association of Lysias with rhetorical teaching (cf. Cicero Brutus 48).

The main complications added by the biographical tradition are twofold: first, there are some chronological challenges that emerge with dating Lysias’ birth to as early as 459/8, a tradition that seems to start with Dionysius and is followed by all other ancient sources.Footnote ²⁰ This early date is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the information we have about Lysias’ life from Apollodorus,Footnote ²¹ but it also poses difficulties for the dramatic date of Plato’s Phaedrus.Footnote ²² I would like to reiterate at this point that the question of the dramatic date is not in itself a problem, in as far as we are not trying to establish an actual or historical moment where Lysias would have met Phaedrus. There are plenty of historical inaccuracies, deliberate or not, in Plato’s work to make it clear that Plato’s attitude to his characters was not driven by aims for historical accuracy but rather by artistic and philosophical ambition.Footnote ²³ His envisioned character meetings were fictional and thus do not require us to conclude anything about an actual historical encounter.Footnote ²⁴ More important is the way in which Plato’s imagined dramatic date contributes to the overall representation of the character in view. In our case, a dramatic date before 415 bce (Dover’s 418–16 bce is an attractive proposal) would simply mean that Lysias spent quite some time in Athens between then and 403 bce when he allegedly took up speechwriting without engaging with rhetoric or at least without leaving for posterity evidence of any such potential (rhetorical or otherwise) activity. And as such, it turns out that the question whether the dialogue is envisioned to take place in the early or late 410s is not in itself a major one.

The second, and arguably more problematic, question emerges from the representation of Lysias’ rhetorical teaching and practice in that dialogue. The ancient evidence (the biographical tradition seems here in agreement with, or perhaps even dependent on, Plato’s Phaedrus 228a2) presents Lysias as having engaged in rhetorical activity (either through studying or teaching) much earlier than the proposed start of his speechwriting career.Footnote ²⁵ Even though it is often acknowledged in modern scholarship, the biographical tradition is not a reliable source and, with the absence of any independent evidence, Lysias’ possible pre-403 rhetorical activity is generally brushed aside.Footnote ²⁶ While it is indeed rather unlikely (and definitely not alluded to in the Phaedrus) that Lysias would have authored a technical handbook, Lysias’ overall characterization in the dialogue seems to make more sense if we consider the possibility of Lysias having had a sort of intellectual or rhetorical following before his speechwriting career started soon after the restoration of democracy in 403 bce.Footnote ²⁷ An independent source that seems to corroborate this view is Apollodorus’ Against Neaira, where Lysias is referred to as a sophist (σοφιστής, §21).Footnote ²⁸ Whether or not we should accept this detail about Lysias’ possible rhetorical activity in Athens before 403 bce, it is clear that the closer the dramatic date is to 403 bce, the more time Lysias has had to gain reputation in Athens and thus to deserve the wholehearted praise of Phaedrus as one of the ‘most clever contemporary writers’ (δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν, 228a2).

1.2 … and the Corpus Lysiacum

Let us move on from Lysias’ life to his output. Estimating by the number of speeches attributed to Lysias by the first century bce, he was either extremely prolific (especially given his ‘late’ start) and/or highly regarded enough to be used as a ‘mark of quality’ to raise the literary status of speeches written by others. In fact, the number of items (425) attributed to him in antiquity makes him by far the most productive speechwriter; the number of speeches that are attributed by Ps. Plutarch to other Ten orators, for instance, never exceeds 75.Footnote ²⁹ In comparison with the 233 speeches that Dionysius accepted as genuine in the first century bce, our modern editions present 34 or 35 speeches, plus fragments which in the most recent OCT edition amount to 145.Footnote ³⁰ All of the preserved speeches are contained in Codex Palatinus Graecus 88, now by scholars unanimously designated as MS X, which dates to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.Footnote ³¹ X, the archetype of the majority of our medieval manuscripts, was organized largely by legal action,Footnote ³² and was very probably based on an anthology, which also contained orations by other Attic orators.Footnote ³³

A brief look at the entire corpus Lysiacum, which I take here to encompass all titles attributed to Lysias in antiquity, reveals Lysias as an author competent in a variety of rhetorical genres and legal proceedings. This tradition should be treated, however, with caution and no doubt some attributions go back to biographical details that have been attached to Lysias’ life and were later accepted as facts about his literary output.Footnote ³⁴ In antiquity, Lysias was credited with:Footnote ³⁵

1. 1 Display (epideictic) speeches, e.g. Ἐπιτάφιος (speech 2), Ὀλυμπιακός (fragmentary, speech 33), Ἐρωτικός (speech 35). Given the importance of Plato’s Phaedrus for the reception of Lysias, most references to this category of epideictic speeches primarily discuss, or depend on, the Ἐρωτικός.

2. 2 Dionysius preserves an example of a public or deliberative speech, Περὶ τοῦ μὴ καταλῦσαι τὴν πάτριον πολιτείαν Ἀθήνησι (fragmentary, speech 34). It is difficult to imagine, however, how or in what circumstances this speech could have been delivered by Lysias.

3. 3 Various sources suggest that Lysias authored letters and other writings of private content.Footnote ³⁶ Dionysius of Halicarnassus announces rather unexpectedly that he is not interested in Lysias’ letters, amatory discourses or the other works, because he wrote them for amusement (μετὰ παιδιᾶς).Footnote ³⁷ This is surprising indeed, especially since Dionysius was not interested in the legal argumentation but in Lysianic style and one would think that having access to variety of genres would have given Dionysius an even better and broader overview of Lysias’ art. This conundrum will be taken up with the closer examination of Dionysius’ criticism below.

4. 4 Both Ps. Plutarch (836b) and the Suda suggest that Lysias wrote a handbook or technical treatise on rhetoric. This, along with Lysias’ possible rhetorical activity, will be discussed below.

5. 5 The most important group of Lysias’ writings are his private courtroom speeches, which, within the boundary of private speeches, encompass a whole host of writings for different legal procedures. For the present purpose it is not necessary to divide these speeches further according to their underlying legal issues; it suffices to acknowledge that even within the category of private speeches Lysias seems to have been regarded as a competent writer on, for instance, cases regarding public/personal offense, murder or examinations for the holders of public offices.Footnote ³⁸

As this list demonstrates, Lysias’ speeches attest to a variety of rhetorical genres and legal procedures and, for this reason, it has been pointed out that Lysias’ surviving work shows a broader range of litigation than what we see in any other orator or speechwriter of the time.Footnote ³⁹ This aspect of Lysias’ writings is often overlooked in modern scholarship, where Lysias is mostly regarded as a writer of forensic speeches.Footnote ⁴⁰ There are two main reasons for this: first, the fact that, with the exception of Ἐπιτάφιος and Ἐρωτικός (both regarded as dubious by modern scholars), the majority of the Lysianic corpus that has come down to us consists of private speeches. The second reason, which is possibly directly related to the first, is that Lysias’ fame in the first century bce seems to have rested primarily on his forensic speeches and our prime witness for this view is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who is not particularly interested in the legal procedures of the various private speeches (which would show Lysias’ capability in different legal contexts) but focuses mainly on the literary quality and style of Lysias’ writing.Footnote ⁴¹ More specifically, Dionysius is interested in a very particular kind of style, and he finds the prime examples for this ‘simple and effective’ rhetoric in Lysias’ private speeches. However, the ancient tradition (other than Dionysius) shows a close awareness of, and interest in, legal procedures. The Alexandrian edition of Lysias, for example, was organized broadly based on the underlying legal issue.Footnote ⁴²

The corpus Lysiacum brings together rhetorical writing at a rather large scale – from court speeches for a variety of juridical matters to epideictic speeches and a personal speech (speech 12) that allegedly gives us a sense of Lysias’ own voice early in his career. Despite the large variety of texts that constitute the corpus at the moment, we should also remember that we do not even have 10 per cent of the corpus that was available for ancient critics. In fact, none of the speeches cited and discussed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the most prominent critic of Lysias’ rhetoric, have come to us through the manuscript tradition. From all this we can infer that Lysias was an important writer of the late fifth and fourth centuries bce, even though we would be also justified to wonder how much we would know about Lysias and his work had there not been one text in particular that did much to immortalize his figure to the history of rhetoric – Plato’s Phaedrus.