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Lysias ( / ˈlɪsiəs /; Greek: Λυσίας; c. 445 – c. 380 BC) was a logographer (speech writer) in ancient Greece. He was one of the ten Attic orators included in the "Alexandrian Canon" compiled by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace in the third century BC.
Lysias was a 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.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sir Richard C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos, Lysias: Forensic Speeches in Public Causes; Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (3): LSJ, ἀγα^νακτ-έω; LSJ, ἀνήρ; LSJ, ποιέω
Jun 27, 2024 · 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).
Jun 20, 2024 · Quick Reference. Attic orator, d. c. 380 bc. His work is discussed in Plato's Phaedrus; in Plato's Republic, his father Cephalus is an elderly Syracusan, resident as a metic in Athens, and friend of assorted Athenian aristocrats.
Jun 27, 2024 · 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.
Lysias must have been a well-known figure in Athens, and in his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato quotes (and criticizes) an entire speech of Lysias as paradigmatic of Athenian rhetoric: seductively attractive on the surface but not true.
