Lysias

34 works in the library, 34 with an English translation.

Athenian orator, born at Syracuse. From Wikidata; Wikipedia.

Lived: 5th–4th c. BC
Kinds of writing: Oratory (34)
Dialect: Attic
Analysed: 64,652 words

The 34 works

First the work Lysias is best known for; then the works here with a translation and the most familiar vocabulary: the fewest rare words to look up. That is vocabulary only; grammar, dialect and ideas may still be demanding.

The road of the text

Follow the text from Lysias's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like ¹ are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. Ancient tradition / legend This is what ancient writers told; it may not be what happened. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

The author
Readers
Copies
Print and editions

c. 445 BCThe authorBorn at Athens, son of the Syracusan Cephalus, probably in the mid-440s (the ancient lives give a date that works out at 459)^1,2,8 Debated among scholars
about 30 years later412 BCThe authorExpelled from Thurii, in southern Italy, after the Athenian disaster in Sicily; settles at Athens^7,8
8 years later404 BCThe authorThe Thirty arrest him and his brother Polemarchus; Polemarchus is made to drink hemlock and Lysias escapes to Megara^5,8
1 year later403 BCThe authorAgainst Eratosthenes; a grant of citizenship is struck down, and he begins his career as a speech-writer^2,7,8
15 years later388 BCThe authorThe Olympic Oration, against Dionysius of Syracuse^1,6,8 Debated among scholars
about 8 years laterc. 380 BCThe authorHis latest datable speech (381 or 380); he probably dies in or soon after 380⁸
about 360 years laterc. 20 BCReadersIn the age of Augustus, 425 speeches circulate under his name; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, teaching at Rome, accepts 233 and writes his essay On Lysias^4,7,8,17
about 1,120 years laterc. 1100CopiesThe Heidelberg manuscript X (Pal. gr. 88), on which almost all the speeches depend, is written (second half of the eleventh century, or early twelfth)^25,26 Debated among scholars
about 210 years laterc. 1313CopiesA note in X, dated by the patriarch Niphon (1310–1314), places it in a monk's cell at Nicaea^25,26
about 130 years laterc. 1445CopiesX belongs to Palla Strozzi, who has copies made of it^25,26
about 50 years laterc. 1492CopiesAristobulus Apostolius copies the speeches for Marcus Musurus in Florence (1492/3)²⁵
about 20 years later1513Print and editionsFirst printed edition, in the Aldine Oratores at Venice, from Musurus' manuscript^8,25
71 years later1584CopiesUlrich Fugger, one of X's owners, leaves his manuscripts to the Elector Palatine's library at Heidelberg²⁶
about 330 years later1912Print and editionsCarl Hude's Oxford text⁶
7 years later1919CopiesGrenfell and Hunt publish an Oxyrhynchus papyrus with parts of lost speeches, including Lysias' own case Against Hippotherses^6,24
11 years later1930Print and editionsW. R. M. Lamb's Loeb edition and translation, the Greek and English in the reader^6,27
38 years later1968ReadersK. J. Dover's Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum²
39 years later2007Print and editionsChristopher Carey's new Oxford text, with the fragments; Stephen Todd's commentary on speeches 1–11^2,11

Life and work

Checked against sources · 6 October 2026

Lysias was a professional writer of speeches for the law courts of Athens. He was born probably in the mid-440s BC and died around 380.^1,2 Later antiquity counted him among the ten great Attic orators.¹ Yet he lived and died without Athenian citizenship, apart from a grant that was soon struck down: he was a metic, which the dictionary defines as an “alien resident in a foreign city”.³ And this outsider's Greek became, for the critic Dionysius, the purest Attic prose of its day.⁴

A family from Syracuse

His father, Cephalus, came from Syracuse in Sicily. Lysias himself tells the story: “My father Cephalus was induced by Pericles to come to this country, and dwelt in it for thirty years”.⁵ The Lives of the Ten Orators, an ancient work once credited to Plutarch,⁶ calls Cephalus a man of great wealth, and adds that some said he had been banished from Syracuse.⁷ The family made shields. Lysias and his brother Polemarchus had a factory in the Piraeus, the port of Athens, worked by a hundred and twenty skilled slaves.^5,8

Plato set the Republic in their home. Socrates goes back with Polemarchus to his house, and says: “there we found Lysias and Euthydemus, the brothers of Polemarchus”; old Cephalus was at home too.⁹ The scene suggests that Plato knew the family well.⁸

Debated among scholars When was Lysias born? The Lives and Dionysius of Halicarnassus give a date that works out at 459 BC. That date was probably reckoned back from a story that he went to the new Athenian colony of Thurii, in southern Italy, at fifteen, the colony having been founded in 444.^7,8 Most modern scholars put his birth about 445 and his journey to Thurii about 430,^1,2 though W. R. M. Lamb, the translator of the reader's English, was still ready to accept the ancient date in 1930.⁶

At Thurii, the story goes, he studied rhetoric with the Sicilian teachers Tisias and Nicias.^7,8 After the Athenian disaster in Sicily in 413, he “was accused of favouring Athens” and expelled with three hundred others.⁷ In 412 he settled at Athens.^6,8

The Thirty

In 404 BC, after Athens lost the war with Sparta, a junta known as the Thirty seized power.⁸ Lysias tells what happened next in his speech Against Eratosthenes. Theognis and Peison told the Thirty that some of the metics resented the new regime, which gave a fine excuse to seize their money, and ten men were picked for arrest. Lysias was at home entertaining guests when they came. He offered a talent of silver to save his life, but when he opened his chest Peison helped himself to all of it: “three talents of silver, four hundred cyzicenes, a hundred darics and four silver cups”.⁵ Taken to a friend's house, Lysias knew it had a back way out: “there were three doors for me to pass through, and they all chanced to be open”. He hid with a ship's captain and sailed to Megara the next night.⁵

Polemarchus was not so lucky. Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, arrested him in the street, and he “received from the Thirty their accustomed order to drink hemlock”, without a trial. The family was refused a cloak for his funeral, and a man called Melobius pulled the gold earrings from his widow's ears.⁵

From Megara, Lysias helped the exiled democrats who fought their way back. The Lives says he gave two thousand drachmas and two hundred shields and hired three hundred soldiers.⁷ When democracy returned in 403, Thrasybulus proposed to make him a citizen. The grant was struck down on a point of procedure, because the Council had not voted on it first.^7,8 Lysias lived on as an isoteles, a privileged metic who paid the same taxes as a citizen.^3,7

Against Eratosthenes

In 403 Lysias prosecuted Eratosthenes for his brother's death. It was his only direct part in Athenian politics.⁸ The speech ends with four words and a command: «ἀκηκόατε, ἑωράκατε, πεπόνθατε, ἔχετε· δικάζετε», “You have heard, you have seen, you have suffered; you have them: give judgement.”¹⁰ Debated among scholars Did he speak it himself? Its title in the manuscripts says so, and Lamb saw no reason to doubt it.⁶ Stephen Todd, whose commentary on the speech is the largest in English, thinks it unclear whether a non-citizen could take part in this kind of hearing. He leaves open that the speech was circulated as a pamphlet instead.¹¹

Speeches for hire

Much of his fortune had been seized, and probably for that reason, among others, Lysias turned to writing speeches for clients to deliver in court.^2,8 He became a logographos, a “professional speech-writer”.³ It was not a respected trade: in Plato's Phaedrus a politician abuses Lysias and “kept calling him a speech-writer”, «λογογράφον».¹² His career ran from 403 to about 380.² The Lives says: “Four hundred and twenty-five orations attributed to him are current”. Ancient critics accepted 233 of them as genuine, and with those “he is said to have lost his case with only two of them”.⁷

Ancient tradition / legend Plutarch tells a story about one client. The man read his speech over and over and came back in despair: the first time it seemed wonderful, but by the third reading it was “completely dull and ineffectual”. Lysias laughed: “isn’t it only once that you are going to speak it before the jurors?”¹³

Today the most widely read of his speeches, at least by students, is probably On the Murder of Eratosthenes (a different Eratosthenes).¹¹ An Athenian called Euphiletus caught a man named Eratosthenes in bed with his wife, killed him, and was put on trial for murder.^2,6 He paints himself as a trusting husband, “simple-minded enough to suppose that my own was the chastest wife in the city”.¹⁴ Lysias wrote speeches for the Council, the Assembly and the courts, and showpieces too.⁴ At the Olympic festival of 388, the date given by the historian Diodorus, he called on the Greeks to unite against Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse.^7,8 Debated among scholars Some historians have preferred 384, but Lamb thought the speech itself points to 388.^1,6 The opening of that speech survives because Dionysius of Halicarnassus quoted it: Lysias deplores a Greece “with many parts of her held subject by the foreigner, and many of her cities ravaged by despots”.^15,16 His latest datable work belongs to 381 or 380, and he probably died in or soon after 380.⁸

The plain style

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek teacher of rhetoric at Rome in the reign of Augustus,¹⁷ wrote a whole essay on Lysias.^4,6 He calls his language pure, «τῆς Ἀττικῆς γλώττης ἄριστος κανών», “the best standard of the Attic tongue” (our translation): not the older Attic of Plato and Thucydides, but the Attic spoken in his own time. No later writer, he says, surpassed him in purity. Lysias uses ordinary words and hardly any figures of speech, yet makes his subjects seem grand.⁴ He also praises the quality that many called «ἠθοποιΐαν»: the drawing of character, so that each speech sounds like the person who delivers it.^3,18 Lysias' sentences seem artless, but, says Dionysius, «πεποίηται γὰρ αὐτῷ τοῦτο τὸ ἀποίητον», “this very artlessness is something he has made” (our translation).¹⁸ The Lives puts it in one line: “In the matter of his diction he appears to be easy, although in fact he is hard to imitate.”⁷

Ancient critics spoke of three styles, the grand, the middle and the plain, and Lysias became the model of the plain, the one nearest to everyday speech.⁸ The Roman teacher Quintilian admired his subtlety and elegance, but “would compare him to a clear spring rather than to a mighty river”.¹⁹

Lysias in Plato

Plato's Phaedrus opens with Phaedrus coming from a morning with Lysias, the son of Cephalus, full of a speech on love that Lysias has written; Socrates guesses that he has the text hidden under his cloak. Phaedrus calls Lysias “the cleverest writer of our day”, «δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν».²⁰ Socrates answers with speeches of his own, and Phaedrus admits that Socrates' was far finer. Socrates prays that Love will turn Lysias, “as his brother Polemarchus is turned, toward philosophy”.¹² At the end he predicts that the young Isocrates “has a nature above the speeches of Lysias”.²¹ Debated among scholars Is the love speech in the Phaedrus really by Lysias? It has generally been thought Plato's own work, but Jebb pointed out how carefully the dialogue insists on an exact reading of it.⁸ Lamb thought it more probably a Platonic parody.⁶

Ancient tradition / legend The Lives lists among his writings “a Defence of Socrates addressed to the judges”.⁷ Diogenes Laertius tells how Socrates read the speech Lysias wrote for him and said: “A fine speech, Lysias; it is not, however, suitable to me.” Asked why not, he answered that fine clothes and shoes would not suit him either.²² Jebb thought the story probably arose from a confusion: years after Socrates' death the sophist Polycrates wrote a speech attacking him, and Lysias replied.⁸

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Ancient collections. In the age of Augustus, 425 works circulated under Lysias' name.⁸ Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Caecilius accepted 233 of them as genuine.⁷ Dionysius had his own test: true Lysias has a charm, χάρις, and its absence led him to reject many speeches that most people took for genuine.²³ In 1911 Jebb counted 34 surviving speeches, whole or in part, and 127 more are known from fragments or titles.⁸ Modern editions print 34 or 35, and the fragments in Carey's Oxford edition give evidence of another 145 speeches.² The speeches we have seem to come in groups arranged by type of lawsuit, and Todd argues that which groups survived may owe more to chance than to choice.²

Papyri and quotations. Some lost speeches come back in pieces. An Oxyrhynchus papyrus published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1919 (P. Oxy. XIII 1606) holds parts of at least six speeches.^6,24 Among them is Against Hippotherses, a case in which Lysias himself was the defendant, though a supporting speaker delivered the speech. In it the speaker calls Lysias “the wealthiest resident alien in the times of your prosperity”, and the papyrus adds clauses of the amnesty of 403/2.^6,24 Other remains, of a speech against Theozotides, were found among the Hibeh papyri.⁸ Later writers quoted him too: the opening of the Olympic Oration survives only because Dionysius copied it into his essay.^6,16

One manuscript. As Hermann Sauppe first showed, all the manuscripts of Lysias collated so far come from a single book now in Heidelberg, known as X (Palatinus graecus 88).⁸ It is the best witness, and every surviving speech has come down through it. The first two speeches also travelled on another path, probably in an anthology of rhetorical pieces.²⁵ Debated among scholars The date of X is disputed: Mark Sosower called it early twelfth century, while the Pinakes catalogue dates its Lysias to the second half of the eleventh.^25,26 A fourteenth-century note in it, dated by the patriarch Niphon (1310–1314),²⁶ places it in a monk's cell at Nicaea. Sosower suggests it was brought there when Nicaea was the Byzantine capital in exile (1204–1261), after the sack of Constantinople in which, he thinks, any other witnesses to the larger collection perished.²⁵ Losses in X have left holes in the text. Eight pages are missing that held the end of speech 25, the whole of a speech Against Nicides and the beginning of speech 26.⁶ Speech 5 survives in just under three hundred words because the manuscript is damaged,² and speech 6 has lost its beginning.¹

Renaissance owners. In the fifteenth century X belonged to the Florentine Palla Strozzi, who had copies made of it.^25,26 Later it passed to Ulrich Fugger, who in 1584 left his manuscripts to the Elector Palatine; that is how it came to Heidelberg.²⁶ Of the later copies, Jebb names a fifteenth-century manuscript in Florence (Laurentianus C) as the next most valuable.⁸

Print. The first printed Lysias appeared in the Aldine Oratores at Venice in 1513. Its main source was a copy written for the scholar Marcus Musurus, and through it the whole tradition of X stands behind that first edition.²⁵ Among the great later editions are Reiske's (1772), Bekker's (1823) and Baiter and Sauppe's (1839).^1,8 Lamb based the reader's Greek on Thalheim's Teubner text of 1901.⁶ The Oxford Classical Texts printed Carl Hude's text in 1912 and Christopher Carey's new one, with the fragments, in 2007.^2,6

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

A critic rejects a speech. The Lives of the Ten Orators says Lysias wrote speeches for the general Iphicrates, and that Iphicrates defended himself on a charge of treason with a speech by Lysias.⁷ Dionysius of Halicarnassus thought otherwise. He found the speech On the Statue of Iphicrates well argued, but «ἄχαρίς ἐστι», “it has no charm” (our translation). Then he checked the dates. If Lysias died at eighty, the speech was written seven years after his death, and Iphicrates' defence on a charge of treason a full twenty years after. Dionysius guessed that Iphicrates wrote both himself.²³

Debated among scholars The Funeral Oration. Speech 2 claims to honour Athenians who fell in the Corinthian War. Jebb called it “certainly spurious”, perhaps composed about 380–340 BC.⁸ Lamb noted that its attribution “has been much disputed”: Aristotle quotes it without naming the author, and Dionysius' essay on Lysias never mentions it.⁶ Todd, on the other hand, accepts it as Lysias' work. He thinks it was a showpiece rather than a speech given at a real funeral, since a metic was unlikely to be chosen for that honour.²

Debated among scholars Against Andocides. Speech 6 attacks Andocides at his trial for impiety around 400 BC. Lamb wrote in 1930 that it was “now generally agreed” that the writer could not be Lysias, and thought it probably a pamphlet by one of Andocides' enemies.⁶ Todd argues that it is not the work of a late rhetorician but a genuine speech delivered at the trial, perhaps revised before it was circulated; Wikipedia's table of the speeches still calls it generally considered spurious.^1,2 Others in the collection are doubted too: Jebb and Todd both think For the Soldier (speech 9) probably not by Lysias, and both treat speech 11 as a mere summary of speech 10.^2,8

Debated among scholars Lysias and his clients. K. J. Dover argued in 1968 that the speeches were not written by Lysias alone but grew out of work with his clients. Todd rejects this, and like Dover he doubts that counting features of style can settle who wrote a speech.²

Mending a text from one book. Because nearly everything hangs on X, editors must often repair its mistakes by guesswork. Lamb's notes credit corrections to generations of scholars, from the Renaissance printers onwards.⁶ Even a title can be wrong: the title Lamb prints for speech 17 is a correction by Hoelscher, because the one in the manuscripts is plainly mistaken.⁶

Books to read it in

W. R. M. Lamb, Lysias (Loeb Classical Library; London, Heinemann, and New York, Putnam, 1930; reprinted by Harvard University Press).^6,27 The Greek and English in the reader are Perseus's copies of this edition; the Greek is based on Thalheim's text of 1901.
C. Carey, Lysiae Orationes cum Fragmentis (Oxford Classical Texts, 2007).^2,11 The standard Greek text, with the fragments.
S. C. Todd, A Commentary on Lysias, Speeches 1–11 (Oxford, 2007) and A Commentary on Lysias, Speeches 12–16 (Oxford, 2020).^2,11 Carey's Greek with a facing English translation, introductions and a full commentary.
S. C. Todd, Lysias (The Oratory of Classical Greece 2, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2000).^2,11 A modern English translation of the speeches.
C. Carey, Lysias: Selected Speeches (Cambridge, 1989).¹¹ Selected speeches with a concise commentary, attentive to style and language.
L. Gernet and M. Bizos, Lysias: Discours (Collection des Universités de France, Paris, Les Belles Lettres; vol. 1, 1924).^1,6,26 Greek text with French translation, in two volumes.
C. Hude, Lysiae Orationes (Oxford Classical Texts, 1912).⁶ The older Oxford text.

Where this comes from

Sources (27)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 6 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

In The Painted Stoa

Entries that quote or point to Lysias's Greek.

Love, sex and marriageA Greek marriage was a deal between two households, made so that a man would have legitimate children to inherit his house.

The most mentioned words in Lysias (the Census)
Your own notes on Lysias (the Treasury)