Lysias, a resident alien at Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E., acted as a consultant for clients involved in litigation and put into circulation written versions of the speeches that he composed for them. In the early Hellenistic period, a corpus of more than four hundred speeches was ascribed to him; however, literary critics in the first century C.E. formed the opinion that scarcely more than half that number were correctly ascribed. In late Roman times, a small selection of speeches was made without regard for the opinions of critics on authenticity, and that selection has survived. Our knowledge of the remainder is fragmentary and indirect. K. J. Dover examines the extent to which, and the means by which, the work of the individual Lysias can be distinguished within the total corpus ascribed to him. One part of the examination is an attempt to reconstruct the entire process of transmission, from the making of the late Roman selection through the internal arrangement of the corpus in ancient editions to the relation between client and consultant at the time of writing. The other part evaluates the criteria used to establish authenticity: chronology, ideology, and style. Dover concludes that any demand for a clear division of the speeches into two categories, authentic and spurious, is unreasonable and methodologically unsound. Instead, we must content ourselves with degrees of probability and treat the corpus as presenting us not with an individual but with certain aspects of Athenian art and society. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

This volume focuses on the representation of the recent past in classical Athenian oratory and investigates the ability of the orators to interpret it according to their interests; the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of it; and the unwillingness of the citizens to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results. Twenty-eight scholars have written chapters to this end, dealing with a wide range of themes, in terms both of contents and of chronology, from the fifth to the fourth century B.C. Each contributor has written a chapter that analyzes one or more historical events mentioned or alluded in the corpus of the Attic orators and covers the three species of Attic oratory. Chapters that treat other issues collectively are also included. The common feature of each contribution is an outline of the recent events that took place and influenced the citizens and/or the city of Athens and its juxtaposition with their rhetorical treatment by the orators either by comparing the rhetorical texts with the historical sources and/or by examining the rhetorical means through which the speakers model the recent past. This book aims at advanced students and professional scholars. This volume focuses on the representation of the recent past in classical Athenian oratory and investigates: the ability of the orators to interpret it according to their interests; the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of persons and events of the recent past and their unwillingness to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results.

This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This volume represents the sixth in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. The present work comprises a collection of essays that explore the tensions and controversies that arise as a society moves from an oral to literate culture. Part 1 deals with both Homeric and other forms of epic; part 2 explores different ways in which texts and writing were manipulated for political ends. Part 3 and 4 deals with the controversies surrounding the adoption of writing as the accepted mode of communication; whereas some segments of society began to privilege writing over oral communication, others continued to maintain that the latter was superior. Part 4 looks at the oral elements of Athenian Law.

The most important study of the funeral oration for dead combatants in democratic Athens since Nicole Loraux's classic work.