I I. ANDOCIDES Andocides was the son of Leogoras, son of that Andocides who once made peace between the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians The Thirty Years’ Peace, by the terms of which Athens gave up Megara and its ports in 446-445 b.c. ; he was as regards his deme a Cydathenian or a Thorian See note d below for the source of this error. and was descended from nobles, and even, according to Hellanicus, Cf. Müller, Frag. Hist. Graec. i. p. 55, no. 78. from Hermes; for the race of heralds traces its origin to him. On this account, too, he was once chosen along with Glaucon to go with twenty ships to aid the Corcyraeans who were embroiled with the Corinthians. Cf. Thucydides, i. 51, who seems to have been the source of this error. The colleague of Glaucon on this expedition was Dracontides, son of Leogoras of Thurae, and not Andocides, who at the time, 433 b.c., was too young. See I. G. i. 295 (ed. min.), and Kirchner, Prosopographia Attica , 828 and 4551. And after this he was accused of impiety as being one of those who mutilated the Hermae The Hermae, square pillars surmounted by the head of the god Hermes, stood before the doors of Athenian houses. In 415 b.c., just as the great expedition against Sicily was about to sail, these Hermae were systematically mutilated in the night by unknown persons. and as profaning the mysteries of Demeter [because at an earlier time he was dissipated and in a nocturnal revel had broken one of the images of the god, and when he was indicted refused to surrender the slave whom his accusers were looking for, so that he gained a bad name and was suspected and accused in the second suit also, which was brought shortly after the expedition went to Sicily, when the Corinthians sent in men from Leontini and Egesta and, as the Athenians hesitated about aiding them privately, they mutilated the Hermae about the market-place, as Cratippus says, and profaned the mysteries besides]. At his trial on these charges he was acquitted on condition that he should inform against the wrongdoers. He exerted himself greatly and discovered those who were guilty of the sacrilege, among whom he informed against his own father. And he brought about the conviction and death of all the others, but saved his father, although he had already been put in prison, by promising that he would be of great service to the city. And he kept his promise; for Leogoras caused the conviction of many men who were embezzling public funds and committing other misdeeds. And for these reasons he was acquitted of the charge. But Andocides, since his reputation in public life was not good, took to merchandising and became a friend of the Cypriote kings and many other men of note, at which time he abducted a girl of Athenian birth, daughter of Aristeides and his own niece, without the knowledge of her family, and sent her as a gift to the King of Cyprus. Then, when he was to be brought to trial for this, he stole her back again from Cyprus and was caught and put in prison by the king; but he ran away and came back to Athens at the time when the Four Hundred were in control of affairs. He was put in prison by them, but escaped, and again, when the oligarchy was overthrown, he was banished from the city after the Thirty had taken over the government. He spent the period of his exile in Elis, but when Thrasybulus and his band returned, In the summer of 404 b.c. thirty men had been appointed to draw up laws and manage the state temporarily. Thrasybulus seized the hill-fortress of Phylê in December and maintained his position against two attacks by the Thirty. In May 403 Thrasybulus and his followers seized Peiraeus. In September the Thirty were overthrown and the democracy re-established. he also returned to the city. He was sent to Lacedaemon to negotiate a peace, but was suspected of wrongdoing The nature of the accusation cannot be determined. See Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit , 2nd ed., pp. 293 ff. The oration On the Peace , delivered between 393 and 390 b.c., deals with the terms proposed by the mission in which Andocides participated. and banished. He gives information about all this in the speeches which he wrote; for some of them he composed in his defence in the matter of the mysteries, and others when he was asking to be allowed to return home. There is also extant his speech On the Indictment , also the Defence against Phaeax and the speech On the Peace . He flourished at the same time as Socrates the philosopher; the date of his birth was the seventy-eighth Olympiad, when Theogenides was archon 468-467 b.c. This date, however, is based upon a false reckoning, and from the orator’s own statements he could not have been born much before 440. See Blass, ibid. i. p. 283, and Kirchner, Prosop. Att. 828. at Athens, so that he was about ten years older The numeral is an emendation. than Lysias. The Hermes called the Hermes of Andocides is named after him. It is a dedication of the tribe Aegeis and is called Hermes of Andocides because Andocides lived near it. He himself supplied the chorus for his tribe A decree of the tribe Pandionis in which the orator is named among the victorious choregi is extant, I. G. ii. 1138 (ed. min.); it was with a chorus of boys at the Dionysia. when it was competing in a dithyrambic contest, and he gained the victory, for which he set up a tripod on a high spot opposite the limestone Silenus. He is simple and free from artifice in his orations, plain and employing no figures of speech. III. LYSIAS Lysias was the son of Cephalus, grandson of Lysanias, and great-grandson of Cephalus. His father was by birth a Syracusan but moved to Athens because he wished to live in that city and also because Pericles, son of Xanthippus, persuaded him to do so, as he was a personal friend of Pericles and they were connected by ties of hospitality, and he was a man of great wealth. But some say that he moved because he was banished from Syracuse when Gelo was tyrant. Lysias was born at Athens in the archonship of the Philocles 459-458 b.c. who succeeded Phrasicles, The archon in 460-459 b.c. was Phrasicleides, not Phrasicles. in the second year of the eightieth Olympiad, and at first he was a schoolmate of the most prominent Athenians; but when the city sent the colony to Sybaris, which was afterwards renamed Thurii, he went out with his eldest brother Polemarchus (for he had two others, Euthydemus and Brachyllus), their father being already dead, to share in the allotment of land. The scene of Plato’s Republic is laid at the house of Cephalus. The dialogue is not historical, and its imagined date cannot be fixed, but it seems to show that Plato knew Cephalus and his sons, see Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit , 2nd ed., i. p. 341. This was in the archonship of Praxiteles, 444-443 b.c. and he was then fifteen years old. He remained there, was instructed by the Syracusans Teisias and Nicias, acquired a house, had a share of the allotment, and was a citizen for thirty-three years, until Cleocritus was archon at Athens. 413-412 b.c. The ninety-second Olympiad is the date of the archonship of another Callias, 406-405 b.c. But in the next year, when Callias was archon, The dates given by our author for events in the life of Lysias are consistent (see also 835 a above, and 836 f below, Cf. also Dion. Hal. Isocrates , i.), on the assumption that he went to Thurii when the colony was founded, in 444 b.c. But if that is correct, his activity as a writer of speeches to be delivered in the Athenian courts would not begin until his fifty-seventh year. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit , 2nd ed., i. p. 345, after stating the evidence, comes to the conclusion that Lysias was born at Athens probably about 446 b.c., the only certain date being his age (fifteen years), when he went to Thurii, and his treutn to Athens in 413-412 b.c. or the year following. It is quite possible that he did not go to Thurii until some years after the foundation of the colony. The latest of his extant speeches may be dated about 380 b.c., so that we may believe that he died not long after that date. in the ninety-second Olympiad, when the misfortunes in Sicily The great expedition which the Athenians had sent out in 415 b.c. expecting to conquer Sicily was utterly annihilated in the autumn of 413 b.c. had happened to the Athenians and unrest had arisen among the allies in general and especially those who dwelt in Italy, he was accused of favouring Athens and, with three hundred others, was banished. Arriving at Athens in the archonship of the Callias 412-411 b.c. who succeeded Cleocritus, when the Four Hundred already had possession of the city, Summer of 411 b.c. he remained there. But when the battle of Aegospotami 405 b.c. The Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Lacedaemonians, which virtually ended the Peloponnesian War. had taken place and the Thirty had taken possession of the city, 404 b.c. he was banished after having been there seven years. He was deprived of his property and lost his brother Polemarchus, but he himself escaped from the house in which he was kept to be executed (for it had two doors) See Lysias, xii. ( Against Eratosthenes ) 15. and lived at Megara. But when the men at Phyle Thrasybulus and his followers, May 303 b.c. After these exiles seized Periaeus, there was a period of confusion until the democracy was re-established and Eucleides made archon for the year 403-402 b.c. set about their return to Athens, he was seen to be more helpful than anyone else, since he supplied two thousand drachmas and two hundred shields and, when sent with Hermas, hired three hundred mercenaries and persuaded Thrasydaeus of Elis, who had become his guest-friend, to give two talents. For these services Thrasybulus, after the restoration of the exiles to the city and in the period of anarchy The Athenians termed any period an anarchy in which no archon could be elected because of party strife. before Eucleides, proposed a grant of citizenship for him, and the popular assembly ratified the grant, but when Archinus had him up for illegality because it had not been previously voted by the senate, The Senate or Council of Five Hundred prepared the business for the Popular Assembly, which could not legally vote upon any measure not previously adopted by the Senate. the enactment was declared void. And after losing his citizenship in this way, he lived the rest of his life at Athens with all the rights of citizenship except the vote and eligibility to office, and died there at the age of eightythree years or, as some say, seventy-six or, as others say, over eighty; and he lived to see Demosthenes as a youth. They say he was born in the archonship of Philocles. Four hundred and twenty-five orations attributed to him are current. Of these Dionysius and Caecilius and their school say that two hundred and thirtythree are genuine, and he is said to have lost his case with only two of them. There is also his speech in support of the enactment against which Archinus brought suit and deprived him of citizenship, and another against the Thirty. He was very persuasive and concise and produced most of his speeches for private clients. There are also Textbooks of Rhetoric prepared by him, and Public Addresses, Letters and Eulogies, Funeral Speeches, Love Speeches, and a Defence of Socrates addressed to the judges. Cicero, De Oratore , i. 231, and Diogenes Laertius, ii. 20, 40, say that Lysias composed an oration in defence of Socrates, and offered it to him, but Socrates refused it. A speech in defence of Socrates ( ὑπερ Σωκράτους πρὸς Πολυκράτην ) is mentioned several times by the scholiast on Aristeides. It was composed probably some years after the death of Socrates, as an epideictic oration in reply to a similar speech against Socrates by the sophist Polycrates. This is doubtless the speech which Cicero and Diogenes wrongly believed to have been composed for use in the actual trial of Socrates. See Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit , 2nd ed., i. p. 351. In the matter of his diction he appears to be easy, although in fact he is hard to imitate. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ἀρχαίων κρίσις , v. 1 ὡς ἀναγιγνωσκόμενον μὲν εὔκολον νομίζεσυαι χαλεπὸν δὲ εὑρίσκεσθαι ζηλοῦν πειρωμένοις , when read he is considered easy, but is found to be difficult by any who try to imitate him. Demosthenes in his speech against Neaera Demosthenes, Or. lix. 21. says that he was in love with Metaneira, a fellow-slave with Neaera; but later he married the daughter of his brother Brachyllus. Plato also mentions him in the Phaedrus Plato, Phaedrus , 279 a. as an able speaker and older than Isocrates. Moreover Philiscus, a pupil of Isocrates and comrade of Lysias, composed an elegiac poem to him, from which it is plain that he was earlier in years, which is indicated also by what Plato said. The verses are as follows: Now, O Calliope’s daughter endowed with great eloquence, Phrontis, Show if thy wisdom is aught, if thou hast anything new. Him who is altered and changed to another form, him who in other Orders and manners of life hath a new body assumed, Thou must bring forth some herald of virtue to celebrate: Lysis Lysis, because the word Lysias is inadmissible in the Greek metre. Wyttenbach suggests that the verses were really written in honour of Lysis the Pythagorean. Gone to the dead and the gloom, there an immortal to dwell; One who will show unto all the love of my soul for my comrade, Show, too, the worth of the dead unto the whole of mankind. Bergk, Poet. Lyr Graec. ii. p. 640. Bergk rightly says that this is only part of a longer poem. The fragment does not indicate that Lysias was older than Isocrates, but some such statement may have been contained in a later part of the poem. He also wrote two speeches for Iphicrates, one against Harmodius, the other for use in accusing Timotheüs of treason, with both of which he won his case; but when Iphicrates accepted the responsibility for the actions of Timotheüs, In 355 b.c. Iphicrates and Timotheüs, Athenian generals who had been unsuccessful, were accused by their colleague, Chares, of treason. Although Iphicrates accepted full responsibility, he was acquitted, but Timotheüs was fined one hundred talents, which he could not pay. He left Athens and soon died. assuming at the rendering of accounts the accusation for treason, he defended himself with the speech by Lysias; and he himself was acquitted, but Timotheüs was very heavily fined. And at the Olympic festival also he read a very great oration urging that the Greeks make peace with one another and overthrow Dionysius. Only a fragment (Or. xxxiii.) of this is extant.