Lysias, the first Greek orator who attained perfection in his own line, was the son of Cephalus, who, foreigner though he was—he came from Syracuse—succeeded in making his house one of the centres of intellectual life in Athens. Lysias himself was born in Athens, probably about 432 B.C. (the date is very uncertain), was educated along with children of the best Athenian families, and at fifteen years of age joined the colony planted by Athens at Thurii, where his early manhood was spent. The failure of the Athenian expedition against Sicily made it advisable for Lysias, like other friends of Athens, to leave Thurii, and in 412 he returned to Athens and continued his rhetorical studies, not for professional purposes, for he and his brother Polemarchus were wealthy, but from choice. The choice proved in the event a wise one, for the Thirty Tyrants, in 404 B.C., stripped the brothers of all their wealth, killed Polemarchus, and only failed to kill Lysias because he fled to Megara. The first practical use to which Lysias put his eloquence was, on the fall of the Thirty (403), to avenge his brother's death by prosecuting Eratosthenes, the tyrant on whom the principal responsibility for the legal murder of Polemarchus rested. He then practised, until his death at the age of eighty, with singular success as a writer of speeches for persons engaged in litigation. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he composed 233 such speeches, and only failed in two instances to secure a favourable verdict. From an examination of the thirty-four surviving speeches, we can see that Lysias is at all times and in all matters surprisingly and delightfully lucid in both thought and expression: he rarely indulges in a metaphor, he is always direct, and uses simple, commonplace language for his simple narrative and commonsense arguments. But though simple his narrative is never monotonous: it is lively, graceful, and entertaining. Another quality, which both contributed to his practical success and helps to place his speeches amongst the most entertaining of Greek literature, is his power of character drawing.
The first edition is Aldus (1513); the best edition of the text, Teubner's; a school edition, Cobet's (Amst. 1863). Selections, with German notes by Frohberger and Rauchenstein. See Jebb's Attic Orators; and Blass, Die Attische Beredsamkeit.