Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum

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 select