Lysias — Wellsprings

Lysias

c. 445 BCE–c. 380 BCE · Athens

Lysias (c. 445 - c. 380 BCE) was an Athenian speechwriter and one of the canonical "Ten Attic Orators." As a resident foreigner (metic) he could not normally speak in court himself, but he made his name composing speeches for others to deliver in lawsuits. Admired in antiquity for his clear, simple, and natural style, his surviving speeches vividly illuminate everyday life, law, and politics in Athens around the end of the Peloponnesian War.

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Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→

Stop 1 of 1445 BCE–380 BCELived

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Attic orator and speechwriter in Athens.

About Athens

The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.

In Athens at the same time

Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides

See other sages who lived in Athens→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Lysias’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias, Antisthenes, Aristophanes, Andocides, Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Lysias’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Buddhist world

The Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama)· 480 BCE–400 BCE

Jewish world

Works(34)

Against Eratosthenes

Athens · -403