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Isaeus

Isaeus

c. 420 BCE–c. 340 BCE · Athens

Isaeus (c. 420 - c. 340s BCE) was an Athenian speechwriter and one of the canonical "Ten Attic Orators." He specialized in cases concerning inheritance and family property, and nearly all of his surviving speeches deal with disputed estates. Because of this focus, his work is an exceptionally important source for ancient Athenian law on wills, adoption, and inheritance, and he was remembered as a teacher of the orator Demosthenes.

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Stop 1 of 1420 BCE–340 BCELived

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Attic orator specializing in inheritance law.

About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

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In the same place & time

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

The world in their lifetime

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

Works(12)