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Lysias

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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Stop 1 of 1445 BCE–380 BCELived

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Attic orator and speechwriter in Athens.

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

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

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

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.

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.

Works(34)

On the Confiscation of the Property Of The Brother Of Nicias

Athens · -380

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