3
There are four hundred and twenty-five orations which bear his name, of which Dionysius and Caecilius affirm only two hundred and thirty to be genuine, and he is said to have been overcome but twice in all. There is extant also the oration which he made in defence of the fore-mentioned decree against Archinus, who indicted it and thereby prevented Lysias from receiving the citizenship, as also another against the Thirty Tyrants. He was very cogent in his persuasions, and was always very brief in what he delivered. He would commonly give orations to private persons. There are likewise his institutions of oratory, his public harangues, his epistles, his eulogies, funeral orations, discourses of love, and his defence of Socrates, accommodated to the minds of the judges. His style seems plain and easy, though hardly imitable. Demosthenes, in his oration against Neaera, says that he was in love with one Metanira, Neaera’s serving-maid, but afterwards married his brother Brachyllus’s daughter. Plato in his Phaedrus makes mention of him, as a most eloquent orator and ancienter than Isocrates. Philiscus, his companion, and Isocrates’s votary, composed an epigram concerning him, whence the same that we have urged from Plato is deducible; and it sings to this effect: Calliope’s witty daughter, Phrontis, show If aught of wit or eloquence thou hast; For ’tis decreed that thou shalt bear a son, Lysias by name, to spread the name of him Whose great and generous acts do fill the world, And are received for glorious above. Let him who sings those praises of the dead, Let him, my friend, too, praise our amity.
