Of the Epideictic speeches of Lysias at least one genuine specimen remains—the fragment of an oration delivered at the Olympic festival. The fashion of addressing a set harangue to the Panhellenic concourse at the great national meetings had been set by the earliest sophists. Hippias ‘used to charm Greece at Olympia with ornate and elaborate speeches.’ ⁸ The Olympic oration of Gorgias was renowned; and at Delphi his golden statue stood in the temple where, during the panegyris, he had ‘thundered his Pythian speech from the altar.’ ⁹ If only as displays of rhetorical art, such harangues were in harmony with the character of the great Panhellenic meetings, the central idea of which was open competition in every sort of excellence, physical and mental. But the speaker at such a time would have certain practical themes suggested to him by the occasion itself, and would enjoy a rare opportunity of treating them with practical effect. He could interpret and apply to passing events the thought, necessarily present to every mind in such an assemblage, of a common Hellenic brotherhood. Gorgias had not failed to strike this chord. ‘His speech at Olympia dealt with the largest of political questions. Seeing Greece torn by faction, he became a counsellor of concord, seeking to turn the Greeks against the barbarians, and advising them to take for the prizes of their arms not each others' cities but the land of the barbarians.’ ¹⁰ Hellenic nationality as a tie no less real than local citizenship, the Hellenic cause as paramount to all individual interests, must, in one form or another, have always been the foremost topic of speakers at the Panhellenic festivals.

This topic had a special significance at the moment when the Olympiakos of Lysias was spoken ¹¹ . It was spoken, according to Diodôros, in the first year of the 98th Olympiad, 388 B. C.—the year before the Peace of Antalkidas, by which the Corinthian War was brought to a close. Athens, Thebes, Argos and Corinth had in 388 been seven years at war with Sparta. During this time two powers, both dangerous to the freedom of Greece, had been rapidly growing. In the east the naval strength of Persia had become greater than it had been for a century. In the west Dionysios, tyrant, since 405, of Syracuse, had reduced Naxos, Katana and Leontini; had twice defeated Carthage; and was threatening the Greek towns of Italy.

¹² A magnificent embassy from the court of Dionysios, with his brother Thearides at its head, appeared at the Olympic festival of 388. Tents embroidered with gold were pitched in the sacred enclosure; a number of splendid chariots were entered in the name of Dionysios for the four-horse chariot-race; while rhapsodists, whose skill in recitation attracted crowds, repeated poems composed by their royal master ¹³ . While eye and ear were thus allured by the glories of the Syracusan tyrant, Lysias lifted up his voice to remind the assembled Greeks that in Dionysios they must recognise one of the two great enemies of Greece. Let them not admit to their sacred festival the representatives of an impious despotism. Let them remember that their duty is to overthrow that tyranny and to set Sicily free; and let the war be begun forthwith by an attack upon those glittering tents ¹⁴ .

Only the first part of the speech has been preserved; but, to judge from the scale on which the topics are treated and from the point in the argument which the extract reaches, the whole cannot have been much longer.

After praising Herakles for having founded the Olympic ¹⁵ festival in order to promote goodwill among all Hellenes (§§ 1, 2), the speaker says that he is not going to trifle with words like a mere sophist, but to offer serious counsel upon the dangers of Greece. Part of the Greek world is already subject to barbarians, part to tyrants. Artaxerxes is rich in ships and money; so is Dionysios. Greeks must lay aside civil strife, and unite like their fathers against their common foes. (§§ 3—6.) The Lacedaemonians are the acknowledged leaders of Greece, unconquered abroad, untroubled by faction at home. Why do they not bestir themselves? (§ 7) Instant action is needful. Greece must not wait until the enemy in the east and the enemy in the west close in upon her together. (§§ 8, 9.)

Here the extract ends—probably at the point ¹⁶ where Lysias addressed himself more particularly to the state of Sicily, before concluding with an invective against the envoys of Dionysios. It is natural to compare with this fragment the great speech in which eight years later the same subject was treated,—the Panegyrikos of Isokrates. In each case a Panhellenic audience is reminded of the political unity of Hellas and is urged to common action against the barbarian; in each case there is an appeal to the most powerful of the Greeks to become organisers and leaders of the rest; in each case the speaker claims to be a more practical adviser than his predecessors. This last claim would not be easy to decide. It would be hard to say which was the more hopeful scheme; in 388, that Sparta should persuade the other Greek cities to lay aside all jealousies and unite for the common defence under her leadership; or in 380, that Sparta and Athens should jointly achieve that task, and act as harmonious colleagues in such a leadership. As regards form, the vigorous plainness which stamps the fragment of the Olympiakos is perhaps in better keeping with counsel given at a grave national crisis than is the artistic finish of the Panegyrikos. Dionysios says that in the epideictic style Lysias is ‘somewhat languid,’ and wants that power of ‘rousing the hearer’ which Isokrates, like Demosthenes, possessed ¹⁷ . It is not certainly in this fragment that we find the justification of the criticism.

The Funeral Oration ascribed to Lysias purports to have been spoken, in the course of the Corinthian War, over Athenians who had been sent to the support of Corinth. The precise date cannot be determined. In § 59 there is an allusion to the battle of Knidos in 394, and to the visit of the Persian fleet to Greece in 393; and in § 63 there is an allusion to the rebuilding of the walls of Athens in the latter year. If it were supposed that the speech was retouched after delivery, it might have been spoken over those who fell in the battle of Corinth in 394. Otherwise the fight in the Long Walls of Corinth in 392, or that in 391 when Agesilaos took Lechaeum, might be assumed as the occasion. To any one of these three hypotheses there is, indeed, the objection that the speaker seems to refer to the battle in question as one in which the deceased were on the winning side (§ 70).

The oration opens by contrasting the greatness of the ¹⁸ theme with the shortness of the time allowed to the speaker for preparation (§§ 1—3). It goes on, in the usual fashion of such discourses, to commemorate the exploits of Athens from the earliest times. It relates the war in which Theseus repelled the Amazons; the part taken by Athenians in obtaining burial for the Argives who fell before Thebes in the war of the Seven; the brave refusal of Athens to give up the children of Herakles to Eurystheus (§§ 4—16). Then a brief digression on the character of the Athenians as autochthones, and on the early growth of democracy (§§ 17—19). The Persian wars—the siege of Aegina in 458—and the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants are successively noticed, with remarks on the contrast between the Athenian and the Spartan empire. (§§ 20—66.) Then comes a curiously short tribute to the departed (§§ 67—70), and a most gloomy address to their surviving relatives (§§ 71—76); followed by the usual commonplace about the immortal honours of the dead (§§ 77—81).

Two questions have to be considered in regard to the Epitaphios; whether it was written for a real occasion or merely as an exercise; and whether it is or is not the work of Lysias ¹⁹ .

If it was written for a real occasion, then it can hardly be his work; for Lysias, not being an Athenian citizen, could not have spoken it himself; and it is unlikely that he should have composed it for another, since the citizen chosen by the Senate to pronounce a funeral harangue was usually an orator of repute ²⁰ . But two things are in favour of the view that the Epitaphios was a mere rhetorical exercise; first, the character of the references to supposed contemporary events,—references particular enough to have been inserted by a composer anxious for the appearance of reality, yet not exactly corresponding with any known situation; secondly, the neglect of topics which a mere exercise could afford to ignore, but which in a real oration would, according to all fitness and all usage, be prominent—the topics of practical advice and of consolation. This Epitaphios says little enough about the dead; it scarcely attempts to exhort or to comfort the living. If, then, we may assume what the general character of the speech indicates—that it was composed merely as a rhetorical essay—the next question is—Was Lysias the author? The external evidence is inconclusive. Harpokration and Theon ²¹ ascribe it without suspicion to Lysias. Aristotle quotes from ‘ the Epitaphios’ a passage which is found in our speech, but does not name Lysias, though in the same chapter he cites Perikles, Isokrates and others by name. Nothing, however, can fairly be inferred from this except that in Aristotle's time the speech was celebrated ²² . Dionysios nowhere mentions an Epitaphios by Lysias; and his silence is suspicious. Turning from the external to the internal evidence, we find that this is overwhelmingly against the authorship of Lysias. All his leading characteristics—simplicity, grace, clearness, the sense of symmetry—are conspicuous by their absence. The structure of the whole is clumsy; the special topics are ill-arranged, and receive a treatment sometimes meagre, sometimes extravagantly diffuse; the language is affected, turgid and in many places obscure to a degree which makes it inconceivable that this oration and the fragment of the Olympiakos can be the work of the same man ²³ . There are several resemblances of expression between this Epitaphios and the Panegyrikos of Isokrates, and these have often been explained by supposing Isokrates to have borrowed from Lysias. But let any careful reader note how thoroughly the more rhetorical parts of the Epitaphios bear the stamp of a cento, and he will prefer to suppose that some very inferior writer has borrowed from Isokrates ²⁴ . No weight can be allowed to the argument that Plato in the Menexenos (386 B. C.?) had this particular Epitaphios in view. The Menexenos goes, indeed, over very nearly the same range of subjects; but these subjects were the commonplaces of commemorative oratory, and the coincidence is no warrant for assuming a direct imitation. If it may be taken for granted that Aristotle's citation in the Rhetoric is from our Epitaphios, the composition of the speech, whoever was the author, may be placed between 380 and 340 B. C. ²⁵ . In any case, considering the general character of the Greek ²⁶ , it can scarcely be put much below the first half of the second century B. C.

The speeches of Lysias for the ekklesia have had the same fate as his epideictic speeches. These, too, are represented by one fragment alone—that which now stands last in the collection as Oration XXXIV. Like the fragment of the Olympiakos, it is given by Dionysios as a specimen of a class. The title which it usually bears describes it as a Plea against abolishing the ancient Constitution of Athens. When, after the fall of the Thirty, the democracy was restored in 403, it was the aim of Sparta to restrict it. One Phormisios proposed in the ekklesia that only landowners should have the franchise, a measure which, according to Dionysios, would have excluded about five thousand citizens. The speech from which he gives an extract was made against this motion during a debate in the ekklesia. It appears to have been written by Lysias for some wealthy citizen who was not personally affected by the proposal, and may probably be regarded as the earliest of the orator's works now known.

A censure on the proposers and supporters of the motion ²⁷ is followed by a statement of the speaker's political faith. Nothing but a full democracy, he says, can save the country. When Athens was imperial, did she limit the franchise? On the contrary, she gave one of the special privileges of citizenship to the Euboeans. Then, to take the landowners' point of view, it is not they who have ever profited by oligarchies. In fact it is just on their property that the advocates of this, as of former oligarchies, have designs. (§§ 1—5.)

If it is said that Athens can be safe only by obeying Sparta, it should be remembered how desperate are the terms which Sparta would like to impose. Surely it is better to die fighting for one's rights than to pass sentence of death upon oneself. But there is a danger for Sparta also, which will to a certain extent restrain her. She leaves Argos and Mantineia at peace, because she knows that nothing can be gained, and that much would be risked, by driving them to extremities: she will feel the same in regard to Athens. This was the policy of Athens herself when she was greatest. (§§ 6—9.) It would be strange if the democrats who fought bravely in exile should lose heart now that they are restored; if the sons of men who saved Hellas should shrink from delivering Athens. (§§ 10, 11.)

Dionysios remarks on this speech that there is nothing to prove that it was actually delivered on the occasion supposed, but that ‘at all events it is in a style suitable for debate.’ ²⁸ For that very reason, the smooth finish of the extract from the Olympiakos is not to be looked for here; a rougher vigour takes its place. Regarded historically, it has one point of interest—the analogy suggested between Sparta's contemptuous forbearance towards Argos and Mantineia and her probable attitude towards Athens. Nothing could show more strikingly the prostrate condition in which Athens was left by the Thirty Tyrants than that a speaker in the ekklesia should have ventured to use such an illustration.