A statistical study of authorship in the Corpus Lysiacum

Abstract

Thirty-five speeches, fragments and abstracts of speeches' comprise the corpus that has survived from a body of over four hundred attributed in ancient times to the Greek orator Lysias2. All three of the genres of oratory recognised by ancient critics are represented deliberative, epideictic and forensic. Most belong to the last category, being products of the profession which he practized during the latter part of his life, composing speeches for litigants to deliver in their own persons, as they were required to do in Athenian law-courts. Lysias, a Syracusan whose father Cephalus settled in Athens before the Peloponnesian War, conducted his own case against Eratosthenes, who had murdered his brother and despoiled his estate as one of the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens briefly in 404/3 B.C. The speech which he wrote for this prosecution survives as 12 in the Corpus (Oxford Text numbering, which is used in this article), and was probably the only speech that he made on his own behalf. But his name occurs