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 ANDOCIDES. LYSIAS 337 tion till 399, when the notorious Meletus, among others, charged him with impiety, raking up the old scandal of 415, and accusing him further of having profaned the Mysteries. Andocides was acquitted. His speech has its name from the accusation, but its main object is really to give the speaker's own version of that youthful act for which he had been so long persecuted. The third speech, advocating the peace with Lacedaemon in 390, failed in its purpose, and was apparently pub- lished afterwards as a justification of the writer's policy. Lysias was a Syracusan, born probably about 450, though his extant work lies entirely between 403 and 380. His father Kephalus, known to us from the charming portrait in Plato's Republic, was invited to Athens by Pericles. He owned several houses and a large shield-factory in the Piraeus. Lysias went to Thurii at the age of fifteen, and had his first oppor- tunity of suffering for the Athenian Democracy in 412, after the defeat of the Sicilian Expedition. Expelled from South Italy, he returned to Athens, and continued his father's business in partnership with his brother Polemarchus. He composed speeches for amusement, and possibly gave lectures on rhetoric. We hear that he was not successful as a teacher compared with Theodorus and Isocrates ; which is not surprising if either the Eroticus attributed to him by Plato in the Phcsdrus, or the Epitaphms extant in his remains, is a genuine type of his epideictic style. In 404 things changed with Lysias. The Thirty Tyrants took to plundering the rich * Metoikoi ' or resident aliens. The two brothers were arrested. Lysias escaped, Pole- marchus was put to death, and what could be found of the property was confiscated. Evidently not all ; for