Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/525

503 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 503 summary of it : it lies open to only one censure, which is generally brought against Lysias by the old rhetoricians — that the. proofs of his accusation, which follow the narrative, hang together too loosely, and have not the unity which might easily have been produced by a more accurate attention to a closer connexion of thought. § 6. Lysias was, in these and the following years, wonderfully prolific as an orator. The ancients were acquainted w r ith 425 orations which passed under his name ; of these, 250 are recognized as genuine : we have 35 of them, which, by the order in which they have come down to us, appear to have belonged to two separate collections.* One of these collections originally comprised all the speeches of Lysias arranged according to the causes pleaded in them, a principle of arrangement which we have already discovered in the case of Antiphon. Of this collection we have but a mere fragment, containing the last of the speeches on manslaughter, the speeches about impiety, and the first of the speeches about injuries :t either from accident or from caprice, the Funeral Oration is placed among these. The second collection begins with the important speech against Eratosthenes. It contains no complete class of speeches, but is clearly a selection from the works of Lysias, the choice of speeches being guided by their historical interest. Con- sequently, a considerable number of these speeches carry us deeply into the history of the time before and after the tyranny of the Thirty, and are among the most important authorities for the events of this period with which we are not sufficiently acquainted from other sources. As might be expected, none of these speeches is anterior in date to the speech against Eratosthenes : nor can we show that any one of them is subsequent to 01. 98, 2. B.C. 387, § although Lysias is said to have lived till 01. 100, 2 or 3. n.c. 318. || The arrangement is neither chronological, nor according to the causes pleaded ; but is an arbitrary compound of both. probably be soon brought out in a complete and finished state. f The speech for Eratosthenes is an a-xoXoy'ia. (ptniov, and is followed by the speech against Simon, and the following moi t^ccvumto;, which also belong to the tpovixr.i X»y»t then come the speeches wig} acri/iuas, for Callias, against Andocides, and about the Olive : then follow the speeches xxxoXoyiav, to his comrades, for the warriors, and against Theomnestus. The speech about the Olive ia cited In Har- pocration, v. iryxos, a* contained iv toI; rn; ««/3s/a?, and so his ruv c-v/u-jioXaiuv x'oyoi, iriT^oi-ix/ii Xoyoi, are also quoted. + The speech of Foh stratus does not belong to the time of the Four-hundred, but was delivered at. the scrutiny (Wi^aa-ia) which Polystratus had to undergo as an officer of his tribe, and at which he was charged with having belonged to the Four-hundred. The speech Iripou x.u.TuXvtnu>f avokoylct was delivered under similar circumstances. § The speech about the property of Aristophanes probably falls under this year. Ol. 98, 1, or 99, 1. B.C. 384.
 * According to the discovery made by a young friend of the Author, which will
 * A speech in the first series (that against Theomnestus) was written later, —