Lysias

Lysias was an Athenian speech-writer, the son of Cephalus, a wealthy Syracusan who settled in Athens at the invitation of Pericles. He was born about 445 BC and spent his early manhood at Thurii in southern Italy, returning to Athens about 412 BC.

His family suffered under the Thirty in 404 BC: his brother Polemarchus was put to death and Lysias escaped. He then wrote speeches for litigants in the Athenian courts, admired in antiquity for their plain and lifelike style, and died about 380 BC. This archive carries the thirty-four speeches in W. R. M. Lamb's Loeb translation (1930).