Homer's Odysseus reveled in his crafty disguises and in his heaven-sent articulateness, a paradigm of the man skilled in fitting his words to the occasion. No less gifted was Lysias, nor less storm-tossed his eventful career. From the beginning the Greeks admired and venerated excellence in speech, and when the tradition of Greek oratory found its critical articulation, Lysias emerged as one of the ten canonical Attic orators and, ultimately, as the emblem of Atticism.

The sources for Lysias's life are few but authoritative, principally the critical essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus; the comments found in Demosthenes' Against Neaira; Lysias's twelfth speech, Against Eratosthenes (403 B.C.); and his fragmentary Against Hippotherses (Papyrus Oxyrrhincus, 1606), though one cannot ignore the biographical material preserved in the pseudo-Plutarchan Lives of the Ten Orators. Lysias was born around 459 B.C. in Athens and was one of the four children of Cephalus, who was...