The Greek Orators Considered as Historical Authorities. Arnold Prize Essay (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and acquitted.3 In the chairs of the Prytanes sit the tyrants. Instead of the urns and the ballot, the votes are cast openly on tables in reversed order, under the eye of the Thirty.' Their first profession of purging the city of evildoers," the cruelty and rapacity of their attack on the wealthy aliens/ the terrorism that prevented daughters from being given in marriage, w and relatives from attending the funerals of the victims of proscription,1 the massacre at Salamis, and again at Eleusis, where a single vote condemned three hundred citizens to death/ the support given to the Thirty by the knights,2 are all contributions of Lysias to history. That the Thirty made adherents by forcing citizens to participate in their guilt and its odium, and that Lysander had a hand in the proscriptions, we learn from an early forensic oration of Isocrates." The return of Thrasybulus and the exiles was worn threadbare by all the orators. There are some points of importance given by Lysias. After the skirmish in Pemeus, ten men of the more moderate party? among them Pheidon and Eratosthenes?were put in power instead of the Thirty, with the view to a compromise.b So far from reconciliation, the Ten make war on both, borrow a hundred talents from Sparta, and get a mercenary army with Lysander to command C. Agor. 38. Id. ) 37. " C. Erat. 5. T C. Erat. 6, scqq. " Id. 21. C. Agor. 87. y C. Erat. 52. Pro Mantitheo. Mantitheus wishes to prove that he was not a knight under the Thirty. The oration is one of Lysias' greatest successes in Ethopceia. ' Isocr. C. Calltm. 16, 17. Lys. C. Erat. 53-57. it. The restoration of the liberties of Athens was mainly due to the moderation of the Spartan king Pausanias. Lysias tells how the heart of the king was moved by the ...