Lysias, the son of Cephalus, was an Athenian logographer, a wealthy metic and a staunch democrat: In the Dictionary of Received Ideas about Greek antiquity, the entry devoted to Lysias would probably read along these lines. If there was ever a man identified with a status, a social class, a professional function and a political identity, it is indeed the orator Lysias, whose family, originally from Syracuse, benefits from an exceptional documentary focus. Along with Socrates, he is certainly the most famous figure in our gallery of characters, celebrated throughout antiquity as one of the principal Attic orators. Lysias was admired by grammarians and rhetoricians already in antiquity, and his career path can be reconstructed both through his own works – in particular, the morsels of oblique autobiography that he slips into Against Eratosthenes – and through the various Lives that were devoted to him in Roman times.Footnote ¹

Let us recall, one by one, the popular beliefs about him.Footnote ² That Lysias was a metic – and even a model or ideal metic – emerges from his own speeches. Doesn’t he in fact say so himself to contrast the exemplary conduct of his family with that of the Thirty and their supporters? ‘They clearly did not believe that we as metics should behave in the same way that they behaved as citizens [that is, unjustly].’Footnote ³ His enemies also viewed him in this way, since it was as metics that he and his brother Polemarchus were arrested by the Thirty. As Xenophon indicates, ‘One measure that [the Thirty] resolved upon, in order to get money to pay their guardsmen, was that each of their number should seize one of the foreigners residing in the city, and that they should put these men to death and confiscate their property.’Footnote ⁴ Lysias therefore seems to embody this status of foreign resident, and this defines him for better or for worse.

If Xenophon suggests greed was the only reason for these arbitrary arrests, Lysias maintains that he was also persecuted for political reasons: ‘It was at a meeting of the Thirty that Theognis and Peison raised the subject of the metics, claiming that some were hostile to the new regime (politeia). This would provide an excellent pretext for appearing to punish them while in reality making money, because the city was completely impoverished, and the regime needed cash.’Footnote ⁵ When faced with the jurors, Lysias unceasingly brought to the fore his attachment to the democratic regime and his opposition to the oligarchy. The implication is clear: It was not only because he and his brother were rich metics that they were targeted by the Thirty, but because they belonged to a family that, for several decades, had shown a particular devotion to democracy. This political fidelity had terrible consequences: Polemarchus was executed, and while Lysias managed to escape death at the last moment, the Thirty apparently left him not ‘the least bit of [his] fortune.’Footnote ⁶

By its brutality, it seems this sequence of events led Lysias, who was utterly ruined, to reorient his career and become a logographer (a ‘speechwriter’), composing speeches for hundreds of clients due to go to court. In fact, it is as a judicial orator that Lysias went down in history and how he was eventually canonized as an eminent example of the ten Attic orators: In the Western imagination, Lysias is emblematic of those rhetoricians who were capable of adjusting their style to their clients in order to make them sound all the more convincing to their listeners.

One initial observation is essential. All these clichés were developed during the civil war, the intensity of which produced a powerful stylizing effect on the lives of those who lived through it. It was the stasis that led Lysias to define himself as a democratic metic; not unlike the Sartrean Jew, whose identity is constructed in response to the attacks he endures, it was the civil war that forced the wealthy craftsman to become an orator after the family workshop was ruined. However, this exceptional moment tends to obscure the twists and turns of Lysias’ life, which cannot be summed up in such a simple outline. Considering all the available evidence and his path through life as a whole, a completely different image of the man emerges. Outside of the brief context of the civil war, Lysias was never depicted as a metic and never defined himself as such; nothing, moreover, indicates that he particularly suffered from this status or that he sought to be a naturalized Athenian at any price after the failure of his bid for citizenship in 403. Likewise, considering his life as a whole, his attachment to the democratic regime is not as clear to see as his vibrant proclamations in Against Eratosthenes suggest: The company he kept and the choice of his clients plead for a much more nuanced approach. Finally, his conversion to logography also deserves to be put into perspective: Was he not already considered a brilliant ‘sophist,’ albeit not a logographer, before the beginning of the civil war? He certainly continued to be considered as such after the reconciliation.

Beyond the din of stasis, which forced everyone to choose their camp and froze individuals in clear-cut positions, Lysias’ life reveals that Athenian society was much more fluid than it appears in terms of status, partisanship or profession. On deeper examination, the life of Lysias seems marked by a form of uncertainty due not only to gaps in the source material, but also to the irreducible complexity of Athenian community life. Around this ill-defined man gravitate shifting choruses whose principles of composition and recomposition can be defined by taking advantage of the exceptional light shone on them by the shock of the civil war.

An Uncertain Date of Birth

Lysias was a prolific author and, with the exception of Demosthenes, his work is the best preserved of all the Attic orators. In addition to the thirty-five complete speeches that have come down to us, there are nearly 500 fragments documented through indirect or papyrological tradition, as well as 145 titles of works and about fifteen summaries of speeches. However, this is only a fraction of a much larger body of work lost to us: Only 15 percent of the Lysianic corpus considered authentic has been preserved today.Footnote ⁷ Worse still, this sampling is not based on the historical value of the speeches, but on rhetorical and legal considerations.Footnote ⁸

What is known about the life of the orator is like his writings: incomplete and uncertain. While there is some remarkable documentary evidence about him, many ambiguities remain, and the Lives of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and of Pseudo-Plutarch swarm with partial, even contradictory information.Footnote ⁹ It is therefore difficult, even impossible, to establish so much as the year of birth of the oratorFootnote ¹⁰: Was Lysias born in 459/8 or fifteen years later, around 445/4? Far from being anecdotal, this chronological question affects our whole interpretation of his path through life. To put it differently: In 404/3, was Lysias still a dashing forty-year-old ready to embark on a second career or was he an almost sixty-year-old forced to become a logographer just as he entered old age?

The earlier dating is often favored because Dionysius of Halicarnassus, followed by Pseudo-Plutarch, places the birth of the orator ‘under the archonship of Philocles’ – that is to say, in 459/8.Footnote ¹¹ However, it is probable that the two biographers are working by inference here: It is because they believe that Lysias was fifteen years old when he left for Thurii in southern Italy and that the foundation of this colony goes back to 443 that, by extrapolation, they have placed his birth at such an early date.Footnote ¹² Now, this hypothesis implies that Lysias developed most of his oratorical activity between fifty-six and eighty years old, between 403 and 379. Even more disturbing is a testimony preserved in Demosthenes’ corpus that makes this dating unlikely: The litigator of Against Neaira explains how ‘Lysias the sophist’ fell in love with a hetaira named Metaneira, when he was already married and his mother still lived in their house.Footnote ¹³ However, in view of the indications given in the speech, this torrid episode cannot have taken place any earlier than the decade of the 380s. If Lysias had been born in 459, he would have been between seventy and eighty years old, while his mother would have been over ninety: We would then have to imagine an orator with a Berlusconian profile, blessed with a mother who had an iron constitution.Footnote ¹⁴

Dating Lysias’ birth so early poses one final difficulty. It is hard to reconcile with the (certainly fictitious) setting of Plato’s Republic, which, as we know, takes place in the house of Lysias’ father, Cephalus.Footnote ¹⁵ Mentioned in the speech, Lysias does not take part in the discussion, unlike his elder brother, Polemarchus, who actively participates in the dialogue. This is probably because the future orator is too young to speak, like Plato’s brothers who, equally silent, keep him company. But these men were not born before the 440s; Glaucon, for example, was born c. 445. How could Lysias be fifteen years older than the comrades with whom Plato imagines him in the Republic?

It is all these difficulties that led Kenneth Dover to place the birth of Lysias around 445/4, about fifteen years later. According to the British scholar, the biographical reconstructions of the ancient authors are based only on one single reliable piece of information, probably given by the speaker himself in Against Hippotherses: Lysias was fifteen years old at the time of his departure to Thurii.Footnote ¹⁶However, nothing proves that he emigrated to the colony as soon as it was founded in 444/3, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and, after him, Pseudo-Plutarch assume. He could just as well have settled there only after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. That is, this dating offers the advantage of being compatible with the (fictitious) context of the Republic.Footnote ¹⁷ The later dating is all the more attractive as it fits better with the testimony of Against Neaira about the love affair between the orator and Metaneira: He would have been only about fifty years old at the time of the episode.

However, this assumption is itself problematic in that it comes to contradict the calculations of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, according to which Lysias spent over thirty years in Thurii.Footnote ¹⁸ Certainly, the argument is not critical, insofar as the ancient biographer could very well have deduced this duration by calculating the interval between the foundation of Thurii (443/2) and the return of Lysias to Athens (412/1). But it is another of Plato’s dialogues that makes this chronological adjustment particularly fragile. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates talks with the young Phaedrus, who speaks with admiration of Lysias and presents him as an already accomplished sophist, which suggests he is a man of a certain age.Footnote ¹⁹ But Phaedrus was born around 444, or even a little earlier.Footnote ²⁰ The dating proposed by Dover would imply that Lysias was the same age as his admirer and still a very young man. Is this enough to reject definitively Dover’s hypothesis? Perhaps not, insofar as this Platonic dialogue seems in any case impossible to locate at any given moment in history.Footnote ²¹ Should we be surprised by this chronological imbroglio? Not at all. As usual, Plato likes to blur times and places to make his speech all the more universal for being unlocatable.Footnote ²²

If we had to settle this undecidable issue, we would tend to prefer the traditional chronology, precisely because of Plato’s Phaedrus. For it may not be the fictitious date of the dialogue that matters, but rather the particulars of the discussion that is staged within it: A very young man, Phaedrus, conversing with Socrates about an accomplished sophist, Lysias. Might Platonic irony go so far as to represent the young Phaedrus as being impressed by a fellow student of the same age? This seems doubtful.

Whatever the solution, these chronological uncertainties have serious consequences for the way in which Lysias’ status, political affinities and professional activities are viewed.

A Model Metic?

In 403, for a few hours, a few days, even for a few weeks, Lysias believed that he would become Athenian. According to Pseudo-Plutarch, Thrasybulus proposed that citizenship be granted to him because of his loyal services, and the Assembly voted to ratify this.Footnote ²³ Did he have time to benefit from his new rights by integrating into a phratry? It is unlikely, since Archinus was undoubtedly quick to attack the decree of naturalization for illegality, thereby blocking the procedure, and he succeeded in having the decision overturned in the courts.Footnote ²⁴ According to the testimony of Pseudo-Plutarch, ‘Lysias spent the rest of his life as an isotelēs’Footnote ²⁵ – that is, as a privileged metic exempt from the metoikion tax, an honor he may have already enjoyed before the outbreak of the civil war.Footnote ²⁶

By concentrating on this single dramatic moment, it is quick work to write the history of Lysias – and, beyond that, of Athenian society – in terms of clearly defined legal statuses. From this perspective, Lysias can be seen as the model of every individual who, in spite of all their merits, remained separated from full citizens by an unbridgeable chasm. Lysias’ life story encourages us to look at this legal status-based conception of Athenian social history in a whole new light. Was the acquisition of a new status indeed a vital prize for Lysias and his peers? Was he obsessed by the prospect of becoming an Athenian citizen? Accentuated by the magnifying effect of the civil war, this legal vision is, if not false, at least only partially true.

In fact, Lysias was not the man of a single status. While he was indeed a metic in his early youth, he arrived in Thurii when he was fifteen years old and, upon reaching his majority, became a citizen with full rights for fifteen or maybe even thirty years if one defers to the traditional chronology. Whether Lysias died at eighty (according to the early-dating hypothesis) or at sixty-five (according to the late-dating hypothesis), he still lived as a citizen for half of his adult life. Pseudo-Plutarch even confirms it: ‘And once he had bought himself a house there and been granted an allotment, he was citizen of Thurii thirty-three years, up to and including the archonship of Cleocritus in Athens (413/2).’Footnote ²⁷ It is only once he returned to Athens that Lysias again became a metic, perhaps enjoying some privileges like enktēsis (the right of a foreigner to own land and a house).Footnote ²⁸ And the story was far from over: After a few months of exile in Megara in 404/3, he briefly became a citizen again before becoming (or becoming again) an isotelēs, a legal status in its own right, putting him on an equal fiscal footing with citizens.Footnote ²⁹ This quick summary therefore allows us to consider Lysias as much as a citizen as a metic. From this perspective, the aborted naturalization of 403 no longer stands out as an exceptional moment, but seems rather to be an (aborted) return to the civic norm: In 403, Lysias had lived much longer as a citizen than as a metic!

The case of Lysias suggests, then, that metic status should not be given undue importance in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life. It was, above all, during the civil war that Lysias was considered from this legal perspective, first by his enemies, the Thirty, who sought to rob him, then by his friends, such as Thrasybulus, who wanted to reward him. For the rest of his life, Lysias hardly seems to have been preoccupied by the matter: His status is mostly ignored and, in a way, neutralized. In the Republic, for instance, Plato never mentions that Cephalus and his family are foreign residents. Better yet, Lysias, his father and his brothers ostensibly share the same lifestyle as the Athenian elite, treated as ‘friends and familiars (philous te kai oikeious)’: They all share in the revels of the city.Footnote ³⁰ They eat and drink at the same banquets, attend the same festivals and parade in the same processions, such as the one organized in the honor of the Bendis goddess at the beginning of the Republic.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, at the (fictitious) time of the dialogue, Lysias is not yet of age: Considering him a metic makes all the less sense as he shares the relative marginality of all the young inhabitants of Athens – whatever the status of their parents – symbolized by their shared silence during the dialogue.

This neutralization of legal status is also striking in the Phaedrus. Lysias has grown up this time: He is presented as an accomplished orator, already well known to Athenian politicians. Yet, no allusion is ever made to his status as a foreigner. The real foreigner of the dialogue is Socrates, a foreigner in his own city.Footnote ³² The dialogue presents him only as ‘Lysias, son of Cephalus,’ ‘the best of our contemporary writers’ in Athens.Footnote ³³

Plato is not the only one to make such an omission. In Against Neaira, Apollodorus refers, without any further precision, to ‘Lysias the sophist’ (§21): His social identity is based on his stylistic virtuosity, not on his condition as a foreigner.Footnote ³⁴ Beyond these questions of naming, Apollodorus’ speech reveals how, in the private sphere, nothing differentiated Lysias from a full citizen: He observed the same matrimonial practices as the Athenians, having married his own niece, according to a very common practice in the city.Footnote ³⁵ In the same way, he protected his oikos from the presence of hetairai, as the members of the Athenian elite did in general, whatever their status: In Athens, prostitutes were not admitted into the house of a free person if there was any risk of them being in contact with a legitimate wife or a woman protected by a guardian.Footnote ³⁶ This is why Lysias installed Metaneira in the house of one of his ‘intimate friends’ (philon … kai epitēdeion) who was not yet married, a citizen named ‘Philostratus, son of Dionysius, of the deme of Colonos.’Footnote ³⁷ The relevant boundary here is not between citizens and noncitizens, but between married and unmarried men.

On many occasions, the life of Lysias was not very different from those of the citizens and even of the richest of them, whose leisure practices he shared. It is by no means certain that Lysias wanted to become a citizen at all costs, and even less so that he aimed to enlarge the civic body to include deserving metics, as has sometimes been argued from a one-sided reading of Against Philon.Footnote ³⁸ On the contrary, some speeches in the orator’s corpus show a strong hostility toward those who seek to change their status when they do not deserve to.Footnote ³⁹ Furthermore, he probably had nothing but contempt for most of the poor metics, a sizeable proportion of whom were freed former slaves, such as Gerys.Footnote ⁴⁰

In sum, Lysias should not be considered a metic seeking to acquire citizenship by any means, but rather as an individual endowed with significant agency whose life and activities remained unhindered by his legal condition. Can it be said, then, that his status was of little consequence? That would certainly be an exaggeration. For his condition as a foreigner, even a privileged one, came flooding back in certain contexts and at certain times: on the battlefield, when he had to fight in a separate contingent; at certain feasts, when he could not share the same meats as the citizensFootnote ⁴¹; at court, where he had to go through the intermediary of his prostatēs (patron) in order to file a claim.Footnote ⁴² The fact remains that outside of these special events – be they festive or conflictual – Lysias did not live and probably did not see himself as a metic, even a model one, but rather as an active member of the Athenian community.

An Equivocal Democrat

Just as it is difficult to reduce Lysias to his status, it is equally complex to associate him with a single political stance. There is, however, a rich tradition that tends to portray him as a staunch democrat: The orator himself claims, at the beginning of Against Eratosthenes, to have led an exemplary life under the democracy.Footnote ⁴³ This attachment to the Athenian political regime may even hark back to the previous generation, since his father boasted that he came to Athens at the invitation of the great Pericles.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is why Lysias has long been considered a ‘radical’ democrat – in the words of Wilamowitz-MoellendorffFootnote ⁴⁵ – or a ‘democratic intellectual,’ or even the ‘official logographer of the democracy.’Footnote ⁴⁶ In fact, he wrote a vibrant eulogy of the Athenian political system in the funeral oration preserved in his corpus and composed between 395 and 386.

However, for more than a century historians have insisted on the difficulty of identifying the orator’s political convictions. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was one of the first to remind us that Lysias had defended many ‘enemies of his political camp,’Footnote ⁴⁷ while Paul Cloché underlined the fact that he had supported people of all parties, including both aristocrats and democrats.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such observations have sometimes led to a very dark image of the orator, portrayed as an opportunistic logographer, willing to sell his talents to the highest bidder. This characterization culminated in Friedrich Ferckel’s thesis, published in Germany in 1937, which likens Lysias to ‘a Jewish element alien to the people and the state (volks- und staatsfremde Jüdische Element)’: Like the Jews, Ferckel suggests that Lysias did not have the slightest consideration for the form of the political regime (Staatsform) in which he lived, pursuing only his own personal interest.Footnote ⁴⁹ Ferckel even went so far as to hope that Lysias’ works would be banned from the curricula of German schools!Footnote ⁵⁰

This vile attack was based on the exegesis of a passage of speech 25 (Defense Against a Charge of Subverting the Democracy), in which the anonymous client of Lysias formulates this relativistic profession of faith: ‘In the first place, it is important to remember that no human being is by nature either oligarchic or democratic: instead, he wants that regime (politeia) to be established which would most benefit himself.’Footnote ⁵¹ In addition to the fact that such a proclamation is not particularly original and is expressed differently in other contemporary writings,Footnote ⁵² we must be careful not to carelessly assign this opinion to Lysias, given that it was intended to clear the name of a citizen who had remained in the city during the civil war. Rather than being satisfied with a single, biased testimony, it is better to take a second look at the orator’s political career over the long term and highlight all the uncertainties that surround it.

Let us begin by interrogating the figure of his father, whose memory Lysias invokes in Against Eratosthenes. Do we have to see Cephalus choosing to settle in Athens as an act of democratic faith? Here again, chronology matters. In all probability, Lysias’ father left Syracuse after 466, when the Sicilian city had already freed itself from its tyrants and adopted a democratic regime.Footnote ⁵³ If this was the case, Cephalus’ emigration takes on an ambivalent meaning: If he came to Athens, it was not to live in a democracy, since his home city was just as democratic.

These chronological questions are also important in determining how deeply Lysias himself was committed to the democrats. The moment when, after the death of their father,Footnote ⁵⁴ Lysias and Polemarchus left Athens to establish themselves in Thurii is a particular subject of debate. Did the two brothers leave Athens in 443, as members of a grandiose colonization project initiated by Pericles, or did they abandon a city at war, ravaged by the plague and the Lacedaemonians, shortly after 430? Everything depends, once again, on Lysias’ date of birth.Footnote ⁵⁵ At least one thing is certain: The orator does not say a word about his departure to Thurii in Against Eratosthenes because this episode was difficult to portray in a positive light.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even his return to Athens in 412/1 is open to discussion. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, it may have been the consequence of the Athenians getting routed out of SicilyFootnote ⁵⁷: It was a forced departure toward a destination imposed by the circumstances. Worse still, Lysias could not claim that his return had been motivated by the desire to live in a democracy: Until 406, Syracuse was a city every bit as democratic as Athens! Furthermore, Lysias disembarked in Piraeus just as the oligarchs had taken power in the city. According to Pseudo-Plutarch, ‘he arrived in Athens and began to live there in the year of the archonship of Callias (the Callias who succeeded Cleocritus), at the time of the regime of the Four Hundred in Athens.’Footnote ⁵⁸

From this perspective, it is less surprising that Plato chose to depict the close links between Lysias and other citizens known for their oligarchic sympathies. If the Republic portrays Lysias in the company of many Athenians later involved in the revolutions of the end of the fifth century, it is especially the Phaedrus that attracts attention in this respect. Plato portrays Phaedrus as an admirer of Lysias, whereas everyone knew at the time of the dialogue’s composition in the 380s that he had been forced into exile for having profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries in 415.Footnote ⁵⁹ If it is difficult to take Plato’s word for it, it is at least worth noting that Lysias himself mentions Phaedrus in a favorable light in a speech delivered around 388: One of his clients assures us that Phaedrus, when he married his cousin after his return from exile, was ‘a man who had become poor not because of any wickedness.’Footnote ⁶⁰

This exercise of methodical doubt can even be extended to the period of the civil war. Can we really be so sure that Lysias acted as a committed democrat at that time? Against Eratosthenes, followed by the whole ancient biographical tradition, certainly presents him as a strong supporter of Thrasybulus and of those who resisted the oligarchy, and we do not wish to deny that here. On the other hand, one can wonder if this was truly a voluntary choice. As when he left Thurii, torn apart by stasis, in 403 Lysias was forced to go into exile to save his life; moreover, it is by no means certain that in arresting him and his brother the oligarchs wanted to attack democrats: It was primarily their fortune they were interested in, as Lysias himself admits to those who came to arrest him: ‘I have done nothing wrong but am being killed for my wealth.’Footnote ⁶¹ Let us, moreover, note that, until their arrest, the two brothers had remained in the city and had not sought to rally the embryonic resistance to the Thirty.Footnote ⁶²

This political uncertainty does not stop with the end of the stasis. After 403, it is also difficult to identify a well-defined political line in the speeches of the orator. More precisely, if there is one, it is not the ‘radical’ line of Thrasybulus, as we will see by studying the choruses that gravitate around Lysias. Let us simply say here that he had among his clients many neutral citizens or moderate oligarchs, and, more disturbingly still, that he did not hesitate to attack, in the late 390s, his own ‘side’ – or, at least, the ‘side’ with which he is often associated. While the speech In Defense of Mantitheus (16), delivered around 392–390, takes an early dig at Thrasybulus, the attack became more ferocious in the speech Against Ergocles (28), dated 389 or 388. In it, the former leader of the resistance to the Thirty is blamed for the excesses of his campaign in Asia in 390, during which he had just died.Footnote ⁶³

At the end of this rereading, it would be easy to draw a disturbing portrait of Lysias and his family, far from the democratic vulgate: Here is a man born into a family of rich Syracusans, who left their fatherland just as it declared itself as a democracy; a man who left Athens perhaps in about 429, while his adopted city was fighting against enemy troops and disease; a man who returned in 412/1 and settled in a city that was in the hands of the Four Hundred; a man who mixed with well-known oligarchs, be they Plato’s family or the impious Phaedrus; a man who remained in the city in 404 until he was arrested by the Thirty, without trying to rally to the early resistance fighters; a man, ultimately, who chose to defend the former members of the Three Thousand and ended up trampling on the memory of his ‘patron,’ Thrasybulus …

However, this account is not only tendentious – there are still a great many uncertainties about Lysias’ life – but also trapped in a partisan vision of Athenian politics. In Athens, political affiliations were not fixed once and for all and did not take as their basis stabilized ideological programs. Lysias’ trajectory is in fact emblematic of a world where the two sides are not as clear-cut as the civil war suggests. This principle of uncertainty characteristic of Athenian politics was strengthened still further in the case of Lysias by his activity as a logographer. Because he wrote for others in return for payment, he found himself defending political positions that he did not necessarily endorse personally.

The Paradoxes of Logography

Lysias the logographer? Here, again, doubt must be cast over this statement, as it seems impossible to reduce him to this sole function. For the facts are stubborn: If Lysias was indeed born in 459 and only became a logographer after the reconciliation in 403, he only began his new career at the age of fifty-six. Even if he had been born fifteen years later, he would have been over forty already at the time of his career change. It is therefore difficult to identify Lysias with this activity alone: His rhetorical career lasted fewer than twenty-five years, while he was a rich landowner and/or a wealthy owner of a workshop for at least as long (if he was born around 444), if not much longer (if he was born in 459).Footnote ⁶⁴

However, these chronological considerations cannot exhaust the subject, not only because the year 403 probably does not constitute a clear cut-off point in Lysias’ career, but especially because it is illusory to define the identity of a member of the social elite by means of the ‘profession’ they exercised, according to a very anachronistic standard. Let us begin by questioning the radical break that the civil war would have represented in Lysias’ ‘professional’ career. The idea that he converted to logography is in fact based on a single testimony, that of Lysias himself in Against Eratosthenes: ‘For myself, gentlemen of the jury, I have never taken part in public affairs, either on my own or on anybody else’s account, but because of what has happened.’Footnote ⁶⁵ But should we take him at his word here? It is all the more doubtful since this claim is a rhetorical platitude.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was in every litigant’s interest to assert their inexperience in legal matters so as not to be seen as a sycophant or an expert in quibbling.

If many historians have nevertheless agreed to take Lysias’ statement seriously, it is because they rely on an implicit reasoning: It seems that Lysias was forced to become a logographer to compensate for the plundering of his goods by the Thirty, like Isocrates, the son of a craftsman was impoverished by the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, here again the parallel is misleading for the reason that Lysias was probably far from being totally ruined in 404. If he maintains, in Against Erastosthenes, that the oligarchs had not left him ‘the least bit of his fortune’ (§20), he still had enough resources left to support the democrats after his flight from Piraeus: ‘Once the men of Phyle had resolved to recover Athens, there was no one who proved more supportive than Lysias. He supplied them with 2,000 drachmas and 200 shields; he was dispatched, along with Herman [?], to hire 300 mercenaries; and he persuaded Thrasydaeus of Elis, a guest-friend of his, to donate two talents.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, he seems to have been able, on his return to the city, to make an (unsuccessful) offer to buy back some of his property.Footnote ⁶⁹ This shows that his fortune probably consisted partly in loans and mobile capital, which was easily transportable from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, from Athens to Thurii, then from Thurii to Athens.

Better still, several testimonies tend to indicate that Lysias was already working as a rhetorician even before the civil war. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus – who does not mention the episode of the Thirty at all in his biography – Lysias started his rhetorical career as early as 412/1, on his return from Thurii: ‘Returning to Athens in the archonship of Callias, when his age was presumably forty-seven, he lived and worked for the remainder of his life in Athens. He wrote many speeches for the law courts, and for debates in the Council and the Assembly, each well-adapted to its medium.’Footnote ⁷⁰

From this perspective we would be well advised to imagine a long overlap between his work as a businessman and his career as an orator. This would provide the advantage of making the large number of speeches that Lysias managed to compose during his career more understandable. If he had only started his activity in 403, he would have had to produce an average of nearly ten speeches per year to arrive at the 233 ‘authentic’ speeches that the ancient tradition recognizes!Footnote ⁷¹ However, it is necessary to take into account all the consequences of this hypothesis, which might also cause certain speeches to be attributed to him in cases where Lysianic authorship is usually denied for chronological reasons.Footnote ⁷²

This shift in viewpoint also means Lysias is no longer confined to the sole practice of logography. It is true that the orator’s corpus is essentially composed of speeches delivered before Athenian courts. Cicero even assures us that Lysias specialized in legal matters after having realized that he could not compete with Theodoros of Byzantium (an important sophist at the end of the fifth century) in theoretical speculations.Footnote ⁷³ However, this legend is highly suspect, not only because it may well be a rather free adaptation of Plato’s Phaedrus,Footnote ⁷⁴ but especially because ancient biographers present Lysias as a polygrapher, excelling in all types of rhetoric.Footnote ⁷⁵ His corpus includes a Funeral Oration and an Olympic Oration, of which Dionysius quotes a large excerpt,Footnote ⁷⁶ as well as a speech On Love (Erotikos), even if the latter is probably only a Platonic pastiche.

Posterity is the best judge of such rhetorical versatility: In the speech Against Neaira, delivered in the 330s, Lysias is indeed defined as a ‘sophist,’Footnote ⁷⁷ without it being necessary to specify his patronymic or his city of origin. This was certainly an ambivalent term, often taken in the wrong way, including by Lysias himself.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, the term is far from always being pejorativeFootnote ⁷⁹ and, at the very least, tends to prove that Lysias was never considered a pure logographer. Should we, then, trading one social identity for another, consider him a ‘sophist’? That would not be doing justice to his successive and, sometimes simultaneous, social activities: Lysias certainly partook of various rhetorical practices at the same time during his career, including when he was still the owner of a flourishing shield workshop. Plato provides the best evidence of this when he amuses himself by depicting Lysias as both a sophist (i.e. belonging to that category of men who are not ‘ashamed to write speeches’) and a ‘logographer.’Footnote ⁸⁰ If the term does not have its usual meaning of ‘writer of judicial speeches’ here, the allusion is nevertheless transparent: The philosopher is playing on the interferences between the fictitious context of the dialogue – situated before the civil war of 404 – and the real context of composition, in the 370s, when Lysias was well known for his logographical activity.

Beyond its polemical dimension, Platonic irony, as it often did, gets right to the heart of things. Lysias is characterized precisely by his versatility and the fact it was impossible to confine him to a single sphere of activityFootnote ⁸¹: Depending on the place and the time, he could be understood – and could define himself – as a businessman, a sophist or a logographer.

Let’s narrow the focus, finally, to his activity as a logographer. In this particular register, uncertainty is exacerbated, because it is difficult to know who is speaking in a speech composed by Lysias. With the exception of Against Eratosthenes, he never speaks himself, but always gives voice to others. One could say – to paraphrase Flaubert – that, in his works, the logographer is ‘present everywhere and visible nowhere.’ Present everywhere, since he acts as a ventriloquist, placing his own words in the mouths of his clients; visible nowhere, insofar as Lysias must always adjust his words to the interests of his clients and, above all, erase his name from the work he has created.

This tension between anonymity and authorship has a paradoxical effect over time. While in court, the client appropriates the speech of the logographer and erases all trace of its true author who, incidentally, has no interest in being recognized as such.Footnote ⁸² However, in the long term, it is very often the client who sinks into anonymity: The speech then becomes the work of Lysias alone, to the extent that, in the great majority of cases, the identity of the client remains unknown.Footnote ⁸³ Initially erased, the name of Lysias is even transformed over time into a powerful magnet likely to attract to it other ‘inauthentic’ speeches that come to swell an ever more imposing corpus.

These contradictions characteristic of logography are explored in the Phaedrus, a decidedly crucial, if one-sided, testimony. This is because, in the dialogue, Lysias is not only qualified as a ‘logographer,’ but acts as such: He composes a written speech, of which the young Phaedrus obtains a copy in order to deliver it before a new audience – just as a client buys a speech to deliver it later in court. Of course, the analogy is only partial, since, in the Platonic dialogue, Lysias’ speech is not composed for a fee and is dedicated to love, not to a lawsuit. Besides, in the end, it is not pronounced from memory but read aloud by the young Phaedrus: ‘Do you think that a mere dilettante like me could recite from memory in a manner worthy of him a speech that Lysias, the best of those who write (graphein) nowadays, took such time and trouble to compose?’Footnote ⁸⁴ However, as we have seen, the verb graphein leads the reader to connect this to the later career of Lysias,Footnote ⁸⁵ especially since the whole dialogue functions as the parody of a trial: Phaedrus ends up delivering Lysias’ speech to Socrates, who plays the role of a juror; after listening to him, the philosopher turns into an accuser, elaborating a counter-speech to tear his opponent’s argument to pieces. Finally, the verdict comes in: Having become a juror in turn, Phaedrus recognizes Socrates’ clear superiority over Lysias.Footnote ⁸⁶ End of story!

But the dialogue plays with logography in an even more subtle way. Plato has fun portraying Lysias as a character who is both omnipresent and radically absent according to the principle of logography. On the one hand, his name is constantly quoted, and the speaker insinuates himself into the dialogue through his manuscript with which he is one, like Christ in the host: As Socrates ironically points out, ‘Lysias himself is present’ through his text.Footnote ⁸⁷ On the other hand, he is only a ghost and, lacking any physical presence, is unable to defend his own text against Socrates’ criticism. Here, again, the parallel with logography is obvious: The author is always at the mercy of a client who may deliver a poor oral performance, disfiguring the speech. How better to illustrate the main thesis of Phaedrus, according to which the written text always needs the assistance of its ‘father’ – of the one who conceived it – at the risk of seeing its meaning distorted?Footnote ⁸⁸ Because it implies genetically (so to speak) a need to dissociate the work and its creator, logography exposes the risk inherent in any written production.

However, the Platonic critique is based on a questionable conception that tends to establish a rigid division between the author, Lysias, and the performer, Phaedrus, deprived of any autonomy. But this is the exact opposite of the way logography worked, as Kenneth Dover once showed. Most of the speeches cannot be assigned to a single, clearly identified author: In them, Lysias always mixed his own voice with those of his clients, even if it is difficult to discern their respective contributions.Footnote ⁸⁹ It was in the litigants’ interest to be personally involved in writing their speeches, not only because they risked a great deal – both as the accused, of course, but also as the accusers if they suffered too bitter a failure – but also because they themselves had to speak in front of the jurors. Moreover, most of them were far from being devoid of any rhetorical capacity. Often rich and well educated, Lysias’ clients were able to contribute to their own defense.Footnote ⁹⁰

This principle of coproduction applied to all stages of the logographic process: Downstream, the client had to deliver his own account of the case, find possible witnesses for the prosecution or the defense and participate in the development of a judicial strategy with Lysias, who acted as a legal advisor, like Antiphon in Thucydides’ work.Footnote ⁹¹ Preparing the speech also implied close collaboration, insofar as Lysias had to adjust his style to the rhetoric skills of the litigant and to his ‘idiolect,’ his singular way of speaking. As for the speech actually delivered in court, the client needed to make his mark on it, if only to make it sound natural. Finally, the logographer perhaps needed to have the client’s agreement to ‘publish’ the speech – even if it meant touching it up – by means of written copies put on sale in selected ‘bookshops.’Footnote ⁹²

Obviously, not all clients got involved to the same extent in the logographic process, whether by necessity or by choice, and some ancient testimonies mention utilitarian relationships, reduced to the strict minimum, between Lysias and his buyers.Footnote ⁹³ Even if these interactions are limited, they are nonetheless sufficient to modify the terms in which questions of authenticity are generally raised. Thus, it is undoubtedly futile to try to identify a work by Lysias on the sole basis of stylistic considerations: This would mean retrojecting an anachronistic conception of the author – specific to the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and to the ‘invention of literature’Footnote ⁹⁴ – but above all forgetting that Lysias did not act as a solitary demiurge, and that he worked to make himself literally (and literarily) indistinguishable.Footnote ⁹⁵ From this perspective, it is important not to mechanically assign to him the words he puts in the mouths of others and that do not necessarily correspond to his own convictions.Footnote ⁹⁶ By nature, the logographer had to act like a chameleon and adopt as his professional ethic the principle of not aligning his speeches with his own thoughts.

His logographic activity therefore brings to a head the uncertainties that characterize Lysias’ entire life, be they his fluctuating legal status, his unclear political opinions or his varied professional occupations. To this multifaceted and ambiguous man corresponded multiple and moving choruses of which he was sometimes the coryphaeus, sometimes a simple participant: an enlarged chorus of family and friends; a chorus of the Athenian ‘gilded youth,’ caught up in the excitement of banquets and processions; a chorus of the colonists in Thurii, which mixed Athenians and foreigners in a shared political project; a chorus of exiles and the banished, forced to leave the city to save themselves during the civil war; and, finally, a chorus of SUPPRIMER Athenian litigants, of which he was the invisible coryphaeus and with whom he wove bonds that were not purely mercenary.

A Family Epic

Everything begins with the family circle. In the ancient sources Lysias is often portrayed as a family member rather than as an autonomous and independent individual. In the Republic, Plato represents him as a mute figure, overshadowed by his father, Cephalus, and his brother, Polemarchus, in whose house the dialogue takes place.Footnote ⁹⁷ After the death of his father comes the time of his departure to Thurii, either in 444/3 or closer to 429. There, again, the adventure remains collective: According to Pseudo-Plutarch, ‘Lysias went there with his eldest brother Polemarchus,’ while Dionysius of Halicarnassus specifies: ‘At the age of fifteen he sailed away to Thurii with his two brothers to join in the foundation of a colony there, a Panhellenic venture promoted by the Athenians in the twelfth year before the Peloponnesian War.’Footnote ⁹⁸ The departure therefore does not result in us being able to see Lysias’ individual trajectory, but rather one in solidarity with that of his brothers. At the time, of course, it was likely that both he and Euthydemus, still minors, were under the supervision of their eldest brother, Polemarchus. As for their return to Athens in 412, it does not put an end to this fraternal solidarity: There, still, Lysias and Polemarchus act in concert and both settle in the Piraeus.Footnote ⁹⁹

In a revealing way, the Thirty jointly attack the two brothers, the better to plunder them. Moreover, Lysias and Polemarchus seem to have owned and managed in common the flourishing shield factory that made them extremely prosperous metics, perhaps even the most prosperous of the whole community.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When, in Against Eratosthenes, the orator gives his poignant account of their simultaneous arrest, the ‘we’ is omnipresent: ‘We owned plenty of cloaks, but when we asked, they would not give us a single one for the burial. […] The Thirty had seven hundred shields of ours. They had a huge amount of silver and gold, bronze and ornaments, […] and also one hundred and twenty slaves […]. We received not the smallest degree of pity from them; instead, because of our money, they behaved towards us just as others would have done if angered by very serious offenses.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ The two brothers even seem to have considered their dwelling places as one unit: Lysias evokes ‘the three houses’ (§18) that he and his brother occupied without feeling the need to distinguish them.Footnote ¹⁰²

Lysias’ family chorus did not, however, function only along the patrilineal and male line. The women around Lysias also played a major role in the transmission of his patrimony and, more widely, in the integration of the family within the Athenian community. Let us return briefly to the already much-noted passage of Apollodorus’ Against Neaira: ‘When the women arrived, Lysias did not take them to his own house, since he was embarrassed to do so in front of his wife, Brachyllus’ daughter, who was also his niece, and his elderly mother, who lived there too.’Footnote ¹⁰³ If there is no reason to be surprised that Lysias brought his old mother under his roof out of affection or, at least, out of obligation,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ marrying his own niece was also quite a common practice. It was even an advantageous marriage that aimed to avoid splitting any inheritance between the collateral branches of the same family.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, Lysias’ marriage starts to look less banal as soon as one wonders about the probable identity of his wife, who is not named according to the customs of Athenian judicial rhetoricFootnote ¹⁰⁶: She was probably the daughter of his sister, who was in turn married to a certain Brachyllus.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ An anecdotal detail? Not quite. This Brachyllus – who became both the brother-in-law and the father-in-law of Lysias – could in fact be a well-known Athenian citizen from the deme of Erchia.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ If this is the case, Lysias’ family would thus have been allied by a double marriage to an important Athenian oikos.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As a relative by marriage, Brachyllus was part of the many ‘familiars’ (oikeioi) who gravitated around the house of Lysias.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Still, one should not imagine these as a homogeneous chorus, made up only of free men and women, whether they were metics or citizens. This second circle also included, at the other end of the social and legal spectra, many slaves. While these dependents, essential to the production and reproduction of the oikos, hardly appear in the ancient sources, the shock of the civil war made it possible to perceive their outline fleetingly – for example, in the speech Against Hippotherses, delivered shortly after the reconciliation. Published in fragmentary form in 1919,Footnote ¹¹¹ the text is difficult to reconstruct, but certain elements seem certain. After the amnesty of 403, a certain Hippotherses, unknown in other respects, brought a lawsuit against Lysias, whom he accused of having tried to recover all or part of the goods the Thirty had confiscated from him.Footnote ¹¹² If the details of this affair remain obscure, the speech attests to the exceptional wealth of Lysias before 404 and, implicitly, his relative financial prosperity after the reconciliation.Footnote ¹¹³ More importantly, it gives voice to a slave who provides the speech’s subtitle: Against Hippotherses, on the female servant (huper therapainēs). In the absence of any precise indications in the text, it is possible to make two hypotheses: Either the servant girl was the very object of the dispute – the property over which (huper) Lysias and his adversary were fighting – or Lysias was being sued for the actions that this slave had undertaken in his service, perhaps in an attempt to recover some of his property, the speech therefore being made ‘in favor (huper) of a servant girl’ targeted by the lawsuit at the same time as her owner, Lysias.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Both hypotheses raise some difficulties. On the one hand, it is difficult to understand why anyone would sue over the possession of a single slave, especially since the preserved fragments suggest that the financial stakes of the lawsuit were considerable; on the other hand, some scholars find it difficult to conceive that a servant could have acted as a commercial agent on behalf of her master.Footnote ¹¹⁵ However, this may be an anachronistic projection, since it is known that some slaves could enter into contracts instead of their owners, even if the latter remained ultimately legally responsible for their actions.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In any case, this anonymous servant is certainly just one representative (on the documentary level) of a chorus of familiars, where individuals of various statuses were living together: metics, of course, but also citizens, such as Brachyllus, and slaves.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Gravitating around the oikos of Lysias, all contributed, voluntarily or not, to preserving, restoring or increasing the family patrimony.

A Very Small and Rich World

Let us pause for a few moments and examine the speech Against Hippotherses, by focusing on its performance context. Obviously, the speech was not delivered by Lysias himself, but by an anonymous citizen, tasked with defending him, because the speaker is mentioned in the third person in the fragments transmitted on papyrus. Is this because metics were not allowed to speak in court and had to use a third party to defend themselves? This is highly unlikely. On the contrary, everything indicates that they could sue in the courts, as attested by the speech Against Eratosthenes delivered by Lysias himself.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As Philippe Gauthier has demonstrated, it is only for the application – and not for the trial itself – that a metic had to resort to a prostatēs.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Why then did Lysias not deliver the speech himself? We don’t know, but it is possible to put forward an argument from silence. Lysias could very well have spoken in court without leaving a written trace, and this speech – his Against Hippotherses – was composed for a friend who came to support him as a sunēgoros (‘cospeaker’).Footnote ¹²⁰

This anonymous citizen testifies to the dense relational network on which Lysias could rely. He was certainly one of the numerous friends in Lysias’ social circle before, during and after the civil war. As we have already seen, from his childhood on, Lysias frequented the Athenian gilded youth. Portrayed on stage in Plato’s Republic, this proximity is confirmed by Pseudo-Plutarch: ‘He was educated along with the sons of the most distinguished Athenian families.’Footnote ¹²¹ When he reached middle age, but still before the civil war, Lysias seems to have cultivated close links with powerful citizens. The opening of the Phaedrus shows him as the guest of Epicrates, a politician and a democrat.Footnote ¹²² The house, Plato specifies, belongs to another citizen, Morychos, known for his dietary extravagances and, therefore, for his oligarchic leanings.Footnote ¹²³ The glutton Morychos, the democrat Epicrates, the controversial Phaedrus: In this dialogue, Plato was probably right in linking Lysias to a single social milieu with varied political orientations.

In fact, this friendly chorus was far from being a harmonious little world where all danced as one: As is often the case, proximity went hand in hand with rivalry.Footnote ¹²⁴ The relations between Socrates and Lysias are perhaps the best illustrations of this. On the one hand, Lysias seems to have been quite close to Socrates, since several scholiasts attribute to him a speech For Socrates, against Polycrates, in response to a pamphlet written against the philosopher in 394.Footnote ¹²⁵ On the other hand, the ‘sophist’ never managed to fully integrate the Socratic circle, as demonstrated both by the Phaedrus’ acrimonious tone toward him and a speech attributed to Lysias against Aeschines the Socratic.Footnote ¹²⁶ To this should also be added a probably apocryphal but revealing tradition. According to Diogenes Laertius, Lysias offered his services to Socrates during his trial in 399:

Despite his willingness, then, Lysias could not accord (harmottein) himself with Socrates. Even though they were in the same intellectual chorus, in the eyes of most Athenians, who barely distinguished between philosophers and sophists,Footnote ¹²⁸ their relations were nonetheless dissonant.Footnote ¹²⁹

With the trial of Socrates, however, we sidestep the episode of the civil war, which sheds a harsh light on Lysias’ network of friends, since it was severely strained at this time. Everything took place in the Piraeus: Lysias and Polemarchus both lived there and had established multiple links, as revealed in Against Eratosthenes. After having escaped from the Thirty, Lysias states: ‘I went to the house of Archeneus the shipowner and sent him to the town (eis astu) to find out about my brother.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Probably a citizen,Footnote ¹³¹ the aforementioned Archeneus is obviously one of the family’s relatives, since he is ready to take calculated risks to do a favor for a man pursued by the authorities. Perhaps he was both a friend and a business partner of Lysias. As a naukleros, he could have chartered the ships intended to export the productions of the family workshop. Was he also the one who helped Lysias to settle in Megara in favorable financial conditions? We don’t know, but Against Hippotherses suggests that somebody aided Lysias with his escape: He obviously managed to take with him some of his possessions – perhaps in the form of maritime loans or cash – without which he would not have been able to assist, as he did, ‘those of Piraeus.’Footnote ¹³²

Far from being an isolated supporter, the shipowner Archeneus is the most prominent figure of a chorus that included not only citizens and metics, but also foreign visitors. An excerpt from Against Eratosthenes gives a fleeting glimpse of them at the time of Lysias’ arrest: ‘They found me entertaining guests at dinner, drove them out, and handed me over to Peison.’Footnote ¹³³ While denouncing a flagrant violation of the laws of hospitality, the passage draws attention to the presence of xenoi – both guests and foreigners – in Lysias’ house. The cosmopolitan company of a man who had lived for fifteen or even thirty years outside Athens is hardly surprising, and it must be noted that these relations of hospitality (xenia) functioned in a reciprocal way. Once in exile, Lysias could count on a number of faithful hosts to welcome and support him – first of all in Megara, where he settled a few months as a metic and found a patron (prostatēs) to vouch for him; then in the Peloponnese, where he managed to persuade Thrasydaeus of Elis – the leader of the city’s democrats – to provide financial and military aid to the resistance fighters of the Piraeus.Footnote ¹³⁴ Perhaps his role as intermediary was in this case facilitated by his long stay in Thurii, where he rubbed shoulders with numerous Eleans, engaged in this Panhellenic foundation.Footnote ¹³⁵

During his mission in the Peloponnese, Lysias was accompanied by a certain Herman, to whom he must have been close.Footnote ¹³⁶ For a very long time, a number of scholars have suggested correcting the name of this man – totally unknown otherwise – to Hermas, or even to Hermon.Footnote ¹³⁷ The latter proposal would have the advantage of linking Lysias to an Athenian citizen well known for his commitment against the oligarchy, since a certain Hermon had participated in the conspiracy against the ‘tyrant’ Phrynichus in 411.Footnote ¹³⁸ Let us take the suggestion seriously for a moment. If this was the case, it would mean Lysias acted in concert with an authentic resistance fighter. However, this Hermon was by no means a rabid democrat: A close contact of Theramenes, he had even served as a magistrate under the Four Hundred – he was in charge of the ephebes in Mounychia.Footnote ¹³⁹ He therefore seems to have been, in fact, a ‘moderate’ Athenian, tired of the oligarchic excesses of 411. And if Hermon was forced to take exile in 404, it was undoubtedly because the Thirty counted among their ranks several friends of Phrynichus, who were unwilling to forgive his complicity in the attack.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In this context, it seems all the more coherent to associate Lysias with this man who belonged to the same privileged social circle and who was also personally targeted by the oligarchs.

But it would be a mistake to tell an irenic story, full of nothing but solidarity and assistance. The friendly chorus of Lysias was also pushed to breaking point by the civil war. In 404, underlying disagreements burst into the open, and certain close relations turned brutally against him. Lysias touches on this without dwelling too much on the subject, probably because he does not want to draw attention to his elite friends. After having been arrested by the Thirty’s envoys, Lysias was led to the residence of a citizen named Damnippus, to be momentarily locked up there. Now, the two men knew each other well, and the prisoner hoped to convince his jailer to set him free: ‘So I called Damnippus and said, “You are a close friend (epitedeios) of mine, and I am in your house”.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ After having heard his supplication, Damnippus promised to help him, before changing his mind and warning the oligarchs.Footnote ¹⁴² Clear-sightedly, Lysias did not, however, wait too long for his help and escaped: ‘as it happened, I was familiar with the house and knew it had two doors; [so] I decided to try and save myself.’Footnote ¹⁴³ This is clear proof that he had been quite intimate with his jailer in the past.

Beyond this specific case, the episode reflects the way in which the civil war transformed former close friendships of Lysias, if not into radical enemies, at least into ‘nonfriends’ (since friendship is defined, in Greece as elsewhere, by a duty of mutual assistance).Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Conversely, Lysias seems to have established new bonds with Athenians – like Hermon? – placed in the same uncertain situation. Should this lead us to believe that the traumatic experience of the stasis led to a total reconfiguration of the speaker’s social circles?

Shared Suffering: A Chorus of Exiles?

At first sight, this idea is attractive. As the Greeks themselves had already theorized, it is not only joys that unite men, but also sorrows, through the feeling of solidarity that stasis arouses between comrades in misfortune.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ And Lysias certainly had more than his fair share of misfortune in life. For we should bear in mind an often-overlooked fact: The orator suffered through the torments of civil war and exile not once, but twice: first in Thurii, then in Athens. Although he makes no mention of it in Against Eratosthenes, his long stay in southern Italy was probably a foundational experience. It is in Thurii that Lysias became an adult and a citizen, a community in which he lived for fifteen or even thirty years, and where he seems to have forged close links with ‘best men.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The ancient tradition mentions several famous participants in the expedition, such as the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the sophist Protagoras of Abdera and the Athenian soothsayer Lampon, one of the founders (oikistai) of the colony.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The enterprise was so successful that it is sometimes described in the ancient tradition as a utopia come to life, combining a geometric urban grid, equally distributed land and democratic laws.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Thirty years later, the dream turned into a nightmare. After the Athenians were routed in Sicily, old antagonisms revived in the city of Thurii: ‘After that disaster there was a civil strife (stasiasantos), and he [Lysias] was exiled along with three hundred others on the charge of pro-Athenian sympathies (attikismon).’Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The orator and his brother therefore returned to Athens not only as a family, but in a group: Expelled as one, many ‘Atticizers’ probably sought refuge in Athens. Nothing, however, indicates that there was a significant Thurian community in the democratic city: The experiment had undoubtedly been too short to create a strong collective identity between colonists. The Athenians did not grant any special status to these refugees from southern Italy, unlike the 212 Plateans who, after the destruction of their city in 428, had been collectively granted Athenian citizenship.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In 404 Lysias had to undergo the trauma of the civil war and banishment a second time. This was also a collective experience. While he went alone to Megara to save his life, he shared in the fate of a great number of Athenians who had been exiled and separated from their relatives because of the Thirty. He himself, in Against Hippotherses, proclaims he was a full member of this suffering community:

Here, the speaker mobilizes the memory of the hardships shared during the civil war to build a collective of victims, associating citizens and metics indiscriminately. He uses the same rhetorical technique in the peroration of Against Eratosthenes, when he tries to revive the memory of past sufferings in order to obtain the conviction of his opponent, Eratosthenes:

Lysias immediately specifies the composition of this emotional community. It includes all ‘those who escaped death found danger in many places, who wandered to many cities and were banished from all of them.’ These suffering people broke down into two groups: on the one hand, those who had remained ‘in a hostile fatherland’ (i.e. ‘those of Piraeus’) and, on the other hand, those who had left ‘in foreign territory’ (i.e. those who, like the speaker, had settled temporarily in another city to escape persecution).Footnote ¹⁵³ The final words of the speech return to these shared misfortunes that united the dead with the living. It is, indeed, as the dead look on that the jurors are called to vote: ‘You have heard, you have seen, you have suffered, and you have them in your grasp. Give your verdict!’Footnote ¹⁵⁴

It remains to be seen how strong the bonds created by this shared suffering were. If it was intensely felt at the time, the solidarity between victims obviously vanished quickly, since once they had returned to the city, some of the democrats of Piraeus opposed naturalizing the foreigners who had fought by their side, either directly or indirectly.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In the case of Lysias, these moving appeals obviously had limited effectiveness: In all likelihood, the orator did not recover the property confiscated from him by the Thirty, while his opponent, Eratosthenes, may well have been acquitted by the popular court.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ This is probably because exile had not been a real collective experience, creating lasting solidarity, unlike the enduring ties that bound, for example, the rowers of the fleet of Samos between 411 and 407.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But Lysias himself does not seem to have felt part of this resistance community: As a logographer, he only very rarely gave his support to those who had suffered together with him.

The Discreet Charm of the Oligarchy

This is to enter into a very complex question: Is it possible to reconstruct a coherent chorus of clients revolving around the orator? The idea may seem strange, even paradoxical. Isn’t logography based on purely contractual bonds between the producer and his clients? Lysias seems to have produced ten speeches per year: Could he really have been picky about the identity of his clients?Footnote ¹⁵⁸

This approach cannot get to the bottom of the question, not least because a chorus could also include the existence of fee-paying relationships within it: The coryphaeus maintained, or even paid, the choreutai it recruited to its service, even if their ties were not limited to their monetary aspect.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Logography has similar features in that it is not a craft like the others: In principle, it supposes that intimate links are forged with the client over a long period of time, from their introductory talks to the verdict of the trial, or even the publication of the speech. And the exchange is not a one-way street: As we have seen, while Lysias lent his voice and his talent to his client, he had to adapt to his attitudes and, above all, to momentarily espouse his friendships and hatreds, so as to compose a well-tuned speech.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ These bonds of identification were all the more powerful because the logographer was obliged to write the speech in the first person and because the stakes were much higher than in the context of an ordinary craftsman’s activity: While the client risked his property, even his life, the stakes for the logographer were his reputation and, therefore, his economic survival.

These specific features suggest that a logographer’s choice of clients did not depend on the law of supply and demand alone, and even less on any supposed (and anachronistic) obligation to act as a ‘court-appointed lawyer.’Footnote ¹⁶¹ Is it therefore possible to identify, if not selection criteria, at least some consistency in the cases selected by Lysias? A thorough investigation into this subject deserves to be carried out, in spite of the uncertainties linked to the partial conservation of the corpus. We will take into account here the seventeen speeches referring directly or indirectly to the civil war written between 403 and the 380s in order to try and think this through.Footnote ¹⁶²

Let us begin by dismissing two false leads often followed by scholars. The first one consists in attributing to Lysias a leaning toward the ‘radical’ democrats, because of the support that Thrasybulus had given him for his (aborted) naturalization attempt in 403. In reality, there is nothing to support this assumption: If he perhaps supported Thrasybulus at the time of the reconciliation – although we have no proof of this – he was by no means his right-hand man in the long term; less than fifteen years after 403, he even took on as clients two men who were challenging the great man of Phyle.Footnote ¹⁶³ As for the second error of perspective, it consists of overestimating the hatred that Lysias felt for the oligarchs in general, based on the sole reading of Against Eratosthenes. In reality, Lysias only prosecuted the citizens he considered directly responsible for his family misfortunes: Eratosthenes, his brother’s ‘murderer,’ and Hippotherses, who, it seems, had appropriated their fortune for his own benefit. Now these initial misunderstandings have been cleared up, let us review the available evidence, focusing on Lysias’ clients on the one hand and on their opponents on the other.

In the sample of works preserved to this day, Lysias’ clients are, for the most part, Athenians who remained in town during the civil war: No less than eight of them can be identified as such. In Against Andocides (speech 6), the litigant is none other than Meletus, one of Socrates’ accusers and, above all, one of the Three Thousand involved in the arrest of Leon of SalamisFootnote ¹⁶⁴; in a more discreet way, the anonymous client of the Defense in the Matter of the Olive Stomp (speech 7) is obviously one of ‘those of the city,’ since he admits having bought a plot of land under the Thirty and appears to have taken advantage of the setbacks of the previous owner (associated with the democrats) to buy at a low price.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Mantitheus, another client of Lysias (speech 16), is also a member of the Three Thousand, since he has to defend himself from his supposed connections with the Thirty and claims to have been absent from Athens for a long time during the civil war. In addition, there are three speeches whose litigants present similar profiles and a similar line of defense: Whether it is the anonymous citizen accused of corruption (speech 21), the man accused of activities against democracy (speech 25) or a certain Eryximachus (fragment 9c Todd), all of them recognize that they remained in the city, but fiercely deny having actively participated in the oligarchic regime.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

This clear preference of Lysias for ‘those of the city’ persisted with time. Delivered twenty years after the reconciliation, On the Scrutiny of Evandros (speech 26) is a good example. In 382/1, a certain Leodamas was dismissed from the Council after his initial examination (dokimasia) because of his past involvement in the regime of the Thirty; one of his friends then commissioned a speech by Lysias to attack his replacement, a certain Evandros, and, through him, Thrasybulus of Collytos, an influential general among the democrats (who should not be confused with his great homonym, Thrasybulus of Steiria). The accusations seem to have been made on both sides. While the litigant blamed Evandros for having supported the Thirty,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ his ally Leodamas seems to have done even worse: According to Aristotle, he had been banished in 411 after the first oligarchic revolution and his name had even been engraved on a stele of infamy; during the reign of the Thirty, it seems he opportunely got rid of this compromising record.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As for the litigant himself, given his insinuations against ‘those of Piraeus,’ we can guess that he remained in the city during all of the civil war.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Two other speeches deserve also to be considered from this perspective. In Against Nicomachus (speech 30), composed in 399, Lysias has as a client a man who may have been a member of the Four Hundred, despite his denials,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ and who, in 404, probably remained in the city: If he had been able to do so, he would not have failed to mention his banishment by the Thirty or his participation in the democratic resistance like his opponent, Nicomachus, who did go into exile.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The same argument can be applied to Against Ergocles (speech 28), which dates from 389 or 388. Lysias’ client refuses what we might call the ‘excuse of Phyle (or Piraeus)’: He should not be punished for his present crimes because, fifteen years before, his adversary fought against the Thirty.Footnote ¹⁷² Here, again, the accuser would undoubtedly have put forward his own democratic service record, if he had been able to do it, to better counter the argument of Ergocles.

In short, of the fifteen clients of Lysias who were involved in the civil war (if we exclude Against Eratosthenes and Against Hippotherses), nine or ten obviously belonged to the Three Thousand.Footnote ¹⁷³ And the orator not only put his talent at the service of former oligarchs forced to defend themselves against vengeful democrats,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ but also assisted them in attacking their political enemies.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

That leaves five clients – one-third of the sample – who do not fall into this category. Does this mean they are committed democrats? The reality is much more nuanced. Let us start with the famous speech On the Refusal of a Pension (24), which occupies a special place in Lysias’ corpus. This colorful speech was composed for the benefit of – in his own portrayal – a pitiable and disabled citizen who was in danger of being deprived of his living allowance. Whether it is a real case or a covert sophist exercise,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ the adunatos cannot be qualified as a democratic freedom fighter: On the one hand, he may not be as poor as he claims, since it is in his interest to hide his possible assets in order to obtain his pension; on the other hand, he never rallied to the men of Phyle or Piraeus, but fled to be a metic abroad, without contributing in any way to the fight against the Thirty.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Delivered between 397 and 395, On the Property of the Brother of Nicias (speech 18) is also difficult to interpret. Lysias’ client in this case is one of the nephews of the famous Nicias, who was killed during the expedition of Sicily. To avoid having his goods confiscated, the young man recalls his family’s democratic service record. However, in spite of his proclamations, his relatives could not all be regarded as staunch democrats. His uncle Nicias was certainly a great Athenian general, but also a resolute opponent of the most radical democrats.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ As for his father, Eucrates, his execution by the oligarchs at the very beginning of the civil war did not make him a hero in the eyes of the democrats: His sons were dragged before the courts because Eucrates had been accused – and convicted – for having acted in a criminal way while he was a stratēgos at the end of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Worse still, having become an orphan, Lysias’ client was taken in, at the time of the Thirty, by another of his uncles, Diognetus, who was very close to the oligarchs. Exiled by the democracy, this former member of the Four Hundred had returned to Athens in 404 and, far from trying to join the resistance in Piraeus (§10), had remained in the city.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Beyond these two very difficult cases, three clients could have belonged to the camp of Piraeus. The anonymous litigants of Against a Proposal Tending to Destroy the Regime of the Ancestors (speech 32), Against Theozotides (which has come down to us in fragmentary form) and Against Archinus (of which we only know the title) might be seen in this light.Footnote ¹⁸¹ But it should be noted that, in the latter two cases, this identification is only a pure inference, not based on any concrete proof.Footnote ¹⁸² More importantly, these three speeches targeted Piraeus veterans, and not oligarchs who remained in the city.Footnote ¹⁸³ Lysias therefore seems to have participated more willingly in the internal struggles between former fighters of the Piraeus than in the prosecution of former members of the Three Thousand.

Through their complexity, these last three cases indicate that we must take into account not only the identities of the clients, but also those of their enemies in order to reconstruct the other side of the story, as it were. Out of fifteen identifiable opponents, five are formerly of the Piraeus, or even of Phyle. In addition to the three speeches opposing former ‘men of Piraeus’ to one another,Footnote ¹⁸⁴ we must add Against Agoratus (13), which attacks a citizen or a metic who had rallied to the army of Thrasybulus,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ as well as Against Ergocles (28), in which, twenty years after the civil war, the litigant attacked a former member of the Phyle army by reproaching him for hiding his crimes behind this flattering front.

There are also four opponents whose political position is not explicit, but who seem to have been, if not resistance fighters, at least fervent democrats: The adunatos’ (24) accuser is likely to have been close to ‘those of Piraeus,’ otherwise Lysias would have had good reason to blame him for having been a member of the Three Thousand. As for the three speeches composed for the benefit of citizens who remained in town (Defense Against a Charge of Taking Bribes [21], Defense Against a Charge of Subverting the Democracy [25] and For Eryximachus Who Remained in Town), it would be logical to conclude they were written in response to accusations emanating from the democratic camp. Finally, the opponents of Lysias’ clients also included some individuals who, without having taken part directly in the resistance, had suffered from the regime of the Thirty: Against Nicomachus (30) and Against Philon (31) fall into this category, since these speeches attack individuals who had been banished under the oligarchy.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Therefore, out of the fifteen opponents of Lysias’ clients, we count five former Piraeus fighters and four who had probably been banished by the Thirty, to which we have to add two individuals who are difficult to pinpoint: the equivocal Andocides and the anonymous accuser of the speech Defense in the Matter of the Olive Stump (7). Only two speeches composed by Lysias against former members of the Three Thousand remain; and, again, these are borderline cases, since they are confrontations between citizens who remained in the city: The speech On the Property of the Brother of Nicias (18) pits a former member of the oligarchy, Poliochus, against Nicias’ nephew, who also remained in the city in the company of his uncle and guardian; as for the speech On the Scrutiny of Evandros (26), it not only pits former oligarchs against each other, but ends up praising ‘those of the city’ rather than the ‘those of Piraeus’:

At the end of this quick prosopographical survey, some consistencies deserve to be highlighted. Lysias did not, as far as we know, ever compose a speech for a man of the Piraeus fighting against a man from the city: His few ‘resistance’ clients were involved in conflicts between themselves and other democrats, not former oligarchs. Symmetrically, Lysias never went after former members of the Three Thousand unless their opponent was also in the same camp: In this respect, the speeches Against Hippotherses and Against Eratosthenes are more the exception than the rule. More generally, his clients were, for the most part, former members of the Three Thousand who denied their active involvement in the regime of the Thirty, while their opponents were most often former resistance fighters from Piraeus or men banished by the Thirty.

This general panorama increases the likelihood that Lysias composed the speech For Polystratus (20) insofar as this (chronologically possible) attribution is in line with the same logic: There is nothing to prevent the orator from taking as a client a former member of the Four Hundred who claimed to have acted as best he could under the circumstances.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Similarly, it now seems easier to believe that Lysias offered his help to Socrates during his trial in 399: The philosopher was – like many of his clients – a prominent member of the Three Thousand, who claimed to have been in no way involved in the crimes of the Thirty.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

We still need to explain these preferential choices, which are far from random. Is it out of simple opportunism that Lysias chose such customers? In fact, ‘those of the city’ were at the same time those most in need of defense in the (barely) reconciled Athens of 403, and also those who had the economic resources to pay for the orator’s services. However, this pragmatic explanation overlooks the personal reasons that might have motivated the speaker’s choices. Might not Lysias also have been guided by a certain animosity toward the fighters from Piraeus who, in some cases (the chorus of Archinus), had joined forces to deprive him of his citizenship and, in others (the chorus of Thrasybulus), had not provided him with sufficient support at this time? It is nevertheless necessary to take into account another factor: Lysias mainly took on as customers men to whom he was sociologically close, and he had done so since his youth.

If this observation seems reductive, it is nonetheless crucial: For his entire career, Lysias was at the service of a coherent group, to which he himself belonged – the socioeconomic elite of the city. With the exception of the (self-proclaimed) adunatos and, perhaps, Eratosthenes’ murderer, Euphiletus,Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Lysias wrote only for wealthy men, who were usually obliged to pay for liturgies, those costly public services to which only wealthy citizens and metics were subject. In the fourth century, this privileged group numbered barely a thousand individuals out of several tens of thousands of taxpayers.

Many of Lysias’ clients thus boasted of their multiple contributions to the common good,Footnote ¹⁹¹ and even claimed loud and clear to draw political and legal benefits from this. ‘But the reason I spent more than was required by the city was to improve my reputation among you and to be able to defend myself better if I were to encounter any misfortune,’ assures oneFootnote ¹⁹²; ‘the expenditure is the reason I am justly being rescued by yourselves,’ claims another.Footnote ¹⁹³ As for Lysias himself, he recalls how generous his family had been to the Athenian people in the past: ‘we had sponsored all our choral performances and contributed to many war taxes (eisphorai).’Footnote ¹⁹⁴ This shows the orator as chorēgos in the true sense of the term. This is far from surprising: Rich metics had to carry out such tasks as much as Athenians did (although the trierarchy was only for citizens).

It is still necessary to take the stock of what a chorēgia implied in terms of prestige and, more broadly, of relations with society. First of all, it was a practice that functioned in part beyond the established distinctions of status: At the Lenaia and the rural Dionysia, metics could not only participate in the procession in honor of the god, but also could act as a chorēgos during the drama competitions that took place thereafter.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ A metic could therefore find himself in an eminent position that involved directing and maintaining a group of choreutai that could include full citizens for several months; in the same way, they could gain victory over other chorēgoi who were Athenians. Of course, certain differences remained, since metics could not be chorēgoi at the time of the city Dionysia,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ but their partial integration is no less significant for all that.

Full participation implied the establishment of specific links between groups of liturgists, metics and citizens alike. On the one hand, the chorēgoi were in competition with one another, and the contest could sometimes degenerate into a feud, according to a deleterious process revealed by some of the judicial speeches.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ On the other hand, liturgists were distinguished as a collective in the social space, whatever their status, especially during any procession preceding the contest: They could not fail to recognize themselves as a coherent group – the ‘liturgical class’Footnote ¹⁹⁸ – who shared the same interests and were bound to frequent each other’s company, and even join together (e.g. through reciprocal marriages with the women in their families).

In the case of Lysias, the social links between chorēgoi appeared after the civil war and not before. Let’s go back one last time to Against Neaira: According to Apollodorus, Lysias installed his concubine Metaneira, not in his own oikos, but ‘at the home of Philostratus of the deme Colonos, a friend of his, still a young man.’Footnote ¹⁹⁹ However, Philostratus was not an average citizen, but in fact came from a very small, fortunate world: A well-known orator, he was a victorious chorēgos in the Dionysia and, in 342, a trierarch alongside his father.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The episode is a good demonstration of the almost carnal proximity between Lysias and a young citizen – who took in his adulterous lover – and is presented as an ‘intimate friend (philon kai epitedeion).’Footnote ²⁰¹ Epitedeios: It is the same term that qualified Damnippus, the powerful Athenian who chose not to help Lysias when he was arrested by the Thirty.Footnote ²⁰² Thanks to the civil war, Lysias had perhaps changed some of his friends, but not his social class.

The Civil War or the Great Simplification

At the end of this survey, Lysias stands out as resolutely different in the gallery of characters that we have considered. His trajectory connects several figures of the choral city that we have tried to bring to light. For better or for worse, Lysias was connected to Thrasybulus, whom he perhaps supported before turning away from him; to Archinus, who was his adversary at the time of the reconciliation; to Nicomachus, whom he pursued with his hatred as a parvenu bureaucrat; to Socrates, with whom he maintained strong but dissonant ties; to the ‘neutral’ citizens who remained in the city and of whom he was an unfailing supporter; to the rich Athenian families, torn apart by the civil war and to whom he often lent his legal assistance; and to Gerys, with whom he shared the status of isotelēs, while living in a completely different social world.

Because he benefits from a privileged documentary status – due to the multiple sources produced by him and about him – Lysias also allows us to emerge from of an aporia characteristic of writing the history of the civil war. At the beginning of the investigation, we wagered that, through its destructive ability, the stasis was the ideal opportunity to appraise how Athenian society functioned and how its various parts hung together. This event, which disturbed the normal order of things, had the capacity to unveil and make visible what would normally remain unseen. It nonetheless tends to obscure as much as illuminate our view, functioning like a ‘device,’ or ‘dispositif’ according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition: ‘Each device (dispositif) has its way of structuring light, the way in which it falls, blurs and disperses, distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear.’Footnote ²⁰³ In this case, the civil war tends to oversimplify Lysias’ life story by reducing him to the role of a democratic metic, forced by circumstances to become a logographer. This distortion is further amplified by the extraordinary prestige of one speech, Against Eratosthenes.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Canonized by modern tradition – but ignored by Dionysius of HalicarnassusFootnote ²⁰⁵ – the speech seems to deliver the definitive truth about Lysias’ identity, while it in fact actually hardens and freezes it in time.

It is therefore appropriate to dial down the blinding glare of the civil war and, through a longitudinal approach, restore to Lysias his multifaceted nature. Obviously, this perspective also entails danger: to end up with an anachronistic description of Athenian society as overly fluid; in short, an Athens reread through the prism of our time – that of intermittent careers, the decline of political parties and the emancipation from legal constraints. In fact, following Lysias does not lead to the conclusion that legal status or political choices counted for nothing in Athens at the end of the fifth century, but rather to grasp the moments and places where these distinctions played a decisive role or, on the contrary, were neutralized. These variations explain precisely why metics – as a fetishized category – could be considered, in historiography, sometimes as quasi-citizens, sometimes as anti-citizens, depending on whether the emphasis was on their participation in cult, the army, the city’s finances or their exclusion from political institutions and land ownership.Footnote ²⁰⁶ This is, it seems to us, a false alternative – doubly false, in fact. First of all, it neglects the evidence that individuals with the same status but radically different origins and existential experiences coexisted: A whole world separated the freedmen, still carrying the stigma of slavery, from the foreigners who had come from all over the Greek world to seek wealth in Athens. In addition, it forgets that all metics, even those with privileges, like Lysias, could, according to the time and place, be included or excluded from society.

Likewise, reinstating all the uncertainties about Lysias’ life also fails to bring about any underestimation of the strength of class distinctions. His multiple choruses are the proof of this: From the beginning until the end of his life, Lysias was part of the who’s who of the Athenian community, in circles where citizens and wealthy metics rubbed shoulders and mostly stayed on good terms.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Certainly, the civil war put the coherence of this small world severely to the test: The discords sometimes tore through the social fabric at this moment of truth. However, while Lysias was sometimes betrayed by those close to him, he was never a traitor to his class. His networks of friends, allies and clients were reconfigured on the same distinctive basis after the civil war. As is often the case, everything had to change for everything to remain the same.