9 - Authorship and Ideology in Lysias’ Funeral Oration

Summary

Lysias’s funeral speech is a paradoxical work. In theory a funeral speech by a foreign speech-writer should not exist. At first glance, this oration seems to point to a failure of process. What does it say about Athenian democracy that it had carefully selected a man to deliver a speech who needed to employ a speech-writer because, presumably, he was not up to the task of writing the speech himself? Moreover, how could it be that the best person to write an encomium of Athens is not an Athenian, but a metic? Lysias, what is more, was not just any metic, but one to whom Athenian democracy had repudiated a grant of citizenship. Lysias’ funeral speech thus potentially disrupts any straightforward story that we might want to tell about the relationship between the funeral oration, citizenship and civic ideology. His speech highlights the constructed nature of the genre’s statements about normative values. This chapter explores the implications of this speech for our understanding of the epitaphic tradition. It reviews the evidence for the authorship and authenticity of Lysias’ funeral speech. It canvasses the various possibilities for the construction and dissemination of his text.