The Athenian Civil War according to Lysias' Funeral Oration

This chapter aims to analyze the passages of Lysias’s funeral speech (Lys. 2) that deal with the dramatic events of the 405-403 BC, from the Aegospotamoi battle to the democratic restoration. The principal intent is to underline continuity with and differences from the other narrations of the same events in the Lysianic corpus; in particular there will be important to compare these passages with the speech Against Eratosthenes (Lys. 12) and the one Against Agoratus (Lys. 13), in which the speaker, who is Lysias himself in the first case and a client of him in the second one, gives an interpretation of the Athenian stasis (indeed a civil war) from a democratic point of view. An important passage is Lys. 2.58, where the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian war seems to be attributed to the «fault (κακία) of the commander». Τhe scholars argue about the meaning of the word κακία here; my point is that it is used not just as ‘incompetence’ but as ‘wickedness’, recalling the idea that the crucial battle at Aegospotami was lost for treason.