Sir Richard C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos

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Character and authorship of the Epitaphios.

Two questions have to be considered in regard to the Epitaphios; whether it was written for a real occasion or merely as an exercise; and whether it is or is not the work of Lysias¹.

If it was written for a real occasion, then it can hardly be his work; for Lysias, not being an Athenian citizen, could not have spoken it himself; and it is unlikely that he should have composed it for another, since the citizen chosen by the Senate to pronounce a funeral harangue was usually an orator of repute². But two things are in favour of the view that the Epitaphios was a mere rhetorical exercise; first, the character of the references to supposed contemporary events,—references particular enough to have been inserted by a composer anxious for the appearance of reality, yet not exactly corresponding with any known situation; secondly, the neglect of topics which a mere exercise could afford to ignore, but which in a real oration would, according to all fitness and all usage, be prominent—the topics of practical advice and of consolation. This Epitaphios says little enough about the dead; it scarcely attempts to exhort or to comfort the living. If, then, we may assume what the general character of the speech indicates—that it was composed merely as a rhetorical essay—the next question is—Was Lysias the author? The external evidence is inconclusive. Harpokration and Theon³ ascribe it without suspicion to Lysias. Aristotle quotes from ‘the Epitaphios’ a passage which is found in our speech, but does not name Lysias, though in the same chapter he cites Perikles, Isokrates and others by name. Nothing, however, can fairly be inferred from this except that in Aristotle's time the speech was celebrated⁴. Dionysios nowhere mentions an Epitaphios by Lysias; and his silence is suspicious. Turning from the external to the internal evidence, we find that this is overwhelmingly against the authorship of Lysias. All his leading characteristics—simplicity, grace, clearness, the sense of symmetry—are conspicuous by their absence. The structure of the whole is clumsy; the special topics are ill-arranged, and receive a treatment sometimes meagre, sometimes extravagantly diffuse; the language is affected, turgid and in many places obscure to a degree which makes it inconceivable that this oration and the fragment of the Olympiakos can be the work of the same man⁵. There are several resemblances of expression between this Epitaphios and the Panegyrikos of Isokrates, and these have often been explained by supposing Isokrates to have borrowed from Lysias. But let any careful reader note how thoroughly the more rhetorical parts of the Epitaphios bear the stamp of a cento, and he will prefer to suppose that some very inferior writer has borrowed from Isokrates⁶. No weight can be allowed to the argument that Plato in the Menexenos (386 B. C.?) had this particular Epitaphios in view. The Menexenos goes, indeed, over very nearly the same range of subjects; but these subjects were the commonplaces of commemorative oratory, and the coincidence is no warrant for assuming a direct imitation. If it may be taken for granted that Aristotle's citation in the Rhetoric is from our Epitaphios, the composition of the speech, whoever was the author, may be placed between 380 and 340 B. C.⁷. In any case, considering the general character of the Greek⁸, it can scarcely be put much below the first half of the second century B. C.