L'Epitafio e gli ideali democratici di Lisia nella lettura di Giuseppe Schiassi

Around 1960, Giuseppe Schiassi focussed his attention on the corpusculum of the Athenian speeches written for the public ceremony held every year in the Kerameikos in honor of the Athenian soldiers fallen in war. After his 1959 commentary on Hypereides’ Epitaph and an article on Plato’s Menexenos (1962), he published in 1962 a commentary on the Epitaph transmitted as or. II in the corpus Lysiacum. Following in the steps of J. Walz, F. Zucker and F. Buchner, he pleads for the authenticity of the speech, interpreting it as a mature document of Lysias’ loyalty to the traditional ideals of democratic Athens, enriched with new panhellenic ideas. Though sometimes too confident in the possibility to extract personal opinions from the writings of the logographs, the commentary sets in a honest and clear way the arguments in favour of Lysianic authorship and gives an articulated picture of the place of the speech in early fourth-century Athens’ politics. His work still deservers the attention of all scholars interested in Lysias’ oratory.