Lysias, orator, democrat, alien

The name of our law firm was chosen in homage to Lysias, a contemporary of the Greek philosopher, Socrates. Lysias (440/380 AD) was one of the ten greatest orators in Attica, Greece, author of some 300 speeches of which only 35 have been found. He was born in Athens, but his father Cephalus was a native of Syracuse, in Sicily. He was a founding father of what would become the legal profession, even though he pleaded only once, against Erastothenes, one of the Thirty Tyrants that Sparta forced upon Athens after her surrender in 404 AD at the end of the Peloponnese war. Erasthothenes murdered Lysias’ brother, Polemarchus, because he was a Metic – in Greek, metoikos means “who has changed house” – in other words, a resident alien. From there stems the French word “métèque” – a racist insult aimed at foreigners, based on the colour of their skin.

During the reign of terror that Metics had to endure under the yoke of the Thirty Tyrants, Lysias put his wealth and his great knowledge at the service of the democrats and of the citizens of Thebes who liberated Athens. The great French historian Jules Isaac, in his book “Les oligarches” (The Oligarchs) written in 1944 while he was in hiding to escape anti-Jewish repression, described the regime of the Thirty Tyrants as an early twin version of the French government set up in Vichy in 1940.

Lysias faithfully supported Pericles who united the forces of Athens, the democratic city, against the dictatorship, military brutality and inequality of Sparta. Lysias was definitely one of those who, like the soldiers of Athens killed in combat and saluted by Pericles in his famous funeral oration (431 AD) reported by Thucydides, considered “happiness to be the fruit of freedom, and freedom the fruit of courage”.