Isaeus – författare

The foreigner whose style shaped Athens’ greatest orator.Though he occupies a firm place in the canon of the ten Attic orators, Isaeus seems not to have been an Athenian, but a metic, being a native of Chalcis in Euboea. From passages in his work he is inferred to have lived from about 420 to 350 BC. But no contemporary mentions him, and it is from Dionysius of Halicarnassus that we learn he was the teacher of Demosthenes, a fact confirmed by several unmistakable examples of borrowing from or imitation of him by his great pupil. Isaeus took no part in politics, but composed speeches for others, particularly in cases of inheritance. While he shares with Lysias the merits of a pure Attic and a lucidity of style, Isaeus is more aggressive and more flexible in his presentation; and in these respects he undoubtedly influenced Demosthenes. We learn of the existence in ancient times of at least fifty orations, but all that has come down to us are eleven speeches on legacy cases and a large fragment of a speech dealing with a claim of citizenship.

Very little is known about the life of the Attic orator Isaeus, who was active during the first half of the fourth century BCE, and many of his speeches have been lost to posterity. Published in 1904, these surviving speeches, presented in the original Greek with extensive commentary by the classical scholar William Wyse (1860-1929), are mostly concerned with the convoluted intrigue of inheritance disputes. Wyse regarded Isaeus as 'an unscrupulous falsifier of law and fact in the service of clients whose claims to the estates they contested were, without exception, fraudulent'. While modern scholars may not fully share this view, Wyse's monumental and learned edition is still a standard work in the study of ancient family law. In addition to a critical introduction, the texts of the speeches, and the detailed commentary, this work also includes family trees to aid understanding of the complex cases.