ABSTRACT
In Lysias 1, the defense of Euphiletos for the murder of his wife’s lover has parallels in the story of Gyges and Candaules in Herodotus. The author suggests that, rhetorically and literarily, Lysias portrays nomos as a conflation of Herodotean custom and Athenian forensic law. In Lysias 1 there is also an ironic and wryly staged bedroom preamble to actual attack on Eratosthenes eventually in a bedroom below. The queen and Euphiletos then are both noiseless, each one wanting to delay an open reaction to the offenders, when the act of shamelessness is unfolding, the Lydian viewing or the adultery at the Athenian husband’s house. The author also suggests that Lysias’ speech, in its rhetorical excellence and in the continuum of domestic and national politics. She aims to demonstrate that truth rests in the active power of forensic rhetoric to harness the methodology of the historian to the drama and ethics of tragedy’s dilemmas, for the family and state.
