Library › Greek: Oratory & Rhetoric › For Callias
Only the opening survives of For Callias, an Ancient Greek defense speech attributed to Lysias for a resident alien accused of sacrilege on the testimony of slaves. The brief fragment, from classical Athens of the late fifth or early fourth century BC, warns the jury how dangerous it would be if the word of slaves hoping for freedom could destroy their masters.
Short as it is, the piece raises questions that ran through Athenian justice: the value of slave testimony, the vulnerability of metics, and the stakes of religious accusations. It offers a compact glimpse of the courtroom world in which Lysias built his career as a writer of speeches.
About this edition. The Greek text is that of the Perseus Digital Library. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).