Tipi da commedia? Personaggi e trame nel Corpus Lysiacum

Abstract

Modern scholars have sometimes noticed in the Lysianic speeches some affinities with characters and plots of the (New) Comedy. Through a survey of the corpus, this paper resumes the critical data, adds some new elements of similarity, not only with Comedy, but generally with literature and suggests that Lysias usually worked in this way. If so, it could be preferable to suppose that the logographer took the cue not from comedy, but from everyday life; secondarily, that he sketched characters and plots starting from the particular (his client) to the general; finally, that these artistic elements were useful to jury's persuasion and not added to a following publication.