Lysias was by descent a Syracusan; his father Cephalus, of whom Plato gives us a charming picture in the opening chapters of the _Republic_, was induced by Pericles to settle in Athens, and there Lysias was born. The Pseudo-Plutarch gives the date as 459 B.C., and Dionysius gives the same year; but this is founded on an assumption. He was known to have gone to Thurii at the age of fifteen, and Thurii was founded in 443 B.C. But there is no proof that Lysias went to Thurii in the year of its foundation; we only know that he cannot have been born earlier than 459 B.C. Tradition, however, made him live to the age of eighty or eighty-three, and his latest known speech is dated, probably, in 380 B.C., so that if we assume his death to have occurred shortly after 380 B.C., we shall be consistent.[117] The modern view, supported by Blass, that Lysias was born not earlier than 444 B.C., has little evidence to support it. It is based chiefly on the statement of the Pseudo-Plutarch that Lysias did not go to Thurii till after his father’s death, and the belief that Cephalus was alive in 430 B.C., the date in which the scene of the _Republic_ is supposed to be laid. But Blass has himself collected instances of Plato’s untrustworthiness about dates, and the biographer by himself is a poor authority. Lysias, then, went to Thurii with his brothers Polemarchus and Euthydemus. He is said to have studied under the Syracusan rhetorician Tisias. After the loss of the Athenian armies in Sicily, 413 B.C., Lysias and his brothers were among three hundred persons accused of ‘Atticizing,’ and were expelled from Thurii. They returned to Athens in 412 B.C. From this year till 404 B.C., the brothers lived in prosperity and happiness, making a considerable fortune as proprietors of a shield-factory, where they employed 120 slaves. They had many friends; they belonged to the highest class of aliens—the _isoteleis_—and the evidence of Plato and Dionysius makes it clear that they mixed with the most cultivated society. They took pride in the performance of all public services which fell to their share. Fortune changed for the sons of Cephalus when in 404 B.C. a successful revolution brought the Thirty into power; the orator himself gives a graphic description of the way in which their ruin was brought about. The Thirty, he tells us, ‘avowed that they must purge the city of wrongdoers, and turn the rest of the citizens towards virtue and justice.’ Two of the leaders pointed out that some of the _metoeci_ were discontented with the new constitution; these _metoeci_ were rich, so that their execution was not only a moral duty but a sound financial move. They easily prevailed on their colleagues, who, as Lysias neatly puts it, ‘thought nothing of taking life but thought a lot of making money.’ The orator’s name was on the list, and he was arrested at a dinner-party in his own house. He describes what followed: