Athenian logographer (speech writer) — one of the ten canonical Attic orators — whose speech on love (arguing that it is better to gratify the non-lover than the lover) opens Plato's Phaedrus and is used by Socrates as a foil for his own account of eros.
Provides the Phaedrus's negative pole — the cold calculation of rational self-interest in love relationships, which Socrates parodies and then corrects with the palinode's account of divine erotic madness — making Lysias's speechwriter's cleverness the example of everything philosophy is not.
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