Hypereides's speech in trial against
Philippides lasted over thirty minutes. In the first speech against Philippides he attacked
King Philip II of Macedon and
Alexander the Great. In the second part of the
papyrus, he attacks Philippides and his associates and states: Each one of them was a traitor, one in
Thebes, another in
Tangara, another in
Eleutherae, doing everything in the service of the
Macedonians. He pleaded Philip's cause and campaigned with him against our country which is his most serious offense. Hypereides detested Philippides pro-Macedonian sympathies. Hypereides exposed Philippides who was known as saying in the Assembly: We must honor Alexander for all those that died at his hand. Seventy-seven speeches have been attributed to Hypereides, of which twenty-five were regarded as spurious by his contemporaries. It is said that a manuscript of most of the speeches survived as late as the 15th century in the
Bibliotheca Corviniana, library of
Matthias Corvinus, king of
Hungary, but was later
destroyed after the capture of
Buda by the Turks in the 16th century. Only a few fragments were known until relatively recent times. In 1847, large fragments of his speeches,
Against Demosthenes and
For Lycophron (incidentally interesting for clarifying the order of marriage processions and other details of Athenian life, and the Athenian government of
Lemnos) and the whole of
For Euxenippus (c. 330 BC, a
locus classicus on εἰσαγγελίαι
eisangeliai or state prosecutions), were found in a tomb at
Thebes in Egypt. In 1856 a considerable portion of a
logos epitaphios, a
Funeral Oration over
Leosthenes and his comrades who had fallen in the Lamian war was discovered. Towards the end of the nineteenth century further discoveries were made including the conclusion of the speech
Against Philippides (dealing with an indictment for the proposal of unconstitutional measure, arising out of the disputes of the Macedonian and anti-Macedonian parties at Athens), and of the whole of
Against Athenogenes (a perfumer accused of fraud in the sale of his business).
New discoveries In 2002 Natalie Tchernetska of
Trinity College, Cambridge discovered fragments of two speeches of Hypereides, which had been considered lost, in the
Archimedes Palimpsest. These were from two new speeches, the
Against Timander and
Against Diondas, increasing the quantity of material known by this author by 20 percent. This prompted the establishment of a working group under the auspices of the
British Academy, which includes scholars from the UK, Hungary and the US. In 2006, the
Archimedes Palimpsest project together with imagers at
Stanford University used powerful X-ray fluorescence imaging to read the final pages of the
Palimpsest, which contained the material by Hypereides. These were interpreted, transcribed and translated by the working group. In 2018 a passage of another speech of Hypereides (
Against the envoys of Antipater) was discovered in a papyrus from
Herculaneum. == Lost speeches ==