celebrated Athenian orator, one of the ten comprised in the Alexandrian Canon, was the contemporary, and sometimes the friend, sometimes the enemy of Demosthenes. The date of his birth is not accurately known; but it probably fell within the first decade of the fourth century B.C. After studying philosophy under Plato, and oratory under Isocrates, he began his public career as an advocate in the Athenian courts of justice. When it became necessary for him to choose a political creed he joined the patriotic party, at that time led by Demosthenes and Lycurgus. To this choice he clung through life, reckless of the hardships it entailed. In proof of his sincerity he fitted out two triremes at his own expense for the Euboean expedition of B.C. 358. His whole public life, for the next twenty years, was spent in devising means of resistance to the growing power of Macedonia. In B.C. 338, when the disastrous flight of Charonca laid Greece at the mercy of the victorious Philip, Hyperides proposed that the citizens should rise en masse, send their wives and children to places of security, and fight it out to the last.

Though this desperate advice was not taken, the genuine patriotism of the advice was appreciated and rewarded by his countrymen. When the death of Philip revived the hopes of the anti-Macedonian faction, Hyperides promoted the alliance with Thebes; and after the destruction of that city by Alexander, was one of the orators demanded of the Athenians by the young victor. Alexander, however, did not press his demand, and Hyperides continued to oppose the Macedonian influence as strongly as ever. The arrival in Athens of Harpalus, the run-away treasurer of Alexander, then absent on his eastern conquests, disturbed the friendly relations that had hitherto subsisted between Hyperides and Demosthenes. Harpalus had embezzled some 5000 talents of the public money, with which he endeavoured to organize a party for himself among the Athenians. It was believed, that among others, Demosthenes had yielded to his bribes and specious stories, and Hyperides, who had shown himself proof to these temptations, either volunteered, or (as is more likely) was selected to prosecute his ancient friend. This, as was natural, led to a rupture between them which was not healed for some time. In the Lamian War, which followed the death of Alexander, Hyperides took a leading part; and when it was brought to a close, spoke the funeral oration over his countrymen who had perished in battle. This oration, of which considerable fragments are preserved in Stobaeus, was looked upon as a masterpiece by the ancients themselves. The following year (B.C. 322) saw the hopes of Athens finally crushed at the battle of Cramnon. The chiefs of the patriotic party sought safety in flight. Hyperides was overtaken at Aegina by the minions of Antipater and cruelly put to death. Seventy-five orations were attributed to Hyperides; but a third of these were rejected as spurious by the ancients themselves. Westermann has preserved the titles of sixty-one of these in his History of Greek Oratory. Hopes have been entertained at comparatively recent periods of recovering the bulk of the authentic speeches. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a German scholar professed to have seen a complete copy of Hyperides in the library of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus at Ofen. Taylor, the editor of Demosthenes, gave out that he had been similarly fortunate; but as neither of these scholars turned their good luck to account, it has been concluded that they were both mistaken. In 1847, however, the hopes of the learned were revived by the tidings that the famous speech against Hypathia Demosthenes, or, at least, very considerable fragments of it, had been discovered. It turned out that Mr. A. C. Harris, an English gentleman resident in Alexandria, when inquiring at Thebes, in Upper Egypt, in the spring of 1847, for Tahidic fragments, had been shown some broken Greek papyri by a dealer in antiquities, and had purchased them. The papyri themselves were of the better kind, and were pronounced by the able scholars to whom they were submitted, to date from a very remote antiquity. The evidence seemed complete that they could not be later than the third century of the Christian era, while there was a strong probability in favour of a still greater age. The Cambridge editor, Mr. C. Babington, inclines to the belief that they may be referred to the age of the Ptolemies. What the value of the oration itself may be, it is possibly somewhat premature to pronounce. It certainly contains the bulk of the evidence on which Demosthenes was banished from his country, but the question of the great orator's guilt is one on which Droysen and Niebuhr, Mitford, and Thirlwall, have come to opposite conclusions; and though the recovered oration is a valuable contribution to the history of the time, as well as to Greek philology, it is still too mutilated to be finally decisive. How the MS. came to be found in Thebes, is itself, at first sight, somewhat of a mystery. It is believed that its Arab discoverer found it among the tombs in that city, and that it had been buried there with a mummy. Mr. Harris, however, states that the MS. "is unique among the contents of the tombs of Thebes;" but endeavours to account for its existence there by saying, that "when we reflect on the numbers of rhetoricians, philosophers, and literary men, who used to flock from Greece as well as Rome to the banks of the Nile, and notice a practice that prevailed in that country of burying writings with the dead, our wonder ceases;" and we begin to entertain legitimate hopes that the discovery of this oration may be followed by that of portions, at least, of many of the lost works of antiquity." These hopes, however, have not, in the meantime, been realized. (See The Oration of Hyperides against Demosthenes respecting the Treasure of Harpalus, by Churchill Babington, M.A., London, 1850. There is also a good German edition of the oration by Schneiderin, Gottingen, 1853.)