Numbers

The Canon of Ten

• Antiphon
• Andocides
• Lysias
• Isocrates
• Isaeus
• Aeschines
• Lycurgus
• Demosthenes
• Hypereides
• Dinarchus

How It's Used

"We are accustomed to identifying culture with the class that has long been its arbiter: the critics, publishers, editors, museum and gallery curators, theatrical impresarios, teachers, cultural historians, and others who have been the judges and gatekeepers of what is supposedly deserving, praiseworthy, and lasting, and what is merely "popular" and therefore disposable. The history of this class - and its power to dispose of the culture it deems inferior - is a very long one. In antiquity, for example, it created the Alexandrian Canon of 56 worthy poets, and the even more limited canon of the 10 Attic Orators whose voices we have been allowed to hear; we can only speculate on what has been lost as a result."

“Cecil Wooten, a professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who attended a Hyperides presentation by Mr. Herrman on Nov. 13, called the discovery ‘interesting and significant.’

“‘Although Hyperides is a very important fourth-century Greek orator, one of the canon of 10, we have very little of his speeches, and much of that is fragmentary,’ Professor Wooten said in an e-mail message.”

Also Known As (AKA)

The Canon of 10, The Canon of the 10 Attic Orators

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