Little is known about his early life except that he was the son of Glaucippus, of the deme of Collytus and that he studied logography under Isocrates. In 360 BCE he prosecuted Autocles for treason. During the Social War he accused Aristophon, then one of the most influential men at Athens, of malpractices, and impeached Philocrates for high treason. Although Hypereides supported Demosthenes in the struggle against Philip II of Macedon; that support was withdrawn after the Harpalus affair. After Demosthenes' exile Hypereides became the head of the patriotic party.
Downfall
After the death of Alexander the Great, Hypereides was one of the chief promoters of war against Macedonian rule. His speeches are believed to have led to the outbreak of the Lamian War in which Athens, Aetolia, and Thessaly revolted against Macedonian rule. After the decisive defeat at Crannon in which Athens and her allies lost their independence, Hypereides and the other orators were captured by Archias of Thurii and condemned to death by the Athenian supporters of Macedon. Hypereides fled to Aegina only to be captured at the temple of Poseidon. After being put to death, his body was taken to Cleonae and shown to the Macedonian general Antipater before being returned to Athens for burial.
Personality and oratorical style
Hypereides was an ardent pursuer of "the beautiful," which in his time generally meant pleasure and luxury. He was a flamboyant figure, unwavering in public his hostility to Macedon. He was a well-known epicure given to fine food and women. He engaged in countless affairs with prostitutes, some of whom he defended in court. His temper was easy-going and humorous. Though in his development of the periodic sentence he followed Isocrates, the essential tendencies of his style are those of Lysias. His diction was plain, though he occasionally indulged in long compound words probably borrowed from Middle Comedy. His composition was simple. He was especially distinguished for subtlety of expression, grace and wit. Hypereides is known to have owned at least two or three pieces of property: an estate in Eleusis, a house in Athens, and a house in Piraeus, where he kept one of his many women. In around 340 B.C. he is known to have performed only two public services, as tierarch and Chorus producer. It is said he had received money from the Persian King who was alarmed at Macedon's expansion.
Surviving speeches
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 and the whole of For Euxenippus, 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. Currently this is the best surviving example of epideictic oratory. Towards the end of the nineteenth century further discoveries were made including the conclusion of the speech Against Philippides, and of the whole of Against Athenogenes.
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 the Against Timandros and Against Diondas. Tchernetska's discovery led to a publication on the subject in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. 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. The new Hypereides revelations include two previously unknown speeches, effectively increasing the quantity of material known by this author by 20 percent. In 2018 a passage of another speech of Hypereides was discovered in a papyrus from Herculaneum.
Lost speeches
Among the speeches not yet recovered is the Deliacus in which the presidency of the Delian temple claimed by both Athens and Cos, which was adjudged by the Amphictyonic League to Athens. Also missing is the speech in which he defended the illustrious courtesanPhryne on a capital charge: according to Plutarch and Athenaeus the speech climaxed with Hypereides stripping off her clothing to reveal her naked breasts; in the face of which the judges found it impossible to condemn her.
Assessment
William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project, called Hypereides "one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy."
