Page:EB1911 - Volume 17.djvu/199

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184
LYSIMACHUS—LYTHAM
  


ed., 1888) and F. Blass, Die Attische Beredsamkeit (2nd ed., 1887–1898); W. L. Devries, Ethopoiia. A rhetorical study of the types of character in the orations of Lysias (Baltimore, 1892).  (R. C. J.; X.) 


LYSIMACHUS (c. 355–281 B.C.), Macedonian general, son of Agathocles, was a citizen of Pella in Macedonia. During Alexander’s Persian campaigns he was one of his immediate bodyguard and distinguished himself in India. After Alexander’s death he was appointed to the government of Thrace and the Chersonese. For a long time he was chiefly occupied with fighting against the Odrysian king Seuthes. In 315 he joined Cassander, Ptolemy and Seleucus against Antigonus, who, however, diverted his attention by stirring up Thracian and Scythian tribes against him. In 309, he founded Lysimachia in a commanding situation on the neck connecting the Chersonese with the mainland. He followed the example of Antigonus in taking the title of king. In 302 when the second alliance between Cassander, Ptolemy and Seleucus was made, Lysimachus, reinforced by troops from Cassander, entered Asia Minor, where he met with little resistance. On the approach of Antigonus he retired into winter quarters near Heraclea, marrying its widowed queen Amastris, a Persian princess. Seleucus joined him in 301, and at the battle of Ipsus Antigonus was slain. His dominions were divided among the victors, Lysimachus receiving the greater part of Asia Minor. Feeling that Seleucus was becoming dangerously great, he now allied himself with Ptolemy, marrying his daughter Arsinoë. Amastris, who had divorced herself from him, returned to Heraclea. When Antigonus’s son Demetrius renewed hostilities (297), during his absence in Greece, Lysimachus seized his towns in Asia Minor, but in 294 concluded a peace whereby Demetrius was recognized as ruler of Macedonia. He tried to carry his power beyond the Danube, but was defeated and taken prisoner by the Getae, who, however, set him free on amicable terms. Demetrius subsequently threatened Thrace, but had to retire in consequence of a rising in Boeotia, and an attack from Pyrrhus of Epirus. In 288 Lysimachus and Pyrrhus in turn invaded Macedonia, and drove Demetrius out of the country. Pyrrhus was at first allowed to remain in possession of Macedonia with the title of king, but in 285 he was expelled by Lysimachus. Domestic troubles embittered the last years of Lysimachus’s life. Amastris had been murdered by her two sons; Lysimachus treacherously put them to death. On his return Arsinoë asked the gift of Heraclea, and he granted her request, though he had promised to free the city. In 284 Arsinoë, desirous of gaining the succession for her sons in preference to Agathocles (the eldest son of Lysimachus), intrigued against him with the help of her brother Ptolemy Ceraunus; they accused him of conspiring with Seleucus to seize the throne, and he was put to death. This atrocious deed of Lysimachus aroused great indignation. Many of the cities of Asia revolted, and his most trusted friends deserted him. The widow of Agathocles fled to Seleucus, who at once invaded the territory of Lysimachus in Asia. Lysimachus crossed the Hellespont, and in 281 a decisive battle took place at the plain of Corus (Corupedion) in Lydia. Lysimachus was killed; after some days his body, watched by a faithful dog, was found on the field, and given up to his son Alexander, by whom it was interred at Lysimachia.

See Arrian, Anab. v. 13, vi. 28; Justin xv. 3, 4, xvii. 1; Quintus Curtius v. 3, x. 30; Diod. Sic. xviii. 3; Polybius v. 67; Plutarch, Demetrius, 31. 52, Pyrrhus, 12; Appian, Syriaca, 62; Thirlwall, History of Greece, vol. viii. (1847); J. P. Mahaffy, Story of Alexander’s Empire; Droysen, Hellenismus (2nd ed., 1877); A. Holm, Griechische Geschichte, vol. iv. (1894); B. Niese, Gesch. d. griech. u. maked. Staaten, vols. i. and ii. (1893, 1899); J. Beloch, Griech. Gesch. vol. iii. (1904); Hünerwadel, Forschungen zur Gesch. des Königs Lysimachus (1900); Possenti, Il Re Lisimaco di Tracia (1901); Ghione, Note sul regno di Lisimaco (Atti d. real. Accad. di Torino, xxxix.); and Macedonian Empire.  (E. R. B.) 


LYSIPPUS, Greek sculptor, was head of the school of Argos and Sicyon in the time of Philip and Alexander of Macedon. His works are said to have numbered 1500, some of them colossal. Some accounts make him the continuer of the school of Polyclitus; some represent him as self-taught. The matter in which he especially innovated was the proportions of the male human body; he made the head smaller than his predecessors, the body more slender and hard, so as to give the impression of greater height. He also took great pains with hair and other details. Pliny (N.H. 34, 61) and other writers mention many of his statues. Among the gods he seems to have produced new and striking types of Zeus (probably of the Otricoli class), of Poseidon (compare the Poseidon of the Lateran, standing with raised foot), of the Sun-god and others; many of these were colossal figures in bronze. Among heroes he was specially attracted by the mighty physique of Hercules. The Hercules Farnese of Naples, though signed by Glycon of Athens, and a later and exaggerated transcript, owes something, including the motive of rest after labour, to Lysippus. Lysippus made many statues of Alexander the Great, and so satisfied his patron, no doubt by idealizing him, that he became the court sculptor of the king, from whom and from whose generals he received many commissions. The extant portraits of Alexander vary greatly, and it is impossible to determine which among them go back to Lysippus. The remarkable head from Alexandria (Plate II. fig. 56, in Greek Art) has as good a claim as any.

As head of the great athletic school of Peloponnese Lysippus naturally sculptured many athletes; a figure by him of a man scraping himself with a strigil was a great favourite of the Romans in the time of Tiberius (Pliny, N.H. 34, 61); and this has been usually regarded as the original copied in the Apoxyomenus of the Vatican (Greek Art, Plate VI. fig. 79). If so, the copyist has modernized his copy, for some features of the Apoxyomenus belong to the Hellenistic age. With more certainty we may see a copy of an athlete by Lysippus in the statue of Agias found at Delphi (Greek Art, Plate V. fig. 74), which is proved by inscriptions to be a replica in marble of a bronze statue set up by Lysippus in Thessaly. And when the Agias and the Apoxyomenus are set side by side their differences are so striking that it is difficult to attribute them to the same author, though they may belong to the same school.  (P. G.) 


LYSIS OF TARENTUM (d. c. 390 B.C.), Greek philosopher. His life is obscure, but it is generally accepted, that in the persecution of the Pythagoreans at Crotona and Metapontum he escaped and went to Thebes, where he came under the influence of Philolaus. The friend and companion of Pythagoras, he has been credited with many of the works usually attributed to Pythagoras himself. Diogenes Laertius viii. 6 gives him three, and Mullach even assigns to him the Golden Verses. But it is generally held that these verses are a collection of lines by many authors rather than the work of one man.


LYSISTRATUS, a Greek sculptor of the 4th century B.C., brother of Lysippus of Sicyon. We are told by Pliny (Nat. Hist. 35, 153) that he followed a strongly realistic line, being the first sculptor to take impressions of human faces in plaster.


LYTE, HENRY FRANCIS (1793–1847), Anglican divine and hymn-writer, was born near Kelso on the 1st of June 1793, and was educated at Enniskillen school and at Trinity College, Dublin. He took orders in 1815, and for some time held a curacy near Wexford. Owing to infirm health he came to England, and after several changes settled, in 1823, in the parish of Brixham. In 1844 his health finally gave way; and he died at Nice on the 20th of November 1847.

Lyte’s first work was Tales in Verse illustrative of Several of the Petitions in the Lord’s Prayer (1826), which was written at Lymington and was commended by Wilson in the Noctes Ambrosianae. He next published (1833) a volume of Poems, chiefly Religious, and in 1834 a little collection of psalms and hymns entitled The Spirit of the Psalms. After his death, a volume of Remains with a memoir was published, and the poems contained in this, with those in Poems, chiefly Religious, were afterwards issued in one volume (1868). His best known hymns are “Abide with me! fast falls the eventide”; “Jesus, I my cross have taken”; “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven”; and “Pleasant are Thy courts above.”


LYTHAM, an urban district and watering-place in the Blackpool parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, on the north shore of the estuary of the Ribble, 131/2 m. W. of Preston by a joint line of the London & North Western and Lancashire & Yorkshire railways. Pop. (1901) 7185. It has a pier, a