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⁴ Ernesti, Ernesti, Lexicon technologiae Latinorum rhetoricae (1797; rpt. Hildesheim 1962) 189–90.Google Scholar

⁵ Hendrickson, , ‘The Origin’ 286.Google Scholar

⁶ However, one notes several, apparently unsuccessful, attempts to enlarge the scope of the plain style, making it the oratorical style as well. See Hendrickson, ‘The Origin’ 272–73; Hans von Arnim, Leben und Werke des Dio von Prusa (Berlin 1898) 56–57. Google Scholar

⁷ Arnim, Arnim 42, 68, 80–84, 89, 97, 113.Google Scholar

⁸ De finibus 4.3.5–6.Google Scholar

⁹ 'Demosthenes' 15. In The Critical Essays I, trans. Usher, Stephen (Cambridge, Mass. 1974).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Arnim, Arnim 97–98.Google Scholar

¹¹ For example, Dionysius of Halicarnassus classifies Plato and Demosthenes together as representatives of the middle style. Neither Demetrius nor Longinus makes any fundamental distinction between oratory and other forms of artistic prose. Google Scholar

¹² Ernesti defines it as ‘genus illud dicendi, quod in splendore, gravitate, sublimitate, amplitudine, et robore quodam cerneretur’ (190). Google Scholar

¹³ Panegyricus 11. See Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and its Continuity (Princeton 1983) Chapter 7.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Quadlbauer, Quadlbauer, 'Die genera dicendi bis Plinius d. J.,’ Wiener Studien 71 (1955) 60–61, 64–68.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Hendrickson, , ‘The Origin’ 286–87; Trimpi, Muses, Chapter 7.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Trimpi, , Muses 138–39.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See Cope, Edward M., The Rhetoric of Aristotle with a Commentary, rev. ed. Sandys, John E. (Cambridge 1877); Hendrickson, ‘The Origin’ and 'The Peripatetic Mean of Style and the Three Stylistic Characters,’ American Journal of Philology 25 (1904) 125–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Cope, 3.18.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.4.6.–1.6.9; De oratore 2.115. Google Scholar

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²⁴ Hendrickson, , ‘The Origin’ 290.Google Scholar

²⁵ Quadlbauer, 61; See also Margorie J. Milne, ‘A Study in Alcidamas and his Relation to Contemporary Sophistic’ (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr 1924). The distinction between a meticulous and passionate style is closely parallel to the modern distinction between analytic/written and agonistic/oral composition. See Walter J. Ong. S.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London 1982) 43–45.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ernesti, Ernesti, Lexicon technologiae Graecorum rheioricae (Leipzig 1795) 306.Google Scholar

²⁷ Poetics 1449a.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid. 1459b.Google Scholar

²⁹ Isocrates, , Antidosis 47.Google Scholar

³⁰ For example, On the Parts of Animals 1.5.; Metaphysics 1.2.; Nicomachean Ethics 6.7 and 10.7. Google Scholar

³¹ Trimpi, Trimpi, 'Horace's “Ut Pictura Poesis”: The Argument for Stylistic Decorum,’ Traditio 34 (1978) 35, 41–42, 49.Google Scholar

³² Ibid. 45.Google Scholar

³³ Quadlbauer, 65, 68.Google Scholar

³⁴ Brutus 55.203.Google Scholar

³⁵ Hendrickson, , ‘The Origin’ 259–61, 272–73.Google Scholar

³⁶ Wit may be another aspect of the sophistic legacy of the plain style. In the Frogs (965), Euripides claims that he was the first to have introduced witticisms into tragedy. Also note that while for Cicero wit characterizes the Attic plain style, for Demetrius it is a feature of the sweet style. Google Scholar

³⁷ Orator 19.64. 'Umbratilis' refers to the shaded gardens of the Academy and, by extension, to the dimly-lit schools of the declaimers—as opposed to the dust and sun of the forum. The contrast is simply the literary counterpart to that between the contemplative and active lives.Google Scholar

³⁸ Quadlbauer, 61.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ibid. 72.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Ibid. 65–68.Google Scholar

⁴¹ See Russell, D. A. on and in his introduction to Longinus' On the Sublime (Oxford 1964) xxxvii–xli. Also note the presence of in Aristotle's terminology in the Nicomachean Ethics. Google Scholar

⁴² Quadlbauer, 63; Hendrickson, ‘The Origin’ 255.Google Scholar

⁴³ Hendrickson, , ‘The Origin’ 256–57.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Caplan, Harry, trans, and ed., Ad C. Herennium: de ralione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium) (Cambridge, Mass. 1954) 256.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See Vossius, Vossius, Commentariorum rhetoricorum sive oratoriarum institutionum libri sex (Leyden 1643) 2.501–2, where Vossius distinguishes three kinds of beauty. The first he finds excessive, curled, and affected; this is the style of the sophists and of decadent Latin. Its opposite is that dignity which gives lustre to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes. Between these two is the sweet (γλαϕνϱóχ) style, which Vossius associates with demonstrative oratory and the style of Catullus, Petronius, Herodotus, and Lucian. The second two represent the old opposition between the true grand style and sophistic Kunstprosa. Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Arnim, Arnim 10, 86–87, 97.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Ibid. 8, 113.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ See his famous praise of Socrates in Tusculan Disputations 5.10: 'Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit a caelo et in urbibus collocavit et in domus etiam introduxit et coegit de vita et moribus rebusque bonis et malis quarere.’ Google Scholar

⁴⁹ De Oratore 2.82.33–2.83.338.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Trimpi, , ‘Horace’ 29–73.Google Scholar

⁵¹ See Quintilian, 8.Pr.20.Google Scholar

⁶² De oratore 3.31.125. See also ‘Ars poetica’ 310–11.Google Scholar

⁵³ De optimo genere 3.9. The term Attic possesses several quite different meanings in antiquity, a situation which leads to considerable confusion. Depending on the context, Attic may mean (1) the characteristic qualities of the masterpieces of Athenian literature, especially oratory. (2) A simpler, more succinct and conversational style, best exemplified in the speeches of Lysias. This is the Attic style prized by Brutus and Calvus, which Cicero describes at length in Orator 75–90. (3) The mannered extreme of (2), deliberately cultivating an archaic roughness and harsh, unrhythmic composition or an over-anxious and deadening meticulousness. This brand of Atticism survived from the mid-first century B.C. through the first century A.D., and is frequently associated with the inappropriate imitation of Thucydides. Such mannered Atticism is also frequently very difficult to distinguish from the sententious form of Asianism, described by Cicero in Brutus 325. (4) While (2) and (3) represent movements in Roman oratory, the fourth type of Atticism is primarily Greek and refers to the demand for linguistic purity based on the idiom of Classical Athens. This type of archaistic Atticism survives into Byzantium, and, in its basic tendencies, is similar to the Ciceronianism of the sixteenth century (see R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries [Cambridge 1958] 72–84). A few more points may be helpful here: Cicero, Quintilian, the first-century Greek critics, and Romans like Messala in Tacitus' Dialogus are all Atticists in the first sense; ‘Attic’ here often simply means 'the best.’ Atticism, in its second and third senses, possesses a number of different connotations, the most important of which are: an intelligent urbanity (Orator 75–90), a Socratic (and Stoic) analysis of moral experience (see Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style [Stanford 1962] 5–6, 10), inartistic roughness (Seneca, Moral Epistles 114.15; Orator 28–32), and a graceful delicacy (Quintilian 12.10.35–38). Throughout this article, I have tried to distinguish these various senses of ‘Attic’ by calling the partisans of (1) true Attic, of (2) Attici, and of (3) hyper-Attici. Sense (4) is not particularly relevant to my discussion.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Quadlbauer, 72.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ 'Lysias' 13, in The Critical Essays. Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Quadlbauer, 88, 91.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Moral Epistles 100.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Cicero's contrast between the school and the forum hearkens back to a passage in Plato's Theaetetus, where Socrates compares the philosopher and the orator. Plato, of course, prefers the philosophical manner, but the nature of the opposition suggests how easily philosophic inquiry could slip over into the cultus of the secluded academy. The speaker in the courts, Plato argues, is a slave to the judges, the clock, and to circumstances; he must be brief, to the point, and wary. There is no time for detached reflection, since in the law courts matters of vital personal concern, even one's life, are at stake. Oratory is, therefore, the language of emotional engagement, not intellectual detachment. The philosopher, on the other hand, is free; he possesses the leisure to ramble digressively from one point to the next as he chooses (172 ce) and can range at will among various arguments (173 b ). If such a man, Plato continues, enters the forum, he seems absurd, since he is accustomed to an abstracted leisure, remote from whatever is close at hand (173 d). The word Plato uses for ‘leisure’ is particularly interesting; leisure is σχoλη, which also means school (172d ). Thus the philosophical style is, in Cicero's sense, scholastic; it deliberately retreats from civic life in order to wander leisurely among ideas, removed from the urgency of personal or political concerns. Significantly, by the first century A.D., the term ‘scholastica’ comes to be a synonymn for the declamatory controversiae (Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 1.Pr.12). Although Plato usually thinks of philosophical discourse as a series of brief, dialectical exchanges as opposed to the copious, unbroken speech of oratory (Prot. 337 e -338 a; Sophist 230 a -231 b; Gorg. 448 de), from this curious passage in the Theaetetus one can easily see how the philosophic style could become vulnerable to a rambling, sheltered, umbratical digressiveness, how naturally it approaches a smooth, relaxed, and graceful middle style—like the style of Cicero's own philosophic dialogues. (See Friedrich Solmsen, 'Greek Ideas about Leisure,’ Wingspread Lectures in the Humanities [The Johnson Foundation 1966] 1: 25–38 for a history of the tension between the philosophic ideal of leisure and rhetorical engagement in civic action.)Google Scholar

⁵⁹ On the problem of dating these works see Russell, D. A., xxii–xxx; and W. Rhys Roberts' introduction to the Loeb Library edition of On Style 268–77.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Russell, xxxii–xxxiii.Google Scholar

⁶¹ De oratore 3.26.103.Google Scholar

⁶² On Literary Composition [OLC], ed. and trans. Rhys Roberts, W. (London 1910) 119–21.Google Scholar

⁶³ Ibid. 120–21.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Perhaps Dionysius' distinction is based on a misreading of Rhetoric 3.12. See Cope 3.146. Google Scholar

⁶⁵ 'Demosthenes' 45, 47.Google Scholar

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⁶⁷ 'Demosthenes' 18.Google Scholar

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⁶⁹ 'Demosthenes' 2.Google Scholar

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⁷⁴ 'Demosthenes' 1. See also ‘Thucydides' 23–24. On Thucydides’ style see Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis in die Zeit der Renaissance (Leipzig 1898) I 95–100.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ 'Demosthenes' 22.Google Scholar

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⁷⁷ Hendrickson sharply distinguishes Dionysius' concept of the middle style from Aristotle's notion of decorum as a flexible mean between clarity and distinctiveness. See ‘The Peripatetic Mean’ 143. Google Scholar

⁷⁸ 'Demosthenes' 8, 10.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Cicero, Cicero (Orator 13.41–42), Dionysius has a deep respect for the noble idealism of Isocrates, whom he explicitly dissociates from the sophists. See ‘Isocrates’ 1–5, 12, 14.Google Scholar

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⁸¹ OLC 209–10.Google Scholar

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⁸⁶ OLC 247.Google Scholar

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⁸⁸ 'Demosthenes' 58.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ Trimpi, , ‘Horace’ 55 on Vergil's adaptation of the oral, epic style of Homer to the literary epic.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Quadlbauer, 75.Google Scholar

⁹¹ Trimpi, , Ben Johnson 60–68.Google Scholar

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⁹⁶ Demetrius, comments: ‘Ornament, however, it [the plain style] may have in the shape of friendly bits of kindly advice, mixed with a good few proverbs. This last is the only philosophy admissible in it — the proverb being the wisdom of a people, the wisdom of the world’ (4.232).Google Scholar

⁹⁷ In the Renaissance, the sublime is not distinguished from the genus grande. Note, for instance, the titles of early translations of On the Sublime: Liber de grandi sive sublimi orationis genere … (1554), Dionysii Longini … liber de grandi loquentia sive sublimi dicendi genere (1612), A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegance of Speech (1680). See also Russell, xliii and xxiv; Vossius 2.432–33; Thomas Farnaby, Index rhetoricus, scholis & institutione tenerioris aetatis accommodatus (London 1625) 30. Renaissance dictionaries also treat the sublime as equivalent to the grand style; for example in Glossaria duo, Estienne defines νψoχ as altitudo, amplitudo; see also the definition of sublimis as ‘high, that is above us … Verses of an high stile’ in Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus linguae Romanae & Britannicae, tarn accurate congestus. (London 1584).Google Scholar

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¹⁰⁰ Longinus 18–27. Corresponding to the change in emphasis from the body to the soul of discourse, one perceives a very un-Aristotelian tendency to blur the distinction between the stylistic and ethical connotations of literary terminology (see Russell xxi). Thus Longinus distinguishes between a true and false grandeur, where the latter possesses all the stylistic trappings of elevation, but lacks inward truth. On the other hand, ‘the true sublime, by some virtue of its nature, elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud possession, we are filled with joyful pride, as if we ourselves produced the very thing we heard’ (7). A passage from Seneca suggests that this joy results from the sudden perception of (Stoic) natural law. The Roman offers an observation, similar to the passage from Longinus quoted above, on the effect of maxims; these ‘need no special pleader; they go straight to our emotions, and help us simply because nature is exercising her proper function. The soul carries within itself the seed of everything that is honourable, and this seed is stirred to growth by advice, as a spark that is fanned by a gentle breeze develops its natural fire. Virtue is aroused by a touch, a shock’ (Moral Epistles 94.28–29). Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ Russell, 57–62.Google Scholar

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