Jacques Stella (1596 - 29 April 1657) was a French painter, a leading exponent of the neoclassical style of Parisian Atticism.
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Wright, W.C. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. The historical sophist criticized its form calling it, “theatrical shamelessness”. It seems that this approach of oratory tended to put more emphasis on form, passion and sentiment rather than prudent realities. 2\. Atticism In contrast, the other mode of rhetoric, Atticism, is explained by Philostratus as technique that is exemplified by the sophist Aelius Aristides. He describes Aristides as one who, “usually imitates some classical author, aims at simplicity of style, and is a purist, carefully avoiding any allusion or word that does not occur in a writer of the classical period.” Atticism drew from Greece’s rich past and originated in its illustrious city of Athens.
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This continuation of neo-Atticism influenced architecture, craftsmanship, and painting. Emblematic works of this era are the Ara Pacis, the Via Labicana Augustus, and the Augustus of Prima Porta.
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Atticism was a trend of the Second Sophistic. Intellectuals such as Aelius Aristides sought to restore the standards of classical Greek characteristic of the Attic dialect, represented by Thucydides, Plato, Demosthenes, and other authors from the Classical period. Prose stylists who aspired to Atticism tried to avoid the vulgarisms of koine—an impractical goal, but this linguistic purism also reflected the 2nd-century flourishing of grammarians and lexicographers.Anderson, The Second Sophistic, pp. 87–91.
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Laurent de La Hyre (; February 27, 1606 – December 28, 1656) was a French Baroque painter, born in Paris. He was a leading exponent of the neoclassical style of Parisian Atticism.
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Both tendencies persisted in Byzantium, but the first, as the one officially recognized, retained predominance and was not driven from the field until the fall of the empire. The reactionary linguistic movement known as Atticism supported and enforced this scholarly tendency. Atticism prevailed from the 2nd century BC onward, controlling all subsequent Greek culture, so that the living form of the Greek language was obscured and only occasionally found expression in private documents and popular literature.
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Atticism (meaning "favouring Attica", the region of Athens in Greece) was a rhetorical movement that began in the first quarter of the 1st century BC; it may also refer to the wordings and phrasings typical of this movement, in contrast with various contemporary forms of Koine Greek (both literary and vulgar), which continued to evolve in directions guided by the common usages of Hellenistic Greek. Atticism was portrayed as a return to Classical methods after what was perceived as the pretentious style of the Hellenistic, Sophist rhetoric and called for a return to the approaches of the Attic orators. Although the plainer language of Atticism eventually became as belabored and ornate as the perorations it sought to replace, its original simplicity meant that it remained universally comprehensible throughout the Greek world. This helped maintain vital cultural links across the Mediterranean and beyond.
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The commonalities between Attic and Hellenistic era Greek grammar are far greater than the differences. Where divergences became too wide the focus was attracted of the "Atticism", language purists, who sought in their writing to leave the lingua franca of the marketplace for the classical style.
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Aphthonius' style is pure and simple, and ancient critics praise his "Atticism." The book maintained its popularity as late as the 17th century, especially in Germany. A collection of forty fables by Aphthonius, after the style of Aesop, is also extant. According to Rowe and Rees, an Aphthonius, the Greek rhetorician of Antioch visited Serapeum about A.D. 315.
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In these orders, they won the favor of Emperors who would restore their eastern centers of intellect. Some like Lucian heavily favored Atticism (an artificial purist movement favoring archaic expressions), while others like Plutarch favored the Greek of their day. A. Oratory A resurgence of educational value occurred during this time and these sophists were at the heart of it.
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When Koine Greek became a language of literature by the first century BC, some people distinguished two forms: written as the literary post-classical form (which should not be confused with Atticism), and vernacular as the day-to-day vernacular. Others chose to refer to Koine as "the dialect of Alexandria" or "Alexandrian dialect" (), or even the universal dialect of its time. Modern classicists have often used the former sense.
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Admired and popularly imitated writers such as Lucian also adopted Atticism, so that the style survived until the Renaissance, when it was taken up by non- Greek students of Byzantine expatriates. Renaissance scholarship, the basis of modern scholarship in the west, nurtured strong Classical and Attic views, continuing Atticism for another four centuries. Represented at its height by rhetoricians such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and grammarians such as Herodian and Phrynichus Arabius at Alexandria, this tendency prevailed from the 1st century BC onward, and with the force of an ecclesiastical dogma controlled all subsequent Greek culture, even so that the living form of the Greek language, even then being transformed into modern Greek much later, was quite obscured and only occasionally found expression, chiefly in private documents, though also in popular literature. For instance, there were literary writers such as Strabo, Plutarch, and Josephus who intentionally withdrew from this way of expression (classical Greek) in favor of the common form of Greek.
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Another esteemed sophist in the 2nd century, Herodes Atticus, paved the way for succeeding sophists of Atticism in the great center of Athens.Philostratus: The Lives of the Sophists, page 139. Trans. Wright, W.C. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. These three eminent connoisseurs of rhetoric were significant sophists of the 2nd century AD. Many succeeding them would strive to replicate and illustrate their immense knowledge of the Hellenic classics and eloquent skills in oratory.
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Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture. Brill. The Jews have a place of note in the history of Modern Greek. They were unaffected by Atticism and employed the current colloquial vernacular which they then transcribed in Hebrew letters. The Romaniotes were Jews settled in the Eastern Roman Empire long before its division from its Western counterpart, and they were linguistically assimilated long before leaving the Levant after Hadrian's decree against them and their religion.
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Luzzatto was a warm defender of Biblical and Talmudical Judaism; and his strong opposition to philosophical Judaism (or "atticism" as he terms it) brought him many opponents among his contemporaries. However, his antagonism to philosophy was not the result of fanaticism nor of lack of understanding. He claimed to have read during twenty-four years all the ancient philosophers, and that the more he read them the more he found them deviating from the truth. What one approves the other disproves; and so the philosophers themselves go astray and mislead students.
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De Optimo Genere Oratorum, "On the Best Kind of Orators", is a work from Marcus Tullius Cicero written in 46 BCE between two of his other works, Brutus and the Orator ad M. Brutum. Cicero attempts to explain why his view of oratorical style reflects true Atticism and is better than that of the Roman Atticists "who would confine the orator to the simplicity and artlessness of the early Attic orators."Hendrickson, G. L. "Cicero De Optimo Genere Oratorum." The American Journal of Philology 47.2 (1926): 109–23. JSTOR. Web.
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In the Neronian period, the surviving portion of Petronius' Satyricon begins midway through a rant in which the unreliable narrator, Encolpius, denounces the corruption of Roman literary taste and the Asiatic style in particular: "that flatulent, inflated magniloquence later imported from Asia to Athens has infected every aspiring writer like a pestilential breeze" (trans. Branham and Kinney). Quintilian accepted Cicero's attitude towards Asianism and Atticism,G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics, 1968, p. 286 and adapted the earlier debate's polemical language, in which objectionable style is called effeminate, in his own De causis corruptae eloquentiae.
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Special suspicion was reserved for crusading leader Bohemond of Taranto, a southern Italian Norman who, under the leadership of his father Robert Guiscard, had invaded Byzantine territory in the Balkans in 1081. The Alexiad was written in Attic Greek, and the literary style is fashioned after Thucydides, Polybius, and Xenophon. Consequently, it exhibits a struggle for an Atticism characteristic of the period, whereby the resulting language is highly artificial. Peter Frankopan argues that the lapses in some of the chronology of events can in part be attributed to errors in, or lack of, source material for those events.
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Summarized in Mackridge 2009 p. 211. In the same year (1884) the young Hatzidakis, now also a professor at Athens University, replied in turn with his Study on Modern Greek, or Trial of the Censure of Pseudo-Atticism in which he defended Kontos for insisting on grammatical correctness. As an outstanding linguist of the new generation, Hatzidakis was well aware of the evolutionary history of demotic and recognized that Katharevousa was an artificial construction, a Kunstsprache. But he maintained that since its use was now well established, it should be used correctly and consistently, in line with Ancient Greek models where possible.
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The account differs from the contemporary history of John Anagnostes, who described Murad's sack of Thessalonica in 1430, chiefly in Cananus' frequent religious polemic and in his willingness to write in the vernacular Greek, as opposed to the Atticism of Anagnostes and Critobulus. Their use of Greek, while "artificial in the extreme," is intended as an "imitation of the classics", an ideal which had been "the governing principle for all writers who aimed at a good style not merely under the Roman empire but right to the end of the Byzantine period."Reynolds, L. D., & Wilson, N. G. (1991). Scribes and scholars: a guide to the transmission of Greek and Latin literature.
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It is possible to distinguish between three levels of speech: Atticism (the literary language), Koine (the common language of the Hellenistic period), and Demotic (the popular language, and the forerunner of modern Greek). Thus a certain diglossia between spoken Greek and written, classical Greek may be discerned. Major genres of Byzantine literature include historiography (both in the classical mode and in the form of chronicles), hagiography (in the form of the biographical account or bios and the panegyric or enkomion); hagiographic collections (the menaia and synaxaria), epistolography, rhetoric, and poetry. From the Byzantine administration, broadly construed, we have works such as description of peoples and cities, accounts of court ceremonies, and lists of precedence.
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Ever since the times of Koiné Greek in Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, there was a competition between the naturally evolving spoken forms of Greek on the one hand, and the use of artificially archaic, learned registers on the other. The learned registers employed grammatical and lexical forms in imitation of classical Attic Greek (Atticism).Horrocks, Geoffrey (1997): Greek: a history of the language and its speakers. London: Longman. Ch. 5.5 This situation is known in modern linguistics as diglossia.Ferguson, Charles A. (1959): "Diglossia." Word 15: 325–340. During the Middle Ages, Greek writing varied along a continuum between extreme forms of the high register very close to Attic, and moderate forms much closer to the spoken Demotic.
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His eclectic range of styles have given art historians exercise in tracing his adaptation of his models, while the lack of an immediately recognizable "Bourdon style" has somewhat dampened public appreciation. Some of his work was in the neoclassical style of Parisian Atticism. Bourdon spent most of his working career outside France, where, though he was a founding member of the Académie royale, he was for long largely dismissed as a pasticheur, a situation partly rebalanced by a comprehensive exhibition in 2000 of his work at the Musée Fabre, where the collection includes a fine Lamentation painted in the last years of his life. His success required the establishment of an extensive atelier, where his pupils included Nicolas-Pierre Loir and Pierre Mosnier.
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The first known use of the term is in Rome, by Cicero in the mid-first century BC. It came into general and pejorative use for a florid style contrasting with the formal, traditional rhetoric of Atticism, which it was said to have corrupted. The term reflects an association with writers in the Greek cities of Asia Minor. "Asianism had a significant impact on Roman rhetoric, since many of the Greek teachers of rhetoric who came to Rome beginning with the 2d cent. B.C.E. were Asiatic Greeks."David E. Aune, "Asianism," in The Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003 "Mildly Asianic tendencies" have been found in Gaius Gracchus' oratory, and "more marked" ones in Publius Sulpicius Rufus.
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87–88 Gazan lawyer and church historian Sozomen, also a law student at Beirut, wrote in his Historia Ecclesiastica about Triphyllius, a convert to Christendom who became the bishop of Nicosia. Triphyllius received legal training in Beirut and was criticized by his teacher Saint Spyridon for his atticism and for using legal vocabulary instead of that of the Bible. Zacharias Rhetor studied law at Beirut between 487 and 492, then worked as a lawyer in Constantinople until his imperial contacts won him the appointment as bishop of Mytilene. Among Rhetor's works is the biography of Severus, the last miaphysite patriarch of Antioch and one of the founders of the Syriac Orthodox Church, who had also been a law student in Beirut as of 486.
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Koine Greek grammar is a subclass of Ancient Greek grammar peculiar to the Koine Greek dialect. It includes many forms of Hellenistic era Greek, and authors such as Plutarch and Lucian,Helmut Köster Introduction to the New Testament 2000, Page 107: "Plutarch (45-125 ce) and the Jewish writers Philo and Josephus show some influence from the vernacular Koine. The sophist and satirist Lucian of Samosata (120-180 ce), though an admirer of Classical literature, still made extensive use of the language of his own time and ridiculed the excesses of Atticism." as well as many of the surviving inscriptions and papyri. Koine texts from the background of Jewish culture and religion have distinct features not found in classically rooted writings.
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7) that the events described in his history occurred during his lifetime. Photius (Codex 99) gives an outline of the contents of this work and passes a flattering encomium on the style of Herodian, which he describes as clear, vigorous, agreeable, and preserving a happy medium between an utter disregard of art and elegance and a profuse employment of the artifices and prettinesses which were known under the name of Atticism, as well as between boldness and bombast. He appears to have used Thucydides as a model to some extent, both for style and for the general composition of his work, often introducing speeches wholly or in part imaginary. In spite of occasional inaccuracies in chronology and geography, his narrative is in the main truthful and impartial.
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Another proponent of classicism working in Rome was Claude Gellée, known as Le Lorrain, who defined the form of classical landscape. Many young French painters of the beginning of the century went to Rome to train themselves and soon assimilated Caravaggio's influence like Valentin de Boulogne and Simon Vouet. The later is credited with bringing the baroque in France and at his return in Paris in 1627 he was named first painter of the king. But French painting soon departed from the extravagance and naturalism of the Italian baroque and painters like Eustache Le Sueur and Laurent de La Hyre, following Poussin example developed a classicist way known as Parisian Atticism, inspired by Antiquity, and focusing on proportion, harmony and the importance of drawing.
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87–88 Gazan lawyer and church historian Sozomen, also a law student at Beirut, wrote in his Historia Ecclesiastica about Triphyllius, a convert to Christendom who became the bishop of Nicosia. Triphyllius received legal training in Beirut and was criticized by his teacher Saint Spyridon for his atticism and for using legal vocabulary instead of that of the Bible. Zacharias Rhetor studied law at Beirut between 487 and 492, then worked as a lawyer in Constantinople until his imperial contacts won him the appointment as bishop of Mytilene. Among Rhetor's works is the biography of Severus, the last miaphysite patriarch of Antioch and one of the founders of the Syriac Orthodox Church, who had also been a law student in Beirut as of 486.
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Dimitrios Vernardakis in 1890 Two years later it received an answer, in the form of A Censure of Pseudo-Atticism by Dimitrios Vernardakis, another professor (and aspiring neoclassical dramatist). In this long, rambling book Vernardakis defended the current version of Katharevousa, and criticized Kontos for archaistic nit-picking when he should have been addressing the problems of Greek education. In keeping with his general defence of the status quo, Vernardakis also attacked the language of the new demotic poets as inauthentic, and untrue to the actual rural demotic of the 'common people'. In this he was justified to some extent, because the New Athenian poets were more or less consciously working to create a de- regionalized demotic for national use; Vernardakis warned against this modern notion, claiming it would corrupt "the language of the people".
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They emphasized the importance of the practice of oratory. Sophists would begin their careers lecturing to groups of students. As they gained recognition and further competence they would begin speaking out to the public. There were two different oratory styles of sophism that developed out of the period of enlightenment: Asianism and Atticism. 1\. Asianism A later sophist who wrote one of the only remaining accounts of these great orators in his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus describes Asianism as a form that “...aims at but never achieves the grand style.” He adds that its style is more, “flowery, bombastic, full of startling metaphors, too metrical, too dependent on the tricks of rhetoric, too emotional.” This type of rhetoric is also sometimes referred to as “Ionian” and “Ephesian”, because it came from outside of Athens.Philostratus: The Lives of the Sophists, page xx. Trans.
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The Alexandrine grammarians were philologists and textual scholars who flourished in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, when that city was the center of Hellenistic culture. Despite the name, the work of the Alexandrine grammarians was never confined to grammar, and in fact did not include it, since grammar in the modern sense did not exist until the first century BC. In Hellenistic and later times, "grammarian" refers primarily to scholars concerned with the restoration, proper reading, explanation and interpretation of the classical texts, including literary criticism. However unlike Atticism, their goal was not to reform the Greek in their day. The Alexandrine grammarians undertook the critical revision of the works of classical Greek literature, particularly those of Homer, and their studies were profoundly influential, marking the beginning of the Western grammatical tradition.
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But above his other duties, Quintilian makes clear that the orator "should never, like so many, be led by a desire to win applause to neglect the interest of the actual case" (12.9.1). Lastly, Quintilian compares various styles of Greek and Roman oratory (especially Atticism and the Asiatic style), also commenting on artistic styles of painting and sculpture (12.10). As he concludes, Quintilian discusses when the orator should retire and examines the possible advantages of such a career. His final words urge the orator to devote himself fully to the task: "Wherefore let us seek with all our hearts that true majesty of oratory, the fairest gift of god to man, without which all things are stricken dumb and robbed alike of present glory and the immortal record of posterity; and let us press forward to whatsoever is best, since, if we do this, we shall either reach the summit or at least see many others far beneath us" (12.11.30).
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Now first translated into English, by E. Jones. London: Printed for B. White, 1776. Cicero encouraged the plebeians through his writing, “Moreover, not only were outstanding men not deterred from undertaking liberal pursuits, but even craftsmen did not give up their arts because they were unable to equal the beauty of the picture of Ialysus . . . .” Cicero proposes that rhetoric cannot be confined to one specific group but rather outlines a guide that will lead to the creation of successful orators across Roman society. In Orator, Cicero also addressed the accusation lodged by his fellow senators, including Brutus, that he was an “Atticist.” Cicero addresses this claim by saying that he is too independent and bold to be associated with Atticism, producing his own unique style. Cicero claims the perfect orator creates his own “elocutio,” or diction and style, rather than following this movement. Cicero states that all five canons are equally important.
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As early as in the Hellenistic period, there was a tendency towards a state of diglossia between the Attic literary language and the constantly developing vernacular Koine. By late antiquity, the gap had become impossible to ignore. In the Byzantine era, written Greek manifested itself in a whole spectrum of divergent registers, all of which were consciously archaic in comparison with the contemporary spoken vernacular, but in different degrees.. They ranged from a moderately archaic style employed for most every-day writing and based mostly on the written Koine of the Bible and early Christian literature, to a highly artificial learned style, employed by authors with higher literary ambitions and closely imitating the model of classical Attic, in continuation of the movement of Atticism in late antiquity. At the same time, the spoken vernacular language developed on the basis of earlier spoken Koine, and reached a stage that in many ways resembles present-day Modern Greek in terms of grammar and phonology by the turn of the first millennium AD. Written literature reflecting this Demotic Greek begins to appear around 1100.
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Greek diglossia belongs to the category whereby, while the living language of the area evolves and changes as time passes by, there is an artificial retrospection to and imitation of earlier (more ancient) linguistic forms preserved in writing and considered to be scholarly and classic. One of the earliest recorded examples of diglossia was during the first century AD, when Hellenistic Alexandrian scholars decided that, in order to strengthen the link between the people and the glorious culture of the Greek “Golden Age” (5th c. BC), people should adopt the language of that era. The phenomenon, called “Atticism”, dominated the writings of part of the Hellenistic period, the Byzantine and Medieval era. Following the Greek War of Independence of 1821 and in order to “cover new and immediate needs” making their appearance with “the creation of the Greek State”, scholars brought to life “Κatharevousa” or “purist” language. Katharevousa did not constitute the natural development of the language of the people, the “Koine”, “Romeika”, Demotic Greek or Dimotiki as it is currently referred to.
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