Attic Style Rhetoric

Asiatic attic style in greek literature and art was replaced for a time by the more decorative and florid asiatic style.

Attic style rhetoric. The work of the attic orators inspired the later rhetorical movement of atticism an approach to speech composition in a simple rather than ornate style. In classical rhetoric decorum is the use of a style that is appropriate to a subject situation speaker and audience. Style is the dress of thoughts lord chesterfield the style of an author should be the image of his mind but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise edward gibbon style is not the gold setting of the diamond thought. Hegesias developed and exaggerated stylistic effects harking back to the sophists and the gorgianic style.

Attic style in greek literature and art was replaced for a time by the more decorative and florid asiatic style. Unlike the more austere formal and traditional attic style asiatic oratory was more bombastic emotional and coloured with wordplay. According to cicero s discussion of decorum in de oratore see below the grand and important theme should be treated in a dignified and noble style the humble or trivial theme in a less exalted manner. Hegesias of magnesia was asianism s first main representative and was considered its founder.

Attic would resurface again as the ideal suggesting a more ascetic brief and witty concise style. It is the glitter of the diamond itself austin o malley thoughts of a recluse 1898. Both styles influenced writers and speakers in rome and much later in britain.