Asiatic style

The Asiatic style or Asianism (Latin: genus orationis Asiaticum, Cicero, Brutus 325) refers to an Ancient Greek rhetorical tendency (though not an organized school) that arose in the third century BC, which later became an important point of reference in debates about Roman oratory.^[1]

Third-century origins

Hegesias of Magnesia was Asianism's first main representative and was considered its founder. Hegesias "developed and exaggerated stylistic effects harking back to the sophists and the Gorgianic style."^[2]

The Roman perspective: Up to Cicero

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 Atticism, which it was held 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."^[3] "Mildly Asianic tendencies" have been found in Gaius Gracchus' oratory, and "more marked" ones in Publius Sulpicius Rufus.^[4]

Cicero (Brutus 325) identifies two distinct modes of the Asiatic style: a more studied and symmetrical style (generally taken to mean "full of Gorgianic figures"^[5]) employed by the historian Timaeus and the orators Menecles and Hierocles of Alabanda, and the rapid flow and ornate diction of Aeschines of Miletus and Aeschylus of Cnidus. Hegesias' "jerky, short clauses" may be placed in the first class, and Antiochus I of Commagene's Mount Nemrut inscription in the second.^[6] The conflation of the two styles under a single name has been taken to reflect the essentially polemical significance of the term: "The key similarity is that they are both extreme and therefore bad; otherwise they could not be more different."^[5] According to Cicero, Quintus Hortensius combined these traditions and made them at home in Latin oratory.

Cicero himself, rejecting the extreme plainness and purism of the Atticists, was attacked by critics such as Licinius Macer Calvus for being on the side of the Asiani; in response he declared his position as the "Roman Demosthenes" (noting that the preeminent Attic orator would not have qualified as Attic by the strict standards of the oratores Attici of first-century Rome).^[7] Thus Cicero professed a mixed or middle style (genus medium; Quintilian 12.10.18: genus Rhodium...velut medium...atque ex utroque mixtum) between the low or plain Attic style and the high Asiatic style, called the Rhodian style by association with Molo of Rhodes and Apollonius the Effeminate (Rhodii, Cicero, Brutus xiii 51).

The Roman perspective: After Cicero

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,^[8] and adapted the earlier debate's polemical language, in which objectionable style is called effeminate, in his own De causis corruptae eloquentiae.^[9] In his Institutio Oratoria (XII.10), Quintilian diagnoses the roots of the two styles in terms of ethnic dispositions: "The Attici, refined and discriminating, tolerated nothing empty or gushing; but the Asiatic race somehow more swollen and boastful was inflated with a more vainglory of speaking" (trans. Amy Richlin).^[10] Pliny the Younger continued to profess the mixed style. The debate remained topical for Tacitus (as seen in Pliny's correspondence with him on oratorical styles in Letter 1.20) and contributes to the atmosphere of his Dialogus de oratoribus.

Notes

1. ^ Hildebrecht Hommel, "Asianismus," in Lexikon der Antike, Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1965
2. ^ Laurent Pernot, Rhetoric in Antiquity, trans. W. E. Higgins, Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2005, p. 82
3. ^ David E. Aune, "Asianism," in The Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003
4. ^ Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, trans. Sodolow, JHU Press, 1994, p. 120
5. ^ ^{a b} Martine Cuypers, "Historiography, Rhetoric, and Science: Rethinking a Few Assumptions on Hellenistic Prose," in James J. Clauss and Martine Cuypers (eds.), A Companion to Hellenistic Literature, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 328f.
6. ^ H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Literature, 4th rev. ed., London: Methuen, 1950, p. 363, following the analysis of Eduard Norden's Die antike Kunstprosa
7. ^ Gesine Manuwald, Cicero: Philippics 3-9, vol. 2, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 129f.
8. ^ G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics, 1968, p. 286
9. ^ C. O. Brink, "Quintilian's De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae and Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus," Classical Quarterly 39:2 (1989), pp. 472-503, at p. 478
10. ^ Amy Richlin, "Gender and Rhetoric: Producing Manhood in the Schools," in William J. Dominik (ed.), Roman Eloquence, Routledge, 1997, p. 78

Further reading

• Gualtiero Calboli, "Asiani (Oratori)," in Francesco Della Corte (ed.), Dizionario degli scrittori greci e latini, vol. 1, Milan: Marzorati, 1988, pp. 215-232
• Jakob Wisse, "Greeks, Romans, and the Rise of Atticism," in J. G. J. Abbenes et al. (eds.), Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle: A Collection of Papers in Honour of D. M. Schenkeveld, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Press, 1995, pp. 65-82