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Home , Atticism, Koine Greek

THE ATTICIST GRAMMARIANS

John A.L. Lee

1.

Atticism was a complex phenomenon that has been described and ex- plained in numerous ways, but its essential element was the tendency to look back to the language and literature of a former era as the model to follow, from a later time when the spoken language had changed and origi- nal composition of that literature was in the past. The former era was the Classical period, and access to it was through its texts, which were stud- ied and imitated in the education system. The later time was almost the whole of the post-Classical period: the phenomenon appeared in the  rst century bc, reached a peak in the second century ad, and continued its inu- ence through the Byzantine era, with efects still today. The results were seen not only in writing but in the shape of the language as a whole, in a difer- entiation of the spoken and written varieties, or a “diglossy/,” that afected Greek for the rest of its history.1 Atticism was not simply a linguistic phenomenon but part of a larger enterprise to recover the Classical past. The cultural world of  fth and fourth century bc was to be recreated, in literature, , the arts and philosophy. Powerful cultural and social forces fostered the enterprise, and even emperors supported it. The whole was an exercise in imitation, but it had a deep and enduring—some would say disastrous—impact.2

1 For an accurate de nition of the term (too long to repeat here), see Ferguson’s in R.A. Hudson, Sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 54. I am grateful to Michael Curran for reading this chapter and ofering many useful comments. 2 The literature is extensive. Recommended are: Graham Anderson, The Second Sophis- tic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. 86–100; E.L. Bowie, “ and Their Past in the ,” Past and Present 46 (1970): 3–41; Robert Browning, Medieval and (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 44–50; 104–113; Geofrey C. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers (London: Longman, 1997), 78–86; 151–153; J.N. Kazazis (trans. Deborah Kazazis), “Atticism,” in A.-F. Christidis, ed., A History of : From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1200–1212, 1215–1217; Simon Swain, 284 john a.l. lee

The attempt to turn the clock back created complexity for users of the language, especially when they wished to commit anything to writing, or, at a more advanced level, engage in rhetorical display. Anyone who had been to school had been introduced to the notion that some forms, words, and uses were “better” or more “correct” than others. They were the ones that matched the Classical models, contrasting with new features that had arisen as a result of change in the spoken language. The contemporary, spoken language was disparaged, the older, obsolete features were approved and accorded prestige. The need for guidance in  nding one’s way through these arti cial shoals soon led to the creation of works ofering instruction in how to do it. The authors of these works were the Atticist grammarians.3 There is a long list of names of Atticist grammarians, though most of their works survive today only in fragments. The efects of their eforts, however, and of the whole movement to treat the Greek of the past as the model of good Greek, are to be seen in almost all the written remains of post-Classical Greek. Most works of literature from that period exhibit arti cial Atticizing features to varying degrees, and even the lower levels of everyday writing display some inuence.4 Although the Atticizing movement had marked success, and writers at the top of the scale could write a whole work that appeared to reproduce the Attic of  fth-century Athens, this Atticizing Greek was not a spoken language or dialect separate from ; it was a stylistic variety, or rather group of varieties, added on to the living language, Koine Greek. The

HellenismandEmpire:Language,Classicism,andPowerintheGreekWorld,AD50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), esp. 17–41; Tim Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic ( & Rome: New Sur- veys in the 35; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Rafaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2001), esp. ch. 8. It is worth noting that “Asianism,” against which Atticism was supposedly a reaction, is largely a  ction: see Whitmarsh, Second Sophistic, 7–8; 50–51. 3 The epithet “grammarian” is not quite appropriate, but it is hard to  nd a better alternative. 4 This last topic has hardly been touched. There are limited observations in Basil G. Man- dilaras, The Verb in the Greek Non-Literary Papyri (Athens: Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sciences, 1973), mostly on the ; W. Schmid, Der Atticismus in seinen Hauptvertretern von Dionysius von Halikarnass bis auf den zweiten Philostratus (5 vols.; Stuttgart: Kohlham- mer, 1887–1897; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), 3:19–33, passim; A. Kotsevalov, “Koine Syntax of Greek Colonies on the Black Sea,” in G.E. Mylonas and D. Raymond, eds., Studies Presented to D.M. Robinson (2 vols.; Saint Louis: Washington University Press, 1951–1953), 2:434–442. The only extensive study known to me is an unpublished work: Andrew L. Connolly, “Atticism in Non-literary Papyri of the First Seven Centuries ad: A Study in Several Features of Orthogra- phy and Syntax” (B.A. diss., University of Sydney, 1983).