Atticist-Asianist controversy. The termsAtticist andAsiamsl were employedover a period of severalcenturies (starting probably in the third century bce) in a debatethat was concernedas much with Next result ideologr and literary identity as it was with style and language. Developedin the Greek world, the terminolory was taken up by the < Searchresults Romansat a critical point in their literary history. It would be a mistaketo look for unity in a debatethat spannedso many centuries and two different literary cultures. In the secondhalf of the first century bce, we find at Rome a bad-temperedargUment among writers and orators over how the In this entry appellationAttic was to be employed.This purely Roman debate, like much of the literary and intellectualrevolution at Rome, was Atticist-Asia nist controversy conductedin terminolory taken over from Greek. Insofar asAttic had any meaning it denoteda plain and unadornedstyle of Bibliography composition;but its more irnportantfunction was evaluative. It was usedby the self-proclaimedAtticists as a term of approbationfor the Roman heirs of the greatfigures of the classicalGreek tradition and Isocrates):Attica Seealso (particularly Lysias, Demosthenes,Xenophon, is the reglon of Greecein which Athens is located.The antonym of Attic, on this view, wasAsianist, aterm best defined negatively; it o Classicalrhetoric . denotedall the bad qualitiesthat a dedicatedAtticist should avoid. (10643 bce),the o Stvle The principalobject of this needlingwas Cicero most famousorator of his day. RomanAtticism was thus in part a normal literary reactionto a familiar and prestigiousstyle, described Adjacent entries "full" by Quintilian as (Cicero'ssentences are often long and complexocharacterizndby attention to balance,rhythm, and o Arangement rhetorical effect). Much of our insight into this ephemeraldispute (both composedin 46 bce), o Ars dictaminis comesfrom Cicero'sBrutus andOrator in which he discussesstyle and repliesto his opponents.He argues' o Art with somejustification, that it is absurdto restrict the term Attic to a singlestyle (it was identified with the simple and unaffected style of o Assonance Lysias by the Atticists), since a whole rangeof styles and registers are found in the Athenian orators.Part of Cicero's irritation seemsto . Aqyndeton stem from the implicit threat by the Atticists to deny him the title of the RomanDemosthenes. Since Demosthenes was generallyheld to o Atticist-Asianist controversy representthe acmeof Athenian rhetoric, Cicero would become ineligible for this position if he were proven to be un-Attic. The name o Audience most associatedwith the Atticists is G. Licinius Calvus (8247 bce), and it is unlikely to be a coincidencethat Calvus was a friend of the r AuxEsis neoteric poet Catullus:both men championedthe Callimachean in r Belles-lettres literary aesthetic,which rejectedthe swollen and the large-scale favor of the "slender \{sss"-in other words, a smaller-scaleand o Black PowerMovement restrainedstyle of composition. r Byzantinerhetoric The debatein Rome seernsto presupposean argumentusing the sameterms in the Hellenistic schoolsof rhetoric. There is, Copyright@ Oxford UniversityPres$ unfortunately,a gap in our Greek sourcesbetween the end of the 2010.All RightsReserved fourth century bce and the time of Cicero, which makesit diffrcult to PrivacyPolicy and LegalNotices understandwhat exactly the debatewas and what force the terms .. Atticist andAsianisl may have had. After the end of the fourth century, the Greeksseem increasingly to have looked back to the "classical" period as a literary and linguistic high point, deviation from which could only meandecline. The establishmentof a classicalcanon led to a conceptionof stylistic and linguistic norms, which affected almostthe entire subsequenthistory of the Greek language(this linguistic insecurity coincidedwith the collapseof Greek political autonomyfollowingthe Macedonianconquest). It is likely, then, that Atticism had its roots in a Hellenistic tradition of declamationthat looked back to the great mastersof classical rhetoric and insistedon rigid adherenceto the lexicon, syntax, and style of a period of the languagethat was increasinglyremote. The requirementfor "correct Greek" (Hell1nizefn) is laid down in Aristotle'sRhetoric, and was reiteratedby Stoic writers. At this early stage,the emphasisseems to have been on clarity, for which correct diction (grammarand syntax) was necessary:the choice of vocabulary is, of course,a gray area betweendiction and style. The Attic movementduringthe Hellenistic period was probably marked by an increasingemphasis on stylistic conformity. The antonymAsianism is more diffrcult to unravel. There is some evidencethat at the end of the fourth century, a separatetradition of rhetoric evolved in the easternMeditenanean. This tradition to someextent loosenedthe strangleholdof classicismand encouraged a greaterdegee of creativity and innovation in composition.To this extent, the term had a geographicalcontent, and its most famous exponentwas Hegesiasof Magnesiain Lydia. By the first century bce, however,the termsAttic andAsianic denotedthe style that a speakeradopted rather than his geographicalprovenance, and even from a stylistic perspectivewere often devoid of useful descriptive content about a particular orator'stechnique. Cicero mentionstwo different rhetorical techniques,which he calls Asianic (he is talking of Greek, but then moveswithout a break to talking of Latin): one was "pointed and epigrammatic,"and the other was'opassionate and rapid." Cicero'sattitude toward Asianic style is ambiguous: while he doesnot condemnit outright (ust as he refusesto endorse a simplisticview of Atticism), most of the oratorsto whom he appliesthe designationare criticized for their excesses.Much of the point of the oppositionwas in fact ideological,stemming from a long tradition of viewing Asia Minor and the East as a repository of anticlassicalvalues: comrpt, barbarian,and effeminate.This favored the eventualdisappearance of the term Asianic (since there was reluctanceto apply it to one'sown side); but it doesnot mean that the Asianic sryle (as defined, and perhapsoccasionally exemplified,by Cicero) was uninfluential in the subsequent developmentof prosestyle in Rome. In the Greek world, the aspirationto Atticize enjoyed a new vogue in the period known as the SecondSophistic (c.60-230 ce), in which the ability to reproducethe Greek of the Athenian masters was a hallmark of educationthat was indispensablefor civic prestigeand political power. [Seealso Classicalrhetoric; and Stvle.] Bibliography Cicero,tutaicus Tullius. Brutus and Orator. Text and translation byG.L. Hendricksonand H. M. Hubbell.Loeb classical Library. Carrbridgs,Mass., lg3g.ffi Fairweather,Janet. Seneca the Elder. Cambridge,U.K., 1981. Containsa useful review of the Roman sourcesin section IV. I' "Asianism, Atticisnr, and the Style of the Declaimers,"pp.PP. 243-303.irnffitfitl Flashar,H. Le Classicismed Romeaux lers sidclesavant et aprds J.-C. Geneva(Entretiens Hardt 25),1979. A collectionof nine essaysin English,French, and Germanby leadingscholars in the field.ffil Kennedy,George A., ed. TheCambridge History of Literary Criticism,vol. l, ClassicalCriticisim. Cambridge, U.K., 1989. "The ffil Seeespecially E. Fantham, Growthof Literature andCriticism at Rome,"pp.pp. 22W244, and D. C. Innes, "AugustanCritics," pp.pp. 245'-273. " Wilamowitz-MoellendodU. von. Asianismusund Atticismus." Hermes35 (1900),l-52.Reprinted in hisKleine schriften, vol. 3, pp.pp.223-273, Berlin, 1969. A classicdiscussion that reviews (andcorrects) previous scholarly interpretations. f,#giffi -Stephen C. Colvin How to cite thisentry: StephenC. Colvin" Atticist-Asianistcontrover sy" Encycl opedi a of Rhetoric.Ed. ThomasO. Sloane. @ 2006 Oxford University Press.Encyclopedia of Rhetoric:(e-reference edition). Oxford UniversityPress. University College London. 3 July2010 http: //www. oxford-rhetoric. com/entry ?ent rY =t223 .e29 .