Atticism

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Atticism literally means a preference for the Athenians or the pure Attic ( Greek ) language. In a narrower sense, atticism is a movement in rhetoric that began in the middle of the 1st century BC. . AD began.

The roots of atticism in the broader sense go back to the beginnings of Hellenism , its origin lies in the areas of grammar and philology . After the death of Alexander the Great , Pergamon and Alexandria began to work on the literature and poetry of the past centuries philologically , and the feeling soon emerged that the cultural achievements of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Should be placed above the contemporary. The Attic authors from this period were then compiled by Alexandrian grammarians in the Canon Alexandrinus , whereby they were soon regarded as exemplary, their vocabulary and linguistic usage became normative: the imitation of the Attic patterns became the style, with the foreseeable result that the literary language led to a classicism and soon found itself in contrast to the evolving colloquial language ( Koine ), the basis of which had been the Attic dialect since the beginning of Hellenism, and from which the Middle Greek later developed.

Atticism became part of the program when it was introduced in the 1st century BC. In rhetoric came into a position opposite to the Asianism originating from the Greek cities of Asia Minor . After the style of this Hellenistic, sophistic rhetoric was perceived as too exaggerated, the call for a return to the simple and matter-of-fact approaches quickly found itself in the positions of atticism: the sick Asian style was replaced by the healthy atticist (especially that of the Lysias ) opposite.

Essential representatives of Atticism in Rome were Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus (82-47 BC), who even described Ciceros (who dealt with Asianism and Atticism in his Brutus ) style as verbose and artificial, and here the so-called Jungattiker followed, in Greece Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st century BC) and later Lukian of Samosata (120–180), with the latter in particular contributing to the fact that Atticism survived into the Renaissance . Although the originally simpler language of atticism was at some point refined as well as the speeches it tried to replace, it remained universally understandable throughout the Greek world, which contributed significantly to maintaining cultural connections in the Mediterranean and beyond.

The dispute between Atticism and Asianism was continued in the early imperial period by succession struggles between modern and archaic rhetoric, the latter producing an archaism in literature in the 2nd century , which was particularly evident in Marcus Cornelius Fronto , the educator of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus becomes clear.

Literature (not evaluated)