Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome
Author: Richard L. Hunter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 110847490X

Interprets the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, an important critic and historian in Rome, in a range of contexts.

The Critical Essays

The Critical Essays
Author: Dionysius (of Halicarnassus.)
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 1974
Genre: Classical literature
ISBN:

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS migrated to Rome in 300 B.C., where he lived until his death some time after 8 B.C., writing his Roman Antiquities in twenty books and teaching the art of rhetoric and literary composition to a small group of upper-class Romans. His purpose, both in his own work and in his teaching, was to re-establish the classical Attic standards of purity, invention and taste in order to reassert the primacy of Greek as the literary language of the Mediterranean world. The essays in the present volume display the full range of Dionysius' critical expertise. In the treatise On Literary Composition, his finest and most original work, discussion of the effects produced by the arrangement of words involves minute analysis of phonetics and metre in addition to more general aspects of literary aesthetics such as the difference between poetry and prose, and the tripartite classification of the types of arrangement. The other four essays are on a less ambitious scale. The Dinarchus is primarily a study of authenticity in which Dionysius attempts to identify the genuine speeches of the latest Attic orator from the list of those ascribed to him by the librarians. The three literary letters are all concerned with possible models. In the Letter to Pompeius, Dionysius gives his reasons for criticizing Plato on stylistic and also moral grounds, and appends critiques of Herodotus, whom he greatly admired, and three other historians -- Xenophon, Philistus and Theopompus. Of the two Letters to Ammaeus, the second may be read as an appendix to the Thucydides, but the first concerns literary history, and investigates the question of whether Demosthenes could have learnt his oratorical skills from Aristotle's Rhetoric. Volume I contains the essays On the Ancient Orators, Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, and Thucydides.

On Thucydides

On Thucydides
Author: Dionysius (of Halicarnassus.)
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1975
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520029224

Between Grammar and Rhetoric

Between Grammar and Rhetoric
Author: Casper Constantijn De Jonge
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004166777

Dionysius of Halicarnassus has long been regarded as a rather mediocre critic. This book rehabilitates the Greek rhetorician by demonstrating the creative ways in which he integrated theories from different linguistic disciplines into a coherent programme of rhetoric.

The Ideology of Classicism

The Ideology of Classicism
Author: Nicolas Wiater
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2011-05-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110259117

So far, the critical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus have mainly attracted interest from historians of ancient linguistics. The Ideology of Classicism proposes a novel approach to Dionysius’ œuvre as a whole by providing the first systematic study of Greek classicism from the perspective of cultural identity. Drawing on cultural anthropology and Social Identity Theory, Wiater explores the world-view bound up with classicist criticism. Only from within this ideological framework can we understand why Greek and Roman intellectuals in Augustan Rome strove to speak and write like Demosthenes, Lysias, and Isocrates. Topics addressed by this study include Dionysius’ view of the classical past; mimesis and the aesthetics of reading; language and identity; Dionysius’ view of the Romans, their power and the role of Greek culture within it; Greek classicism and the contemporary controversy about Roman identity among Roman intellectuals; the self-image as Greek intellectuals in the Roman empire of Dionysius and his addressees; the dialogic design of Dionysius’ essays and how it implements a sense of elitism and distinction; Dionysius’ attitudes towards communities competing with him for leadership in rhetorical education and criticism, such as the Peripatetics and Stoics.

The Critical Essays

The Critical Essays
Author: Dionysius (of Halicarnassus.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 696
Release: 1974
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, born ca. 60 BC, aimed in his critical essays to reassert the primacy of Greek as the literary language of the Mediterranean world. They constitute an important development from the somewhat mechanical techniques of rhetorical handbooks to more sensitive criticism of individual authors.

Dionysius and The History of Archaic Rome

Dionysius and The History of Archaic Rome
Author: Emilio Gabba
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1991
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780520073029

In The History of Archaic Rome, Dionysius purposely viewed Roman history as an embodiment of all that was best in Greek culture. Gabba places Dionysius's remarkable thesis in its cultural context, comparing this author with other ancient historians and evaluating Dionysius's treatment of his sources. In truth, the last decades B.C. made the historian's task an enormous challenge. On the one hand, the ancient writers knew Rome to be the greatest empire the world had seen, seemingly impregnable in military power and still capable of expansion. On the other hand, they were acutely aware that it recently had barely survived half a century of civil strife. Gabba recalls to us how little was confidently known of Rome's actual origins in an illuminating examination of Dionysius's methodology as a historian.

Machiavelli in Tumult

Machiavelli in Tumult
Author: Gabriele Pedullà
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107177278

Reconstructs the origins of the idea that social conflict, and not concord, makes political communities powerful.