42 - Λέξεις Λόγγου (2019)

Summary

The chapter’s first objective is to give a flavour of the post-classical vocabulary in Longus’ artistic prose and to determine at what literary level the authors with whom he shares such vocabulary locates him. After noting some hapax legomena, and documenting some fifty words and a score of usages first found in post-classical literary texts ranging from Epicurus to Himerius, I concluded that, while these were only a sub-class of the numerous cases of vocabulary and usage that Longus shares with post-classical authors, they showed that, while Longus does himself often Atticise, he does so much less consistently than other Atticising writers of the late second and early third centuries. In some respects, then, his linguistic behaviour can be seen as analogous to that of Chariton. whose vocabulary matches that of several writers of the first century AD. But though writing in a period when Atticism was gaining strength, and may well have been prominent in some places, Chariton does not follow this path: a century and a half later Longus was writing in a world where some lexicographers and sophists both preached and tried to practise hard-core Atticism; but he himself blends Atticist and post-classical usage without apparent concern. It is conceded that the data marshalled could not establish a firm date for Longus’ writing, but it is suggested they point to the 220s or 230s AD.