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2 results

  • Chapter 5 - The Void of Hellenistic Criticism

  • Jonas Grethlein, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany
  • Book:
    The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception
    Published online:
    23 August 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021, pp 107-136

  • Summary

    Hellenistic criticism provides little material for my study; Chapter 5 tries to grasp why this is due not only to its scanty transmission. Neither critics who championed pleasure as the function of poetry nor the ekphrastic tradition seem to have taken an interest in apatē’s ambiguity. We find more evidence at the beginning of the Imperial era in the critical essays of Dionysus of Halicarnassus and in Philo’s polemics against a specific kind of rhetoric and myth. Only Philo, however, exploits apatē’s oscillation between aesthetic illusion and deception. Philo’s debts to Plato help us identify one reason for apatē’s decline in Hellenistic criticism: as some scholia illustrate, Plato’s criticism of poetry was well-known but was often felt to be less compelling than the ideas of other philosophical schools. With due caution, I also suggest that the waning interest in apatē is related to the emergence of the Hellenistic book-culture that made it easy to contemplate aesthetic issues independently of ethical issues.

  • 11 - Cicero and the relationship of oratory to literature

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 230-267

  • Summary

    Marcus Tullius Cicero has been endlessly studied as a character and as a politician, and certainly these aspects of him are of absorbing interest; but his chief historical importance is as a man of letters. Hellenistic criticism recognized three styles, the grand, middle and plain. Not only higher education but literature in general at Rome was founded on oratory. Cicero in the Orator associated these with the three aims of oratory, to move, to please and to convince respectively. The grand style was forceful, weighty, spacious, emotional and ornate, carrying men away: it was what is understood by rhetorical. The ambition to be an orator probably came to the boy from the hill-town of Arpinum, south-east of Rome, through his being entrusted by his father to the care of Rome's leading orator, Lucius Crassus. The nature of Roman legal procedure promotes Cicero's oratorical development.