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Updated: June 24, 2025
We should aim only at our enemies; and even at these, not upon every occasion, or without any distinction of character, or with the same invariable turn of ridicule. Under these restrictions our artless Orator will play off his wit and humour, as I have never seen it done by any of the modern pretenders to Atticism, though they cannot deny that this is entirely in the Attic taste.
But to speak floridly, nervously, and copiously, this also is true Atticism: otherwise, neither Aeschines nor even Demosthenes himself were Attic Speakers. There are others who affect to be called Thucydideans, a strange and novel race of Triflers!
Another fault in composition is that which occurs in the speeches of Hierocles and Menecles, two brothers, who may be considered as the princes of Asiatic Eloquence, and, in my opinion, are by no means contemptible: for though they deviate from the style of nature, and the strict laws of Atticism, yet they abundantly compensate the defect by the richness and fertility of their language.
To be sure, Calvus had already raised the banner of Atticism and had in several biting attacks shown what a simple, frugal and direct style could accomplish; Calidius, one of the first Roman pupils of the great Apollodorus, had already begun making campaign speeches in his neatly polished orations which painfully eschewed all show of ornament or passion; and Caesar himself, efficiency personified, had demonstrated that the leader of a democratic rabble must be a master of blunt phrases.
Some of them, in which the black keys are exclusively taken, are acute and subtle, and remind us of the character of his own gaiety, lover of atticism as he was, subject only to the higher emotions, recoiling from all vulgar mirth, from coarse laughter, and from low enjoyments, as we do from those animals more abject than venomous, whose very sight causes the most nauseating repulsion in tender and sensitive natures.
It is clear that aesthetic delicacy, elegance, distinction, and nobleness that atticism, urbanity, whatever is suave and exquisite, fine and subtle all that makes the charm of the higher kinds of literature and of aristocratic cultivation vanishes simultaneously with the society which corresponds to it. No. 10: "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux.
For if the only true Atticism is what they suppose to be, not even Pericles was an Attic Speaker, though he was universally allowed to bear away the palm of Eloquence; nor, if he had wholly attached himself to this plain and simple kind of language, would he ever have been said by the Poet Aristophanes to thunder and lighten, and throw all Greece into a ferment.
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