Atticism: The Language of 5th-century Oratory or a Quantifiable Stylistic Phenomenon?

Abstract

Abstract This paper comparatively explores Atticism as it first appeared in fifth-century Greek oratory and was later revived by Imperial Greek authors. Using Dionysius’ of Halicarnassus and his appreciations of oratory and orators as a frame of reference and then expanding his inferences on works of Imperial era, I attempt to parameterize Atticism as a phenomenon. Ultimately this study will apprise us of the usage of Atticism in Imperial Roman oratory as well, as it then becomes obvious that Atticism has transcended the boundaries of language and has transformed into a constructional rhetorical system. This paper employs a unified node-based metric formulation for implementing various syntactical construction metrics, indicative of the syntactical attributes of the sentences. The developed metrics were applied to annotated texts of six authors, which were then comparatively examined using Principal Component Analysis.