ESKi YUNAN ve ROMA'da SÖZ SÖYLEME SANATININ ÜÇ BİÇEMi: Attike, Asia ve Rodos

Abstract

There were three main forms of rhetorics widely used among the ancient Greeks and the Romans. One of them was the Attic kind, which attained to its full development under the influence of the styles of Lysias, Demosthenes and his contemporaries. It took as its model particularly Lysias' style which was on the one hand full of every rhetorical trick hiden and not easy to see at once, on the other hand simple without ornamention and abundance of words, identifying its author with his client and giving the impression that it was not writen by a paid professional logographos, but spoken by a ordinary litigant who was stuck to elequence by his grievous wrongs. From the middle of second century B.C. on there were some orators at Rome who followed to some extent the Attic style of rhetorics, but in Hellenic times a general tendency to artificiality had already showed itself. As we learn from Cicero's Brutus this Atticism, having spread over the Aegean sea first to the islands and then to the cities of western Anatolia, lost its simple but healthy characteristics under the unavoidable influence of the local people's nature and customes. Thus the new ornate style of rhetorics, Asianism, is said to have come to being. The typical example of the Asianism was the style of Hegesias, who together with the other Asians generally used jerkey,short clauses, words which had no meaning in the context and was fond of ending with one particular rhythm (periodos or numerosa comprehensio). There were two kinds of Asianism, one characterized by its use of neat and pretty epigramatic phrases, lacking in weight, the other by the rush words (Cicero,Brutus,325). The prominent representative of this Asiatic style of rhetorics at Rome was Hortensius, Cicero's great rival in his profession. After some time Asianism appeared again in the style of the younger Seneca. Somewhat inbetween Atticism and Asianism was the Rhodian style of rhetorics. On of the best teachers of this rhetoric school was Apollonios Molon of Rhodes, who having come on an embassy to Rome on the behalf of the Rhodians, had the chance to give some stylistic advice to Cicero in his defence of Roscius and Cicero attended his lessons when he went to Rhodes after this legai case.