The evolution of a theory of artistic prose

Abstract

Literary prose first emerges in the middle of the fifth century BC in writings in the Ionic dialect, including the Histories of Herodotus, then in the Attic dialect in the oratory of the Siciliạn Gorgias and the Athenian Antiphon, and is seen at the end of the century in Thucydides' History. Oratory and history, throughout antiquity, remain privileged prose genres, to which is added as a third the philosophical dialogue, developed by Plato in the fourth century. Except for a very few references to the literary epistle, ancient critics ignore all other prose forms as sub-literary. History, with its mixture of narrative and set speeches, may be thought of as corresponding to epic in poetry, the dialogue to drama; epideictic oratorỵ, seen in the display speeches of sophists, such as that attributed to Lysias in Plato's Phaedrus , or in funeral orations or speeches at festivals, has some relationship to lyric forms, such as the hymn, but the chief poetic antecedents of deliberative oratory are found in the debates in epic. Aristotle claims ( Rhetoric of Aristotle 1.1404a20 - 39) that prose became artistic in the first instance by borrowing stylistic features from poetry; a more accurate statement might be that analogies were created to the effects of poetic sound and rhythm, seen in the so-called Gorgianic figures of isocolon, paronomasia, homoeoteleuton, and the like. These are flagrantly indulged by Gorgias himself and found in more restrained form in Thucydides and elsewhere. As pointed out in chapter 1, section 3 above, ‘prose’ assumes the prior existence of ‘poetry’.