Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Lysias, Rhetoric and Style

Abstract

Dionysius of Halicarnassus says just enough about himself to allow us to date him with confidence to the last part of the first century bce. In the preface to his monumental work on the origins of Rome, the Roman Antiquities (Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἀρχαιολογία 1.7.2), Dionysius writes that he arrived in Rome after the Battle of Actium either in late 30 or early 29 bce and settled there to learn Latin, to familiarize himself with Roman literary culture, and write the history of Rome. What he does not tell us, but what has been assumed from his literary activity, is that in Rome he ‘also practiced as a teacher of rhetoric’, and perhaps even ‘kept an open school’. Hence, next to this magnum opus of Roman history, Dionysius was engaged with rhetoric and literary studies and as evidence for this activity we have his essays on ancient orators and literary criticism. It is these critical works in particular that will constitute the focus of the following, and in many ways culminating, chapters of this book. Altogether, ten shorter essays and treatises have come to us: five essays on ancient orators (Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Dinarchus) with a preface to the work On the Ancient Orators, an essay on Thucydides, a treatise on