How Style Met the City

Abstract

Abstract The modern concept of style is a complex one and is difficult to map fully onto a corresponding notion in ancient Greek thinking and vocabulary. This paper sets out to examine both the common understandings of this term in contemporary scholarship and the ancient sensitivities to what we may call stylistic phenomena – the multi-levelled features that may be conceptualized as characterizing the ‘how’ as opposed to the ‘what’. The paper moves on to show in what ways style and ancient stylistics are related to the city, that is to say, to the use of language in the culturally-defined communicative contexts for which texts were produced and circulated in classical Athens. In the final section, this paper briefly reviews recent approaches and perspectives in the stylistics of Greek oratory and lays out the framework of this special issue.