Atticism

These are sometimes called Asiatic, Attic, and Rhodian: hence “Atticism” and “Asianism” in this book’s glossary.

Sainte-Beuve calls Terence the bond of union between Roman urbanity and the Atticism of the Greeks, and adds that it was in the seventeenth century, when French literature was most truly Attic, that he was most appreciated.

This classical renaissance turned back the literary language into the old ossified forms, as had previously happened in the case of the Atticism of the early centuries of the empire.

This gulf was, moreover, considerably widened owing to the fact that there took place in the written language a retrograde movement, the so-called “Atticism.”

He admits, that Attic eloquence approached the nearest to perfection; he pauses, however, to correct a prevailing error, that the only genuine Atticism is a correct, plain, and slender discourse, distinguished by purity of style, and delicacy of taste, but void of all ornaments and redundance.