Towards the end ofthe first century, we see the evidence ofa debate between proponents of three distinct styles of oratory in the works of Cicero on oratory and in the reactions of his contemporaries and later scholars to his own oratory.22 Some of Cicero’s detractors accused him of practising Asianic rather than Attic oratory; he defended himself by appealing to Demosthenic antecedents, and others, including the emperor Claudius, wrote works against Cicero’s detractors. The details of Cicero’s rhetorical style are not relevant here, but his experience alerts the modern scholar to that development of distinct styles of rhetoric, whose merits and faults are treated in a number of Greek and Latin writers. While Classical Greek orators and theorists of rhetoric, including Aristotle, had paid some attention to the existence of different styles, the sharp divisions between schools of thought on this issue were a product of the Hellenistic period. That is perhaps self-evident from the name given to one of these schools, the Asianic, for its very existence depends on the Hellenization of Asia Minor and the presence of schools for instruction in rhetoric in that part of the eastern Mediterranean. Since the debates had become acrimonious by Cicero’s time, these different points of view on the proper style for oratory had become entrenched by the mid-first century. Thus, the rise of these three approaches to style is clearly a Hellenistic phenomenon.
The styles are difficult to characterize for the simple reason that even ancient writers do not agree on the precise characteristics. In general, Attic oratory, which sought its models in the canonical Attic orators, such as Isocrates, Lysias, and Demosthenes, was typically simple and straightforward, while Asianic was the opposite: florid and complex; the Rhodian style was somewhere in between. The matter was not, however, as simple as that. The Attic orators differed greatly among themselves; Demosthenes’ oratory was far more ornate, with its long complex sentences, than that of Lysias, and had he not been an Athenian orator some might well have considered his oratory Asianic (once the term was invented, of course). Cicero certainly did not think so, for, as noted, he defended himself, and others defended him, against charges of Asianism by stating that he employed Demosthenes as a model of Attic oratory. Furthermore, many Hellenistic and later Greek orators, and Cicero in Latin, adopted different stylistic characteristics at different times or as the situation demanded: when straightforward prose was most beneficial, they employed the Attic style; when flourish and ornateness might accomplish an objective more readily, Asianic oratory was featured in a speech.
Rhodian oratory is not much discussed in the ancient writers, for it was neither too simple to annoy the Asianists nor too complex to bother the Atticists. It perhaps hardly needs stating that the style is closely associated with the schools at Rhodes; possibly, Antisthenes, said to have founded a school there in the fourth century, is responsible for the origin of the style, though that is not a necessary conclusion: it may also have developed subsequently. To a considerable extent, Asianic oratory developed as a consequence of the widespread expansion of rhetorical schools over the Greek-speaking world in the Hellenistic period. As rhltores sought to distinguish themselves from each other, and as the refinement in the treatments of rhetorical theory and practice grew ever more precise, one avenue to reputation was the use of a florid style in displays of an orator’s craft. Simply put, Asianic oratory attracted more attention because it encouraged virtuosity, often for its own sake. Oratory, we may suggest, came full circle during the Hellenistic period. What had begun as a dispute between the philosophers and the sophists about the utility and nature of rhetoric became a disagreement between different schools of rhetorical thought on the proper style for oratory. In some ways, the Asianists replaced the sophists in what was by and large the same debate, a battle now fought in technical terms rather than centring on issues of morality. At the same time, the dispute between groups can be seen as little more than typical disagreement between scholars, though each side also worked out a practical application for its point of view.
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