Asiatic style

The Asiatic style or Asianism (Latin: genus orationis Asiaticum, Cicero, Brutus 325) refers to an Ancient Greek rhetorical tendency (though not an organized school) that arose in the third century BC, which, although of minimal relevance at the time, briefly became an important point of reference in later debates about Roman oratory.

Hegesias of Magnesia was Asianism's first main representative and was considered its founder. Hegesias "developed and exaggerated stylistic effects harking back to the sophists and the Gorgianic style."

Unlike the more austere, formal and traditional Attic style, Asiatic oratory was more bombastic, emotional, and coloured with wordplay.

The Asiatic style was distinguished by the use of a prose rhythm, especially the end of clauses (clausulae). This worked in much the same way as in Latin poetry, although poetic metres themselves were avoided. An effective rhythm could bring an audience to applaud the rhythm alone, however Cicero criticised Asiatic orators for their overly repetitive endings.

The first known use of the term is in Rome, by Cicero in the mid-first century BC. It came into general and pejorative use for a florid style contrasting with the formal, traditional rhetoric of Atticism, which it was said to have corrupted. The term reflects an association with writers in the Greek cities of Asia Minor. "Asianism had a significant impact on Roman rhetoric, since many of the Greek teachers of rhetoric who came to Rome beginning with the 2d cent. B.C.E. were Asiatic Greeks." "Mildly Asianic tendencies" have been found in Gaius Gracchus' oratory, and "more marked" ones in Publius Sulpicius Rufus. However we have almost no remnants of oratory that can properly be called Asiatic.

Cicero (Orator ad Brutum 325) identifies two distinct modes of the Asiatic style: a more studied and symmetrical style (generally taken to mean "full of Gorgianic figures") employed by the historian Timaeus and the orators Menecles and Hierocles of Alabanda, and the rapid flow and ornate diction of Aeschines of Miletus and Aeschylus of Cnidus. Hegesias' "jerky, short clauses" may be placed in the first class, and Antiochus I of Commagene's Mount Nemrut inscription in the second. The conflation of the two styles under a single name has been taken to reflect the essentially polemical significance of the term: "The key similarity is that they are both extreme and therefore bad; otherwise they could not be more different." According to Cicero, Quintus Hortensius combined these traditions and made them at home in Latin oratory.

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