1611, Thomas James, A Treatiſe of the Corruption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome, for maintenance of Popery and irreligion.…Diuided into V. Parts., London: Mathew Lownes, The II. Part.: Corruption of the true Fathers., “The 19. place corrupted, in Agapetus words lib. 2. Meliſſarum per Antonium Monachum Græcum. Bibl. Sſ. Patrum Tom. 1. pag. 208. Par. 1571.”, page 68:
By the Cardinals own confeſsion, this Agapetus liued at Conſtantinople in Iuſtinians time: where it was a great matter for him, no doubt, in ſo long time, to learn to make ſuch a Greek booke as this is; which yet for the ſtile and Atticiſmes, comes a great deale ſhort of Baronius commendation.
For with Athenians you haue walked in the way of iniuſtice. And thus much wee haue laid open touching our inuoluntary Medizing, and your voluntary Atticizing.
And the Chians, as hauing beene diſheartned in diuers former Battels, and otherwiſe, not onely, not mutually well affected, but iealous one of another, (for Tydeus and his Complices, had bin put to death by Pædaritus for Atticiſme, and the reſt of the City was kept in awe, but by force, and for a time) ſtirred not againſt them.
There while they acted, and overacted, among other young ſcholars, I was a ſpectator; they thought themſelves gallant men, and I thought them fools, they made ſport, and I laught, they miſpronounc’t and I miſlik’t, and to make up the atticiſme, they were out, and I hiſt.
1792, William Newcome, An Hiſtorical View of the Engliſh Biblical Tranſlations: The Expediency of Reviſing by Authority our Preſent Tranſlation: And the Means of Executing Such a Reviſion., Dublin: John Exshaw, Chap. V.: Rules for conducting an improved verſion of the bible, Rule II., page 279:
There is an elegant Atticiſm which occurs Luke xiii. 9. “If it bear fruit, well.” We find this figure of ſpeech in the Chaldee, Dan. iii. 15; and, I think, in the Hebrew, Exod. xxxii. 32: “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their ſin, well.”
Much force will be added to a verſion of the bible by retaining thoſe Hebraiſms which the Engliſh language eaſily admits, or to which an Engliſh ear is now accuſtomed. Of this kind are, Enoch walked with God; though ſhe fortify the height of her ſtrength; the throne of his glory; labour of love; as for Ephraim, their glory ſhall flee away as a bird: which laſt form reſembles Salluſt’s plebs urbana ea vero præceps ierat; and that common Atticiſm, urbem quam ſtatuo, veſtra eſt.
When we say one word against Catalani, may we never hear her sing again. Her extatic warblings overwhelm reason with delight; criticism is content to wonder without referring to its rules of analysis; and her mistakes, if she makes any, are perceptible only to the musical pedant who thinks a deviation from a scientific canon ill compensated by the most fanciful beauties of execution. Such a man would accuse Thucydides of false grammar on account of his atticisms, or Homer of incorrect quantity for the occasional artful protraction of a short syllable.
When the disasters of the Athenians in Sicily had ruined their interest in all the Italiot cities, Lysias and his brother were compelled to quit Thurii on the charge of Atticism (of taking the Athenian side in political questions) and they returned to Athens, which was then under the government of the Four Hundred, and continued to reside there to the time which out narrative has now reached.
It [scil.Alexandria] looks towards Athens as well as towards Jerusalem. Herein lies the germ of the intellectual dualism which thoroughly permeates the Byzantine and partly also the modern Greek civilization, the dualism between the culture of scholars and that of the people. Even the literature of the Hellenistic age suffers from this dualism; we distinguish in it two tendencies, one rationalistic and scholarly, the other romantic and popular. The former originated in the schools of the Alexandrian sophists and culminated in the rhetorical romance, its chief representatives being Lucian, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Longus, the latter had its root in the idyllic tendency of Theocritus, and culminated in the idyllic novel of Callimachus, Musæus, Quintus of Smyrna, and others. Both tendencies persisted in Byzantium, but the first, as the one officially recognized, retained predominance and was not driven from the field until the fall of the empire. The first tendency, strong as it was, received additional support from the reactionary linguistic movement known as Atticism. Represented at its height by rhetoricians like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and grammarians like Herodian and Phrynicus at Alexandria, this tendency prevailed from the second century B. C. onward, and with the force of an ecclesiastical dogma controlled all subsequent Greek culture, so that the living form of the Greek language, even then being transformed into modern Greek, was quite obscured and only occasionally found expression, chiefly in private documents, though also in popular literature.
There are two rival tendencies in the oratory of the second and third centuries, Asianism and Atticism. The Asianic style is flowery, bombastic, full of startling metaphors, too metrical, too dependent on the tricks of rhetoric, too emotional. In short, the Asianic declaimer aims at but never achieves the grand style. The Atticist usually imitates some classical author, aims at simplicity of style, and is a purist, carefully avoiding any allusion or word that does not occur in a writer of the classical period.
Aelius Aristeides, surnamed Theodorus, was born in Mysia, in 117. According to Suidas, he studied under Polemo, but no doubt he owed more to the teaching of Herodes. He is the chief representative of the religious and literary activity of the sophists and their revival of Atticism in the second century, and we must judge of that revival mainly from his works which are in great part extant.
2010 March 12th, Lawrence Kim, “The Literary Heritage as Language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic” (chapter 31), in Egbert Jan Bakker, editor, A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World), Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., →DOI, →ISBN, →LCCN, Part Five: Greek as Literature, pages 468–482
2011 February 17th, Philomen Probert, “Attic Irregularities: Their Reinterpretation in the Light of Atticism” (chapter 15, pages 269–290), in Στέφανος Ματθαίος [Stephanos Matthaios], Franco Montanari, Αντώνιος Ρεγκάκος [Antonios Rengakos], editors, Ancient Scholarship and Grammar: Archetypes, Concepts and Contexts (Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes; 8), Berlin · New York: De Gruyter, →DOI, →ISBN, →ISSN, →LCCN, part III. «The Ancient Grammarians on the Greek Language and Linguistic Correctness», § 1. Introduction, page 269, footnote 1:
Much of the literature on the origins of Atticism is concerned with possible historical connections between linguistic Atticism and the earlier rise of ‘Atticism’ in both Latin and Greek rhetorical style. This paper is concerned only with linguistic Atticism; it leaves aside entirely the vexed question of connections between linguistic and rhetorical Atticism.
Modern students of Atticism, the movement which looked to Athenian literature of the classical age to provide models for later composition, often draw a distinction between what they call “rhetorical” (or “stylistic”) Atticism of the first century BCE and a supposedly later phenomenon termed “linguistic” (or “grammatical”) Atticism. This paper questions this dichotomy by showing the clearly linguistic interests of some significant first century BCE Greek and Roman Atticists—Caecilius of Calacte, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and T. Annius Cimber—and by arguing that they demonstrate that an interest in antiquarian diction and morphology is part of Atticism from its beginnings.
2016, Ελένη Μπόζια [Eleni Bozia], “Atticism: The Language of 5th-century Oratory or a Quantifiable Stylistic Phenomenon?” (pages 557–571), in Giuseppe Giovanni Antonio Celano, Gregory Crane, editors, Open Linguistics, volume 2, special issue on Treebanking and Ancient Languages: Current and Prospective Research, Berlin: De Gruyter Open Access, published the 30th of December in 2016, →DOI, →ISSN, § 1: «Introduction», page 557:
5th- and 4th-century BCE orators, Lysias, Isocrates, Demosthenes, are the par excellence representatives of Attic oratory and paragons of Atticism due to their proper usage of Attic forms and expressions. Asiatic oratory ensues along with a general decadence in rhetorical productions that has been credited to the influx of eastern elements until Atticism is revived in Imperial times. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the 1st-century BCE teacher of rhetoric, attributes this literary upward shift to the Romans – either that means a re-appreciation of Greek eloquence or implies a political vindictiveness that expresses itself through language and literature on behalf of the Roman subjects against their rulers. The fact remains, though, that there is an overwhelming production of grammar books and lexica focusing on Atticism, all the while determining Greekness as well. Additionally, Cicero and Quintilian express their esteem of Atticism and instruct Roman orators on how to achieve it. This acknowledgment alone is enough to put forward not only an issue of political standing of Greek language and literature, but also to contend that Atticism filtered through centuries and literary genres was modulated into a stylistic construction that transcends language. Cleanness of expressions, comprehensiveness, cohesiveness and other structural attributes alongside linguistic appropriateness in the language that is used in each case bear the tag of “Atticism.”
2020 August 27th [2015 December 22nd], Lawrence Kim, “Asianism and Atticism”, in Oxford Classical Dictionary, digital edition, →DOI, Summary:
Asianism is a modern coinage referring to the rhetorical practice of certain Greek and Latin orators whose styles were designated by ancient critics as Asian (Asianus, Asiaticus, Ἀσιανός) — the “Asia” in question being the Republican Roman province. Asian eloquence was often contrasted unfavorably to a corresponding Attic style (Atticus, Ἀττικός), which was modelled on the prose of classical Athenian writers (a practice now known as Atticism). This opposition between Asian and Attic styles is first attested in Roman oratorical circles during the mid-1st century BCE and was subsequently adopted by Greek critics in Augustan Rome, but seems to have fallen out of fashion by the reign of Tiberius. While Attic remains a general stylistic ideal in the more broadly conceived classicism of Imperial Greek literature, the term Asian disappears as a stylistic label. In a related, but separate development, from the late 1st century CE onwards, Greek literary writers increasingly adhered to a linguistic, rather than stylistic, variety of Atticism, which concentrated on reproducing the ancient Attic dialect used by Athenian authors of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. This Atticism was opposed, not to anything Asian, but to the literary koinê of the Hellenistic and early Imperial era.
My thesis entitled ‘The Origins and Development of Linguistic Atticism’ deals with the linguistic debate around the idea of ‘correct Greek’, and especially with the origins and the development of a movement known as Atticism, which promoted the Attic of the fifth century BCE as the correct language through the means of lexica.
