Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Dionysius of Halicarnassus,Greek critic and historian, lived and taught rhetoric at Rome, arriving ‘at the time Augustus put an end to the civil war’, and publishing the first part of his Roman Antiquities (Rhōmaikē archaiologia) 22 years later (Antiquitates Romanae 1. 7). This great work was in twenty books, going down to the outbreak of the First Punic War; we have the first eleven (to 441 BC), with excerpts from the others. Dionysius used the legends of Rome's origins to demonstrate that it was really a Greek city, and his whole history is an erudite panegyric of Roman virtues. It is also very rhetorical, abounding in long speeches. He doubtless thought of it as exemplifying his literary teaching, which was directed towards restoring Classical prose after what he saw as the aberrations of the Hellenistic period. The treatises in which he developed this programme seem mostly to...
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