Asiatic style

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

[2] 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"[8]) 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.

In the Neronian period, the surviving portion of Petronius' Satyricon begins midway through a rant in which the unreliable narrator, Encolpius, denounces the corruption of Roman literary taste and the Asiatic style in particular: "that flatulent, inflated magniloquence later imported from Asia to Athens has infected every aspiring writer like a pestilential breeze" (trans.

Quintilian accepted Cicero's attitude towards Asianism and Atticism,[12] and adapted the earlier debate's polemical language, in which objectionable style is called effeminate, in his own De causis corruptae eloquentiae.

[13] In his Institutio Oratoria (XII.10), Quintilian diagnoses the roots of the two styles in terms of ethnic dispositions: "The Attici, refined and discriminating, tolerated nothing empty or gushing; but the Asiatic race somehow more swollen and boastful was inflated with a more vainglory of speaking" (trans.

The debate remained topical for Tacitus (as seen in Pliny's correspondence with him on oratorical styles in Letter 1.20 Archived 2011-06-15 at the Wayback Machine) and contributes to the atmosphere of his Dialogus de oratoribus.