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A Note on the Dating of Demetrius' On Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Kim Paffenroth
Kim Paffenroth
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
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Extract

Anyone who studies antiquity is surely accustomed to the tenuousness and often wild variances of the dating of many of our texts. But even if this is taken for granted, the dating of Demetrius' On Style seems more problematic than most: the text has been assigned a date anywhere from the late fourth century B.c. to the late first century C.e. Attempts to narrow this wide range have been made using internal linguistic data, but these have not proved definitive, although a late date is now tentativel accepted by most. But a possibly more convincing argument for a late date may be found in a reference to architecture in paragraph 13 of On Style.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 280 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1994

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References

1 See the introduction by Moxon, T. A., Poetics of Aristotle, On Style by Demetrius (London, 1934) x–xiGoogle Scholar; and Roberts, W. R., Demetrius On Style (Cambridge, 1902) 49–64Google Scholar, and his later Demetrius On Style (Cambridge, MA, 1927) 257–87, esp. 268–77.Google Scholar

2 For the linguistic evidence, see Roberts (1902), 55–9; in the introduction to the 1927 edition, 271–7, he conjectures that it was written in the second half of the first century C.e. by the Demetrius mentioned by Plutarch in On the Cessation of Oracles, but even he himself admits that his evidence is slim. An early date (first half of the third century B.c.) is accepted by Kennedy, G. A., The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1963) 286Google Scholar, following the suggestion of Grube, G. M. A., A Greek Critic: Demetrius On Style (Toronto, 1961) 39ffGoogle Scholar. A late date (first century C.e.) is accepted by Schenkeveld, D. M., Studies in Demetrius On Style (Amsterdam, 1964) 135–48Google Scholar, and more tentatively by Kennedy, G. A., ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Classical Criticism (Cambridge, 1989), 196.Google Scholar

3 On the history of vaults, see Briggs, M. S., Everyman's Concise Encyclopaedia of Architecture (London, 1959)354–6Google Scholar;on vaults in Roman architecture, see MacDonald, W. L., The Architecture of the Roman Empire (2 vols., New Haven and London, 1982) vol. 1, 3–8.Google Scholar

4 Moxon, op. cit., 203.

5 On the history of domes, see Briggs, op. cit., 109–10; and MacDonald, op. cit., 24, and his detailed discussion of the Pantheon (ca. 125–8 C.e.) 94–121.

6 Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R., A Greek-English Lexicon (9th edition, Oxford, 1940) 1392.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 1392.

8 Roberts (1927), 307.

9 I would like to thank Dr Schenkeveld for pointing out some of my omissions and errors in a previous version of this paper. This in no way implies his agreement with my conclusion.