Critical Essays, Volume I

A master of ancient Greek prose styles.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus had migrated to Rome by 30 BC, where he lived until his death some time after 8 BC, writing his Roman Antiquities and teaching the art of rhetoric and literary composition.

Dionysius’ purpose, both in his own work and in his teaching, was to re—establish the classical Attic standards of purity, invention, and taste in order to reassert the primacy of Greek as the literary language of the Mediterranean world. He advocated the ...