Style and Stylistics

In this paper, I reinterpret the often-noted stylistic shifts that characterize Pliny the Elder’s prose in the Naturalis Historia as components of a defensive strategy the author employs in an effort to prevent his encyclopedic work from being exploited by the wrong sort of reader. This defensive strategy is a crucial component of the greater complex of rhetorical strategies that Pliny uses to guide his readers’ use of his text and which he explicitly models on strategies he observes Nature, herself, using to guide humans’ and animals’ use of the resources she provides.

Although scholars in recent years have written about the contents of the narratives contained in forensic orations (e.g. Johnstone, 1999; Roisman, 2006; and Wohl 2010), they have given less attention to the form of those narratives. Ancient rhetoricians, on the other hand, because they wanted to teach people how to compose speeches, provided a great deal of information about narrative form that has yet to be studied.

In this paper, I analyze Cicero’s impersonation of Cato in his De senectute to construct a new model for prosopopoeia in literary Latin prose.

The linguistic repertoire of Anatolia during the Achaemenid Era (6th–4th centuries BCE) included many varieties: the dominators’ languages, old Persian and Aramaic; the epichoric languages, one of which was Phrygian; and Greek, whose penetration into the intermediate zone between the western coast and the Anatolian hinterland was promoted by the Achaemenid administration (Asheri 1983: 15–17). In this multilingual context, the scene represented by Timotheus of Miletus in his nome Persae (late 5th century BCE) is not implausible.