Monday, May 28, 2018
Atticism
K.J. Dover (1920-2010), Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 224-225:
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The tendency to treat classical Attic as a linguistic norm and later Greek as degenerate or perverted gathered strength in the early Roman Empire and reached its zenith in the second century A.D., when many Greeks indulged in cultural nostalgia to such a point as to believe that it was in some way better to use the vocabulary and morphology of half a millennium earlier than to realize the literary potentiality of the language which they actually spoke. Their effort to project themselves into the past linguistically was not matched by a comparable effort to see the world through the eyes of classical Athens; 'Atticism' at its worst was rather like a superstition that one's brain will work better if it is encased in an antique hairstyle and hat.
