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标题：Between Grammar and Rhetoric. Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature
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作者：Casper C. de Jonge
期刊名称：Rhetorical Review : The Electronic Review of Books on the History of rhetoric
印刷版ISSN：1901-2640
出版年度：2009
卷号：7
期号：02
页码：19-22
出版社：Pernille Harsting
摘要：The Greek critic and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who worked at Rome in the period of Augustus, is a central witness to the rhetorical and stylistic criticism of the late Hellenistic period, as well as our principal source for Greek Atticism in this period; it cannot, however, be claimed that his critical works have recently received widespread attention beyond a relatively small group of specialists. The reasons for this are complex, but perhaps not difficult to understand. On the one hand, much of the material, particularly in his major work On the arrangement of words (De compositione verborum), which is importantly concerned with such things as the effect of particles and conjunctions and of the quality of different rhythms and of the sounds produced by individual letters and their combinations, is of an arcane and technical nature, which may well seem to most classicists to have very little to do with what they look for in reading, say, Demosthenes. Secondly, as de Jonge points out in this important new study (based on a Leiden thesis), the assumption that Dionysius was simply an unoriginal exploiter and transmitter of other people¡¯s ideas has too often meant that, even where attention has been paid to his text, it is not his own intellectual systems and constructions which have been at the forefront of scholarly interest, despite the fact that Dionysius¡¯ work operates across such traditional category divisions as ¡®rhetoric¡¯, ¡®philosophy and history of language¡¯, ¡®grammar¡¯ and ¡®literary criticism¡¯. There are, as always, exceptions to such generalisations of neglect, but de Jonge¡¯s book is bound to bring Dionysius on to many a radar where he has not been found before. Moreover, there have already been signs of serious stirring in the forest ¨C one thinks of James Porter¡¯s discussions of Dionysius¡¯ classicism1 or of Gian Biagio Conte¡¯s use of Dionysius in his account of the background to Virgilian style2 ¨C and, if Dionysius¡¯ time has indeed come, a principal impetus for this new life will be the important links between some of his central ideas and those of earlier Hellenistic kritikoi, as they are being painstakingly reconstructed from the charred remains of Philodemus¡¯ On Poems (cf., e.g., de Jonge, pp. 37-39); suddenly, Dionysius has an intellectual context (of sorts), and we are somewhat better placed to understand what he thought he was doing, even if we may still be puzzled at the directions his intellectual ingenuity took.