Alexander and Augustus the rhetorical school of history prevailed. Diodorus Siculus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus[1] are both rhetoricians, the rhetoric of Diodorus being combined with a quasi-philosophical bent, and that of Dionysius with aesthetic criticism. Diodorus, indeed, has some quaintly judicious remarks on the introduction of long speeches into history. They interrupt the story, he says, and distract the reader: writers who wish to show their eloquence should do so somewhere else. A history should be an organic whole; a speech which is inserted amiss cannot have vital grace[2]. Still, speeches are sometimes desirable, Diodorus adds, for the sake of variety (ποικιλία). When circumstances require that an envoy or senator should speak, the historian must gallantly accompany his personages into the arena of debate[3]. Diodorus appears to recognise, as he certainly used, the free licence of invention[4]. His view is substantially that
- ↑ I have purposely abstained from examining the criticisms of Dionysius on the speeches in Thucydides, since he regards them exclusively from the point of view of contemporary rhetoric, not at all from the historian's. His criticisms on Thucydides are, for this very reason, immeasurably inferior to those in his excellent essays on the orators. The lengthy speech of Veturia to Coriolanus (Dionys. Ant. Rom. viii. 46—53) is a fair specimen of his own practice in the rhetorical embellishment of history.
- ↑ ἐστέρηται τῆς ψυχικῆς χάριτος, Diod. xx. 2.
- ↑ Diod. xx. 2, ὁ μὴ τεθαρρηκότως συγκαταβαίνων πρὸς τοὺς ἐν τοῖς λόγοις ἀγῶνας καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπαίτιος ἂν εἴη.
- ↑ Thus he says, ib., μεγάλων καὶ λαμπρῶν τῶν ὑποθέσεων οὐσῶν, οὐ περιορατέον ἐλάττονα τῶν ἔργων φανῆναι τὸν λόγον.
