01642--Attic style or Atticism

Attic style or Atticism is the style of oratory or prose writing associated with the speeches of the great Attic (i.e. Athenian) orators of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, including Lysias and Demosthenes. Later Roman writers distinguished the purity and simplicity of these Attic models from the excessive artifice and ornamentation of the 'Asiatic' style that had since developed among the Greeks in Asia Minor.