Chapter 7 Towards Atticism: The blossoming of Hellenistic scholarship on Attic

Towards Atticism: The blossoming of Hellenistic scholarship on Attic 1 PreliminariesWe concluded the previous chapter with an extended survey of Eratosthenes' engagement with Attic as documented by Old Comedy.Eratosthenes' work on Attic comedy represented an important benchmark for any future scholarly activity not only in comedy but in Attic language in particular.It is not wholly by chance that it is mostly in the wake of Eratosthenes' contribution that at the end of the 3rd and above all in the 2nd century BCE a proliferation of studies specifically dedicated to Attic dialect emerges.We noted that in the 3rd century BCE the geopolitical centre of power had clearly shifted from Athens to Alexandria and its sphere of influence (particularly the cultural hubs of Cos, Rhodes, and Cyrene).Nonetheless, the importance of Athens and Attica as symbols of cultural capital remained largely unchallenged (cf.Chapter 6, Section 4): from the outset, Attic literature played a qualitatively and quantitatively predominant role in the royal Library and more generally in the policy of cultural hegemony pursued by the Ptolemies, and it is no wonder that Attic 'themes' became increasingly en vogue among Hellenistic poets. 1 It is unsurprising, therefore, that already in the first half of the 3rd century BCE we can see evidence attesting to an enduring interest in Attic vocabulary and idioms as a distinct niche within Greek lexicography at large (consider, for instance, the case of Aristophanes of Byzantium's and Ister's Ἀττικαὶ λέξεις: cf.Sections 2.2 and 4.1 respectively).This chapter will continue to trace the development of Hellenistic lexicography on Attic down to the first half of the 1st century BCEthat is, before the proliferation of the treatises Περὶ ἑλληνισμοῦ (starting with Philoxenus, Tryphon, and Seleucus), which reflect a partially different cultural climate: ἑλληνισμός persists in referring to an abstract notion of linguistic correctness (that is, not to the correctness of a given dialectal variety, the Attic as the more prestigious literary one), but the first signs of a more prescriptive attitude are discernible, even if they are still qualitatively different from the fully fledged prescriptivism of Impe- For the marked interest in matters Attic by Hellenistic poets, see the still seminal paper by Hollis (1992).