ABSTRACT
While the critical activities of the Augustan era, as we have seen, had mainly to do with poetry, at the same time there was not wanting discussion on matters relating to oratory and prose style; and in order to realise fully the critical development at this date, some estimate must be formed of the work done in this particular field. Already a new direction had been given to rhetorical teaching by Cicero. Basing his theories mainly on Aristotle and Isocrates, he had endeavoured to establish in oratory the traditions and methods of classical Greece; and while condemning alike the florid Asianism and the narrow Atticist tendencies then current, he had set before his generation a finer and a more complete conception of the nature of oratory. In the Augustan era that followed, this same task, with some difference, was carried on by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
