Denys d\' Halicarnasse

See also: Denys

Denys d' Halicarnasse (in Greek old Διονύσιος / Dionýsios ), born towards 54 av. J. - C. with Halicarnasse, died about the year 8 of the Christian era in the same city, is a Greek historian.

Contemporary of Jules César and Auguste, it comes to Rome in 29 av. J. - C., where it attends Roman aristocratic big families, as well as the Greek medium which exists there. He teaches the eloquence there and written there several works, including one Histoire of Rome since its foundation in twenty books: the Roman Antiquities (in Greek Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἀρχαιολογία / Rōmaïkḕ Arkhaiología ), whose ten books are preserved, as well as part of eleventh and some fragments preserved by Constantin VII Porphyrogénète.

In this one, Denys has like objectives to attach the origins of Rome to the ancient Greece and to expose how the Roman city, an ideal Polis , became the center of the world. By doing this, it contributes to a rewriting of the Roman past idealized from the imperial point of view augustéenne. It becomes, thereafter, an important source for the posterior Roman writers of the imperial period: Plutarque, Appien and Dion Cassius uses it.

The Roman Antiquités present, moreover, the events which go from the Gallic invasion of Italy until the first Punic War (with books XIV to XX): Denys constitutes one of the only sources which we have today over this period.

Beside its historical writings, Denys d' Halicarnasse was before a whole rhetor, role to which its theses on the Greek origin of Rome a long time confined it in the modern historians: he wrote in particular a Traité arrangement of the words ( Περὶ Συνθέσεως Ὀνομάτων / Perì synthéseōs onomátōn ), a treaty On the imitation and the ancient Speakers ( Τῶν Ἀρχαίων Κρίσις / Tỗn arkhaíōn krísis ) (examination of the style of the Speakers attics), a Rhetoric ( Τέχνη Ρητορική / Tékhnē Rhēthorikḗ ) as well as Judgments shortened on the former Greek writers . We know by his intermediary a Traité eloquence of Démosthène . In these last works, Denys sticks more to the form of the speech than to the ideas. It defends the purity of the language attic against the asianism.

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