Abstract
Modern students of Atticism, the movement which looked to Athenian literature of the classical age to provide models for later composition, often draw a distinction between what they call “rhetorical” (or “stylistic”) Atticism of the first century bce and a supposedly later phenomenon termed “linguistic” (or “grammatical”) Atticism. This paper questions this dichotomy by showing the clearly linguistic interests of some significant first century bce Greek and Roman Atheists—Caecilius of Calacte, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and T. Annius Cimber—and by arguing that they demonstrate that an interest in antiquarian diction and morphology is part of Atticism from its beginnings.