The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

which in fact actually contain important nuances of meanings or add stylistic emphasis”
(Crystal 1992: 305).
The employment of the tumor is a reflection of the Asianist style and a reflection of
later Latin prose. It is verbose, repetitious and lexically superfluous, and the phrase
“immense profusion and exuberance of words” would seem fitting (Purser 1910: 78). This
quote is taken from a work detailing stylistic techniques in Apuleius‟ Metamorphoses, that
“sophistic novel” (Harrison 2000: 210), and has been alluded to here for good reason. He is
an author whose flagrant writing style has been subject to criticism; the Elizabethan William
Adlington, for example, noted that Apuleius wrote “in so dark and high a style, in so strange
and absurd words and in such new invented phrases, as he seemed rather to set it forth to
show his magnificent prose than to participate his doings to others” (quoted in Graves 1950:
9). The rather farfetched notion that he wrote like this because he was “a priest-pious, lively,
exceptionally learned, provincial priest- who found that the popular tale gave [him] a wider
field for [his] description of contemporary morals and manners […] than any more
respectable literary form” should be dismissed (ibid.: 10). Instead, Apuleius was a herald of
the Second Sophistic, and champion par excellence of the Asianic style that had come to play
such an important role in the development and self-definition of Roman literature.
Asianism, developed as an antonym of the traditional and simple Atticist style, was
used by its opponents to denigrate the so-called „cacozelon‟ seen to typify its stylistic
techniques. 417 This typically included verbosity, elaborate language, neologisms, widened
417 Quintilian Institutiones 8.3.56, “cacozelon, id est mala adfectio, per omne dicendi genus peccat;
nam et tumida et pusilla et praedulcia et abundantia et arcessita et expultantia sub idem nomen
cadunt”.
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