Abstract

Anyone who studies antiquity is surely accustomed to the tenuousness and often wild variances of the dating of many of our texts. But even if this is taken for granted, the dating of Demetrius' On Style seems more problematic than most: the text has been assigned a date anywhere from the late fourth century B.c. to the late first century C.e. Attempts to narrow this wide range have been made using internal linguistic data, but these have not proved definitive, although a late date is now tentativel accepted by most. But a possibly more convincing argument for a late date may be found in a reference to architecture in paragraph 13 of On Style.