A general account of the life and literary activities of Dionysius will be found in the volume entitled Dionysius of Halicarnassus: the Three Literary Letters, where the de Compositione Verborum is briefly described in connexion with the other critical essays of its author. Here a fuller summary of the treatise seems necessary before an attempt is made to estimate its value and to follow up some of the highly interesting questions which it raises.
The date of the de Compositione is not known, but may be conjectured to lie between the years 20 and 10 B.C. The book is a birthday offering from Dionysius, as a teacher of rhetoric in Rome, to his pupil Rufus Metilius.
c. 1. This book is a birthday present which deals with the art of speech, and so will be found particularly useful to youths who look forward to a public career. Oratorical excellence depends on skill exercised in two directions—in the sphere of subject matter and in the sphere of expression (πραγματικὸς τόπος and λεκτικὸς τόπος). In the former sphere, maturity of judgment and experience is required: in the latter the young are more at home, but they need careful guidance at the start. The λεκτικὸς τόπος has two subdivisions, ἐκλογὴ ὀνομάτων and σύνθεσις ὀνομάτων. The composition of words is to be treated now: the choice of words is to be treated next year, if Heaven keeps the author “safe and sound.” The chief headings in the present treatise are to be the following:—
(1) The nature of composition, and its effect;
(2) Its aims, and how it attains them;
(3) Its varieties, with their characteristic features and the author’s preferences among them;
(4) The poetical element in prose and the prose element in verse, and the means of cultivating both—of imparting the flavour of poetry to prose and the ease of prose to poetry.
c. 2. “Composition is, as the very name indicates, a certain mutual arrangement of the parts of speech, or elements of diction, as some prefer to call them.” The parts of speech recognized by Theodectes and Aristotle and their contemporaries were three in number, viz. nouns, verbs, and connectives. The number was raised, by the Stoics and others, to four through the separation of the article from the connectives. Later were added the adjective, the pronoun, the adverb, the preposition, the participle, and certain other subdivisions. These principal parts of speech form, when joined and set side by side, the cola (‘members,’ ‘clauses’). The union of cola completes the “periods,” and these make up the entire discourse. The functions of composition are to arrange the words fittingly, to assign the proper structure to the cola, and to divide the discourse carefully into periods.
In its effects, though not in order of time, the composition of words comes before the choice of words.