On the Sublime

Last month, we met with our friend Demetrius to discuss his observations on style. I mentioned in that post that Loeb’s edition of On Style also included Aristotle’s Poetics and Longinus’ On the Sublime, so today, let’s meet the last of those three men, Longinus.

Longinus, unfortunately, is is a man of mystery like Demetrius. We have no real idea of who he was, except that he’s a Greek and probably wrote this book in the First Century, A.D. He addressed the work to Terentianus, but we don’t know who he was, either. As Donald Russell says in his introduction to Loeb’s edition, though, “who these people were, and what circle they moved in, are less important questions than what the book says, and what place it holds in the history of criticism.” The difficulty in identifying Classical authors is a common frustration, but ultimately, Russell is right, so let’s move on to the work itself.