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Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings

Giulia Ferrante Fellow
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Before Burke and Kant there was a short Greek treatise, probably from the first century CE, by an author we do not really know. The manuscript names "Dionysius or Longinus", and scholars have argued about who wrote it and when ever since. For convenience we will say Longinus.

It is one of my favourite ancient books and almost none of my students have heard of it, so I propose we read it together. It is short; the four sittings are only a guide.

  • Sitting 1. Chapters 1 to 8: the purpose of the work, what goes wrong when writers strain for grandeur, and the five sources of the sublime.
  • Sitting 2. Chapters 9 to 15: greatness of thought and strong emotion, with the famous quotations from Homer, Sappho and Genesis.
  • Sitting 3. Chapters 16 to 29: the figures of speech, including the oath in Demosthenes.
  • Sitting 4. Chapters 30 to 44: diction, arrangement, and the strange final chapter on why great writing has become rare.

For translations: W. Rhys Roberts (1899) is free online and still readable; D. A. Russell's version is more precise, and his revision of the Loeb is the one I use with the Greek. A question to carry through: is the sublime here a property of a text, a power in the writer, or something that happens to the reader?

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5 replies

  1. Nikos Theodoridis

    Fellow

    Sitting 1. What struck me is that the effect of elevated writing, for Longinus, is not persuasion but transport, ekstasis. Persuasion is something we can resist; the sublime carries us off whether we like it or not. That already answers Giulia's question partly: it happens to the reader, but it is caused by a power in the writer that the text carries. Also, I loved the list of bad writers straining for grandeur. Every century has them.

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  2. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    Sitting 2. Chapter 9 quotes the opening of Genesis, "let there be light", and calls the Jewish lawgiver no ordinary man for having conceived the power of God worthily. It is one of the earliest places where a pagan literary critic quotes the Hebrew Bible as an example of great writing, and he does it with no fuss at all. For a reader of Jewish thought, that sentence is a small marvel.

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  3. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Sitting 2, a note on Sappho. Longinus quotes her ode, the one where the speaker watches a woman sitting near a man and her body fails her: her tongue breaks, fire runs under her skin, she sees nothing, she hears a roaring. We have that poem largely because he quoted it. Catullus made his own Latin version, which my students know better. Longinus's point is that Sappho chooses the most extreme symptoms and binds them together, so that we feel a whole storm of feelings at once. It is criticism that tells you how a poem works, not just that it is good.

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  4. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    Sitting 3. I teach rhetoric to eleventh graders, and chapter 17 is going straight into my lessons: a figure works best when it is not noticed as a figure. Once a listener sees the device, they feel manipulated and resist. The sublime hides the technique in the force of the thought. Demosthenes swearing by those who fell at Marathon is the example, and it works because the oath feels like passion, not a device.

  5. Rafael Lucena Prieto

    Fellow

    Sitting 4. The final chapter puts a question in the mouth of a philosopher: has great writing declined because freedom and democracy, which nourished it, are gone? The author rejects that answer and blames the readers and writers themselves, their love of money and of pleasure. I guide tourists who ask why no one builds like the Mezquita anymore, and I give both answers depending on my mood. It is a little shocking that the question already sounded old in the first century.

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