Thinker · TH-0272
Longinus
Longinus is the name traditionally given to the author of On the Sublime, a Greek treatise on greatness in writing. The identity of the…
Λογγῖνος
Also known as Pseudo-Longinus, Dionysius Longinus
c. 1st century CE · Greek-speaking Roman world
Traditions: Greek & Roman
Longinus is the name traditionally given to the author of On the Sublime, a Greek treatise on greatness in writing. The identity of the author is unknown: manuscripts named 'Dionysius or Longinus', and the work was long credited to the third-century rhetorician Cassius Longinus, but most scholars now date it to the first century CE. Rediscovered in the Renaissance and popularised by Boileau's French translation, it shaped modern theories of the sublime.
Key ideas
- Sublimity in writing is a quality of greatness that carries the reader away rather than merely persuading.
- He names five sources of the sublime: grand conceptions, strong emotion, figures of speech, noble diction, and dignified arrangement.
- The first two sources depend chiefly on the writer's nature; sublimity is called the echo of a great mind.
- Greatness with occasional faults is to be preferred over flawless mediocrity.
Major works
- On the Sublime (Peri hypsous, c. 1st century CE)
- Traité du sublime (Boileau's French translation, 1674), the version through which the work reached modern Europe
In the conversation
- Debate Yūgen is not a Japanese sublime, and translating it that way loses the point
- Reading group Reading group: Longinus, On the Sublime, in four sittings
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where Longinus takes a place.
- 5.4 The Sublime Why do we seek out what frightens us?