On the Sublime

Based on Wikipedia: On the Sublime

What makes writing transcend mere competence and become something that seizes the reader by the throat? This question consumed an unknown genius nearly two thousand years ago, and his answer—a treatise called On the Sublime—would eventually reshape how the Western world thinks about art, beauty, and the power of language. The twist? We have no idea who wrote it.

The mystery author is conventionally called Longinus, though this name is almost certainly wrong. It's a scholarly placeholder, like calling the unknown artist of a medieval painting "the Master of the Blue Annunciation." The real identity vanished into the fog of centuries, leaving behind only one of the most influential works of literary criticism ever written.

A Manuscript Puzzle

The confusion begins with a medieval manuscript from the tenth century, now housed in Paris and catalogued as Parisinus Graecus 2036. On one page, the copyist wrote that the treatise was by "Dionysius Longinus." On another page—the table of contents—the same copyist hedged his bets and wrote "Dionysius or Longinus." That tiny word "or" tells us everything: even a thousand years ago, nobody knew who had written this thing.

When scholars first prepared the manuscript for printed publication in the sixteenth century, they assumed the author was Cassius Longinus, a distinguished philosopher and rhetorician who lived in the third century. This seemed plausible enough. Cassius Longinus was famous—he had studied under Plotinus, taught in Athens, and later became an advisor to Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. He was eventually executed by the Roman Emperor Aurelian in 273 CE, probably because of the defiant letters he had helped the Queen compose.

But there's a fatal problem with this attribution. On the Sublime quotes extensively from ancient writers, using them as examples of good and bad style. The most recent author mentioned is Cicero, who died in 43 BCE—more than three hundred years before Cassius Longinus was born. If Cassius wrote the treatise, why would he ignore three centuries of literature? The silence is damning.

What about the other name in that medieval heading—Dionysius? Some scholars have proposed Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic who wrote during the reign of Augustus. But his surviving works reveal ideas completely opposed to those in On the Sublime. Style and thought both differ too drastically for shared authorship.

Other candidates have been floated: Hermagoras of Temnos, a rhetorician who worked in Rome during the first century; Aelius Theon, whose work shares some ideas with the treatise; Pompeius Geminus, who exchanged letters with Dionysius of Halicarnassus. None of these attributions has stuck.

The most likely scenario is also the most frustrating: the author was someone writing under the Roman Empire, probably in the first century, whose name was already lost when the medieval copyist sat down to make his copy. We will probably never know who he was.

What the Treatise Actually Says

The mystery of authorship hasn't prevented On the Sublime from being intensely studied for five centuries. The treatise is addressed to a Roman named Postumius Terentianus, apparently a cultured public figure, though we know almost nothing else about him. It takes the form of a letter—a common format for serious intellectual work in the ancient world—and about a third of the original has been lost, including what may have been an extended discussion of public speaking.

The central question is deceptively simple: what makes some writing genuinely great, while other writing—even technically accomplished writing—falls flat?

The Greek word translated as "sublime" is hypsos, which literally means height or elevation. But Longinus isn't talking about lofty subject matter or elaborate vocabulary. He's describing something more like an electric shock—the experience of reading a passage that lifts you out of ordinary consciousness and into a kind of ecstasy.

The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.

This is a radical claim. Most ancient rhetoric focused on persuasion—how to win arguments, sway juries, influence political decisions. Longinus says the truly sublime writer aims for something beyond persuasion. You don't merely agree with sublime writing. You're overwhelmed by it.

The treatise identifies five sources of sublimity. Two are innate gifts that cannot be taught: the power to form great conceptions, and the capacity for strong, genuine emotion. Three can be learned: certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction (choosing the right words), and dignified arrangement of those words into sentences and paragraphs.

Notice the balance. Longinus isn't saying that great writing is purely a matter of natural genius—that would make his treatise pointless. Nor is he saying it's purely a matter of technique—that would make it boring. The sublime emerges from the intersection of inborn capacity and acquired skill.

A Thousand Years of Examples

What makes On the Sublime so readable, even today, is its parade of examples. Longinus quotes or mentions about fifty authors spanning a millennium of Greek and Roman literature. He doesn't just tell you what good writing looks like—he shows you.

Homer appears constantly, as you'd expect. So do the great Greek tragedians and orators. But Longinus also includes a surprising source: the Hebrew Bible.

A similar effect was achieved by the lawgiver of the Jews—no mean genius, for he both understood and gave expression to the power of the divinity as it deserved—when he wrote at the very beginning of his laws, and I quote his words: "God said"—what was it?—"Let there be light, and there was. Let there be earth, and there was."

This is remarkable. First-century Greek literary critics did not typically quote Jewish scripture as an example of excellent writing. The passage suggests Longinus was either Jewish himself, deeply familiar with Jewish culture, or simply willing to find greatness wherever it appeared. His literary taste was broader than his contemporaries'.

One of his most famous examples is a poem by Sappho, the great lyric poet of the seventh century BCE. The poem describes the physical symptoms of erotic jealousy—trembling, sweating, loss of speech, the feeling of dying. Longinus calls it a "sublime ode" and analyzes how Sappho achieves her effect by piling up contradictory sensations until the reader feels overwhelmed.

This points to something crucial about Longinus's method. He doesn't evaluate works in isolation. He's always asking: what is this passage trying to do to the reader, and how does it achieve that effect? The goal isn't empty technical virtuosity. It's emotional impact.

The Ethics of Style

Here the treatise takes an unexpected turn. Great writing, Longinus argues, requires a great soul.

This sounds like a platitude, but he means something specific. The sublime is, in his Greek phrase, megalophrosunēs apēchēma—the echo of a great spirit. The writer's character pours into the work. You cannot fake sublimity. You cannot achieve it through technique alone. Something of who you are must enter what you write.

Never did a slave become an orator.

This line reveals the political dimension of Longinus's thinking. Liberty—genuine freedom to speak one's mind—is necessary for great writing. A society that censors and constrains its writers will not produce sublime literature. The spirit must be free before it can soar.

But Longinus also warns against the opposite extreme. Too much luxury and wealth corrupt eloquence just as surely as oppression does. The pampered writer becomes complacent, loses the hunger that drives genuine creativity. True sublimity requires a kind of moral seriousness that neither slavery nor decadence can support.

The treatise ends—or rather, the surviving portion ends—with a meditation on the decay of oratory. This was a hot topic in first-century Rome. Why had public speaking declined from its golden age? Petronius blamed the schools of rhetoric, with their pompous artificial exercises. Tacitus blamed the Roman Empire itself: the establishment of one-man rule brought peace and stability, but it also meant censorship and the end of genuine political debate. When real decisions are made elsewhere, oratory becomes empty performance.

Longinus seems closer to Tacitus. Without freedom, the high spirit that generates sublimity withers away. What remains is merely an exercise in style.

A Long Sleep and a Sudden Awakening

For centuries, On the Sublime was forgotten. No ancient writer quotes or mentions it. It survived by chance, copied into that single medieval manuscript along with other works on rhetoric. A Byzantine scholar in the thirteenth century may have made an obscure reference to it, but that's uncertain.

Then, in 1554, an Italian scholar named Francis Robortello published the treatise in Basel. The book began circulating among European intellectuals. Translations appeared. But the real explosion of interest came in 1674, when the French critic Nicolas Boileau published his translation.

Boileau's timing was perfect. The late seventeenth century was hungry for a vocabulary to discuss the strange, overwhelming, sometimes terrifying effects that art could produce. Baroque painters were creating canvases of dizzying scale and drama. Poets were reaching for emotions beyond polite refinement. The concept of the sublime gave all this a name and a classical pedigree.

By the eighteenth century, Longinus was a star. In England, his principles of composition were ranked second only to Aristotle's Poetics. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, owes an enormous debt to the ancient treatise. So does Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, which made the sublime a central category of philosophical aesthetics.

The Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats—absorbed Longinus through these eighteenth-century filters. His emphasis on transport over persuasion, on the soul of the writer pouring into the work, on freedom as the condition of great art—all this resonated powerfully with Romantic ideals. There's a delicious irony here: the Romantics sometimes expressed contempt for Longinus because they associated him with the "rules" of classical poetry, not realizing how deeply his ideas had shaped their own movement.

The Puzzle of Authorship, Revisited

Early in the nineteenth century, an Italian scholar named Amati definitively demolished the attribution to Cassius Longinus. The chronological problems were simply insurmountable. But this left an uncomfortable void. If not Cassius Longinus, then who?

The Byzantine scholar Carlo Maria Mazzucchi has argued that "Dionysius Longinus" is actually the true name—that the author used both a family name and a cognomen, as many Romans did, and that the medieval copyist's confusion arose simply because no other rhetor by that exact name was known. This would make "Longinus" not a mistaken attribution but a genuine (if otherwise unattested) historical person.

But this remains speculation. The treatise's language is itself a puzzle—a strange blend of common Greek (the Koine spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean) with elevated constructions, technical terms, unusual metaphors, and rare classical forms. It reads almost like a linguistic experiment, pushing at the boundaries of what Greek prose could do. This stylistic uniqueness has made it harder, not easier, to identify the author by comparison with other texts.

Why It Still Matters

Some critics have found fault with On the Sublime. The eighteenth-century scholar Edward Burnaby Greene complained that Longinus was sometimes "too refined" and that his treatment of certain topics became tedious. More seriously, the treatise focuses almost entirely on the writer's soul and spiritual transcendence, with little attention to how language itself—grammar, syntax, the structures of sentences—shapes thought and feeling. Modern linguistics and literary theory have taken very different approaches.

And yet the treatise endures. Alongside Aristotle's Poetics, it remains the most influential work of literary criticism from the ancient world. Part of its staying power is simply that it's enjoyable to read. Longinus writes with passion and verve, inventing striking metaphors, moving almost lyrically through his examples. He practices what he preaches.

But there's something deeper. Longinus asks a question that every writer and every reader eventually faces: what makes the difference between competent work and work that genuinely moves us? Technical skill matters. But something else matters too—something harder to define, connected to the writer's character and freedom and capacity for genuine emotion.

We still don't have a complete answer. But the anonymous genius who wrote On the Sublime nearly two thousand years ago came closer than most to articulating what that mysterious quality might be. His identity is lost. His insight remains.