James I. Porter
The sublime, defined in modernity as a certain je ne sais quoi that utterly transforms whatever it touches (Boileau), is an elusive entity in any context. How can we tell when the idea of sublimity is being discussed in antiquity? Take the following four passages as a kind of blindfold test:
- Euripides works extremely hard at making these two emotions tragic, madness and love … Though being anything but grand in nature [megalophuēs], on many occasions he nevertheless forces his own nature to become tragic. And in each case where grandeur is concerned, he (as Homer says) “lashes his own ribs with his tail and the flanks on both sides | as he rouses himself to fury for the fight, eyes glaring” [Il. 20.170–171; trans. Lattimore]. Thus, when Helios gives the reins to Phaethon he says, “‘Drive neither entering the heaven above Libya […],’” and then he adds: “‘steer and hold a course for the seven Pleiades.’ […] The boy seized the reins; he struck the flanks of the chariot’s winged horses and set them going, and the mares flew to heaven’s folds. Behind him his father mounted Sirius and rode, advising the boy: ‘Drive over there! Turn the chariot this way, this way!’” [Eur. Phaeth., TrGF 779; trans. Collard and Cropp]. Shouldn’t we say that the soul of the writer has also mounted the chariot and is sharing in the dangers of the horses as he takes wing with them? If his soul weren’t born aloft among the heavenly bodies and following their paths, he would never have imagined such scenes.
- I have often thought, Alexander, that philosophy is a divine and really god-like activity [theion ti kai daimonion ontōs chrēma], particularly in those instances when it alone has exalted itself [diarmenē] to the contemplation of the universe and sought to discover the truth that is in it; the other sciences shunned this field of inquiry because of its sublimity and grandeur [dia to hupsos kai to megethos]; philosophy has not feared the task or thought itself unworthy of the noblest things but has judged that the study of these is by nature most closely related to it and most fitting.
- The Poet displays how great the speed of the heavens’ course is through the following [verses]:
This may well be expressed in an extraordinary way [megalophuōs], and with marvelous expansiveness [kata thaumastēn auxēsin]. [And it was so conceived] by a poet who not only is content to use sight stretched to its limits to indicate the speed involved in the rapid movement of the heavens, but who also adds height [hupsos] [of the promontory look-out] to [that sight-line] along with the [depth of the] sea below. Yet even this description falls short of properly indicating the swiftness of the heavens. Seeing how the speed that the heavens employ in their rapid movement has no limit, and no notion of it can be formed, surely it is stupid to believe that a part of them that is 1 foot wide [viz., the sun, according to Epicurus] could rise in such an interval [diastēma] of time?As far as into the hazing distance a man can see with his eyes,
who sits in his eyrie gazing on the wine-blue water,
as far as this is the stride of the gods’ proud neighing horses.[Il. 5.770–772; trans. Lattimore]- Double words and frequent epithets and unfamiliar words best suit one speaking passionately; for it is excusable that an angry person calls a wrong “heaven-high” [ouranomēkes] or “monstrous” [pelōrion]. And [this can be done] when a speaker holds the audience in his control and works them into a fit of enthusiasm [poiēsēi enthousiasai] either by praise or blame or hate or love, as Isocrates does, among others, at the end of the Panegyricus.… Those who are in a state of enthusiasm make such utterances, and audiences clearly accept them because they are in a similar mood. That is why [this emotional style] is suited to poetry too, for poetry is inspired [entheon]. It should be used as described – or with irony, as Gorgias did and as in the Phaedrus.
Text 1 comes from Longinus’ essay On the Sublime 15.3–4 (mid-first century AD or third century AD, with the earlier date most widely favored). Texts 2 and 3 come from works with only uncertain dates (guesses range from the mid-fourth century BC to the mid-first century AD in the case of the first and from 50 BC to AD 250 for the second), though they stem from a tradition of speculation on the heavens that reaches back to the Presocratics. Text 4 occurs in a treatise on rhetoric from the fourth century BC. Despite their disparate origins, they all share a number of features, many of which indicate a common genealogy and a shared set of assumptions: the terminology of elevation, the shows of extraordinary, exalted emotion, and the appeals to the heavens, to physical grandeur, and to the gods. Moreover, the last three texts describe sublimity in a way that Longinus would have recognized in his treatise On the Sublime. They not only use terminology familiar to Longinus, but they also apply it to the very same kinds of objects as are capable, in his mind, of inspiring sublimity in us (the universe, Homer, impassioned moments of rhetoric). Given these proximities, we are entitled to ask whether in texts 2 to 4 we possibly have three instances of a pre-Longinian sublime and, in all four texts, specimens of a multiform sublime tradition. But before getting carried away by such a prospect, we need to acknowledge one more feature that the last three texts have in common: none of them would be allowed, or has ever been allowed, into the canon of writings on the sublime in the current scholarly consensus about Longinus and sublimity.
According to the current view of the sublime, which emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, each of these texts would be disqualified from the tradition of the sublime for several reasons. On this view, the sublime has no prehistory prior to the latter half of the first century BC when its concept was first conceived and named by Caecilius of Caleacte, Longinus’ sole predecessor (Russell 1964, xxxi); it cannot be found outside of literary contexts (ibid. xxxvii–xxxviii); it cannot be found except where the word hupsos (or sublimitas) is explicitly used in its technical, literary-critical sense (Roberts 1902, 292; Costil 1949, 445 and passim; Russell 1964, xxxi–xxxii; Chiron 2001, 330), nor can synonyms or equivalents of hupsos replace the word itself; not even hupsēlos, the adjectival form of hupsos, is proof of the concept’s presence (Heath 1999, 66). Moreover, on this view sublimity is not equivalent to grandeur; it is not linked in any way to the inherited rhetorical system of styles, because it transcends these (Grube 1957a, xi; 1957b, 356): hupsos is “a special effect, not a special style” (Russell 1964, xxxvii, citing as evidence Boileau-Despréaux 1966 (1674; 1701), 338; repeated verbatim in Richardson 1986, 398; Mazzucchi 1992, xv; Innes 2002, 275; the language originates with Monk 1935, 5–35). Ultimately, given their indelible moral and social connotations, the sublime barely belongs in the vocabulary of ancient literary criticism: “hupsos and its cognates are never entirely at home in literary criticism” (Russell 1964, xxx). They are forever pointing to some other, remotely distant spiritual home, one that transcends literature altogether, and in a way that would be recognizable to a Boileau or a later Romantic but not to an Aristotle, Theophrastus, or the author of On Style, let alone to a writer on nature.
It is easy to see why assumptions like these would preclude treating the three last texts above as instances of engagements with sublimity, but also why the very idea of the sublime, so conceived, flirts with anachronism and risks belonging to no one but Longinus in antiquity, so sui generis is its definition. Texts 2 and 3, deriving as they do from treatises on the nature of the universe and the heavens, would be excluded on generic grounds alone. The fourth comes too early chronologically for the idea of sublimity to have been available to its author, and besides there is irrefragable proof that the idea was not available to him: the author does not know the word hupsos as a term of art.
But this is all very strange. Taken out of context, text 4 might easily pass for an extract from On the Sublime (whose author can go on for paragraphs and even pages at a time without using the h-word, as he does in the text quoted above). Text 4 is in fact from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, book 3, on style (3.7.1408b10–20; trans. Kennedy, slightly adapted). And while Aristotle does not link the effects he names to a single style, he is developing something like a poetically enhanced rhetorical style, one that is elevated, overpowering, and effective beyond the limits of rational persuasion (see Walker, in this volume). Extreme pathos, enthousiasmos, ekstasis (cf. ibid., 3.8.1408b35–36), divine inspiration, complete subjugation of the hearer – all the ingredients of a Longinian experience are available right here (cf. Quadlbauer 1958, 62–64). There are strong hints that Aristotle is theorizing out of character and in a sophistic manner. His possible sources are easily imagined: Gorgias springs to mind (he is named, after all); Plato’s Ion is another possible influence, even more so than the work Aristotle names, the Phaedrus, as is the Menexenus (234c–35c); Democritus may be lurking somewhere farther in the background (Wehrli 1946, 11–12); but above all, one suspects that a general smattering of these and similar influences as received through more pragmatically minded rhetorical manuals are the likeliest culprit, given the other nefarious touches in Aristotle’s depiction of the speaker’s bag of tricks. True, Aristotle is innocent of the critical term hupsos. But he has all the other prerequisites one could ever hope to have in order to establish the presence of sublimity. Perhaps the term is not as all-important as it has been made out to be, and Aristotle and his predecessors should be taken as forerunners of Longinus after all.
The presence of a “Longinian” moment in Aristotle may be surprising taken by itself. But it needn’t be so on a redrawn map of ancient rhetoric in which the sublime no longer marks a sudden intrusion onto the critical landscape during the Augustan era, but is instead one of rhetoric’s abiding features. Aristotle provides us with brief glimpses of predecessors to his adoptive stance in the Rhetoric. Looking ahead, Theophrastean echoes can be overheard as well: after all, the lofty goal of the orator according to Theophrastus is “to delight and amaze [ekplēxai] the hearer and to force him into a state of conviction,” fr. 78 Fortenbaugh), which a speaker achieves by directing all his attention “to the listeners” (as opposed to the subject matter) and to the semnotēs, megaloprepeia, and sublimitas of his language (frr. 78, 691, 688, 707).
Aristotle’s account of exalted rhetoric further anticipates Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who compares his experience of reading Demosthenes to transcendent rapture:
Whenever I read a speech of Isocrates … I become serious and feel a great tranquility of mind, like those listening to libation-music played on reed-pipes or to Dorian or enharmonic melodies. But when I pick up one of Demosthenes’ speeches, I am transported [enthousiō]: I am led [agomai] hither and thither, feeling one emotion after another – disbelief, anguish, terror, contempt, hatred, pity, goodwill, anger, envy – every emotion in turn that can sway the human mind. I feel exactly the same as those who take part in the Corybantic dances and the rites of Cybele the Mother-Goddess … And I have often wondered what on earth those men who actually heard him make these speeches could have felt … If, then, the spirit [pneuma] with which Demosthenes’ pages are still imbued after so many years possesses so much power and moves his readers in this way, surely to hear him delivering his speeches at the time must have been an extraordinary [huperphues] and overwhelming [deinon] experience.
(Dem. 22.176.15–178.2; trans. Usher)
Dionysius’ reactions are virtually predicted by Aristotle’s account. We should note that Dionysius does not use the term hupsos in this passage, though he does use several equivalents (like huperphuēs and deinos), while the whole is undeniably comparable to Longinus’ accounts of ecstasy in 1.3–4 and in other parts of On the Sublime (cf. Subl. 8.4; 13.2; cf. 33.5: daimonion pneuma; cf. de Jonge 2012). Elsewhere, Dionysus confers the label of hupsos on the writing of Demosthenes and other Classical writers (Herodotus, Thucydides, Isocrates, and Plato). If hupsos is not the most prevalent term in Dionysius’ arsenal (and it is not), the reason may be put down to fashion, choice, or happenstance. But whatever the reason, it is plain that most of the literature discussed by Dionysius, from Homer to Pindar and the tragedians to Plato and the orators (with the exception of Lysias), is felt by him to be of the highest form of excellence, and by his time canonically and incomparably “classical” (in modern parlance), which is to say (in ancient parlance) sublime (cf. Porter 2006; Hunter 2009). And for the same reason it is plain that Dionysius is a critic in a sublime tradition that he does not produce but merely inherits.
Dionysius has a surfeit of descriptors available to him to account for sublimity: ogkos, semnos, megaloprepeia, deinos, tonos, perittos, axiōmatikos, austēros, etc. To deny him the concept is a lot like saying that sublimity would be unthinkable for us unless the word sublime – the noun, not the adjective – were in circulation in English. Longinus likewise resorts to this much wider field of vocabulary beyond hupsos or ta hupsē or ta hupsēla to designate sublimity. He has over 70 ways to name hupsos in his treatise, and these are not merely “synonyms” of hupsos (Russell 1964, xxxi–xxxii n.7), but are its equivalents (e.g. megethos, ta megala, huperphuēs, etc.). And if they are, it is because they were grouped together in the minds of earlier generations of critics, rhetoricians, and others who found more than one kind of object worthy of labeling, in some way, sublime. It is nothing more than a reflex of the current views that anyone who discusses grandeur in pre-Longinian contexts (e.g. Innes 1985; O’Sullivan 1992) automatically assumes that the available evidence has to do with the grand style or its emergence, without considering whether such searches do not, in fact, turn up evidence of the sublime (see Quadlbauer 1958; Shuger 1984). Perhaps we should start to recognize that the sublime – in our impoverished, simplex label for the idea – is a multilayered category and object in the minds of ancient critics and writers. For this very reason, terminology is not the best way to determine its presence or absence in an author. The more valid criterion is to measure the author’s pulse rate.
What about the remaining passages? Text 2, the opening words of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On the Universe (391a1–5; trans. Furley, adapted), reminds us of Longinus’ detailed excursus on the sublimity of nature in chs. 34–35, where he sings his hymn to the cosmos in all its startling wondrousness – the universe, the great rivers (the Nile, Danube, and the Rhine), Ocean, and Etna (an account that repays comparison with those of Lucretius, Seneca, and the Aetna poet) – or of Longinus’ analyses of Homer in ch. 9, where he repeatedly invokes the dimensions of the universe and comments on a cosmogony (Gen. 1:3). The Longinian sublime is two parts nature and three parts art (8.1), and it is consistently themed by nature, though it is safer to say that whenever Longinus thinks of nature he conceives of it as hyper-natural – as something that is megalophuēs (“grand natured”) and huperphuēs (“extraordinary in nature”) – which is to say, as sublimely natural. “Hupsos …tears everything up like a thunderbolt,” he says in his initial definition of the sublime, retrieving an old commonplace associated with Pericles (1.4; Ar. Ach. 530–531; Plut. Per. 8.2–3; Cic. Or. 29). Thereafter, the natural sublime is woven directly into Longinus’ view of sublimity. His description of the art of language is an ongoing flirtation with the language of nature in its most extreme forms: its light flashes and blinds (12.4; 34.4), its fires rage and burn (12.4), its torrents flood (12.5), its winds attack in squalls (20.3; 22.1), its quantities are preternaturally large (36.1), it resembles life and living things that are ecstatically alive (30.1). In this way linguistic events – textual moments – become events of nature, catastrophes, and cataclysms in words and of syntax. The sublime thrives in a recreation of nature through art – always slyly, because the art of the sublime is forever staged as though it were an effect of nature. But it does so because it originates, somewhere along the line, in an appreciation of the powers of nature, which almost invariably suggests the nature of the divine.
Phusiologia, or natural inquiry (e.g. cosmology, astronomy, or geology) – and not only “scientific excurses of any kind” within a non-scientific work (Russell 1964; cf. xxxviii; contrast Demetr. Eloc. 75, 231; schol. Eur. Hipp. 514; Men. Rhet. 336.25–337.32 Spengel; Psellus Theol. 21.31 Gautier; Roberts 1899, 79) – is one of the ideal genres for writing about and employing sublimity; it is a “place …where one should deluge [the reader] with a flood of language and emotions” (12.5; cf. Cic. Or. 16, 119). If the admission of phusiologia surprises, all the more surprising is Longinus’ complete nonchalance while he makes it, as if he were stating something utterly uncontroversial. In fact, he is. Writing on nature was a recognized element in the tradition of the sublime well before Longinus and Caecilius came along to treat of hupsos in rhetorical criticism. One of the best known examples is Pericles. Drawing on Anaxagoras, he “suffused his rhetoric with phusiologia, like a dye,” and from phusiologia he acquired great sublimity of thought (to hupsēlonoun) (Plut. Per. 8.1–2; ibid., 8.3–4, 4.6–5.1; Pl. Phdr. 270a). Longinus assimilates these traits to Demosthenes, who becomes his exemplary meeting ground of nature and the sublime (1.4; 34.4). That Longinus is likewise well versed in the traditions of natural inquiry, with their penchant for paradox and marvel (35.4), and for what might be called the cosmological sublime, is evident from the astonishing similarities in On the Sublime to text 3 above, which comes from a work by the Stoic Cleomedes entitled The Heavens (2.1.171–183 Todd; trans. Bowen and Todd 2004, adapted). “How does [Homer] magnify the gods? He measures the speed [of the horses in Il. 5.770–2] with a cosmic measure” (9.5). Longinus not only quotes the same three verses from Homer as Cleomedes does; he also uses the same language of a sublime cosmic distance and cosmic measurement in order to provide a sense of how the universe in its vastness exceeds the capacities of human thought (huperphues; kosmikon diastēma; katametrei). And if Cleomedes concludes that the size and speed of the cosmos surpass all words, Longinus is in agreement here too. Is Longinus familiar with Cleomedes’ text, or vice versa? Or are they both working from a shared source or set of sources?
The likeliest scenario is that Cleomedes is drawing on some prior critical model, which he goes on to reject as mere puff. The fact that in their comments on these same verses the bT-scholia and Eustathius recall both Cleomedes and Longinus makes it all the more probable that Cleomedes was drawing from a source in Homeric criticism. Eustathius finds Homer’s experiment in physical measurement (metrōn) highly poetic and prodigious (poiētikōteron kai teratōdesteron) (Eust. Il. 606.16–17 = 2.199.15–18 van der Valk). He immediately adds: “[Homer] says, ‘as far as into the hazing distance’ – which plainly marks out a distance [diastēma]” to be measured. Evidently Eustathius saw no contradiction between the physics and the poetics of the Homeric image. Nor did his Hellenistic sources. And neither did, ultimately, Homer, who intuitively grasped this very connection when he sought to describe in words Hera’s swift movement as she was driven by her divine steeds “through the space between the earth and the starry heaven” from Olympus to Troy (Il. 5.769; see further Hunter 2009, 149–160).
Even if Cleomedes is reflecting a pre-existing interpretation of Homer, there is no reason to reject the idea that Longinus is exploiting cosmological writings such as those by Cleomedes or Crates of Mallos, the Homerist grammarian and paradoxical dabbler in cosmology who left his imprint all over the scholia to Homer. The relevance of Crates to the Longinian context is undeniable (Porter 1992), and Crates may even be Cleomedes’ immediate source. But Cleomedes and Longinus share one more conceptual trait in common. After he quotes the verses, Longinus has us imagine a mind-boggling scenario: looking at these verses and their hyperbolic grandeur (dia tēn huperbolēn tou megethous), “one is bound say that if the horses of the gods were to take two more swift strides, they would no longer find any room in the universe” (9.5). Longinus is patently quoting from problems in cosmology, some of which reach back to Archytas, who wondered what happens when you reach your arm out past the finite limits of the universe (47A24 DK), before finding their way into Cleomedes too (Cael. 1.1.17–19, 39–60, 81–97; etc.). The final upshot for Longinus is that the universe is immeasurably large, while the sublime Homer is uniquely qualified to register this exhilarating uncertainty. Cleomedes has his own way of stating the same criterion of sublimity: the universe for him is immeasurably vast; its speed “has no limit, and no notion of it can be formed” or “expressed;” it is “of almost unlimited size” (apeiromegethēs) (2.1.169–170; 2.1.343). This is Cleomedes’ cosmic sublime. But it is genetically linked to Longinus’ own idea of sublimity, however much scholars today may wish to deny the fact (Bühler 1964, 24–25; Russell 1964, xxxviii–xxxxix; Kühn 1941, 51–52 is the outlier).
The four passages with which we began are the tip of a much bigger iceberg, and others like them can be multiplied at will. But the outcome remains the same no matter how many examples are adduced: once we look beyond Longinus, the current picture of what can count as sublime in antiquity changes dramatically; and so does our view of Longinus’ work in turn. The best clue to what is sublime for Longinus is not a matter of terminology (hupsos, megethos, deinotēs), but a series of thematic indices and conceptual patterns that exhibit a logic of relations (steep heights, profound depths, sudden and extreme shifts, gaps, transgressive limits, sharp collisions and contrasts, moments of extreme danger, risk, and crisis, excessiveness of various kinds captured by verbal prefixes that mean “beyond” and “outside of”). If these markers of sublimity are found in earlier writings, then we stand a good chance of discovering examples of sublimity at work in them too.
The further back in time one goes, the more the instances accumulate across genres and between discourse types (cosmology, paradoxology, theology, philosophies of matter and the incorporeal, rhetoric, and literature – the passage from Euripides’ Phaethon is itself a blend of several of these). And ever so slowly, it begins to look as if an entire network of connections can be spun out to account for a persistent and abiding interest in the sublime and its inner logic – or better yet, logics – to account for an attention to some, if not all, of the very kinds of features, details, and effects that would later take hold of Longinus’ gaze. Or rather, what results is a sublime that exists in different forms or pre-forms leading up to the Longinian treatise, none of which needs resemble Longinus’ sublime any more closely than a distant relative. Longinus in no way holds a unique patent on the concept: his rendition of the sublime is highly selective, and he recasts it to suit his own specific ends. After all, Longinus set out to hijack a tradition, not to encapsulate it in some academic doxography. Even if Longinus remains the best place to start any investigation into the sublime in antiquity, there is no reason to limit our view to his.
The sublime cannot have originated out of the blue. Prima facie, there is every reason to suspect that Longinus’ treatise acts like a collecting point for earlier traditions. All signs point, in fact, to a tradition of sublime criticism that pre-existed Longinus, and one that was rooted in a widespread sensibility. Longinus may be our single richest, if prejudicial, testimony to the ancient discourse and category of the sublime. (He mentions debts or disagreements involving several, often unnamed predecessors in sublime criticism beyond Caecilius.) But he can, nevertheless, prove to be a reliable clue to the ancient category of the sublime even in its earliest phases.
As it turns out, an unbroken inheritance runs from Homer to Longinus – for the terms and logic of the sublime originated first among the poets. Indeed, the sublime is an aesthetic category that is as old as Greek literature itself. To take only a few salient examples beyond those already mentioned, consider these: “The earth is reeling: in its depths the thunder bellows resoundingly, the fiery tendrils of the lightning flash light up, and whirling clouds carry the dust along: … sky and sea are one, confused together” (Aesch. Prom. 1080–1090; trans. Grene); a Sophoclean chorus speaks of “laws that stand high [hupsipodes], generated in lofty heaven, the laws whose only father is Olympus!” (Soph. OT 865–68; trans. Lloyd-Jones); Pindar transforms success into a “summit” (akros) of “absolute glory,” a “great height of achievement” (koruphē) “surpassing all men” (huper anthrōpōn), bringing victors “boundless” or “massive fame” (apletou doxas, pelōrion kleos) won at the “loftiest” (hupsēlos) games (N. 1.11, 33; P. 3.111; O. 5.1, 4.3–4, 10.21; I. 2.33–36, 4.20; 5.44–45; etc.). In fact, nothing is more Longinian than the thought that “achievements without risk win no honor among men or on hollow ships, but many remember if a noble deed is accomplished with toil” (Pind. O. 6.9–11). Finally there is the Homeric landscape, which is littered with sublime objects and framed by a sublime perspective (one exemplified by the gods above and by plunging depths below, often in massive contrasts), not least by virtue of its remoteness from the diminished present. For this reason, Homer was felt to be the fountain (the “Ocean”) of all poetic grandeur, as Longinus was only among the last to notice in antiquity (9.13). All this high-flown poetic language and imagery, and the finely tuned sensibility that produced both, were taken over, first by prose writers in different genres, and then by critics.
That the current view of the sublime is too restrictive and constraining should be evident by now. But the current view was not always in place. It was once fashionable, even orthodoxy, to see at work in Longinus’ essay a powerful dependency on Posidonius, the Stoic philosopher from the late second to mid-first centuries BC. Some even credited Posidonius with being the direct source of Longinus’ concept of the sublime (Mutschmann 1913 ; Norden 1923, 104–106; Kühn 1941; Quadlbauer 1958, 87), though occasionally Plato was thought to be a contributing factor (Kühn). With this turn to philosophy came a much-needed appreciation of nature, the cosmos, and divinity. But the price for this conceptual expansion was overzealous source attribution, which led to unprovable speculations about Longinus’ philosophical allegiances and about the origins of the sublime. Once “the Posidonius myth” fell into disrepute, so did its appurtenances (Dobson 1918; Kroll 1918, 96–98; Jones 1926; Schrijvers 2006, 98–99). Unfortunately, the baby was thrown out with the bath water. The Longinian sublime survived this demolition shorn of all genuine interest in nature and phusiologia, and was reduced to a treatise operating within a rhetorical and literary context alone – and was eventually further reduced to an “effect” that had no clear rhetorical or literary affinities at all (though the Posidonian thesis occasionally survives minus the physics: Russell 1964, xxxix; Chiron 2001, e.g. 340). An intermediate period of investigation into the sublime before the second century BC was the most promising, but also the least heeded (Wehrli 1946; Quadlbauer 1958). The leads to Plato have also been long since abandoned, or attenuated (Russell 1964, xxxix; but see Michel 1976; Porter 2010b).
Though there are many places one can go looking for larger, pre-Longinian tendencies and traditions of thought, the sublimity of nature (the natural sublime) may be the best place to begin. Here, hupsos in its original physical sense of elevation can provide a thread. Homer, once again, sets the tone. Conventionally regarded as ideal instances of the sublime (Subl. 9.6–8), the Homeric gods are literally this as well. Zeus is hupsizugos, “seated aloft” on Olympus; he “dwells in the skies,” and entreaties by mortals are made to him “up on high” (Il. 4.166; 7.69; 10.16; trans. Lattimore). But like other gods, Zeus is also tied to terrifying natural forces. He is “high-” or “loud-thundering” (hupsibremetēs) (Il. 1.354; 10.5–12; etc.) and his din is called deinos (Il. 20.56–57). Hesiod’s cosmogony, his theogony, and his Gigantomachy stage nature as a sublime spectacle in a more focused way. When the Presocratics came along, they created a new, rich tradition of speculation about nature, gods, the heavens, the vast plethora of sensations in the world, and the highest potentials imaginable (if not attainable) by mankind. In some quarters, matter itself was made sublime, whether in its hard and irreducible materiality or in its increasingly refined and sublimated state, at which point matter finally was seen to rival divinity itself (see Porter 2010a, 138–147).
The impact of the Presocratics on the fifth and fourth centuries was immense. At each turn, the language of the sublime made itself felt (ta meteōra, ta aerobatein, ta aētheria, to hupsēlonoun, “thoughts” that “go higher than air,” hupsēloteron aitheros): Aesch. Suppl. 96–103; Ar. Nub.; Ar. Av. 417, 688–690, 704; Pl. Phdr. 270a; Adesp. TrGF 2.127.1). Sophists (Gorgias and others) translated these exalted ideas into more pragmatically oriented rhetorical conceits, which found their way into the Academy and the Peripatos and in this way became an enduring element of the mainstream of rhetoric and criticism. Meanwhile, the inquiry into nature’s sublimities and the divine went on unabated, often in collusion with earlier poetry (Plato’s Phaedrus is a case in point, as is Aristotle’s Metaphysics 12). This amalgam of interests was carried forward by Hellenistic poets, critics, and thinkers who were attuned to the wonders of nature in its contrastive dimensions (the massively grand and the microscopically small) and to rapturous euphony (e.g. Eratosthenes, Aratus, Crates of Mallos; see Porter 2011). Even Epicureans from around 100 BC speak of the hupsos of cosmic language in an ethically uplifting sense (P. Herc. 831 col. 8 N f. 75 Körte, echoing Epicurus’ Letter to Pythocles and Metrodorus fr. 37 Körte). Roman poets carried the traditions forward in various genres, including didactic poetry (from Ennius to Manilius). If rhetoricians after Aristotle sometimes indulged in these wider speculations, for the most part they limited themselves to narrower inquiries into the art of creating effective speech beyond the limits of reason: here, sublimity designated the highest poetic effects of language tout court (Demetrius, Cicero, Dionysius, Quintilian). Longinus offers a rich index of these myriad strains, and also betrays his truest inheritance: reflection on thought at the limits of the humanly conceivable.
Standing back, we can make the following adjustments in the available picture of the sublime. The sublime does not emerge as a literary critical concept only with Caecilius and Longinus. It was already present and actively informing writers in the rhetorical and critical traditions from the end of the fifth century, and the way was prepared by long traditions in poetry and philosophy starting with Homer and Hesiod. What emerged sometime between the age of Augustus and that of the Antonines was not a new idea, but a rebaptizing of an old word (hupsos) along with its cognates and fellow travelers (including sublimis, excelsus, megethos, and magnitudo) as terms of art that could be used to capture pre-existing aesthetic notions and sensibilities. Longinus was by no means the first to give expression to sublimity as a concept in antiquity; he was merely the most eloquent spokesperson of the sublime tradition, so far as we can tell today. This, at least, is Longinus’ own view of himself, and the evidence we have both confirms this picture and helps to fill it out.
Even if the sublime achieved a kind of voguish appeal in late Augustan Rome, this does not erase the fact that the idea and its myriad expressions pervade much of antiquity. Nor is the sublime limited to literary appreciation, even if its roots lie in literature. Rather, the sublime is best viewed as a broadly aesthetic concept that underlies or accompanies other conceptual formations. The earliest occurrences of sublimis and sublimitas, after all, refer to cosmological contexts (e.g. Naev. Lycurg. 30–2 Warmington; Enn. Achil. IV Jocelyn;), while sublimis is used to designate everything from the upper air and its surrounding atmosphere to the seat of divinity (Acc. Med. 396; Enn. Thy. 351 = Cic. DND 2.65). Finally, there is one more, hitherto unexplored clue as to how the sublime could have been so widely available and gone undetected for so long: the sublime lurks in all judgments of beauty (see below). In sum, the evidence we have for the sublime before Longinus not only obliges us to enlarge the scope of our inquiry into the sublime. It also points to a widespread phenomenon that necessitates a complete rearticulation of our understanding of aesthetic thought in antiquity.
First and foremost, the sublime needs to be reconceived as a category of aesthetic judgment and value that vied with others (beauty, wonder, pleasure, pain – in a word, the whole gamut of aesthetic perceptions) long before Caecilius and Longinus came to discuss it. Only an aesthetic understanding of the sublime can make sense of its prevalence in so many different areas of ancient thought. Aesthetic here should be understood in the widest possible sense of the term, as a category that is tied to the primary features of sentience and experience (Porter 2010a ), and therefore as relevant, or potentially this, whenever the mind comes into sensuous contact with its objects. The sublime can be viewed as the most intense and vibrant dimension of any aesthetic experience: it singles out moments when what is touched, heard, seen, or felt almost seems to come alive for the beholder. The impact of the sublime can be disorienting, exhilarating, or supremely quieting, in part simply thanks to the intensity of the experience itself. If this is right, we can speculate that the sublime captures ordinary experiences in their extraordinary quality (cf. Subl. 40.3). But the shapes that sublimity assumes will vary depending on any number of factors.
Roughly speaking, the sublime can take two distinct forms, both originating in a confrontation with material sensation in its brute form, but resulting in different responses: either in a recoil from the experience and a pursuit of immateriality (an immaterial sublime) or in a desire to dwell more deeply upon the experience in all its material richness (a material sublime). The materiality and phenomenality of things are elusive entities, and they often point as much toward the intangible and the evanescent (fleeting sounds, intervals of time or space, shimmering colors and other effects of surface) as they do toward hard and resisting realities (stone, ink, wood, atoms). The sublime lies in their midst, at their troubling point of juncture, where the line between the material and the immaterial is least distinct. The very precariousness of sensuous experience can itself be productive of sublimity.
In this light, we can easily account for Longinus’ ecstasies in the face of a hyperbaton in Demosthenes that displays the limits of syntactical cohesion and, in the process, sends the reader to the limits of subjective cohesion: if the sentence collapses, so does the world (Subl. 22.3–4). The same goes for Cicero’s location of rhetorical sublimity in a Platonic ideal that lies beyond the senses and even this world (Or. 7; 19; 100). We can also account for the sublime language that surrounds Plato’s account of the ascent of the soul to a “place beyond the heavens” (a huperouranios topos) and Lucretius’ image of the mind of Epicurus transcending the “flaming ramparts of the universe” (DRN 1.72–4), even though the one describes a trajectory away from matter while the other describes a trajectory into the very heart of matter. Plato proceeds to describe what is to be seen in this ecstasy of the soul – only, there is not much to be seen per se: “It is there that true Being dwells, without colour or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it” (247c6–7; trans. Hackforth 1945).
Plato is not merely describing a mystical vision or giving a lesson in metaphysics. He is reforming contemporary views of what can and cannot be described aesthetically; he is contributing to the language of aesthetic apprehension, just as he does in the Ion and in parts of the Republic and the Philebus. We need to be attentive to the fact that all the thinkers and writers in antiquity were involved in a similar project to Plato’s whenever they set out to describe experience, beauty, or higher (or more terrifying) things. They were all making statements about how to use such language, and were seeking either to expand or restrict its inherited limits. And when they did so, they would draw upon (and simultaneously contribute to) the concept of the sublime in order to sanction areas of incontestable value. Longinus is doing nothing different from Plato in his essay when he speaks of the way the mind’s thoughts travel beyond the limits of the universe (35.3) or when he insists that the sublime challenges the imagination to reach for something that is “higher than human” (36.3). He is broaching the same theme as Plato’s – the flight of the mind (Jones 1926; cf. Halliwell 2012, ch. 7) – with the same linguistic elements and tools, albeit from within a somewhat different conceptual framework.
Plato calls his supreme value beauty. What makes it sublime? In naming a beauty that lies beyond beautiful things, and even beyond beauty itself, Plato is describing something like the sublimity of beauty or its essence, what Plotinus would later call the hyper-beautiful (to huperkalon). In one sense, such aesthetic terms merely describe shades of value, which at their farthest limit of intensity no longer register any difference at all. Kalos, after all, means fine, not beautiful. The superlative of kalos (to huperkalon) means “extraordinarily fine,” “the finest possible (conceivable) thing” – which is to say, sublime. Hence, for Longinus the sublime can be beautiful too and sometimes the reverse is true (e.g. 5.1: “beauty of style, sublimity, and charm”; 30.1: “grandeur, beauty, old world charm,” etc.; 35.3: “the grandeur and beauty” of life; 39.3). In his insensitivity to the distinction Longinus is following ingrained precedents, which go back to Homer, for instance in his formulaic pairing of beauty and greatness (kalos te megas te). Together the two words mean, quite simply, “extraordinary” and “sublime,” a sense they will preserve well into later antiquity. Did beauty ever mean anything else than such a consummate experience? We are probably wrong to assume it did (see Wehrli 1946, 22; Porter 2010a, 471).
For Longinus and others, grandeur of thought and writing, and the sublime in particular, has less to do with grandeur or sublimity per se than with an increased contact on the part of the beholder with the various dimensions of any given aesthetic object. That is, the sublime seems to have more to do with an intensification of aesthetic experience than with “the sublime” in its conventional senses, and in particular those which have to do with height, exaltation, or transcendence. In this light, the boundaries between beauty and sublimity can be seen to melt away in favor of a more generalized view of aesthetic perception, one that is arranged by intensities rather than by qualitative labels, and one that is governed by values rather than aesthetics in the narrower sense of a theory of beauty in art. On such a view, what beauty and the sublime name is intense experiences, or rather the very intensity of experiences, however these are had (no matter what their object), and which in the end are felt to be pleasurable even if they can also cause dread, fear, or pain. What beauty and the sublime point to, then, is irrefragable value. In sum, laying down criteria of what counts as sublime is a way of determining what is worthy of one’s utmost attention, while also attempting to forestall debate on the question. Retracing the sublime allows us to retrace these contests of value in antiquity.
Reconceived in this way, the sublime can be seen to evolve continuously in antiquity, from Homer onward, in literature and in philosophy, and within further hybrid genres that are particularly prone to sublimity, including the literature of wonders, didactic poetry, and literary and allegorical criticism of earlier texts. There is a corresponding sensibility to be found in visual culture (see Subl. 36.3; Ar. Rhet. 3.12.1414a8–17; Demetr. Eloc. §76; Strab. 8.3.30; Dio Or. 12.49–85; Neer 2010). And ethical inquiries at their highest pitch of interest are often difficult to tell apart from those just named. In a word, the sublime turns out to be an essential way of comprehending Classical literature, philosophy, art, and spiritual inquiries at their most exuberant and searching moments, cutting across them all. Indeed, the idea of the sublime virtually creates for itself a genre of its own within antiquity, framing the terms of a conversation that spans the areas of criticism, metaphysics, theology, ethical self-inquiry, and natural inquiry, while it eventually takes root in ideological formations, most palpably in the ideals and ideologies that surround Classicism, canons, ruins (Pausanias [Porter 2001]), fragments (literary quotations as epiphanies of lost grandeur [Hertz 1983]), and all notions of cultural belonging, where the sublime typically plays a strong suturing role. To piece together the traditions of the sublime in a more encompassing fashion is to reconceive how we view antiquity as a whole.
The two best articles on the sublime before Longinus remain Wehrli (1946), which is magisterial (though limited by its focus on Democritus and Gorgias as prime movers), and Quadlbauer (1958), which is more diffuse and rapid but covers a great deal of earlier and later ground. Shuger (1984) usefully develops Quadlbauer. An untapped source remains the work of W. Capelle, esp. (1912). Good inroads have recently been made challenging the status quo, mainly in Roman literature in the wake of Lucretius, esp. Michel (1969, 1976), Schiesaro (2003, 22–25, 52–55, 127–135), Porter (2004, 2007), Leigh (2006), Schrijvers (2006), Conte (2007), Hardie (2009), and Williams (2012, esp. 213–230). A handy introduction to the history and theory of the sublime may be found in Shaw (2006), and now the essays gathered in Costelloe (2012). For a more complete and alternative account of the sublime in antiquity see now Porter (2015).