Longinus

Longinus is the name long attached to the anonymous Greek author of Peri Hupsous, “On the Sublime”, a treatise of literary criticism addressed to a young Roman friend, Posthumius Terentianus. The medieval manuscript names its author as “Dionysius or Longinus”, and for centuries he was identified with the third-century rhetorician Cassius Longinus. The treatise itself quotes authors down to the early first century AD and is generally dated to that century, so the traditional attribution is now abandoned; the author remains unknown, and is often called Pseudo-Longinus.

The work answers a lost treatise by Caecilius of Calacte and asks what makes writing great: elevated thought, strong emotion, noble figures, diction and composition. It quotes Homer, Sappho (the ode preserved here only in this treatise), Demosthenes, Plato and the Old Testament. Boileau's French translation of 1674 made it a landmark of European criticism, and through Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and the Romantics it shaped the modern idea of the sublime.

The version given here is H. L. Havell's English translation of 1890, as printed with an introduction by Andrew Lang (omitted).