On the Sublime
"Longinus", a conventional name applied to a Greek teacher of rhetoric or literary critic who may have lived in the 1st century CE, is known only for his treatise On the Sublime. (Peri Hupsous) The treatise was ignored by scholars until it was published by Francis Robertello in Basel, in 1554.
When the manuscript was being prepared for publication, the work was initially attributed to Cassius Longinus (213 - 273 CE), but it is notable that no literature later than the 1st century AD is mentioned, and the work is now usually dated to the early first century AD. The internal evidence in the treatise supports this view, as no writers later than the first century AD are mentioned.
Along with the expected examples from Homer and other figures of Greek culture, Longinus refers to a passage from Genesis:
- "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 - I quote his words - "God said" - what? - "'Let there be light.' And there was. 'Let there be earth.' And there was." "
In the 18th century Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful owed a debt to Longinus' concept of the sublime, and the category passed into the stock-in-trade of Romantic intellectual discourse.