SOURCE: "Longinus on the Sublime: Some Historical and Literary Problems," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1928, pp. 209-19.

[In the following essay, Roberts uses linguistic evidence to argue that, contrary to the claims of many scholars, De Sublimitate was written in the first rather than the third century A.D.]

As long ago as the year 1899 the Cambridge University Press published for me an edition of "Longinus."¹ At the moment I am correcting the proof-sheets of a small volume on Greek Rhetoric and Literary Criticism for an American Series. It would be a great help if you would allow me to confer with you on some of the many problems presented by the De Sublimitate.

You will not disappoint me by failing (as too often happens) to join, young and old, in the discussion at the close. I still remember gratefully a valuable piece of information² I had, on a posteard in September 1901, from a boy, Donald S. Robertson, who was then (I believe) at Westminster School, where the Sublime was being read as a holiday task or treat. That postcard is here to-day as one of two exhibits, the other being the sumptuous Bodoni edition of "Longinus."

More than ever, I am convinced that the essay—this seems the nearest English equivalent for hypomnema—belongs not to the third century of our era but to the first. Its Roman, Greek, and Jewish affinities appear to point that way. Suppose that the last chapter (chapter 44) alone was before us, as a newly discovered fragment, in modern print (with no palaeographical indication of date). Could we take that famous lament for perished liberty, eloquence, and genius to have been written so late as the third century? In the first century the topic of such degeneracy, and its causes, was a commonplace among Roman authors: we think of Tacitus (Dialogus de Oratoribus), the two Plinys, Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria and the lost De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae), Petronius, and Seneca the philosopher. We notice that, in this chapter, "Longinus" (it is convenient so to call him; and I shall do so throughout) speaks of "the world's peace" …, and we recall the "Pax Romana," and a sentence close to the beginning of Tacitus' Histories: "postquam bellatum apud Actium atque omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna illa ingenia cessere." What, by the way, is the nearest equivalent in any Roman author for hetes oikoumenos eirene, a greater phrase (and a greater idea) than "Pax Romana"?

The striking comparison, in the essay, between Demosthenes and Cicero unites with certain Latinisms to make it likely that the author, notwithstanding his modest disclaimer in chapter 12, had some direct knowledge of the Latin language and literature. Consequently the "philosopher" who starts the discussion in chapter 44 may conceivably be a Roman, and of the first century. Apropos of my edition, the late Professor Robinson Ellis in the Classical Review (xiii. 294) pointed out a double parallelism between the Sublime chapter 13, sections 3 and 4, and the Astronomica (book ii, lines 8-10 and 57, 58) of Manilius, who was probably writing between A.D. 9 and A.D. 14. Professor Ellis assumed that here either Manilius must be copying the Sublime or the Sublime Manilius. The latter alternative seems possible, but my own feeling, rather, is that both were drawing from some common source (Greek or Latin) now lost: the modern student is always in danger of forgetting the great losses there have surely been of Greek critical works belonging to the century before and the century after Christ. Still, I now incline, in this difficult problem of dating, to think (for reasons to be given in a moment) that the essay does belong to the earlier, rather than the later, half of the first century, and to somewhere about the year 40 A.D. But I want your help and criticism throughout.

Of the Greek affinities of the essay little need at this point be said: after all, it is written in Greek and shows a remarkable familiarity with the whole course of Greek literature. But, as bearing on its date, it is important to observe that, at its very start, a Greek author of the Augustan period is named and attacked: Caecilius of Calacte. The pugnacity, and pertinacity, with which "Longinus" assails Caecilius's book on hypsos ("sublimity") makes it seem probable that he was writing not much more than a generation after its appearance—not so long after as the time of Plutarch, who makes but passing references to Caecilius, and certainly not so long after as the third century.

To pass from the Roman and Greek to the Jewish side,—to the surpassingly sublime illustration drawn from the beginning of the Book of Genesis. The passage, in chapter 9, is: "Similarly, the legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed and expressed a worthy conception of the power of the Godhead, writes at the very beginning of his Laws, 'God said'—what? 'Let there be light, and there was light; let there be earth, and there was earth."'

First of all, is this passage of "Longinus" genuine? In my edition I maintained that it is and gave my reasons. During the year 1915 the German scholar Konrat Ziegler, in an able and vigorous paper published in Hermes, attacked my views, singling me out no doubt because I had made the fullest recent statement of a case which has never lacked defenders. I did not see the article at the time; I was busy in other ways, patriai tempore iniquo. But a pleasant thing happened. The reply—to me a convincing one—came from Germany itself two years later,—in 1917 and in the same classical journal. Hermann Mutschmann,³ a no less able and vigorous scholar than Ziegler and one better known for special work on "Longinus," dealt with the attack in a long article which still holds the field. To review fully the arguments on the two sides I have no space in half-an-hour's paper. I will select a small but interesting point of language passed over by Mutschmann, and then give my own present views on this issue of authenticity and on the general question of date.

Professor Ziegler will have it, indeed, that exephenen, which I have translated by "expressed," here means "revealed" in that very special sense of "revealed" which you would expect from a Jewish or Christian interpolator. But surely Jew or Christian would have employed the (for him) most significant … "to draw the veil from sacred mysteries"; Ziegler himself uses the German word "offenbaren" …, but this only serves to remind us that "Offenbarung" is the accepted German title of the New Testament book which we often call (as in the Greek) "the Apocalypse." Alokalupim occurs twenty-six times in the New Testament, ekphaino never. In the Septuagint ekphaino is found thirteen times, alokalupim over a hundred times. So that an argument on which Ziegler lays much stress seems rather to turn against himself. Further, the general diction of the section (short as it is) can be shown to tally with the rest of the essay: Ekphaino itself occurs in the first chapter, in the passive voice and in the somewhat colourless sense "appear from," "emerge from"; and the section contains also the characteristic expressions … ("similarly"), … ("extraordinary"), … ("at the very beginning"), and the still more characteristic rhetorical question,—"'God said'—what?",—which tells, assuredly, not of a devout Jewish or Christian believer but of an enthusiastic literary guide and teacher who is resolved to arrest attention even though some solemnity may be lost. The inexactitude of the citation, and a certain rhythmical and symmetrical turn which the great fiat has (perhaps unconsciously) received, leave the same impression on the mind, and also suggest a quotation made from memory.

It is with the relation of the whole passage to the difficult question of date that we are now specially concerned. My own view of the date (on which I want your criticism) is briefly this. Thirty years ago I maintained, on internal evidence (the external being, in my opinion, no better than Byzantine guesswork, since it describes the author either as "Dionysius (not Cassius) Longinus," or "Dionysius or Longinus," or "An Anonymous Writer"),—I maintained that the essay belongs to the first century, not to the third. Now I would go further and suggest that it was written in the earlier half, rather than the later half, of the first century, and probably during the twenty years from 30 A.D. to 50 A.D.,—say 40 A.D. I would bring it nearer in time to Philo than to Plutarch. I have no positive proof to offer; I shall only urge that, alike on the Jewish, Greek, and Roman sides, the period 30-50 A.D. seems highly probable. Let us seize on any known dates we can and make the most of them, especially if they are near the birth of Christ, slightly before or slightly after. The author is replying (as I think, within a generation or so) to Caecilius. Caecilius was a contemporary of Dionysius of Halicarnassus whom we know to have been living at Rome in the year 8 B.C. (the year of Horace's death) and who was probably still living there at and beyond the birth of Christ. With Dionysius, "Longinus" has in common an extensive critical terminology; with Caecilius, whom he opposes vehemently, he at any rate shares an interest in the Jewish race—we have it on the authority of Suidas that Caecilius was in religion a Jew. "Longinus" is connected with the East in yet another way. In chapter 3 we read: "A third, and closely allied, defect in outbursts of passion is that which Theodorus used to call parenthyrsos. By this is meant unseasonable and empty passion, where no passion is required; or immoderate, where moderation is needed." Modern scholars assume (in my opinion, rightly) that this Theodorus is the eminent rhetorician Theodorus of Gadara who taught in Rhodes and Rome. In my edition⁴ I suggested that the imperfect ekalei ("used to call") implies that "Longinus" had been a pupil of Theodorus. This view is also taken by Ziegler and Mutschmann. It is important as providing another clue by which we may hope approximately to date the essay. Quintilian (iii. 1, 17) tells us that Tiberius Caesar, during his retirement in Rhodes, was a diligent hearer of Theodorus. This retirement of Tiberius lasted from B.C. 6 to A.D. 2. It seems to me also possible that Theodorus was not only a Syrian but a Jew (a Jew passing under a Gentile name, like many another Jew in ancient and modern times), and that "Longinus" had heard from him not only about the "dragging-in of the thyrsus" (a verbal coinage suggested no doubt to Theodorus by Euripides' Bacchae, so famous in the East and so well known to "Longinus," as his essay proves), but about the legislator of the Jews and his great written opening now reproduced from memory. It is true that Theodorus liked to be called a "Rhodian" rather than a "Gadarene"; but the man who dubbed the young Tiberius "a lump of clay kneaded with blood" had, surely, courage and independence enough to quote Genesis in his lectures if he knew it; and at Gadara, where Jewish as well as Greek influences had long been felt, he would be likely to know it, even if he were no more than a Syrian cousin of the Jews.

However, I do not in the least insist on this detail nor on the possibility that "Longinus" may owe his knowledge of the quotation not to Theodorus but to the book he criticizes,—that by the Judaizer Caecilius. Word about the greatest opening perhaps in all literature may have come from sources altogether unknown to us. Is it not the case that the Jews are surprisingly to the fore even in the scanty Greek literature which to-day survives from the age of Augustus or slightly later? Please recall the dates of Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Philo: these rather than Josephus, whose floruit comes somewhat later. Diodorus probably wrote his History soon after 8 B.C., and in it he speaks of Moses' claim that his Laws came to him from the God called "Jehovah." Strabo's life extended from (about) B.C. 54 to A.D. 24. In the 16th Book of his Geography, Strabo expresses, in set terms and at some length, his admiration for the work accomplished by Moses, and says of the theocracy which Moses had instituted that it was "no ordinary one," the same two Greek words which "Longinus" has applied to Moses himself.

Take, again, Philo and his date. Philo (who would be born about 20 B.C.) came from Alexandria to Rome, on his celebrated embassy to Caligula, in or near the year 40 A.D.: a date only slightly earlier than the newly-discovered Letter sent by Claudius to Alexandria. That Letter, and Philo's embassy, are enough to show that Alexandria, and the Jews of Alexandria, were much in the mind of Rome (and "Longinus" is writing to a Roman) about this time; and not simply Alexandrian Jews, nor simply turbulent Jews. Some of the widely-dispersed Jews were beginning to hold important posts in the Roman imperial system as financiers, administrators, soldiers, secretaries, and teachers, showing no doubt the same intellectual gifts that they have so often shown in modern times and places; and as to the width of the dispersion, Josephus (Ant. Iud. xiv. 7, 2) reports Strabo to have said that "it is not easy to find a spot in the inhabited world which has not admitted this race and is not controlled by it." (Think of it: in New York to-day there are 1,750,000 Jews,—nearly one-third of the total population!)

Aloof as the Jews in some ways were and are, is it likely (apart altogether from what the word "proselyte" teaches us as to the active Jewish propaganda in the century before, and the earlier part of the century after, Christ's birth),—is it in itself likely that, when spread across the world, the Jews should not, as occasion offered, dwell on the great things of their faith to congenial souls, and that a Greek writer like "Longinus" (I take him, subject to your criticism, to have been a Greek, and not simply a Roman or Jew writing in Greek, like Marcus Aurelius, or Philo Judaeus) should record, incidentally, what he had somehow heard? For want of time, I must pass over the verbal coincidences between Philo and "Longinus," which seem to point to a growing contact in word and thought between Greek and Jewish authors; one of them so striking that it might almost have been written by "Longinus's" "philosopher" in chapter 44. But notice this. Philo, in his puritan sermons on Old Testament texts, occasionally quotes Homer: why should not a contemporary Greek author, once only in a short essay, refer to Genesis if the quotation were apposite? And it is apposite, supremely apposite. In the context, "Longinus" has condemned the human frailties of Homer's Olympian gods, and then turns with relief to a Homeric passage in which the divine nature is (he says) represented "as it really is—pure and great and undefiled." It is at this point that he mentions (with true literary and religious instinct) Moses' high conception of "the Godhead," using the same expression … as Strabo uses in his 16th book. The great idea and its simple setting have, alike, impressed him. The whole chapter deals with greatness of mind and soul, and near its beginning he has observed that a "bare idea" can be more sublime than words, instancing the silence of Ajax among the Shades.

Ziegler (whose doubts and difficulties I have kept in mind while stating my own position) seems to me to take altogether too narrow a view of this Greek "classical man" of (let us say) 40 A.D., when he supposes that he would have shrunk from quoting Moses side by side with Homer. That "Longinus" was a "classical man," we know; no one could have offered better tests of truly "classical" excellence than he has done in his seventh chapter. But the special virtue of these tests is that they are as applicable to one great literature as to another. We must not conceive of "Longinus" as a Greek rhetorician in any narrow and invidious sense; he refers to Isocrates, the idol of the rhetoricians, with some disdain. He is a philosopher and a man of letters; he is a great literary critic (do we, by the way, find in any Greek writer a nearer equivalent for the words "literary criticism" than in the sixth chapter of our essay, where we are told that "literary criticism … is the last and crowning fruit of long experience"?); and (more than all this) he is a man of his own day who has also the good fortune to be endowed with a true historical sense. In thinking of him, we simply must not speak as if Alexander and Alexandria, and Stoicism (half religion, half philosophy, with Greek, Roman, and Semitic elements; Zeno was a Semite), and the later Platonism had never been. We must not forget, either, that the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament had existed, in its earlier part at least, for two or three centuries, and that the interactions between it and Alexandrian Greek literature may have been more far-reaching than we know; did not so sober a scholar as the late Dr. Leaf⁵ go so far as to suggest that, through some channel or other, Callimachus knew Isaiah's paean over the fall of Babylon, "How art thou fallen from heaven, 0 Lucifer, son of the morning!"?

And if we turn to Rome, why should not the Roman Terentianus (the addressee of the book; I wish you could identify him from some inscription new or old) have hailed, in a Greek essay, the great words of Moses with even more surprise and admiration than he would greet the comparison between Demosthenes and Cicero, a comparison which Ziegler describes, in error, as a "favourite theme." It was not so among the Greek literary critics; "Longinus," in this as in other ways, is exceptional. On the evidence of the essay itself, Terentianus would seem to have been an apt and high-minded pupil (past or present) of the author's, at whose somewhat mannered style he may sometimes have smiled, remembering that "Longinus" had (he mentions it in his book) written more than once on the subject of word-arrangement and was much given to that verbal heightening and recasting which belongs to his conception of hypsos, but not forgetting either that he loved, and could make his pupils love, the greater aspects of literature,—the noble thought, character, and feeling enshrined in it. When this literary letter (this classical essay in criticism) was written to him, Terentianus was clearly a man of some standing; the adjective hratistos by which he is once addressed suggests that he was of official rank. In the Acts of the Apostles we remember that the two Roman procurators Felix and Festus are addressed as kratiste Phelix and kratiste Phēste—"your Excellency" almost. When, from (about 61 A.D. to 63 A.D., St. Paul "dwelt two whole years" in a hired lodging of his own at Rome, those that "came in unto him" would come mainly from the poorer quarters of the city. But, in the course of the first century, there faces us also what has recently been called "that most obscure problem regarding the penetration of Christianity during the first century among the aristocracy of Rome";⁶ and I would ask whether that penetration had not been made less difficult because, here and there, men like Terentianus had previously been led to welcome truth even when presented in the Old Testament of the Jews? Be this as it may: if, looking alike to the period and to the man as he is seen in his book, we decide to place "Longinus" about 40 A.D., that will bring him into the earliest years of St. Paul's great career as a convert to Christianity. St. Paul's native town of Tarsus had been a seat of Stoic teaching at least as early as 130 B.C.; and I have lately (in the Loeb Series) offered some reasons for thinking that Plutarch's Demetrius of Tarsus may have written the extant tract on Style, and that, not more than twenty years after St. Paul's death at Rome, this Demetrius was (as a member of Agricola's personal staff) teaching Greek at York, the years about 80 A.D. being thus the birth-years of Classical Education in Great Britain: to be followed later by the great things we owe, through the influence of Christianity and of men like Dean Colet, to such foundations as St. Paul's Schools for Boys and Girls.⁷ All this is, of course, highly problematical; but, for "Longinus," can anyone think of a more likely period than round about 40 A.D.? And can anyone, further, throw fresh light on the date from such details as (1) the nanoi in chapter 44; (2) the hemartemenas kolossos in chapter 36; (3) or the reference to Mt. Etna in chapter 35? As to the last point: it is sometimes thought that, if "Longinus" had been writing later than the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., he would have mentioned that volcano rather than Etna. But did not Etna remain (even in its more tranquil days) the typical volcano, in the Christian era as well as in the earlier centuries, and in Latin literature as well as in Greek? Still, if the essay should be discovered among the charred remains at Herculaneum, we shall have no manner of doubt that its date is not later than 79 A.D.

By way of conclusion, I will propose (without developing) two problems suggested by the main theme of the essay itself. "Longinus" loses no time in defining "the Sublime" as "a certain distinction and excellence of style"; and in chapter nine he describes it, in two resounding words, as … "the reverberation of magnanimity," "the far-heard echo of a great soul." Throughout he connects it with greatness, ringing the changes on megas, megathos, megathopoiemn, megathunein, megalegoria, megalothuia, megalopsukhia; greatness and beauty (rather than littleness and baseness) he seeks for everywhere, alike in the world of nature and of man. The style itself we might well describe as "the great style"; avoiding "grand," with its suggestion of "grandiose." But the question I wish to ask is: how much farther back than Caecilius and "Longinus" can anyone trace, in Greek or Latin, the history of the terms hypsos and hypselos? A difficult question, when so much Greek critical literature has been lost between Aristotle and Dionysius,⁸ and when "sublimis" and "sublimitas" do not come into Cicero's prose vocabulary. And, leaping from Cicero right onward to Chaucer, can you tell me whether the "heigh style," in the Prologe of the Clerkes Tale of Oxenford harks back in some way to øçëüò, and how? Here I think I see a clue.

My final problem may seem a bathos, but it stands in close relation to hypsos, and it possesses much literary and lexicographical interest, in Greek and English. What is the meaning of e bathous at the beginning of the second chapter, where we read, "First of all, we must raise the question whether there is hypsous tis e bathous tekhne? Is bathos the opposite of hypos, or is it an alternative expression ((profundity")? The revised Liddell and Scott renders here by the English word "bathos"; but it quotes no Greek parallel, from the essay or elsewhere. Do you know of any? I know of none, and I believe that Mr. George Loane (now, or formerly, a Master at St. Paul's School, and also a member, I see, of this Association) may be right when, in his excellent Handbook of Literary Terms, he writes, "Bathos.—This is a sudden descent from the sublime, in description … The tern was first used by Pope, as the antithesis of the Greek hypsos,⁹ height, sublimity; bathos means depth, but was never used by the Greeks in this literary sense." The reference here is of course to the satire attributed to the joint efforts of Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, Martinus Scriblerus peri bathous: Or, of the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a title suggested by the De Sublimitate. The literary insight of Pope (whose six lines on "Longinus," in the Essay on Criticism, are still the best appreciation of him that has ever been penned), and the fact that the "sinkings" of style are much in "Longinus's" mind and mouth, keep me from speaking quite as positively as Mr. Loane. But I should much like to be fortified by a Greek parallel. Anticlimax we must, I fear, give up as an ancient Greek word: must we also surrender to Alexander Pope bathos in the sense of "bathos"?

In the discussion,¹⁰ I shall hope to have the benefit of my fellow-members' opinions on the various points of language I have raised, and on the broader questions of the date of the essay and of the genuineness of its citation from Genesis. In my present view of his date, "Longinus" (the earliest of comparative, or international, Greek critics) belongs to a period of marked fusion in the world's intellectual and spiritual history, and has in him something that is characteristic of each of three great races: the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish. This it is that makes and will always make him (unidentified though he may remain) a unique and outstanding figure in the domain of literature.

Notes

¹ A paper read to the Classical Association at its Annual General Meeting held in London, January 9th-11th, 1928.

² As to the mention of the … [term] in Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca Universalis, published in 1545, nine years before Robortello's editio princeps.

³ The writer of the paper has since heard that in July, 1918, Professor Hermann Mutschmann fell, fighting pro patria.

⁴ Roberts' edition of Longinus on the Sublime, p. 9, where the suggestion was more tentative, in 1899, than it would be in 1928.

⁵ Walter Leaf, Little Poems from the Greek, pp. 92-94.

⁶ Cf. W. M. Ramsay, Journal of Roman Studies XVI (1926), 210.

⁷ The Classical Association met, this year, in St. Paul's School for Girls.

⁸ Here Poseidonius might help us greatly, but there are risks in what we may call … "the dragging-in of Poseidonius."

⁹ Or hupsos, as Dean Swift transliterates it.

¹⁰ Part was taken in the discussion by Dr. J. W. Mackail (Chairman), Canon G. C. Richards, Professor J. Wight Duff, Professor R. S. Conway (President of the Association), Mr. A. 0. Prickard, and Professor Wilhelm Kroll of Breslau. The last-named supported Professor Roberts's views, as against those of Professor Ziegler.