On the Sublime

On the Sublime, a critical treatise whose authorship and date remain genuinely disputed, traditionally but almost certainly wrongly attributed to the third-century rhetorician Cassius Longinus and now generally dated to the first century AD, argues that literature's highest achievement is the sublime (hypsous), transporting the reader beyond persuasion into astonished identification with the text. Where it was composed is likewise unrecorded; Alexandria is placed here only as a conventional guess, grounded thinly in the author's familiarity with Alexandrian criticism and his quotation of Genesis, not direct testimony. The author locates sublimity's sources in innate genius and learnable technique, illustrated through readings of Homer, Sappho, and, notably for a Greek critic, Genesis's account of creation. Rediscovered in the sixteenth century, it fed directly into Burke's and Kant's later theories of the sublime.