OUP (2022) h/b 466pp £175.00 (ISBN 9780192894205)
This formidable work, On the Sublime (originally published in Italian) is not the first book on the subject to have been reviewed for CfA: James L. Porter’s The Sublime in Antiquity, of even greater length, was published by CUP in 2016. In terms of size for a commentary, perhaps Nan Dunbar’s The Birds (1995) or Annette Harder’s two volume Aetia (2012) come closest. The (essential) Introduction (61 pages) is followed by Bibliographical Abbreviations (58 pages) which claims to list every work mentioned in the Commentary, the Text and Translation (72 pages), and the Commentary (393 pages). There are also several Indexes, including one of Greek terms in the Introduction and Commentary.
H. splits up the Introduction into seven sections: I. The problem of authorship and date; II. The structure and design of the On the Sublime; III. The author as critic and his rivalry with Caecilius; IV. The sublime and its sources; V. The psychology of creative inspiration; VI. From On the Sublime to the modern sublime: An overview; VII. The text of On the Sublime.
In section I, H., no more than anyone before him, can identify the author, though he does exhaustively demolish, in eight subsections, any claim that Cassius Longinus (third century Neoplatonist philosopher and literary scholar) could be the author: a few scholars who still adhere to that view are given short shrift by H. A date in the 1st century AD seems plausible, perhaps helped by the author’s seeming familiarity with Theodorus of Gadara, born around 70 BC, and is supported by numerous scholars (they go well into double figures: for details, see note 29 on p. xix.).
In section II, H. gives us, in 14 subsections, what amounts to a precis of the work: as he says, this exhibits the ‘basic expository clarity with which the work has been conceived and planned, albeit with an anomaly: the omission of the promised treatment of emotion [sc. πάθος] one of the two most important sources of sublimity’—probably because this was addressed in one of the lacunas in our MS. H. adds that this issue exemplifies the author’s tendency to ‘explore the contours of sublimity in ways which blur the demarcations built into the schema’. It is a question whether Section II might not, at least as usefully, been transferred, subsection by subsection, into the relevant parts of the Commentary.
In section III, H. comments on Longinus’ reluctance, despite his (manifest) praise for and admiration of Plato, to be regarded as a philosopher; but is he then a ‘rhetor’? Hardly—he deals with matters which belong on a higher plane. As for the rivalry with Caecilius (who regarded Lysias as a model of stylistic purity, and superior in every respect to Plato), H. sets out in six subsections the grounds for his antagonism—especially (subsection iii), where Caecilius is strongly censured for neglecting the subject of emotion (πάθος). There is a ‘fundamental clash of rhetorico-literary allegiances’. (We of course are gravely hampered by not having access to the actual works of Caecilius.)
In section IV, H. lists thirteen salient points of principle concerning the nature of sublimity to be found in the treatise—which is where we find, under point viii, the famous ‘Sublimity is an echo of greatness of mind’. The points are developed at length over the following ten pages. H. concludes that while beauty has a wider scope than sublimity in the author’s critical lexicon, sublimity itself can be regarded as one type, and that the most important, of beauty.
Section V, which includes two long quotations from the work, poses a question: does the treatise ‘undercut its own idealism by a concluding note of cultural pessimism’ or rather, does it hold out hope that the ‘great achievements of Greek literature may yet be added to in the future’?
In section VI, H. raises some unanswerable questions: has the idea of sublimity now reached a place where it lies beyond definition? Or did it lack an adequate definition in the first place? The argumentation here, while well worth reading, is philosophically dense, and definite answers are not to be expected.
Section VII gives an account of the text of On the Sublime, which largely depends on one, sadly lacunose, manuscript dating from the tenth century of our era. The text itself is given with a brief apparatus criticus, and is accompanied by an eminently readable translation; proposed emendations are given in the apparatus and are commented upon as appropriate (thus one suggestion by Wilamowitz is dismissed as ‘unnecessary’; but when the same scholar proposes a new reading in the quotation from Sappho, it is left in the apparatus without further comment).
The Commentary deals generously with content and context, grammar and syntax in a manner to satisfy the most demanding. The reviewer pointed out above that more clarity might have been gained by relocating the fourteen ‘subsections’ listed in Section II to appropriate places in the Commentary; the absence of such ‘break points’ is perhaps a pity, even allowing for the relative shortness of the numbered paragraphs. Many years ago, Mayor’s Juvenal was praised in Germany for its exceptionally wide-ranging reading, and a similar commendation would be fully justified here; but was it necessary to spend (for example) over two pages of comment on ὕψος μεγαλοφροσύνης ἀπήχημα? Your reviewer cannot claim to have done more than browse in the wealth that is offered, but that is enough for him to assert with confidence that although completeness can never be achieved, this must come pretty close: and there are Bibliographical Abbreviations occupying 58 pages to support the claim.
The price alone will put the book out of the range of any but the deepest pockets, whether personal or corporate: one reflects that Diggle’s ‘Orange’ Theophrastus has been successfully reduced in size to allow for its transformation to the ‘Green-and-Yellow’ series, and something of the sort might usefully be attempted here. It remains warmly to congratulate both the editor—who first read On the Sublime with Donald Russell—and the Oxford University Press for what is, by any criterion, an outstanding work of scholarship on a treatise which, as James L. Porter observed, did not so much introduce ‘a conceptual novelty’ as a ‘dazzling recharacterization of the familiar, the known, and the approved’.
Colin Leach