32 pages • 1 hour read
LonginusOn the Sublime
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 100A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 6-10 Summary
After discussing faults in writing, Longinus describes its positive attributes: We should not overestimate prose that is showy and grand but “overlaid with many carelessly fashioned ornaments” (9), because a sign of “truly great” writing is that it impresses itself on our minds and stays in our memories. When a range of diverse people hold a strong consensus that a piece of writing is great, that too is a sign of its high quality.
There are five sources of great writing:
- Vigorous mental conception;
- Strong and inspired emotion;
- The apt use of figures of speech and thought;
- Nobility of diction (e.g., word choice and use of figurative language);
- Dignified and distinguished word arrangement.
These qualities rely on a guiding moral quality, which is the source and precondition of greatness in writing. After a lacuna in the text, Longinus discusses the moral nobility and high-mindedness of Homer’s writing, observing that Homer’s stories explore morality by giving human a godlike stature and imbuing the gods with human emotion as well as with divine power.
Longinus goes on to compare Homer’s two works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and states his belief that the former was written earlier in the poet’s life while the latter was a product of his old age. His reasoning is that the Iliad emphasizes action and drama, with a poetically intense mood, while the Odyssey emphasizes episodic storytelling. Longinus defines a “late” or “old age” style as one that focuses on storytelling over emotion, with a more relaxed mood that sometimes veers into comedy.
The writer’s ability to select the most vital events and relate them to each other to form “a unified whole” (17), as Sappho does in her love poems, introduces an additional characteristic of great writing: the importance of unity and tonal consistency. Longinus praises both Sappho and Homer for their ability to select “the most significant details on the basis of merit” and join them together “harmoniously” (19). These great authors insert nothing “irrelevant, frivolous, or artificial” between those details that might spoil their combined effect (19).
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
In this section, Longinus delves into the question of what makes writing great. The ability to judge literary greatness requires long experience (9), but Longinus establishes a set of principles to guide less experienced writers and readers. One quality of great writing is that it uplifts readers’ souls and makes them feel as if they had written it themselves. Great writing is universal, and creates this sense of communion between the writer and the reader in people of all cultures and times.
Literary greatness depends deeply on moral greatness in the writer’s soul, which Longinus calls “nobility.” Longinus implies that the writer must scorn wealth, honors, reputation, and power: We must reject the mere “outward semblance of greatness” which “proves to be hollow conceit” (9). He draws a parallel between these worldly values and showy devices in writing that are merely superficial.
Throughout his treatise, Longinus points out qualities in writing that are superficially impressive and steers the reader away from them, toward attributes that indicate genuine greatness. Longinus’s comments on worldly values reflect the values of Platonic and Stoic philosophy, which emphasized spiritual detachment from material things. Rejecting superficial frills does not mean ignoring the aesthetic elements of writing. In fact, Longinus aligns moral rectitude with aesthetically pleasing writing. Longinus labels the writer’s moral character a state of a “natural high-mindedness” (11), implying that the great writer holds a high status in an of aristocracy of the mind.
Longinus insists that emotion is one of the factors that make writing great, and criticizes Caecilius for neglecting it in his treatise. Longinus does not fully equate greatness with emotion, as if they were the same thing. In fact, there are “lowly emotions that do not go with great writing: pity, grief and fear” (11). This might surprise today’s readers, since Greek tragedy was known for arousing those very feelings. However, Longinus seems to mean that writers should control their own emotions, arousing them in readers rather than feeling them while writing.
When he compares Homer’s younger and older phases of writing, Longinus is drawing a contrast between two Greek aesthetic concepts, pathos and ethos. Pathos means passion, strong emotion, heroism, and tragedy. Ethos denotes naturalness and a down-to-earth portrayal of life. Homer’s two masterpieces, in Longinus’s view, respectively illustrate these two qualities.
In the middle of his discussion of Homer, Longinus quotes from the Book of Genesis, the biblical creation story. Longinus believes God’s statement “Let there be light” embodies divine power just as the Greek epics did. Longinus’s reference to “the lawgiver of the Jews” refers to Moses (14), traditionally credited as the author of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. This passage constitutes a rare reference to the Bible in a work by a classical Greco-Roman author. It suggests Longinus’s open-mindedness to other cultures and his perceptiveness in seeing similarities between Hebrew and Greek literature.
