Longinus Reunited: On Sublimity in Context

Description

The project takes a fresh look at the Greek rhetorical and literary-critical treatise On Sublimity. The project:
(a) critiques the arguments in favour of a date of composition in the first century CE (the consensus position since the early nineteenth century:
(b) makes a case for the older consensus that the treatise was written by the third-century CE polymath Cassius Longinus, based on convergences between the contents of the treatise and evidence (direct and indirect) for Cassius Longinus’ intellectual profile;
(c) situates Cassius Longinus’ philosophical work within third-century Platonist debates; and
(d) argues that reading On Sublimity and the fragments of Cassius Longinus as a single corpus yields a conjectural, but coherent and plausible, reconstruction of an integrated metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic philosophy;
(e) in the light of these conclusions provides a commentary on the argument of On Sublimity.
The project takes a fresh look at the Greek rhetorical and literary-critical treatise On Sublimity. The project:
(a) critiques the arguments in favour of a date of composition in the first century CE (the consensus position since the early nineteenth century:
(b) makes a case for the older consensus that the treatise was written by the third-century CE polymath Cassius Longinus, based on convergences between the contents of the treatise and evidence (direct and indirect) for Cassius Longinus’ intellectual profile;
(c) situates Cassius Longinus’ philosophical work within third-century Platonist debates; and
(d) argues that reading On Sublimity and the fragments of Cassius Longinus as a single corpus yields a conjectural, but coherent and plausible, reconstruction of an integrated metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic philosophy;
(e) in the light of these conclusions provides a commentary on the argument of On Sublimity.
 

Publications and outputs

‘Divine and human laughter in later Platonism’, in P. Destrée and D. Trivigno (ed.), Laughter and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

‘Dionysius Longinus, On Sublimity’, in M. Edwards, A. Serafim and S. Papaioannou, Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Ancient Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

‘The functions of poetry in On Sublimity’, in T. Mackenzie and C. de Jonge (ed.), Ancient Greek Poetry and Poetics: Interactions between Theory and Practice (proposal submitted to Brill)

‘Cicero, Caecilius and On Sublimity’, in C. de Jonge (ed.), Greek Literary Criticism and Latin Texts: Connections and Interactions (proposal submitted to Brill)
 

‘Letters and the philosophical community in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus’, in J. Bryan and R. Morello (ed.), Philosophical Letters (proposal submitted to OUP)

Longinus Reunited. On Sublimity in Context (monograph, in preparation)