[179]. I do not know that Julian was in strictness a “pupil” of Themistius, but the tone of the long epistle to him, ed. cit., inf., i. 328, is at least half pupillary. Himerius, another contemporary sophist to whom Photius (v. infra, p. [183]) devotes some attention, was certainly Julian’s tutor. We have some of his work (ed. Wernsdorf, Göttingen, 1790 and later), but I have found little to the present point in this, which is mostly pure epideictic or didactic.
[180]. Ed. Hertlein, 2 vols. or parts (Leipsic, 1875-76).
[181]. Ed. cit., i. 1-327.
[182]. Ibid., ii. 487. The numbers of the epistles will sufficiently indicate the whereabouts of the remaining citations from them.
[183]. Ibid., p. 434.
[184]. πρὶν ἀναπαύσασθαι.
[185]. See next chapter.
CHAPTER V.
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS, PLUTARCH, LUCIAN, LONGINUS.
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS—HIS WORKS—THE ‘RHETORIC’—THE ‘COMPOSITION’—CENSURES AND COMMENTARIES ON ORATORS, ETC.—THE MINOR WORKS—THE JUDGMENT OF THUCYDIDES—GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE—PLUTARCH—THE ‘LIVES’ QUITE BARREN FOR US—THE ‘MORALIA’ AT FIRST SIGHT PROMISING—EXAMINATION OF THIS PROMISE—THE “EDUCATION”—THE PAPERS ON “READING”—THE ‘LIVES OF THE ORATORS’—THE ‘MALIGNITY OF HERODOTUS’—THE “COMPARISON OF ARISTOPHANES AND MENANDER”—THE ‘ROMAN QUESTIONS’—THE ‘SYMPOSIACS’—LUCIAN—THE ‘HOW TO WRITE HISTORY’—THE ‘LEXIPHANES’—OTHER PIECES: THE ‘PROMETHEUS ES’—WORKS TOUCHING RHETORIC—HIS CRITICAL LIMITATIONS—LONGINUS: THE DIFFICULTIES RAISED—“SUBLIMITY”—QUALITY AND CONTENTS OF THE TREATISE—PRELIMINARY RETROSPECT—DETAILED CRITICISM: THE OPENING—THE STRICTURE ON THE ‘ORITHYIA’—“FRIGIDITY”—THE “MAIDENS IN THE EYES”—THE CANON “QUOD SEMPER”—THE SOURCES OF SUBLIMITY—LONGINUS ON HOMER—ON SAPPHO—“AMPLIFICATION”—“IMAGES”—THE FIGURES—“FAULTLESSNESS”—HYPERBOLES—“HARMONY”—THE CONCLUSION—MODERNITY OF THE TREATISE, OR RATHER SEMPITERNITY.
From a certain point of view, no critical writer of antiquity has a greater interest than the rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus. |Dionysius of Halicarnassus.| It is true, of course, that this view is at once strictly limited and decidedly complex. As Dionysius is not even to be mentioned with Longinus for what may be called critical inspiration, so he falls simply out of sight when he is compared with Aristotle in point of authority, of method, and, above all, of that somewhat indirect and illegitimate, but real, importance which is derived from a long tradition. So, too, there is nothing in him of that “flash,” that illumination, which we still receive from the turning-on of the lamp of satiric genius to the critical field by Lucian, as long before by Aristophanes. But the treatise On the Sublime is, after all, but an inestimable fragment: the loss to criticism, had the Rhetoric and the Poetics shared the fate of some others of their author’s works, would consist partly in the loss of what has been written about them and in following of them; while Aristophanes and Lucian are only critics at intervals and by accident. In Dionysius we have a critic by profession, and not merely a rhetorician, of whose critical work an assortment, varied in matter and considerable in bulk, survives, who had an evident love for his business, and whose talents for it were very much greater than some authorities seem willing to allow.