The work is dedicated to a certain Terentianus, of whom nothing is known (see Roberts’s edition, p. 18).
The alternative author Dionysius of the MSS. has been variously identified with the rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Atticist Aelius Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Dionysius Atticus of Pergamum, Dionysius of Miletus. Other suggested claimants to the authorship are Plutarch (L. Vaucher in Études critiques sur le traité du sublime (Geneva, 1854) and Aelius Theon of Alexandria (W. Christ), the author of a work on the Arrangement of Speech. But it seems most probable that the author was an unknown writer who flourished in the 1st century soon after Caecilius and before Hermogenes. Wilamowitz-Möllendorff gives his date as about A.D. 40.
The rendering On the Sublime implies more than is intended by the Greek Περὶ ὕψους (“impressiveness in style,” Jebb). Nothing abnormal, such as is associated with the word “sublime,” is the subject of discussion; it is rather a treatise on style. According to the author’s own definitions, “Sublimity is a certain distinction and excellence in expression,” “sublimity consists in elevation,” “sublimity is the echo (or expression) of a great soul” (see note in Roberts).
The treatise is especially valuable for the numerous quotations from classical authors, above all, for the preservation of the famous fragment of Sappho, the ode to Anactoria, beginning
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν,
imitated by Catullus (li.) Ad Lesbiam,
“Ille mi par esse deo videtur.”
“Its main object is to point out the essential elements of an impressive style which, avoiding all tumidity, puerility, affectation and bad taste, finds its inspiration in grandeur of thought and intensity of feeling, and its expression in nobility of diction and in skilfully ordered composition” (Sandys).
A full bibliography of the subject will be found in the edition by W. R. Roberts (Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1907), containing an Introduction, Analysis, Translation and Appendices (textual, linguistic, literary and bibliographical), to which may be added F. Marx, Wiener Studien, xx. (1898), and F. Kaibel, Hermes, xxxiv. (1899), who respectively advocate and reject the claims of Longinus to the authorship; J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (2nd ed., 1906), pp. 288, 338, should also be consulted. The number of translations in all the languages of Europe is large, including the famous one by Boileau, which made the work a favourite text-book of the bellelettristic critics of the 18th century. A text and translation was published by A. O. Prickard (1907-1908).
