On the Sublime

Longinus continues to describe literary techniques and how various writers use them. He discusses amplification, a type of literary elaboration in which the writer intensifies emotion or the presentation of facts in a step-by-step manner. Amplification must always go hand in hand with greatness or else it will be “slack and hollow” (19).

There is a lacuna in the text, after which Longinus compares two great orators, Demosthenes and Cicero. While Demosthenes’s oration has a sudden impact, like “lightning or the thunderbolt,” Cicero’s is like a “vast steady fire which flares up […] and is fed intermittently” (21).

Similar to Cicero’s, Plato’s prose flows “in a smooth and copious stream” (21). Plato’s writings, which drew inspiration from Homer’s, remind us that a writer may improve his own work by emulating great writers of the past. When we take a great model from the past, the model will “raise us to a higher level of imaginative power” (23), inspiring competition as well as admiration. Longinus argues that imitating great writers of the past is a valid “road to greatness” (22), and advises writers to imagine how Plato or Demosthenes would have written and judged their work. By the same token, writers should consider what posterity will think of their writing, to avoid producing texts that will quickly become time-bound and limited in their ability to reach readers.

Imagination is “the most effective way of attaining weight, dignity and realism” (23). The purpose of using imaginative language is to create vivid word-images that make readers see, in their mind’s eye, exactly what the writer is describing. Such writing goes “beyond persuasion” to “enthrall” and “excite” the audience on an emotional level, through the use of “fabulous” and “incredible” images. The dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides were masters of this technique. Longinus draws a contrast between poetry, which emphasizes the fantastic, and oratory, which relies on rational persuasion (“actuality and probability,” 26). Oratory can use vivid images, but they must not become too fantastic or far-fetched, overstepping into poetry.