The Sublime

The sublime is that lightning-strike quality in language that lifts an audience out of itself, replacing mere agreement with a rush of wonder and exaltation. For the author known as Longinus, it springs from five sources: grandeur of thought, intense and genuine emotion, skillful figures of speech, noble diction, and the music of well-ordered composition. Where ordinary rhetoric coaxes a listener step by step, the sublime overpowers in a single flash, betraying the greatness of the writer's own soul. Echoed later in Demetrius and in Plutarch's awe at Homer, it became one of antiquity's most enduring measures of literary greatness.