Nonetheless, the treatise On the Sublime contains an excellent response to all the possible objections to reading such an unsuccessful text as On the Sublime and what the argument boils down to is that all texts are unsuccessful, all texts are weird, all texts exist mostly just as an excuse for the one or two sentences that stick with you.
Doing this hurts the brain and is never entirely successful. It is hard to bend your thinking so far in another direction, a past direction, into the ways and paths of a distant and to some degree opaque era. It is hard to feel the urgency of the subject matter anymore. The text is, then, in many ways the document of a lost time. The text dwells in tiresome ways upon tiresome subjects of ancient style and rhetoric and other matters that are hard to wrap one’s head around from a 21st century perspective. This is my own paraphrase of the argument, which is not really an argument.Īs a document, On the Sublime is strangely structured and also is missing various parts and is a fragmentary treatise all around. To be honest, On the Sublime doesn’t ever actually use the word ‘weird,’ not explicitly. Authorship is weird, the text says, and texts are weird. Probably it should be said that On the Sublime was written anonymously since the very point that the person who wrote On the Sublime makes in the treatise On the Sublime is that authorship, in a sense, transcends authorship. This has been disputed by the sorts of scholars who study such things. People used to say that Cassius Longinus wrote it. It is known as On the Sublime and might have been written in the 1st century CE. It was written sometime during the first few centuries of the Common Era.
There is a treatise written in ancient Greek.
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