Book Title: The Dating of Longinus

by James A. Arieti and John M. Crossett

Book Description: Up through the eighteenth century, scholars universally assumed that the author of the treatise entitled On the Sublime lived in the third century C.E. and was to be identified with the most famous philologian of that century, Cassius Longinus. During the nineteenth century, scholars began to revise that concurrence of opinion and to locate the author in the first century C.E. The monograph The Dating of Longinus begins with a full review of the problem and the various kinds of arguments that would be useful to ascertaining the date precisely. The major part of the monograph–an entirely new argument—is its analysis of the various chronological phases manifested by the topos of cultural decline. Other matters taken up include the fad for colossal statues, the banishment of philosophers from Rome, anti-semitism in Rome, the conflict between Asianism and Atticism, references to rhetoricans Caecilius of Calacte and Theodorus, and the eruption of Vesuvius.