Chapter 12: Sublimity and Development
Now, though, the definition of the technical writers is not satisfactory to me. Development, they say, is a speech or writing which sets greatness around the subject. This could be a definition common to sublim ity and emotions and tropes, since indeed these, too, set some sort of greatness around speeches and writings. But to me these appear to diverge from one another: sublimity lies in what has been made lofty, development in multiplicity. For this reason sublimity often subsists even in a single concept, but development subsists entirely in quantity and a kind of abundance. 2. And development is, to put it in a formula, a filling up together of all the segments and topics that bring something to the subjects, one which strengthens what is being argued by dwelling on it, and which differs from proof in this way-because though the proof demonstrates what is being sought…
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… (Plato] like some sea, pours forth his expansive greatness most richly on many occasions. 3. As a result, I take it that though the orator is more emotional and, throughout his speeches and writings, has more fervor and fire, the other, set in a bold and appropriately great impressiveness, does not turn cold—but he does not strain himself towards the subject in the same way. 4. And, dearest Terentianus, in no other ways than these is it my opinion—and I am speaking as if it were allowed for us Greeks to know something about this—that Cicero differs from Demosthenes in great passages. You see, Demosthenes is great by a sublimity that is abrupter, Cicero by a profusion; while our man, because he is such as to set everything on fire and catch it by his force, swiftness, power, may be likened to lightning or a thunderbolt, Cicero, I take it, is like some conflagration that absorbs from all sides, feeds everywhere, and rolls on, for he has great capacity for remaining on the topic and for igniting again at various times and in various ways and for stirring himself up again by taking in more fuel. 5. But you would decide these things critically better than I. But the right moments for Demosthenes’ sublimity and hypertensings are in his powerful passages and his intense emotions and his knowing when one ought to astound the audience. The right moment for a Ciceronian profu sion comes when one must deluge the audience—a time fitting to address oneself to commonplaces and peroration and for stepping alongside the subject and for all of the expressive and epideictic passages, for writings on history and nature, and no small number of other kinds.
Commentary
topics: a word of various and vexed meanings. In English, we preserve part of the Greek word’s sense of “place” in our word “commonplaces”; Greek and Latin, however, distinguished between commonplaces and “particular” places (see Aristotle, Rhetoric 1358a!O ff.). Commonplaces were general statements applicable to all fields and disciplines e.g., “if equals are added to equals the results are equals”—what in geometry are called “common notions” or “axi oms”; “particular” places were restricted to specific disciplines—like the postu lates in Euclid. From “commonplaces” many arguments could be drawn, many instances offered as exemplification (see Aristotle’s Topics). For Longinus’ word for “commonplace,” see ch. 11, n. on commonplaces.
proof: refers to the various kinds of proofs used by public speakers; these are analyzed in detail in the first book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
tum cold: the primary meaning is, of course, that Plato does not Jose his fire and intensity because of a concern for impressiveness. Longinus admires Plato unreservedly; other ancient critics cen sured him for his collegian style (see citations in Russell’s note to criticisms by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plu tarch).
Cicero . . . Demosthenes: this is the famous adjudication of Demosthenes and Cicero. Russell notes that all three great digressions are in this form (that of the Iliad and Odyssey [9.11.5], that of true greatness and faultlessness [33-36], and the one here). The rules for such a comparison are given in the Progym nasmata of Theon (Spengel II.I 12-15).
You see, Demosthenes: in this long sentence, Longinus imitates the style first of Demosthenes and then of Cicero, e.g., the three quick nouns without connectives (“swiftness, strength, power”) balanced against the three rather profusely and completely phrased principal clauses.
profusion: Longinus uses a water image of Plato at the end of paragraph 2; here he uses a fire-image for Demosthenes, a water image for Cicero to point up their essential difference. Once that is established, he then employs fire imagery for each and then returns to a water-image for Cicero at the very end, first repeating “profusion” and then developing and amplifying it by the powerful word “deluge.” The word is pejorative, like Hamlet’s picture of the player-king, who—if he had a genuine “motive and … cue for passion”—would “drown the stage.” Longinus takes up the image again at the beginning of ch. 13. Perhaps the mentions of “profusions” are an echo of Cicero’s fondness for the image in his oratorical writings (On the Orator 2.62.64 and Brutus 274, 325). Since the comparison is subtly derogatory of Cicero, Longi nus stages it well: he lets the accumulated impact of his own values (emotion, intensity, sublimity) operate quietly in the reader’s memory; and he manages his offhand tone of self-depreciation by deferring ultimately to the critical judgment of Terentianus.
these things you: “these things” refers only to Cicero’s qualities, as Longinus insists that he is a better judge of Dem osthenes for the same reason that Terentianus is a better judge of Cicero: their respective knowledges of Greek and . Latin. Russell neatly supplies “Ro mans” after “you.”
powerful: the root word in Greek is an old one used in a very colloquial sense just like that of our “terribly” or “aw fully” in such a phrase as “an awfully good speaker”: it implies both skill and force (see 44.2). “Powerful” is always a positive word in Longinus, who uses it of his favorite authors (Demosthenes especially, but also of Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and Sappho). He distin guishes it from the kind of awfulness or terribleness which is hateful (9.5) and from bombastic rant (3.1); twice he associates it with the quality of being “hypertense” (10.1 and 12.5).
stepping alongside the subject: that is, digressions, although the English word has come to suggest irrelevance. The word is variously defined by the ancient rhetoricians. One of the best is found in the anonymous Art of Rhetoric (Spen gel 1.436), though the anonymous author rejects it: “a running out of the speech in a similitude or imitation of what has occurred.”
The word Longinus chooses for “di gression” (“stepping alongside the sub ject”) is a technical term of Old Comedy (Aristophanes) and denotes that part of the play in which the chorus came for ward and addressed the audience in the poet’s name. It also means “straying,” “overstepping,” “illusion,” and “tran sition.” One of the most famous and relevant “digressions” in oratory ap pears in Cicero’s speech defending the citizenship of the poet Archias. After disposing of the case briefly and easily, Cicero makes the bulk of his speech an exalted defense of education and cul ture. The speech of Pico della Miran dola (On the Dignity of Man) is also an example of a digression that is more important than the apologia proper. In both antiquity and the Renaissance, orators and public figures frequently interrupted their discourses to insert (or digress from) the stated subject in order to make autobiographical justifications of themselves coupled with biographi cal attacks on their opponents. These too may be considered as “digressions”; they are often powerful and moving, and—in a writer like Milton, for example—provide us with personal in formation of a touching kind.
writings on history and nature: by this time history was almost a branch of rhetoric and allowed for passages of display. We should think of Gibbon in English and not the pedestrian journals of history. Ecstatic raptures growing out of scientific observations are com mon: ancient science was often written in poetry and shared its rhetoric (e.g., Empedocles and Lucretius); Cicero’s voice rises in such passages, and Seneca is full of them.
