Chapter 44: The Decline of Sublimity
Since you are engaged in useful learning, my dearest Terentianus, I shall not hesitate to occult this question which is left, a question for which one of the philosophers recently sought elucidation, saying: “Wonder holds me, as no doubt many others, how it is that though in our age there are natures which are highly persuasive and political, insightful and apt, and most fertile in producing pleasing touches in speeches and writings, yet there no longer come to be—except rather rarely—men who are sublime and transcendentally great. So universal is the infertility which has hold over our life. 2. Or, heaven knows, must we believe that assertion being bruited about, that democracy is a good nurse of great men, in which alone do those powerful in speeches and writings both reach their acme and die? That assertion says, you see, that freedom is sufficient to nourish the sensibilities of those who are great in mind and to raise their expectations, and at the same time to excite both an animated zeal for striving with each other and a love of esteem for first prizes. 3. Besides, because of the awards available in their polities, the superiorities of the souls of public speakers are on every occasion professionally exercised and polished and, in the freedom of their practice, bedazzle their audience. But nowadays,” he said, “we are likely to learn from childhood to live under a justified slavery, with our own still tender sensibilities just out of the swaddling clothes of its customs and behavior, and we lack the taste of that finest stream of speeches and writings and the one most able to breed them—I speak of freedom,” he said, “for this is why we emerge as great in nothing except flattery.” 4. Because of this he used to say that though the other abilities we have arise even in household servants, no slave ever comes to be a public speaker: the lack of free speech, you see, boils up in him, and, as it were, guards the one who has been battered over and over again by habitual mistreatment: [5.] “the day of slavery,” according to Homer, “robs us of half our excellence.” “Now,” he says, “if what I hear may be believed, just as the cages in which Pygmies—but only the ones called nani—are reared not only restrict the development of those they enclose but also crush them because of the bond that lies around their mouths, so one might explain that every kind of slavery, even if it should be most justified, is a cage of the soul and a common prison house.” 6. I of course took him up and answered him: “Finding fault with the present over and over again, my best of friends, is easy and a peculiarity of human beings; but see whether it is not the peace of the world that corrupts great nature—but much rather this unlimited war which holds in occupation our cravings and, in addition, (heaven knows) our emotions, which stand guard over our lives nowadays and drive and carry them off to their heights. The love of material things (of which we are all now insatiably sick) and the love of pleasure drive us into slavery—rather (as one might say), they plunge us—men, lives, and all—down into an abyss: though love of money is a disease that makes for pettiness, love of pleasure is one which makes men most ignoble. 7. Indeed, I am not able to discover by reasoning how those of us who over-esteem limitless wealth and (to say it more truly) make it into a divinity can avoid admitting into our souls the vices that naturally follow it. Extravagance, you see, accompanies immoderate and uncurtailed wealth, holding onto it and (as they say) keeping step with it, and when wealth opens the way into cities and houses, extravagance comes in at the same time and sets up house together with him. And when they have stayed for a time, they hatch younglings in our lives (according to the wise), and swiftly begetting offspring, they breed vanity and luxury-not as bastards, but as very legitimate offspring. And if anyone should allow offspring bred of this wealth to come to maturity, they swiftly implant inexorable despots in our souls—contumely and lawlessness and shameless impudence. 8. Thus it is necessary for these things to happen and for humanity no longer to gaze up openly at the cosmos nor for there to be any speech and writing made for later fame, but it is necessary for such vices little by little to accomplish their end in the cycle of corruption in our lives, and for the greatness of our souls to dwindle and wither away and become what no one will emulate, when mortal man wonders utterly at his own bloated parts and neglects to develop what is deathless. 9. You see, no one who in making a judgment has accepted a bribe may still come to be a free and sound judge of what is justifiable and fine (you see, what belongs to the bribe-taker necessarily seems to him fine and justifiable); whenever bribes determine our lives, and the chasing after others’ deaths and the lying in wait for settlements, and the purchasing of profit from every source at the price of our souls—each man made captive and prisoner from the love of material things—would we, indeed, in such a plague-stricken corruption of life believe that there still remains any kind of free and unbribable judge to decide what works are great and will come down through the ages and that this judge will not be out-electioneered by the craving for gain? 10. But perhaps for such as us it is better to be governed than to be free, since such acquisitiveness, if let entirely loose, as if from prison, against its neighbors, would burn up the world with its vices. 11. And, on the whole, I said that ease was the expending the natures bred nowadays—an ease in which all of us (except for a few) live out our lives, without struggling or undertaking anything except for the sake of praise and pleasure and not for the benefit derived from emulation and a worthy esteem. 12. “It is best to let these things go at random,” and to make room for what comes next—this was to be the emotions, about which I promised to write in their own collection of notes; this topic has a place in the other parts of speeches and writing and of sublimity itself, as well as to us …
Commentary
Chapter 44 is the peroration of Longinus’ speech. Aristotle discusses peroration in the closing pages of his Rhetoric (1419bl0 ff.). He lists as its four aims 1) disposing the reader favorably towards oneself and against one’s adversary; 2) development and lowering the opposition’s view; 3) arousing certain emotions in the audience; 4) recapitulation. Among the emotions which he specifies are pity, indignation, hatred, emulation, and a sense of striving. All of these four points appear in the last chapter of Longinus.
Both Nicolas the Sophist and the author of an anonymous work on rhetoric (Spengel I.450-453) say that the peroration embraces an athroismos (see ch. 23) of subject, character, and emotion. The anonymous handbook also divides peroration into two kinds: the pragmatic-the aim of which is re capitulation-and the emotional; an emotional peroration has two aims: to set up the emotions of those who hear it and to strengthen the speech. Cassius Longinus (Spengel I.304) says that the peroration is an antistrophe to the introduction, that it is protreptic to the voters, and that it consists of reminders of what has preceded and development. Longinus observes each of these functions. Apsines, in his Technique of Rhetoric (Spengel I.366-67), says that perorations can be accomplished, among many ways discussed, by means of characterization and question-and answer. Longinus uses both in his device of a dialogue conducted between a philosopher and himself. The device is characteristic of his method for recapitulating his “demonstration” of “proofs”: he does not re-analyze or summarize the figures, for example, but instead utilizes them in his own rhetoric, which exemplifies what Dionysius of Halicarnassus speaks of in his letter to Pompei us (chs. 1 and 6): “philosophic rhetoric.”
For details of how Longinus manages his peroration, see both the Introduction and the following notes.
useful learning: in ch. 2, Longinus had said that even those parts of speeches and writings which came only from nature could be understood only by technique, and that had those who had disesteemed sincere students reasoned this out, they would not have considered theory of technique excessive and useless. Here in ch. 44, he counts Terentianus as just such a sincere student, for whose sake he is going to clear up a popular but erroneous view on the decline of oratory in order to express the true view.
occult: an astronomical term sufficiently common in Greek to require no mollifier. In ch. 32.2, where the word was used earlier, Longinus said that the animus of Demosthenes against the traitors “occulted”-i.e., eclipsed, hid, and intercepted-the multiplicity of his metaphors. Such occultation is, for Longinus, a necessary part of great art; as he remarks in ch. 17, ” … a figure is most excellent when the fact that it is a figure thoroughly escapes our notice.” The verb “occult” is a warning to the reader to read deeply—especially the myth, which Russell describes merely as “a genealogical fantasy (that is all it is).” [“Occult,” the word of the manuscript, we accept as the reading. See Appendix A.]
Every major theme in On the Sublime is given its due place in the peroration, although Longinus does not here adopt the bald and mechanical enumeration which he had used in the partitio of his exposition (8.1). There, of course, the virtues of enumeration are obvious: as Fortunatianus says (Halm, pp. 113-114), when the subject is long and obscure, a partitio is necessary, and it should be enumerated in brief.
left: the word “left” in Longinus indicates a part of the whole, qualitatively different but still a part of the whole. Therefore those who regard ch. 44 as an “appendix” (e.g., Russell and Segal), even though they recognize its close connection with the rest of the work, err in terminology. Ch. 44 is, as we have said above, the “peroration.”
philosophers: as Russell says, “Since the views expressed equate the principate with slavery, we naturally think of the association of certain Stoic groups in the first century with opposition to the principate.” A few lines later (44.2), the philosopher uses the word “democracy,” probably as a reference to the Roman Republic, especially in the years before the principate, when Cicero and Caesar and Hortensius and other great orators flourished. Russell’s note lists modern sources for the problem; the locus classicus is Tacitus’ Dialogue on the Orators.
Longinus will play on many phrases used by the philosopher in his own answering speech.
infertility: in the first clause of this sentence, the philosopher had said that there were many natures “fertile in pleasing touches”; here he says that there is an “infertility” of great speakers. “Dearth” is the usual translation. Behind the words “universal infertility” lies perhaps the Platonic and Stoic explanation for cultural decline, a topos which extends from the birth of Cicero (106 BCE) to the death of Dio Chrysostom (ca. 113 CE), see our monograph The Dating of Longinus, pp. 5-10 and 44-53.
The philosopher’s list of good oratorical traits is depressing: credibility, smartness, pleasing touches. He is describing a Hyperides, not a Demosthenes; a Dryden, not a Shakespeare.
Or, heaven knows. . .being bruited about: the word “or” is disjunctive and indicates that the philosopher is shifting his point of view; the words “must we believe,” coupled with the oath “heaven knows,” indicate that it is a point of view with which he disagrees. His own theory, just briefly hinted at in the previous sentence, in the phrase “universal infertility” would, presumably, have developed along Stoic lines, had he ever got around to developing it. Instead, however, in taking up the alternative theory—that the loss of political freedom is the cause of cultural decline—he becomes so enamored of the other notion that he develops it at length and shows no sign of stopping until Longinus finally interrupts him in 44.6. Although he is called a philosopher, we must not assume that he was sharply distinct from a sophist or a rhetorician: the words were almost interchangeable in antiquity. By using the name “philosopher” of him rather than “sophist,” Longinus is amplifying his stature, only to cut him down.
The phrase “being bruited about” originally signified a confused babble. Later the word refers to what is common knowledge, common talk, our English phrases “being noised about,” “bruited about”—the sort of “cocktail party” philosophy which Sir Thomas Browne would classify as a “vulgar error.”
The popular argument presented by the philosopher is based on external rather than internal causes: it assumes that a different form of government will produce a climate favorable to oratory. Such a view is a direct denial of man’s nature, which responds, even in ages of cultural decline, to the greatness of external nature—to volcanoes and oceans—as well as to the greatness of earlier cultural periods. No combination of nature and technique is needed to respond to a volcano; but to appreciate Homer or Demosthenes both are required. So Longinus argues. Since even the philosopher has the ability to appreciate the fact that earlier writers and speakers were superior in greatness, his very concern for the problem confirms Longinus’ point. “Freedom” was as much a cant word in the first century as it is in our own day. For a full discussion of freedom in first century Rome, see Chaim Wirszubski, LIBERTAS as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
On the question of whether Philo could be the source for the philosopher, see Appendix C.
a justified slavery: we have followed Russell’s interpretation here. The word we have translated “justified” is usually translated “just,” i.e., “justly exercised,” but in its adverbial form means “with reason, with good cause.” If we translate “just,” we must assume an irony in the philosopher which the rest of his diatribe does not justify. In 44.10, Longinus shows that he takes the philosopher’s word for the sense “justified”; he is undoubtedly playing ironically with the two senses of the word.
Perhaps the word-play may be used to help date the work: even in the latter part of the first century CE, the legitimacy of the principate was still a lingering issue; it is hard to believe that in the third century CE. men in Rome were still seriously doubting it-although if the author be Cassius Longinus, who participated in a rebellion against Rome, such a sentiment would be appropriate. Grammatici certant ...
swaddling-clothes: the image of “swaddling-clothes” appears in a pas sage of Philo, the sentiment of which is apposite enough to have caused several scholars to see a close connection be tween Philo and Longinus, and one scholar (Rostagni) has even identified them (see Appendix C).
Romans, at least of the first century CE, seem—like modern Russians—virtually to have bound their babies in swaddling-clothes: see Pliny the Elder (Natural History 7.1.3), where he paints an ironically pathetic picture of man, the future ruler of earth, put into vincula as no domestic animal is, with hands and feet tied down.
stream: Longinus used the image earlier, when he said (13.3) that Plato channeled off some of his greatness from “the Homeric stream.” The image is drawn from Plato himself as well (Timaeus 75£): “The stream of speeches … the finest and best of streams.”
abilities we have: one word in Greek, signifying a permanent condition or habit, either of body or mind; it may be present by nature or by training. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Composition 25) uses the word several times in his assessment of Demosthenes; he compares his mastery of rhetoric to the mastery of a great flautist, whose hands might not have been able to reproduce complicated passages at first, but could later after long training and custom had made such mastery second nature. So Demosthenes, after years of training, had such an ability.
When Longinus uses this word he is preparing for the finale of his peroration, in which he will return to the opening chapter. There he had said that a good speech had to be useful, and usefulness, he said, consisted of two things: first, defining what sublimity was; second, showing how and by what means it might be obtained. He has in the previous chapters given a formal definition, which he then developed both by an analysis of the five sources and by examples. But since sublimity is a characteristic of the soul, and since both the philosopher and he agree that men in their day seemed to lack this characteristic, it is necessary for Longinus to show how it may be re-acquired.
no slave...public speaker: slaves often reached positions of power and prestige in antiquity as doctors, musicians, literary critics, and even philosophers. The slave Epictetus, for example, no less than the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a great Stoic. In the imperial bureaucracy from Augustus on both slaves and freedmen were very powerful. But there is no record of any slave who became active in law or politics (i.e., rhetoric). Russell cites modern sources dealing with the question.
Since it is a philosopher speaking, and one who seems to represent the Stoic arguments used by the supporters of a republic throughout the principate (e.g., Brutus and Helvidius Priscus), we are probably intended to remember certain of the Stoic paradoxes: only the wise man is free and only the wise man is a public speaker. Throughout his discussion of cultural decline, the philosopher is forgetful of such specific Stoic maxims and also of the general Stoic aim of being unemotional.
according to Homer: from the Odyssey (17.322). These are lines spoken by the swineherd slave, Eumaeus, to the disguised Odysseus, whose old dog has just seen his master and died. Eumaeus says that no one has bothered to care for the beast:
You know how servants are: with out a master
they have no will to labor, or excel.
For Zeus who views the wide world takes away
half the manhood of a man, that day
he goes into captivity and slavery.
(Tr. Robert Fitzgerald)
Pygmies...nani: the philosopher suggests that he is using “Pygmies” as a generic term, nani as a species, a dwarf. Although the distinction was not always observed in antiquity, it did exist. Aristotle (Problems 892a) asks why it is that some nani are born small, others large. Dwarves, he says, are produced in two ways: by narrow spaces or by deprivation of food. When narrow space operates, Aristotle says, the creatures produced are called Pygmies. Space, of course, does not refer to artificial cages or quarters that cramp and confine, but rather to the womb of the mother, a confinement by nature. This point he makes clear in the Generation of Animals (749a4): Pygmies, he says there, are “maimed or defective in their parts and in their size during gestation.” Such creatures are, however, proportioned like their parents. Tradition made the Pygmies a race of “little men” who engaged in a war with the cranes, a war which was alluded lo by Homer(Il 3.6).
I. ..answered him: it is part of Longinus’ art that his philosopher, whom he will now answer, is a symbolic amalgam of all the philosophic sects current in the period: Stoic, Epicurean, Peripatetic, and even Cynic. Longinus wishes to set his own Platonic and aesthetic philosophy against all the contemporary explanations, in order to show the timelessness of his own theory as dis tinct from the historicism which infects the others.
The philosopher—true to the form of first century rhetorical philosophers—is warming up to his theme, cast in the form of a diatribe. He has made his main point, that the cause of cultural decline is political in nature, and is now beginning to develop and amplify it with illustrations and images, the first of which is an elaborate and far-fetched conceit the cultural environment of the day is to the mind as cages are Lo the bodies of dwarfed pygmies. As a witty sign of his various games, Longinus even puts the word “development” into the mouth of the philosopher just al the point when he begins his rhetorical “development.” The philosopher reveals his rhetorical and “inorganic” education in his phrase “if what I hear may be believed,” for his knowledge is based on secondary sources. Longinus will outdo him in fanciful conceits in the speech that follows, but his imagery there is drawn from nature, not from books and from the curious and perverted customs of a decadent stage. If the philosopher be a living proof of his own theory, Longinus (his contemporary) is a living disproof.
Of course, the philosopher’s speech is not simply parody and mockery; it has its own rhetorical pulse and power, but its total effect is Ovidian and even conventional. His argument is not wrong; it is superficial. He does not touch on the deeper causes, the moral and internal ones. Longinus had, apparently, expected him to do so, but as soon as the philosopher showed that he was going to be rhetorical and epideictic rather than philosophical, by resorting to development and amplification rather than probing deeper, Longinus interrupts.
Finding fault: Longinus here censures the philosopher just as he would censure any thinker of any age who thought that local and temporal circumstances affected human nature in an essential manner. The “battle of the ancients and the moderns” existed in antiquity; by the striking but “metaphysical” analogy of the pygmies, the philosopher has revealed that he is shifting his original inquiry to this jejune and trivial theme, and Longinus wants none of it. He was well aware of that “human malignity” (Tacitus, Dialogus 18.3) which always praised the past and belittled the present, for he himself had commented on it (33.3). For Longinus, the great men of the past presented models to be imitated and emulated, not sticks to belabor the present, not pretexts for ornate lamentations on the decline of culture. His initial censure of the philosopher comes just here and does not start by contradicting the philosopher’s theory of the reasons for cultural decline.
For a modem statement of “human malignity,” compare Thoreau (Walden ch. “What I lived for”):
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
the peace of the world...corrupts great natures: Juvenal (Satires 6.292) had touched on this notion in his famous phrase “the evils of a long peace.” So, too, in the Dialogus (38.2) Tacitus has Maternus comment on how the long quiet of the times, and the continuous ease of the people, and the perpetual tranquility of the senate, and especially the disciplines of the emperor have pacified eloquence just as they have everything else. (Italics ours)
Our own day has no appreciation of this beneficial vice, but we can reconstruct the feeling from what we know of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. In the Dialogus, Tacitus has Maternus defend the long peace, even if it was purchased at the cost of great oratory: the republic was tormented with continually new legislation, with midnight meetings of the magistrates under crisis, with charges and counter charges and feuds, with factions and class warfare (36); great eloquence is the offspring of license, not of freedom, for licentious freedom is the comrade of sedi tion, an incitement to lawless protest (40). True, Maternus admits, we do not know of any Spartan or Cretan orators; but then they were well regulated states. The Gracchi, he says, were eloquent, and so was Cicero, but at what a price! This is Longinus’ first correction of the philosopher’s theory: he substitutes “peace” for “freedom,” and in the two words sums up the whole argument of Tacitus’ Dialogus, which (for Longi nus) would have been too historical and political and hence superficial. The pax romana was a better term for describing the Roman empire than “tyranny,” which is what the philosopher meant by his word “freedom.” Longinus was under no illusion about the values of peace; like Maternus, he knew the answer to the question (Dialogus 37.7), “Who does not know that it is better and more useful to enjoy peace than to be vexed by war?” But he would have denied the conclusion of Maternus, that war breeds better and loftier combatants than peace, and that “the condition of oratory is similar” (37.8). War is the physical form of anti-logos: Longinus used “war” as his image for this in his second explanation of the cause for cultural decline.
much rather: Longinus here qualitatively shifts the basis of discussion from the external to the internal. It is that “huge army of the world’s desires” which corrupts logos. The peace of the pax romana was purely external; the war of desires raged fiercer because of it.
insatiably sick: a powerful oxymoron which achieves its effect by the double sense of “sick”; this word is also used of emotion, especially the emotion of love, “a womanish desire.” Although Longinus uses much medical imagery, this is his first use of the word “be sick,” which he has reserved for the culmination of his medical metaphors.
love of pleasure: this word and its associated vices, love of material things and love of money, are used only in this chapter. They are all opposed to the philosopher’s misuse of “love of esteem.” In 44.2, the philosopher praised the “good old days” of democracies and republics, when love of esteem and ambition led to greatness in oratory. Longinus is asserting in his nexus of substitute “loves,” that love of esteem will still produce greatness; his point is that man has substituted a love of praise for a love of esteem. Love of esteem may lead to failure because of bad technique and judgment, but it is always a virtue. At the root of the word lies the concept of esteem (in Greek timé); for Longinus the true “timocracy” will be what John Adams called an “aristocracy of the intellect,” and not the timocracy censured by Plato (who seems to have coined the word in Republic 545B), where men “desire material things” (548A).
Love of money is famous as the root of all evils (I Timothy 6: 10). It is used as a synonym for “love of material things,” a word which appears in Plato (Republic 391B-C) in a passage strongly reminiscent of Longinus:
Achilles, although the son of a goddess and Peleus, a man most wise…and although reared by the most wise Chiron, was so full of perturbation that he had within him two sicknesses opposite to each other….an illiberal love of material things and a contempt for gods and men. (Italics ours)
Longinus will take up the “contempt for gods” in 44.8.
drive us into slavery: just as Longinus had offered a political explanation superior to that offered by the philosopher and then replaced it with a “much better” moral explanation, so now he takes up the philosopher’s slave-image, amplified by the conceit of the pygmies, only to replace it with an image superior in truth, if not in ingenuity, to the pygmy-image. He had marked the earlier one by the phrase “much rather”; of this he says simply “rather.”
disease that makes for pettiness...most ignoble: the two vices—love of material things and love of pleasure—are allied but distinct. The first makes man “unfree,” illiberal, as Plato had said (see n. on love of pleasure above); those who strive for wealth as an end in itself lack that expert knowledge of generosity which the liberal man has (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I 122a34).
The epithet “making for pettiness” is also a grim joke; first, it takes up the philosopher’s picture of breeding dwarves, of literally making men little, petit, petty. Second, it links together, in a kind of climax, the sequence of chapters immediately preceding: 41-43. All three deal with similar material—the things that destroy sublimity; all three contain the word “make petty.” In fact, the first chapter in the sequence (41) opens with the word “make petty”; the last chapter (43) contains the word in its last sentence. And in the first line of the intervening chapter it appears in the comparative (42.1). Ch. 41 discusses rhythms that are broken, short, effeminate, cute; ch. 42 discusses syncope—a cramping, confining, compressing, deadening device; ch. 43 discusses low, shameful pettiness of diction. The verb “make petty” was the word used by Aristotle to signify the process of breeding dwarves, and dwarves are the basis for the philosopher’s conceit. Among the reasons that make Longinus interrupt the philosopher is his loathing for such human mannikins, of man manqué.
Pettiness and slavery: Longinus conjoined the two words as early as ch. 9.3, where he began to discuss the five elements that make for greatness and sublimity. It is a sentence which contains many of the key words used here in ch. 44:
the true public speaker ought to have a sensibility neither low nor ignoble. You see, those whose sense of things and behavior in the whole of life are petty and appropriate to a slave are not the sort who would bring out some thing wonderful and worthy of the ages…
So pettiness and slavery are the burden of his interruption of the philosopher, just as they have been the burden of the preceding three chapters, for the petti ness of diction and rhythm make the public speaker who descends to it a slave. Here in ch. 44 Longinus says that the love of money makes a man petty; the love of pleasure (and hence of “pleasing touches”) makes a man ignoble. Both are seen as diseases that cripple and dwarf man’s nature.
Russell observes that Longinus’ terminology is technically exact in accordance with Stoic philosophy (Longinus is reading the Stoic philosopher a lesson from his own book): love of money is a disease, love of pleasure a diseased weakness.
over-esteem: the word picks up “love of esteem” and plays on its root, which means “estimation,” with its attendant notion of setting a price. The only “inspiration” that hedonistic money grubbers have is to neglect what is deathless (44.8) and to raise themselves to a kind of divinity. Of course, they delude themselves, like those guilty of parenthyrson (3.5), with “empty emotion” as they try to make what is even beneath their own “bloated pans” into a god.
Extravagance: the word appeared three times in the passage quoted from Theopompus in the previous chapter—a description of the luxurious and corrupt Persian armament: extravagant carpets, extravagant divans, and extravagantly worked cups and chalices. One suspects that the passage from Theopompus was “staged” there deliberately. The West has always used the “pomp of the Persian” and East as symbols for decadence. Juvenal, for example, throughout the satires attacks Rome for succumbing to this barbaric concern for luxurious living; and Longinus is remarkably close to Juvenal in his moral analysis of Rome’s cultural decline. As usual, his quotations work for him in many ways.
The word “extravagance” corresponds to “love of pleasure” as wealth corresponds to “love of money.”
according to the wise: Plato (Republic 573C-E) traces the corruption of the tyrannic man in similar imagery: he becomes drunk with erotic love and melancholy, takes to indulging in feasts and revels, and Eros enters his house and governs his soul; the cravings put forth their shoots and sprout their wings and hatch, and the result is delusion. Both the Platonic passage and Longinus’ myth are ways of figuring the familiar Greek nexus: satiety, hybris, and delusion.
bastards: the same analogy was used in 39.3. There Longinus had said that musical notes were the bastard off spring of persuasion, not the legitimate ones, which were words, the true “workings of human nature.” Only by logos, Longinus said, could men truly “rear up” their souls to communion with greatness.
inexorable despots: “inexorable” is literal: they cannot be prayed to, like Achilles in Bk. 9 of the Iliad, for he has become a tyrant and a despot and he is compared to death. The true despots and tyrants of men are the internal cravings and their brood of vices, not the Roman emperor. Such, of course, is the main line of Greek philosophical thought: Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in his sequence of Ethics and Politics. The philosopher had argued that if the emperor could be replaced by a democracy, sublimity would return to speech; Longinus answers him by transferring the external tyrant to the internal world of man, the soul, just as Plato had used an external state in the Republic only as a means to show how the parts of the soul must be in a fitting harmony, with logos in command.
In ch. 7, at the end of the exposition proper and just before the mechanical partitio, Longinus listed “tyranny” as one of the things which must be despised before the soul could be great and sublime.
contumely… shameless impudence: the only use of hybris in the text. The usual translation “pride” is only partly correct; much better is Hamlet’s fuller phrase “the proud man’s contumely,” used in his great soliloquy “To be or not to be,” at the heart of the tragedy (IIl.i). Hobbes, in his epitome of Aristotle’s Rhetoric renders it as “contumely” (1378b23). The only formal definition of hybris that has come down from the classical period is Aristotle’s: it is what a superior does to an inferior when he hurts him, in word or deed, not for advantage but for the perception which he gets of the victim’s shame. The ultimate sin of wealth is not its gross physical wallowing in material pleasures but its corruption of the soul.
“Shameless impudence” is also used only here, although cognate forms of the root “shame” appear often. It is a fitting climax to the sequence of hybris and living against the rules. Aristotle, who gives it a formal definition in the Rhetoric (l383bl5), says that it is a “slighting lack of emotion with respect to the vices which lead to a lowering of the opinion held of one by others.” The shameless one slights decency because he has no emotional feeling about it—and in this “lazy apathy” of which “Stoics boast” (Pope, Essay on Man II.101), Longinus is probably “cutting down” the Stoic philosopher with whom he is arguing.
to gaze: in the great passage on man’s nature (ch. 35), Longinus had said that nature designed man to be a spectator of the cosmos and, as a result of the grandeur and sublimity which he beheld, to be an emulator and imitator of its greatness. This is the doctrine of man the animal wilh an upright vision. In 14.3, Longinus says that the man who does not write for the ages will have his soul made “blind” and his works will not survive for a “later fame”—a word which he uses here in ch. 44 in this same sentence. When a man lets the cravings and their brood usurp the sublime nature of his soul, he will become blind both to his immediate cultural milieu and its eternal content. Segal (p. 135) discusses man as a contemplator mundi and, in n. 28 of his article, cites references to the doctrine found in ancient literature.
speech and writing…later fame: in “speech and writing,” we find Longinus’ third and penultimate pun on logos. Speeches and writings have be come so corrupt that no rational account in speech or writing can be made of them; hence they will have no later fame, either by their own qualities or by critical evaluation. (See below n. on “as well as to us”; also Appendix A, entries 9.2 and 13.2.)
The phrase “later fame” recalls the splendid vision (14.3) of the part to be played in imitation and emulation by posterity as well as by the past. As Segal says (p. 124), “What is sublime…is eternal, and what aims at eternity becomes sublime.”
what no one will emulate: one word in Greek; LSJ translate it as “unenviable,” but this loses Longinus’ point—that it is possible for man so to corrupt the natural potential for sublimity in his soul that he will himself cease to be what merits emulation and imitation.
The phrase “the greatness of our souls” deliberately echoes the philosopher’s debased parallel phrase: “superiorities of the souls”—a parallelism which is not translatable into English. Longinus is not only answering the philosopher point for point but is also arguing that there is no “dearth” or “infertility” of potential greatness, that the amount of “psychic greatness” in the world is the same.
mortal man wonders...what is deathless: like Plato, Longinus rejects the Protagorean assertion that “man is the measure of all things”; it is God who is the measure (Laws 4.716c). The philosopher’s environmental heresy is a form of such atheistic humanism, whereas Longinus is advocating what Segal (p. 134) calls “divine humanism.”
bribe...justifiable and fine: Longinus now indulges in development at the same time that he links together many references to “judgment.” In ch. I, he had urged Terentianus “critically to decide most truly with him” concerning the notes which he has written on sublimity: such is the young man’s duty and his nature (1.2). In ch. 6, Longinus says that such adjudication, based on a pure knowledge of true sublimity, must be extended over many years of experience before one can attain to judgment. And in 7.4, he says that the “judgment” of many men in many places at many times produces from discord of manners and tongues a concord of sound approval. Here in ch. 44, he draws an elaborate analogy between the judges of a polity and the judges of literature: just as the man who pursues wealth and luxury corrupts his body with disease, so the judge who takes bribes cannot be sound and healthy and free. In the adjectives “justifiable and fine,” Longinus shows that he intends both political and aesthetic magistrates. He then develops this development as he imagines each man in the republic of letters as a judge; should men take the bribes of wealth, esteem, reputation, and power-as he listed them in ch. 7-there will be left no honest critic of literature, and even appreciation of what has been great in the past will cease to exist.
The metaphorical analogy dramatizes the abstract elements of chs. 6 and 7: the bribers are those to the worldiness of “death devote[d],” and, like Eve, they see their temporal esteems as “justifiable and fine”; in order to obtain their materialistic ends, they bribe the legal judge, in the fond hope that his perverted judgement will alter the reality of things. The judge, once he has accepted the bribe, can no longer pass a true judgment, for he has accepted along with the bribe the necessary standards of worldly values—in fact, the bribe is itself one of those worldly values. Similarly, the true critic—judge must not accept the bribes offered him by those who corrupt literature. Bad authors and bad books-as we know from our own lists of best-sellers—reap vast material rewards, and everyone who has ever reviewed books—or plays, concerts, movies, television, records—knows the pressures exerted upon him to “adjust” his standards to those of his immediate society. Most critics who wish to escape this pressure resort to savage satire, like Juvenal, and make a career of acerbity; they deliberately select bad books and expend their wit in devastating reviews—only to become corrupted by their own savage indignation. If Longinus lived in the first century CE, he was con temporary with Juvenal and Tacitus— though it does not really matter when he lived, for the materialism pervading the early centuries of the Roman empire provides the corrupt milieu which he has in mind; what that materialism did to their genius we know. It is the greatest tribute payable to Longinus to see that he escaped the corruption of satire, the kind of corruption that drove Swift mad. He owes his escape to his Platonism, to his view that literature is a human embodiment of the divine, ageless, and eternal logos.
Longinus then modulates his metaphorical analogy from the professional critic-judge to “everyman,” for in the republic of letters all men are critics. If they succumb to the materialism of their age, they will corrupt themselves. As a result, their literature will reflect that corruption and itself be corrupt. All will eventually sink into a turgid dullness, bedaubed with tinsel glitter but hollow at the core, like that envisioned almost epically by Pope at the end of the Dunciad (IV.649-54):
Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,
An unawares Morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private,
dares to shine,
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word.
As the previous picture of the diseased man showed the corruption of the standard implicit in posterity, so the picture of the bribed judge shows the corruption of the standard explicit in the past.
chasing after… settlements: the Roman satirists and moralists never tire of damning legacy-hunters—those who fawned on wealthy childless men in hopes of being named the heir. Cases exist where the legacy-hunter, once the will was made, killed his benefactor. Both “chase” and “lying in wait” are powerful terms: the first is from a word meaning “wild beast”—one thinks of Dryden’s Secular Masque: “thy chase had a beast in view”—and the second is a military term meaning “ambush.”
love of material things: there is a tiny lacuna here; we have followed others in supplying a word that fits the context.
free and unbribable...ages: both here and above Longinus uses the word “free”; in response to the philosopher’s cry for external freedom Longinus is again emphasizing internal freedom.
On the place of “the ages” or “eternity” in Longinus, see Segal’s article.
out-electioneered: Longinus not only ties the peroration as a whole to the rest of the speech but also links the parts of the peroration. “Craving” was the word used at the beginning of his reply to the philosopher.
“Out-electioneered” means “to be defeated in an election,” usually by unfair means. Our idiom “to buy” an election captures the sense, but we wished to capture something of the polysyllabic original. The root of the word is the Greek word for “beginning” which, by extension, comes to mean “rule,” “office,” “political power.” In philosophy the word is a technical term meaning “principle.” It is barely possible that Longinus intends. a complex bi-lingual pun on the “principate,” for by the middle of the first century the offices of the empire had already been put up for sale. Of course, if one corrupts one’s principles, nothing but ill can follow.
burn up: editors accept Markland’s emendation “drawn” instead of the ms. reading “burn.” Since passion may be seen either as a flood or a fire, and since Longinus often combines them—as in the comparison of Cicero and Demosthenes in ch. 12—we see no reason to alter the ms.
ease: the Greek word suggests being idle, sluggish, frivolous, sloppy in literary style (e.g., Libanius 1.76); it is more pejorative than the Latin otium—the great gift of the Roman Empire—which is often used as a synonym for peace. At the beginning of his reply to the philosopher, Longinus had used the word “peace”; here at the end he exposes that “peace” for what it was—not peace, but a war of cravings.
the expending. . .our lives: we may think of Wordsworth’s sonnet, written when the poet saw beyond the Napoleonic wars to the fate of what Napoleon called “a nation of shopkeepers”:
The world is too much with us;
late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
praise and pleasure: perhaps a hendiadys—the pleasure of praise. Longinus uses this word for “praise” only one other time (28.3), where he had quoted Xenophon:
You consider toil to be the leader of a pleasant life; and you have received into your souls the finest and most warlike possession, for you rejoice in being praised more than in everything else.(Italics ours)
“Praise” is a technical term in rhetoric (see ch. 8); it signifies a speech extolling excellence as distinguished from an encomium, which is a speech extolling great deeds. The most popular form of such a speech in the empire was the panegyric, which was debased from the high standard set by Isocrates in his famous Panegyric until it becomes a pretext for fulsome ingenuity in lauding the emperor. Since many emperors neither performed great deeds nor had human excellence, the substance of such panegyrical praises was void; even today the word suggests uncritical adulation. Those whom Xenophon was praising rejoiced in praise like that they received from Xenophon because they had excellence, because they were willing to place struggle and toil as the true leader and emperor of life, that which made it pleasant The gods, as Hesiod said, have placed sweat before excellence. Longinus saw the Roman empire as loving the pleasure of praise not because they valued struggle but because they loved idle ease. It is this point which he wishes to drive home—by means of his lucid occultation—to the young recipient of his speech, the Roman Terentianus.
As praise is a technical term, so is pleasure (see ch. 4): il signifies a “pleasing rhetorical touch.” Longinus puns frequently on the generic and technical meanings of the term; here, in the closing chapter, he may again be punning, as he takes one last opportunity lo remind his readers that the way to true sublimity and greatness does not lie in imitating such writers as Lysias and Hyperides—both noted for their “pleasing touches.”
benefit: Longinus has ended where he began, with the word and notion of “benefit” He had, in the opening sentence, criticized Caecilius for not doing anything beneficial for his reader—-the special aim of all authors; his work was beneath its subject and omitted discussion of emotion. So, too, at the end of the second paragraph of the first chapter, Longinus had quoted approvingly the maxim that men resemble gods in two things: in doing good deeds and benefits and in truth. His own “speech” is intended to do both, although modestly enough he closes on a quiet note with only the word “benefit” He is now ready to take up the subject of the emotions.
It is best… at random: from Euripides’ Electra (379); but the words also echo Jocasta’s infamous advice to Oedipus (Oedipus Rex, 979):
It is best to live at random, how we may.
I promised to write. . .collection of notes: again Longinus ties the end and the beginning of his speech together: in 1.2, he had referred to the speech as a “collection of notes.” The understatement is the more powerful as we begin to appreciate the artistry and emotion, the technique and sublimity, embodied in his synthesis. Of course, some paragraphs in the work are written as if they were no more than notes and jottings (e.g., chs. 41and 42); their style is almost as cramped as that of Aristotle.
as well as to us: the speech ends in the middle of a sentence, like Thucydides’ History. We call it a speech, for such is Longinus’ own word—logos. As in earlier instances, he is punning on the various senses of logos: speech (or oration), writing, discourse, rational explanation. Russell remarks, “We can be confident that very little of the book is missing at the end”—and if he means the first book, he is probably right. The last sentence, starting with “in their own,” is written in a different hand in the ms.; there would be room for a few more words. Few as they may have been, we wish that we had them.
