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Longinus (Λογγινος) is a conventional name applied to a Greek teacher of rhetoric or literary critic who may have lived in the 1st century AD, and is known only for his treatise On the Sublime (Περι υψους). The treatise was ignored by scholars until it was published by Francis Robortello in Basel, in 1554.

The manuscript's contents page states Διονυσιου η Λογγινου ("by Dionysius or Longinus"), an ascription by the medieval copyist that was misread as "by Dionysius Longinus". When the manuscript was being prepared for printed publication, the work was initially attributed to Cassius Longinus (213 - 273 AD), but it is notable that no literature later than the 1st century AD is mentioned, and the work is now usually dated to the early first century AD.

On the Sublime is a compendium of literary exemplars and also-rans, around 50 authors spanning 1000 years. Along with the expected examples from Homer and other figures of Greek culture, Longinus refers to a passage from Genesis, which is quite unusual for the first century:

A similar effect was achieved by the lawgiver of the Jews — no mean genius, for he both understood and gave expression to the power of the divinity as it deserved — when he wrote at the very beginning of his laws, and I quote his words: "God said" — what was it? — "'Let there be light.' And there was. 'Let there be earth.' And there was."

The "sublime" in the title has been translated in various ways, to include senses of elevation and excellent style. In the 18th century Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful owed a debt to Longinus' concept of the sublime, and the category passed into the stock-in-trade of Romantic intellectual discourse, for as "Longinus" said, "The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport," and Romantic thinkers as well as writers strove to reach beyond logic, to the wellsprings of the Sublime.

Sublime effects were a desired end of much Baroque art and literature, and the rediscovered work of "Longinus" went through half a dozen editions in the 17th century, but it was Boileau's 1674 translation of the treatise into French that really started its career in the history of criticism. In England during the eighteenth century, critics including Dryden and Pope esteemed Longinus' principles of composition and balance second only to Aristotle's Poetics.

Text of On the Sublime (English)

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