© Casper de Jonge,  | doi:./_ chapter  Emotion and the Sublime Casper de Jonge One of the unsolved mysteries surrounding the treatise On the Sublime con- cerns the relationship between emotion (πάθος) and the sublime (ὕψος). It is obvious that emotions play a central role in On the Sublime. The author, whom I will call Longinus, invites us to recognize the sublime in Ajax’ proud prayer to Zeus on the battlefield (Iliad 17.645–647), Sappho’s ecstatic love song (frag- ment 31), Orestes’ insane expressions of fear (Euripides, Orestes 255–257), and innumerable other emotional passages from archaic and classical Greek liter- ature. But not all sublime passages are emotional: Longinus tells us that there are many ‘sublime moments without emotion’ (ὕψη δίχα πάθους) and he offers as an example the attack on the Olympian gods by Otus and Ephialtes: They yearned to pile Ossa on Olympus, and Pelion, with its waving forests, on Ossa, so that heaven might be scaled. And this they would have accom- plished … hom. Od. 11.315–317 What makes these Homeric lines sublime (in Longinus’ interpretation) is prob- ably the superhuman undertaking, the inconceivable height of three moun- tains piled upon each other (i.e. ὕψος in a literal sense), and the suggestion that the attempt might have succeeded. For Longinus these lines are sub- lime and great, but not emotional. Likewise there are rhetorical genres, like eulogies, ceremonial speeches, and showpieces (τὰ ἐγκώμια καὶ τὰ πομπικὰ καὶ ἐπιδεικτικά), which have elements of dignity and sublimity, while lacking emo- 1 Previous discussions of the role of pathos in On the Sublime include Lackenbacher 1911; Bompaire 1973; Paglialunga 2004; Halliwell 2011: 327–367; Porter 2016: 124–130. For pathos in ancient Greek poetics, see Rendona Moyano 2006. Innes 1995a focuses on the ‘low emotions’, pity, grief, and fear (Subl. 8.2: see below). Translations of On the Sublime in this chapter are adapted from Fyfe and Russell (1995). For the date and authorship of On the Sublime (irrelev- ant to the argument presented here), see Russell 1964: xxii–xxx; Mazzucchi 2010: xxix–xxxvii; De Jonge 2012. 2 Longinus, Subl. 9.10; 10.1–3; 15.2. 3 Subl. 8.2. Translation Murray and Dimock 2015. , See Porter 2016: 165–166. Casper de Jonge - 9789004506053 Downloaded from Brill.com12/25/2022 01:28:26PM via free access