This is the first new edition in English for more than half a century of one of the most influential works in the entire history of aesthetics, the treatise On the Sublime, whose author is unknown but usually called Longinus. It was On the Sublime which was chiefly responsible, in the early modern period, for giving the vocabulary of 'sublimity' the important place which it has held ever since in critical discourse about literature, visual art, music, and the experience of nature. This edition contains a substantial introduction to the contents of the work; a newly edited Greek text with facing English translation (designed to be both accurate and readable, and therefore of assistance to non-specialists); and a comprehensive commentary which deals with everything from details of language to the work's overarching ideas and arguments. The book undertakes the fullest and most probing engagement with On the Sublime yet attempted in any language. It advances many new interpretations and
