This paper is concerned with one little-known but intriguing and conceptually promising episode in the history of Greek thought about metaphor. Remarks made by two distinguished scholars will help us to get some preliminary bearings. In ancient discussions of rhetoric, says D.A. Russell, there was ‘a sharp distinction between content (to legomenon) and verbal form (lexis). With some hazy and uncertain exceptions, ancient writers on poetry also adhered firmly to this distinction’. Qualifications are added later in the book; but Russell leaves us with the clear impression that no Greek or Roman theorist made significant concessions to any nonsense about the medium being the message; and that whatever may be true of isolated examples of critical practice, all general theories about the elements of poetry assumed that discussions of what is said can be conducted quite independently of discussions of how it is said. In so far as connections were envisaged at all, Russell maintains, it was in terms of a rather vague notion of ‘suitability’: many writers cite with approval the Gorgian slogan, ‘great words suit great things’.

Every powerful critical idea is the product of a particular interpretive situation: we could even say, with considerable simplification, that it is the product of a prejudice. Every cultural moment develops its own critical myth (or prejudice), and reasons and interprets within the limits of this horizon. Often it needs only a short time for the myth to wither, the prejudice to decay; we realize that its claims, born of a particular historical perspective and valid only in part, were too high, and that it was not content to accept only this partial validity.

But when a critical myth fades away, not everything is doomed to disappear. There are still positive traces, still a residual value which, once appropriately adjusted and corrected, can be recuperated. To achieve this, a more powerful interpretive system must arise which absorbs the error within a new perspective. Whatever survives the testing may become a new instrument of interpretation, perhaps one destined to last forever – or at least for a little longer (this is how progress is made).

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the treatise On sublimity was universally attributed to the third-century critic, rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus. Weiske's edition, first issued in 1809, marked a turning-point in the trend of scholarly opinion, and Longinus' claim to authorship is now generally rejected, often summarily. A variety of alternative attributions have been canvassed; most commonly the work is assigned to an anonymous author of the first century A.D. But a minority of scholars have resisted the consensus and defended Longinus' claim to authorship. This paper will argue that they were right to do so.

To avoid ambiguity, I shall follow Russell in using the symbol ‘L’ as a non-committal way of designating the author of On sublimity; by ‘Longinus’ I shall always mean Cassius Longinus. So the question before us is whether L is Longinus. I begin by explaining why manuscript evidence (§2) and stylistic comparison with the fragments of Longinus (§3) fail to resolve the question. I then try to find a place for the composition of the treatise within Longinus' career (§4). This leads to a consideration of the final chapter, widely regarded as inconsistent with a third-century date; I shall argue that there is no inconsistency (§5). If so, the way lies open to a reassessment of the case in favour of Longinus' claim.

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die.

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

T.S. Eliot, Four quartets (Burnt Norton V)

The poet gives voice to the action of words as they reach out to attain expression. He observes the dangers inherent in this effort: words can break, can become simply unintelligible. Such broken words can no longer function within the fixed constraints of grammar and thus ‘will not stay in place, | Will not stay still’. A.J. Greimas in Structural semantics defined an ‘actantial’ model of language:

If we recall that functions in traditional syntax are but roles played by words – the subject being ‘the one who performs the action’, the object ‘the one who suffers it’ – then according to such a conception, the proposition as a whole becomes a spectacle to which homo loquens treats himself.

In the previous issue of this journal, pp. 213–14, I proposed niue for neue at Vegetius, Epit. 4.41.4. It has since come to my notice that John of Salisbury, who quotes the passage in Policraticus 2.2 (I 69.26–70.1 Webb), writes niue. I owe the information to F.H. Sherwood, Studies in medieval uses of Vegetius' ‘Epitoma rei militaris’ (diss. Los Angeles 1980), which Dr Frank Fürbeth of Bochum kindly enabled me to see. In a chapter on the Policraticus, Sherwood translates John's text (p. 165) and comments that ‘John seems to have emended or misread “niue” for Vegetius' “neue”’ (p. 192 n. 10). When I went through the passage in Webb's edition two years before writing my article, I was investigating the character of the manuscript that John used and had not thought about the problem of neue.

Heroides 15, Sappho's letter to Phaon, is an enigma in its present context for many different reasons. What is Sappho doing, heterosexualised, at the end of a string of elegiac epistles written by women plucked straight from myth and each given their fifteen minutes of fame? Despite the mythology that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was a real woman and a real writer, the Greek love poet par excellence; not only that, she was and is a figure who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for women, not for the local ferryman. This Sappho looks very written, yet as the only heroine–writer, and as the love-poet often cited as Ovid's influential predecessor, she can represent the culmination and reification of the Heroides' illusion of female authorship.

In doing so, Sappho functions as the crucial figure in a collection of poems in which the Ovidian author writes in disguise; in what becomes finally a life or death situation, her poem radically questions the definition and definability of authorship, gender and identity. We are constantly asked, and are prompted to ask: Just how authentic, or how written is Sappho in this self-conscious erotic alignment of His ‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author conspicuously to write, through and over, the poetess whose work he recommends should be read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love-affairs he hints at on several occasions?

Recent contributions to the debate on the role, status and autonomy of the artist in classical Greece remain polarised in terms which have remained largely unchanged for more than a century. On one side, we find ‘modernisers’ who hold that the role of the artist, the function of art and the social structure of the Greek art world was more similar to the modern western art world than different. On the other side are ranged the ‘primitivists’ who argue that modern conceptions of artistic autonomy and creativity are an anachronistic imposition on ancient Greek art, which was a largely anonymous craft, performing traditional functions and oriented to the reproduction of traditional artistic forms rather than the individualistic innovation held to be characteristic of western European art since the Renaissance. The modernisers look back to Winckelmann's neo-classical view of the Greek artist as free and autonomous creator, whilst the primitivists ultimately draw their inspiration from Jacob Burckhardt's alternative account of the Greek artist as mechanical craftsman or banausos. In this century, the primary point of reference for the debate has been Bernard Schweitzer's argument that whilst artists were held in low esteem during the classical period of Greek history, the fifth and fourth centuries, they came to be recognised as ‘creative’ in the Hellenistic period, the third to first centuries B.C. More recent contributions have largely been concerned with adducing, or criticising, new evidence for one or other side of the debate, whilst retaining the assumptions within which the debate was set up in the nineteenth century.

Ceremonial life (contests and festivals) was a major preoccupation of the inhabitants of the cities of the Roman East in general and of Roman Asia Minor in particular. Processions meandered through the streets every week, and perhaps even every day, carrying processional statues and driving along sacrificial animals. The air was frequently filled with the smells and sounds of sacrificial banquets. In public places benches were set up, on which people sat to drink and eat together. On some days flocks of people could be seen rushing towards the theatre or the stadium, eager to take up their places in the auditorium, from where they could watch traditional Greek athletic or artistic contests. It must have seemed as though at any given time some part or other of the population was involved in some public ritual. The Greek city in the Roman period was – to borrow a phrase of Walter Burkert – a Festgemeinschaft, a festive community. Greek festive life was not the last resort of traditionalists, however, trying to insulate themselves from new and unpleasant social and political realities. Traditional Greek festivals were very much part of the contemporary world. I shall argue here that Greek festivals played a central part in civic life under Roman rule. I also intend to discuss how they were reformed and adapted to fit into a world where the centre of power was located in Rome. And finally, I want to assess their importance for the self-identification of the local élites.