The Sublime in Antiquity

James I. Porter is Chancellor's Professor of History and Theory of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. An authority on ancient criticism and aesthetics and an important figure in classical reception studies, he is the author of The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (2010), Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy (both 2000), as well as the editor of several collections. He is also co-editor of the Classical Presences series. The present book is the second installment in a trilogy, the aim of which is to bring back into focus ancient aesthetic thinking and to uncover its forgotten traditions.

• 1. Introduction: the sublime before and after Longinus; 2. The art and rhetoric of the Longinian sublime; 3. The sublime before Longinus in rhetoric and criticism: Caecilius to Demetrius; 4. The sublime before Longinus in rhetoric and literature: Theophrastus to Homer; 5. The material sublime; 6. The immaterial sublime; Conclusion.

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