Mere Rhetoric

Welcome Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today's episode is brought to you by the Humanities Media Project and viewers like you, because today is a listener-suggested topic. Today we’re going to talk about Longinus, which is to say we’re going to talk about On the Sublime,which is to say we're going to talk about the sublime. We don’t know anything about Longinus except that he wrote On the Sublime, and, if we’re going to be strictly honest, we don’t know whether the author of On the Sublime  was actually named Longinus. So we have this key rhetorical text and the only thing we know for sure about its author is that they wrote this key rhetorical text.   Maybe that’s over-stating it. Maybe this was Dionysies of Halicarnassus. You remember him, Greek fellow, loved Romans? Maybe it was Hermagoras, whom you might remember from the stasis episode. Or it was this other bloke, Cassius Longinus. It’s all very confusing, an