On the Sublime

Longinus continues to describe literary techniques and how various writers use them. He discusses amplification, a type of literary elaboration in which the writer intensifies emotion or the presentation of facts in a step-by-step manner. Amplification must always go hand in hand with greatness or else it will be “slack and hollow” (19).

There is a lacuna in the text, after which Longinus compares two great orators, Demosthenes and Cicero. While Demosthenes’s oration has a sudden impact, like “lightning or the thunderbolt,” Cicero’s is like a “vast steady fire which flares up […] and is fed intermittently” (21).

Similar to Cicero’s, Plato’s prose flows “in a smooth and copious stream” (21). Plato’s writings, which drew inspiration from Homer’s, remind us that a writer may improve his own work by emulating great writers of the past. When we take a great model from the past, the model will “raise us to a higher level of imaginative power” (23), inspiring competition as well as admiration. Longinus argues that imitating great writers of the past is a valid “road to greatness” (22), and advises writers to imagine how Plato or Demosthenes would have written and judged their work.