Longinus

Longinus is the name attached to the Greek treatise On the Sublime, a work of literary criticism probably written in the first century AD, though its manuscript heading is ambiguous and it was long ascribed to Cassius Longinus, the third-century rhetorician and adviser to Queen Zenobia. Nothing certain is known of the real author. Addressing a Roman friend, he asks what gives great writing its power to transport the reader, and answers with examples from Homer, Plato, Demosthenes and Sappho, whose ode survives only through his quotation. Rediscovered in the Renaissance and translated by Boileau in 1674, the treatise shaped European ideas of genius and taste for two centuries.