Patrick Glauthier, who has previously explored the sublime in Manilius, here extends his analysis to Seneca, Lucan and the anonymous author of the poetic Aetna. Some of these authors, like some of the ideas about the sublime G. presents, will be more familiar to readers than others. It is particularly refreshing to see the Aetna receiving continued attention after the brief explosion in scholarly interest that followed Liba Taub’s re-centring of the poem in the study of Roman scientific literature in Aetna and the Moon (2008).
Throughout the book G. offers sensitive analyses of his chosen texts in crisp and elegant prose. The first chapter outlines the background of ancient and modern ideas about the sublime that will inform G.’s concept of the ‘scientific sublime’, drawing on all the ancient sources one might expect. Here too G. introduces Doran’s Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (2015), from which emerges the ‘dual logic of the sublime’, the key theoretical concept that will structure G.’s approach to his chosen texts. Doran theorises the sublime as bipolar, embracing both the lofty and the humble and hence producing in the reader a ‘dynamism’ between feelings of being ‘overpowered and ennobled’. This ‘dynamism’ opens up the sublime to a wide range of affective experiences; hence G. argues that, rather than asserting that any text is objectively sublime, it may instead be preferable to focus on ‘how texts dramatize the sublime’s dual logic’ (19) for a particular audience. Thus G. defines his break with prior scholarship on the sublime in Latin literature, particularly Hardie’s Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge (2009) and Porter’s The Sublime in Antiquity (2016).
What exactly G. means by the ‘scientific sublime’ is not starkly spelled out in this first chapter but must be gleaned from the ensuing studies of individual authors. For Manilius, the ‘dual logic of the sublime’ is embodied by the Milky Way, which thrusts its overwhelming distance and power onto humble human observers rather than requiring them to seek it out. In Seneca, the ‘dual logic’ manifests in the tension between the transcendent study of meteorological phenomena and the ‘deflation’ emerging from reflection on the moral decay creeping across the surface of the earth. In Lucan, it appears, with the collapse of the world order, in the shift between entities who are alternately ‘terrified and terrifying’. The Aetna poet takes on the task of respecting the ‘mountain’s sacred energy’ while simultaneously explaining the wonder and horror lurking in the earth’s depths.
The chapters will stand on their own for readers with a topical interest in the individual authors, a useful resource for researchers or advanced students. As a group, G. shapes them into a story of increasing dissatisfaction with the shadow cast by the imperial project upon the study of the natural world. Manilius celebrates the infinity of the cosmos as a double of imperium sine fine; Seneca more pessimistically envisions the elevating study of the magnitudo mundi as an escape hatch from the ‘arrogance and swagger of empire’ (144); Lucan’s pitch-black mundus defies rational comprehension as the understanding of natural laws that in the past yielded sublime experiences ‘turns out to be entirely detached from reality … in Lucan’s crumbling universe’ (169). This collapse leaves the author of the Aetna with no choice but to look downward instead, finding pleasure (voluptas) in the miranda beneath our feet.
Perhaps the book’s most surprising chapter is the last one, a short epilogue on Pliny’s enormous Naturalis Historia. G. designates Pliny a rambling paradoxographer rather than a careful architect of the kind of contemplative skyward journey Manilius or Seneca provides. Pliny appears to be disqualified from the ‘scientific sublime’ partly because of the balance he strikes between facts and causal analysis, and partly on the grounds that he is unwilling to extend his analysis to the celestial realm, dismissing such attempts as ‘madness’ in the first full book of the Nat. Hist. Yet as G.’s Aetna chapter suggests, the celestial realm is not the only place to find sublimity. Indeed, G. notes that Pliny hints at gemstones’ miniaturised ‘scientific sublime’, but ultimately denies that book sublime status because Pliny focuses on ‘history lessons and catalogues rather than causal analysis and an experience of the scientific sublime’ (253). Likewise, Pliny ‘stages the sublime’ in book 18 with the striking image of a sparkling field of fireflies creating a vision of wonder (miraculo) before one’s very feet, but in resembling ‘the seemingly infinite series of facts that sparkle on the scroll of papyrus’ (257), for G. they summon up a paradoxographical tradition devoid of the ennobling wonder of the sublime.
As the creator of the concept, G. is of course free to bound the ‘scientific sublime’ as he sees fit. Yet it is not quite clear why, for example, Pliny’s admiring discourse on the tiny perfection of the insect body at the beginning of book 11, which is followed up by detailed consideration of the little creatures’ physiology, could not be considered sublime, particularly given that G. identifies Aristotle’s enjoinment to study the meanest of creatures as ‘activat[ing] the affective intensity of the sublime’ (44) at the start of the book.
Still, while not every reader would set the boundaries either of the ‘scientific’ or the ‘sublime’ in exactly the same places as G., this book is a delight to read, adjoining new territories to the existing scholarly conversation on the Roman literary sublime.
