This is an important book. That needs to be said upfront, since what follows will be largely critical. But P.’s familiarity with ancient literary and rhetorical criticism and aesthetic theory is undeniably extensive, and he is right on many points: Longinus is widely misunderstood; Longinus has no special claim on sublimity (he is not ‘the sole custodian of sublimity in antiquity’, p. 17); there is a long and diverse tradition in antiquity of interest in things that could be designated ‘sublime’ in one sense or another. Moreover, P.’s collection of evidence for this tradition is unprecedentedly rich, and his interpretations are often subtle, provocative and original. No one with an interest in ancient aesthetics can afford to ignore this book. But reading it will make demands on your patience. Like its predecessor, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought (reviewed by S. Halliwell, CP 107 [2012], 362–6; A. Sheppard, BJA 53 [2013], 367–9), The Sublime in Antiquity is too long: verbose, repetitive. P. is capable of writing with economy and lucidity, as is clear from his recent survey of the sublime (P. Destrée and P. Murray [ed.], A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics [2015], pp. 393–405), which might serve as a useful preface to The Sublime in Antiquity. Here, however, he has failed to exercise editorial self-discipline.

That failure has also contributed to the book's more substantive faults. There is a persistent tendency to self-contradiction. Consider, for example, his flickering judgement on Longinus. ‘Though he is typically viewed as an innovator, he is best seen as a collecting-point’ (p. 7); in fact, he is ‘by no means an innovator’ (p. xviii); or, at any rate, ‘not radically innovative’ (p. 25). Yet ‘Longinus set out to hijack a tradition … His rendition of the sublime is highly selective, and he recasts it to suit his own specific ends’ (p. 29): quite innovative, then? More than that: he is ‘magnificently creative’ (p. 6). Similarly with regard to Longinus’ book: ‘On the Sublime is … a textbook designed for a classroom setting’ (p. 30); in fact, a ‘typical handbook’ (p. 30: typical?!), ‘in most respects … not all that different from other rhetorical manuals’ (p. 118). Yet Longinus ‘elevates his handbook to another genre of writing altogether’ (p. 118): not all that typical, then? Indeed not: ‘more than a manual … it is also a critical essay of the highest order’ (p. 136), ‘of unsurpassed value in its own right’ (p. 178).

But P.’s topic is not Longinus, but the sublime. What does that mean? P. shows with admirable thoroughness that words connoting height, size and weight were freely used in ancient literary criticism from an early period. But that is not news; nor are commonalities in the use of this terminology surprising. In any case, as P. observes, ‘words are a poor indicator of ideas’ (p. 15); ‘the sublime is not a word. It is a concept and an experience’ (p. xx). But he changes his mind at once: ‘or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences’. Hence a recurrent emphasis on pluriformity: ‘the difficulty … in pinning sublimity down to any one thing at any given moment’ (p. 5); ‘it is too easy to assume that sublimity always comes in one form, which it emphatically does not. The criteria in antiquity varied enormously’ (p. 30); ‘a polyphony of views about what counts as sublime and why’ (p. 212); ‘ancient sublimity is a pluriform tradition’ (p. 620). Still, he holds tenaciously on to the concept of ‘the concept of the sublime’ (p. xvii): the ‘elusiveness’ is the elusiveness of ‘sublimity itself’ (p. xvii). So we need a definition of P.’s subject-matter. Or so he says: ‘no approach to the sublime can hope to get off the ground without a working definition of its object’ (p. 5). But ‘at any historical moment the sublime is hard if not impossible to define’ (p. 34): a fortiori, then, a transhistorical definition of the kind P. seeks is even harder. In fact, even in the case of the Longinian sublime, ‘no definition given by Longinus fully captures its essence’ (p. 141): for which ‘the best explanation is that the sublime has none. It merely flickers’. Still, sublimity itself has a ‘nature’ (p. 402) and even ‘its essential DNA’ (p. 27): presumably, then, everything will become clear when sublimity's genome has been sequenced.

Meanwhile, ‘according to a recent analysis, which can be extended to antiquity without anachronism, the sublime is to be found wherever “a positive, material object [is] elevated to the status of [an] impossible Thing”’ (p. 5). Readers of a nervous disposition might have appreciated assistance in decoding P.’s adaptation of Žižek's mediation of Lacan. What would a negative material object be? How does a Thing differ from a thing? What's the difference between an impossible Thing (P.) and the impossible Thing (Žižek)? Does not the denial of anachronism need some justification? How, for example, does it apply to sublimity as Longinus conceived it: he certainly did not think it was impossible. When Quintilian talks about the grand style, which P. equates with sublimity (p. 13), is he talking about something (or some Thing) impossible? So this attempt at a ‘working definition’ does not work. Nor is it made to do much work: I noticed only two subsequent echoes (pp. 262, 524), one of them flippant.

Other formulae throw no more light on the un-Thing's definition. ‘That is what defines the Longinian sublime: it is a value without compare, and one that ultimately puts at risk the meaning of value altogether’ (p. 175: where is the meaning of value doubted in Longinus?). More broadly: ‘the sublime is nothing more than the flickering, terrifying, and exhilarating awareness of this illusory condition, which is built into every representational act and so too into every perception’ (p. 619). What, then, is not sublime? Nothing, perhaps: ‘the sublime is … a transgressive phenomenon that knows no limits’ (p. xviii). But if unlimited, then all-inclusive; and a concept that excludes nothing is useless. So ‘perhaps it is best to jettison the language of the sublime altogether’ (p. 619). Three pages from the end of a 622-page monograph on sublimity, that insight comes too late: introducing it at the outset need not have brought the project to a halt, but might have prompted a pause for serious thinking about how to analyse a pluriform tradition. Or perhaps not. For even after this radical afterthought, and the declaration that ‘there is no one canonical form of sublimity … there are too many variant forms of sublimity to range them comfortably under a single coherent concept’ (p. 621), P. still asserts that ‘the sublime is one … category and concept … the sublime is a concept’ (p. 622, my emphasis).

Hera's movement, quick as thought according to Homer (Il. 15.80), is ‘unthinkably quick’ according to P. (p. 543); and just before this reference to the Deception of Zeus, Homeric gods are declared ‘omniscient’ (p. 542). Even in his treatment of key texts, P. can be a surprisingly careless reader. ‘Sublimity for [Longinus] is never a matter … of large-scale economies of meaning and arrangement … but only of fleeting instances (hupsos) (1.4; cf. 12.1: “sublimity exists often in a single thought”)’ (p. 302). ‘Often’ is not ‘only’: P. quotes the very passage that disproves his claim. And in the same paragraph he elaborates his self-refutation: ‘sublimity … need not have always been tied down to the ephemeral particular – after all, Plato and Cicero are praised by Longinus for the way their language spreads and overflows en masse’ (p. 303). Or again: ‘Alexander's sublimity was a given for Longinus (4.2): he was, after all, “the great”’ (p. 266). But Longinus says nothing about Alexander's sublimity: he denies that Timaeus achieved sublimity in writing about Alexander. Longinus explicitly introduces sublimity as an excellence of discourse (ἐξοχή τις λόγων, 1.3), and regards it as a manifestation of greatness of thought (μεγαλοϕροσύνης ἀπήχημα, 9.2). P.’s reading of Longinus persistently confounds sublimity as a quality of discourse with the qualities of the objects of discourse to which sublime discourse is a worthy response.

I began by saying that this is an important book: I do not withdraw that. But reading it requires patience, tolerance and rigorously critical attention.