ABSTRACT
The relation between sublimity and violence is an important but overlooked aspect of Peri hypsous. Peri hypsous, an incomplete Greek manuscript, supposed to have been authored by Longinus in the first or third century CE, is widely acknowledged to be the first properly theoretical discussion of the sublime. Longinus' highlighting of an innate capacity for the sublime certainly chimed with the aesthetic concerns of his seventeenth-century French translator, Nicolas Despreaux Boileau. The privilege afforded by Longinus to 'the power to conceive great thoughts' would appear to suggest that the sublime is a product of nature rather than of art. Longinus' interest in the sublimity of the noble mind extends, then, even to the concealment of its slavish dependence on the materiality of words. Longinus' stress on the mastery of excess contrasts, then, with Sappho's openness to 'self-shattering'.
