ABSTRACT
Witnessing a series of events that must end in the destruction of outstanding individuals may well cause to feel pity, fear, and sadness. There are major differences between accounts of what it is to feel sublime. In On Sublimity, Longinus claims that Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan war, the Iliad, is much more sublime than the epic he wrote later in his life, the Odyssey. Longinus thinks that truly sublime works like the Iliad can evoke wonder, and he affirms hyperbolic descriptions of characters and events as a way of doing this. In On Sublimity, Longinus claims that the most important source of sublimity is the power to conceive great thoughts, that “sublimity is the echo of a noble mind,” and that “real sublimity contains much food for reflection”. The chapter focuses on what it is about the plays and not their author that accounts for their powers to make feel sublime.
