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The Sublime under Empire
Series: - Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, Volume: 48
The Sublime Under Empire expands the range of classical authors, genres, and phenomena that can be analysed through the lens of the sublime. Building on recent scholarship that has demonstrated the concept’s dynamic versatility, the twelve essays that comprise the present volume locate the sublime in the context of empire, and explore, from a multiplicity of perspectives, the interconnectedness of sublimity and imperium. Focusing on Greek and Latin texts from the first century BCE to the second century CE, contributors examine how the sublime intersects with philosophy, politics, the study of nature, travel literature, and even comedy and satire. The volume concludes with meditations on the influence of this imperial discourse on later revivals of the sublime, especially at moments of political and/or cultural upheaval in the 18th–20th centuries.
Patrick Glauthier is Associate Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on Latin literature of the Republic and early Empire, with a particular interest in the study of nature and the sublime. He is the author of The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome: Manilius, Seneca, Lucan, and the Aetna (Oxford University Press, 2025). In addition, he has published on a wide variety of Greek and Latin texts and authors, from Prometheus Bound and Aratus to Ennius, Vergil, Phaedrus, and the Flavian epicists.
Jeffrey P. Ulrich is Associate Professor of Classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is the author of The Shadow of an Ass: Philosophical Choice and Aesthetic Experience in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (University of Michigan Press, 2024). In addition, he is the co-editor (with Kate Gilhuly) of Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature (Routledge, 2023) as well as a volume (with Carlo Caruso and Luca Graverini) called Ancient Narrative and Reader Response (Barkhuis, 2026). He is currently working on a separate book project on the co-evolution of genre and technologies for measuring time in Roman literature.
Contributors are: Sioban Chomse, Lauren Curtis, Maryam Forghani, Myrto Garani, Patrick Glauthier, Philip Hardie, Victoria Hodges, David Konstan, James I. Porter, Ralph Rosen, Jeffrey P. Ulrich, Gareth D. Williams
Jeffrey P. Ulrich is Associate Professor of Classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is the author of The Shadow of an Ass: Philosophical Choice and Aesthetic Experience in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (University of Michigan Press, 2024). In addition, he is the co-editor (with Kate Gilhuly) of Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature (Routledge, 2023) as well as a volume (with Carlo Caruso and Luca Graverini) called Ancient Narrative and Reader Response (Barkhuis, 2026). He is currently working on a separate book project on the co-evolution of genre and technologies for measuring time in Roman literature.
Contributors are: Sioban Chomse, Lauren Curtis, Maryam Forghani, Myrto Garani, Patrick Glauthier, Philip Hardie, Victoria Hodges, David Konstan, James I. Porter, Ralph Rosen, Jeffrey P. Ulrich, Gareth D. Williams
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures and Maps
Abbreviations
Introduction
Patrick Glauthier and Jeffrey Ulrich
Part 1 The Everyday Longinus
1 Longinus on Emotion, or What Caecilius Got Wrong
David Konstan†
2 Longinus on Comedy and the Sublime
Ralph M. Rosen
Part 2 The Political Sublime
3 The Roman Political Sublime
Philip Hardie
4 The Starving Muse: Juvenal, Materialist Aesthetics, and the Satirical Sublime
Jeffrey P. Ulrich
Part 3 Travel, Memory, and the Sublime
5 History in Ruins: Irony and the Sublime in Lucan’s Bellum ciuile Siobhan Chomse
6 Exploring the Roman Imperial North in Albinovanus Pedo and Ovid’s Black Sea Letters: Sublime and Anti-Sublime
Lauren Curtis
7 From Immovable Trees to Cavernous Seas: the Impossibility of the Sublime Bridge in Lucian’s True Histories
Victoria Hodges
Part 4 The Study of Nature and the Sublime
8 A Circular Argument: Analogy, Cyclical Motion, and the Shape of the Senecan Sublime
Gareth D. Williams
9 Pliny’s Natural History and the Scientific Sublime
Patrick Glauthier
Part 5 The Sublime on the Margins of Tradition
10 What Lies Behind the Mask? Lucretian Aesthetics of the Sublime in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Myrto Garani
11 Translating the Sublime: William Jones and the Aestheticization of Eastern Poetry
Maryam Forghani
12 Erich Auerbach’s Theory of the Sublime
James I. Porter
Works Cited
Index Locorum
General Index
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures and Maps
Abbreviations
Introduction
Patrick Glauthier and Jeffrey Ulrich
Part 1 The Everyday Longinus
1 Longinus on Emotion, or What Caecilius Got Wrong
David Konstan†
2 Longinus on Comedy and the Sublime
Ralph M. Rosen
Part 2 The Political Sublime
3 The Roman Political Sublime
Philip Hardie
4 The Starving Muse: Juvenal, Materialist Aesthetics, and the Satirical Sublime
Jeffrey P. Ulrich
Part 3 Travel, Memory, and the Sublime
5 History in Ruins: Irony and the Sublime in Lucan’s Bellum ciuile Siobhan Chomse
6 Exploring the Roman Imperial North in Albinovanus Pedo and Ovid’s Black Sea Letters: Sublime and Anti-Sublime
Lauren Curtis
7 From Immovable Trees to Cavernous Seas: the Impossibility of the Sublime Bridge in Lucian’s True Histories
Victoria Hodges
Part 4 The Study of Nature and the Sublime
8 A Circular Argument: Analogy, Cyclical Motion, and the Shape of the Senecan Sublime
Gareth D. Williams
9 Pliny’s Natural History and the Scientific Sublime
Patrick Glauthier
Part 5 The Sublime on the Margins of Tradition
10 What Lies Behind the Mask? Lucretian Aesthetics of the Sublime in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Myrto Garani
11 Translating the Sublime: William Jones and the Aestheticization of Eastern Poetry
Maryam Forghani
12 Erich Auerbach’s Theory of the Sublime
James I. Porter
Works Cited
Index Locorum
General Index