BMCR 2025.07.15

Sublime cosmos in Graeco-Roman literature and its reception: intersections of myth, science and history

, , Sublime cosmos in Graeco-Roman literature and its reception: intersections of myth, science and history. Bloomsbury classical studies monographs. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Pp. 248. ISBN 9781350344679.

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

 

Scholarly interest in the sublime in the Greek and Roman worlds has exploded during the opening decades of the 21st century. Two particularly significant results of this development are (1) the realization that the classical sublime can be studied without allowing the views and assumptions of Longinus to set the terms of the debate, and (2) the recognition that the natural world, from the cosmic to the elemental and/or atomic levels, regularly provides ancient authors with material for imagining, exploiting, and interrogating the sublime. Collectively, the eleven essays that make up Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman literature and its Reception take these two propositions as their point of departure. In the book’s introduction, David Christenson makes this clear by grounding the volume’s understanding of sublimity in the overarching vision of James Porter’s The Sublime in Antiquity (1–2). For Porter, the sublimity of cosmic phenomena, especially as revealed through the study of nature’s mechanics, is a core element of the classical sublime, and the contributors to this volume implicitly agree. The essays explore a wide range of authors, genres, and subjects, some of which have not been studied before from the perspective of sublimity. This expansion of horizons makes the volume an important contribution to the ongoing revaluation of the classical sublime, and anyone interested in the topic will enjoy and learn from its essays.

At the same time, it should be noted that most chapters take for granted that their subjects (e.g., the stars, eclipses, eros) are sublime or are potential sources of sublimity. Since little energy is spent establishing why we should think about a given text’s representation of a particular object, phenomenon, or experience from the perspective of sublimity, many chapters barely mention the sublime at all. That being said, the framing of the introduction and the simple act of publishing these essays together suggest a robust ancient dialogue grounded in sublimity that will stimulate further inquiry.

In addition to pushing the boundaries of the classical sublime, the volume honors the memory of Thomas D. Worthen and attempts to revive interest in his work The Myth of Replacement: Stars, Gods, and Order in the Universe (University of Arizona Press, 1991), which is cited throughout. Worthen was Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona, and most of the contributors have a clear connection to that institution.

Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman literature and its Reception is divided into four sections. Part I (“Sublime Epic”) contains five essays. In “Homer’s Odyssey and the Mystery of Time,” Norman Austin explores the significance of time and timing in the Odyssey, arguing both that “The Odyssey makes clear at the outset that its theme is mystery” (12) and that “time [is] the theme around which this whole poem is constructed” (17). While Austin develops several engaging readings (e.g., of the negotiation of time by Odysseus and Penelope), his allegorical approach might not appeal to all (e.g., “The sea across which Odysseus sails in silence and solitude, in hermetic terms, can only be the Amniotic Sea,” 14), but it is primarily through such allegoresis that he gestures towards cosmic sublimity. In “Helen, Paris and the Philosophical ἔρως: Love, Strife and Sublime Contact from Homer to Plato,” Boris Shoshitaishvili examines the relationship between love and strife through the Iliad’s Paris and Helen, selected fragments of Heraclitus and Empedocles, and Plato’s Symposium. The essay builds towards a sketch of “a theory of commonality” between love and strife that Shoshitaishvili calls the “metaphysics of contact” (45). The importance of love, strife, and Empedocles for the history of the classical sublime is well known,[1] and Symposium has similarly attracted critical attention;[2] this essay, then, indirectly adds new dimensions to the story. Frank Romer’s contribution (“The Hard-Break at Hesiod, Theogony 200”) compares the birth stories and powers of Aphrodite as presented in the Theogony and Iliad, focusing on Th. 188–206. Romer divides this passage into two halves, with a “hard-break” at line 200 that “separates the content of two different traditions” (57), one theogonic in a narrow sense, the other dedicated to the goddess’s attributes.

Of all the essays, Christopher Trinacty’s “Visions and Memories of Lucretius in Seneca’s Natural Questions” perhaps engages most directly with 21st-century debates about the sublime. Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Seneca’s treatise on meteorology, both separately and together, have become core texts for the study of the classical sublime,[3] and Trinacty enhances our understanding of Seneca’s negotiation of the Lucretian sublime by teasing out new ways in which Seneca redirects “the sublime impulse he finds in Lucretius… towards his own epistemological and theological goals” (79). Particularly noteworthy are Trinacty’s reading of QNat. 3 praef. against Lucretius’ Epicurus, his treatment of the flood at the end of QNat. 3 as one-upping Lucretian visions of cosmic collapse, and his juxtaposition of QNat. 1 with DRN 4, which makes Seneca’s book “a critique of Epicurean sense-perception” (73). This, in turn, allows Trinacty to develop a novel reading of Hostius Quadra (QNat. 1.16) as “a satiric stand-in for the Epicurean who believes in Epicurean self-fulfillment via pleasure” (75).

The final essay in Part I is Michael Teske’s “Vergil’s bougonia Rite in Georgics 4: Its Nature, Sources, Origins and Possible Link to the Indo-European Myth of Creation.” Relying on ancient allegorical readings of Vergil’s intertexts (as established by Farrell 1991), Teske connects bougonia with metempsychosis (94–5, 97, 99) and suggests that “the myth of bougonia may be a pared-down reflection of the IE creation myth, in which a primordial blood sacrifice is offered to generate life throughout the world” (98). Teske then associates bougonia with the myth of Romulus and Remus, and the essay ends by characterizing Vergil’s account of bougonia “essentially as a sublimely allegorical cosmogony” (99).

The remaining sections of the volume contain two chapters each. Part II (“Celestial Drama”) comprises essays by Gonda Van Steen and David Christenson that explore cosmic elements in Aristophanes and Plautus. The role of the sublime in ancient comedy is understudied, which makes these contributions particularly important. Van Steen’s essay (“An Early Morning Person? Aristophanes and His Star-Studded Cosmic Prologues”) is primarily an attempt “to deduce new meanings from the (pre)dawn settings” (109) of certain Aristophanic plays, especially Ecclesiazusae. One of the most engaging discussions is Van Steen’s identification of dramatic references to planets in phrases such as “by Zeus!” (μὰ τὸν Δι’ at Ach. 373), which potentially transform celestial bodies into “natural props” (108). As she admits, such readings assume that 5th-century Athenians identified the planets with the Olympian gods, which is far from certain, but the difficulty is not insurmountable (112–13, 126 n.14). Even more suggestively, Van Steen observes that the use of such natural props appears to originate in tragedy (e.g., 115 on the beacon in the opening lines of Agamemnon), which prompts readers to think about how the comedic sublime appropriates and problematizes tragic modes of sublimity. This kind of inter-generic play with the sublime has been explored in other contexts,[4] and Van Steen opens new avenues of inquiry here. Christenson’s essay (“Frighteningly Funny Gods: Comic and Cosmic Space in Plautus”) focuses on “the Plautine corpus’s most provocative instance of cosmic boundary-crossing: that of Amphitruo’s Jupiter and Mercury” (133). Although the manipulation of cosmic time receives attention (137, 142), the most compelling discussions explore how the play stages a seemingly postmodern disinformation campaign against Sosia that exploits the tools of 20th-century totalitarianism, such as gaslighting (138–9, 146–9). The experiences of Sosia and the audience are not explicitly framed in terms of sublimity, but they could be—a kind of darkly perverse and terrifying sublimity. The politics of the sublime would repay a more explicit investigation along these lines.

Part III (“History, Historiography and the Cosmos”) begins with Philip Waddell’s study of eclipse narratives in Greek historiography (“Day Suddenly Became Night: Eclipses and the Sublime in Greek Historiography”). Waddell argues that in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Arrian, eclipses symbolize “an inversion of the natural workings of the cosmos” (159), and he demonstrates that it can be useful to think about how key political figures in each text experience “a feeling of sublimity accompanying so sudden a disruption of cosmic laws” (160). Historiography is another genre that has been underserved by scholars of the classical sublime, and Waddell’s topic is a rich one. Waddell, however, does not actually show individual characters in the texts experiencing the affective intensity of the sublime. From this perspective, it might have been helpful to establish the sublimity of the phenomenon more clearly, especially in the archaic and/or 5th-century Greek worlds (e.g., via Archilochus fr. 122 West) and then to read subsequent eclipse narratives against this background. Part III concludes with David Wright’s “The Cosmic Barrier: The Isthmus of Corinth in Imperial Latin Poetry.” Wright’s ultimate goal is to establish an allusion to Nero’s canal project at Lucan 1.99–106. Wright prepares the reader by carefully tracing the history of proposals to channel through the Isthmus and ancient attitudes towards them, all of which combines to characterize Nero as “a superhuman destroyer of worlds… a frightfully sublime transgressor of the cosmos itself” (183). The reading of Lucan is compelling, and Wright nicely establishes the “connection between extravagant works of engineering, human overreach and cosmic disaster” (177), drawing on ancient scientific thinking (178) and the Stoic language of cosmic collapse (179). It would have been easy to connect such topics and discourses explicitly with the sublime, especially since Lucan has been well studied from the perspective of the sublime.[5]

Part IV turns to “Reception.” In “Reading the Classics in Plague-Ridden England, 1629–1722,” Thomas Willard examines “the ways that classically educated English writers respond to such potentially sublime topics as fire, plague, and warfare” (189–90) before the broad dissemination of Longinus’ treatise. Willard’s reading of Hobbes’ translation of the plague narrative in Thucydides is particularly suggestive, as is his treatment of Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year. Here, Willard identifies a tension between Defoe’s commitment to Enlightenment rationality and his own religious zeal (202–3) that suggests multiple ancient parallels; there are close connections between plague and the sublime from Thucydides to Lucretius and beyond. The volume’s final chapter is “‘Solution Sweet’ and Keats’s Poetic Ideal: Erotic and Nuptial Imagery in The Eve of St. Agnes” by Cynthia White. For White, “Keats sees poetry as a means of comprehending the sublime” (216), and the paper argues that in this poem, “the sublime and the beautiful have melded, however evanescently, rather than remained distinct” (219). Although the Romantic sublime, which is heavily influenced by the theories of Burke and Kant, regularly contrasts sublimity with beauty, the classical sublime frequently combines or overlays the concepts;[6] we might find, then, in White’s reading of Keats a more precise reception of the classical sublime.

An Index of names and topics concludes the volume.

To sum up, Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman literature and its Reception builds off recent developments in the study of the sublime in the Greek and Roman worlds. Readers will discover a wealth of exciting material, including authors and topics not regularly associated with sublimity. In addition, anyone who works on or is interested in ancient conceptions of nature and the cosmos will find the volume similarly rewarding.

 

Works Cited

Chomse, Siobhan. 2019. “Building the Sublime Emperor in «A More Vertical Rome».” In Luoghi dell’abitare, immaginazione letteraria e identità Romana: da Augusto ai Flavi, edited by Mario Citroni, Mario Labate, and Gianpiero Rosati, 161–84. Pisa: Edizioni ETS.

Day, Henry J. M. 2013. Lucan and the Sublime: Power, Representation and Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Farrell, Joseph. 1991. Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Garani, Myrto. 2020. “Seneca as Lucretius’ Sublime Reader (Naturales Quaestiones 3 Praef.).” In Lucretius Poet and Philosopher: Backgrounds and Fortunes of De Rerum Natura, edited by Philip R. Hardie, Valentina Prosperi, and Diego Zucca, 105–26. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

Glauthier, Patrick. 2023. “The Classical Sublime.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime, edited by Cian Duffy, 17–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2025. The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome: Manilius, Seneca, Lucan, and the Aetna. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hardie, Philip R. 2009. Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Porter, James I. 2007. “Lucretius and the Sublime.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip R. Hardie, 167–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2016. The Sublime in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shearin, W.H. 2019. “‘The Deep-Sticking Boundary Stone’: Cosmology, Sublimity, and Knowledge in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones.” In Cosmos in the Ancient World, edited by Phillip Sidney Horky, 247–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Gareth D. 2012. The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Authors and Titles

  1. “Introduction” (David Christenson)

Part I: Sublime Epic

  1. “Homer’s Odyssey and the Mystery of Time” (Norman Ausin)
  2. “Helen, Paris and the Philosophical ἔρως: Love, Strife and Sublime Contact from Homer to Plato” (Boris Shoshitaishvili)
  3. “The Hard-Break at Hesiod, Theogony 200” (Frank Romer)
  4. “Visions and Memories of Lucretius in Seneca’s Natural Questions” (Christopher Trinacty)
  5. “Vergil’s bougonia Rite in Georgics 4: Its Nature, Sources, Origins and Possible Link to the Indo-European Myth of Creation” (Michael Teske)

Part II: Celestial Drama

  1. “An Early Morning Person? Aristophanes and His Star-Studded Comic Prologues” (Gonda Van Steen)
  2. “Frighteningly Funny Gods: Comic and Cosmic Space in Plautus” (David Christenson)

Part III: History, Historiography and the Cosmos

  1. “Day Suddenly Became Night: Eclipses and the Sublime in Greek Historiography” (Philip Waddell)
  2. “The Cosmic Barrier: The Isthmus of Corinth in Imperial Latin Poetry” (David J. Wright)

Part IV: Reception

  1. “Reading the Classics in Plague-Ridden England, 1629–1722” (Thomas Willard)
  2. “‘Solution Sweet’ and Keats’s Poetic Ideal: Erotic and Nuptial Imagery in The Eve of St. Agnes” (Cynthia White)

 

Notes

[1] See Hardie 2009: 99–109, 136–52, and Porter 2016: 416–21.

[2] See Porter 2016: 594–601 and Glauthier 2023: 21–2.

[3] For Lucretius, see Porter 2007 (2016: 445–73) and Hardie 2009: 67–228. For Seneca’s Natural Questions, often with an emphasis on Lucretian influence, see Williams 2012: 213–57, Shearin 2019, Garani 2020, and now Glauthier 2025: 100–44.

[4] See Porter 2016: 434–44 on Clouds. Also worth noting is Hardie’s (2009: 180–228) treatment of Horace’s manipulation of the Lucretian sublime.

[5] Wright does not cite Day 2013. For Lucan and the sublime, see now Glauthier 2025: 145–98. For imperial building projects and the sublime, see Chomse 2019.

[6] See Porter 2016: 33–4, 566–7.