Classical Literary Criticism

by D.A. Russell (Editor), Michael Winterbottom (Editor), Aristotle

English, Greek, Latin (translation)

Genres: Classics, Philosophy, Criticism, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Classical Studies, Poetry

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 381

Reviews

[Unknown]

This volume contains:

• Plato - Ion
• Plato - Republic 2-3
• Plato - Republic 10
• Aristotle - Poetics
• Horace - A Letter to Augustus
• Horace - The Art of Poetry
• Tacitus - Dialogue on Orators
• 'Longinus' - On Sublimity
• Dio of Prusa - Philoctetes in the Tragedians
• Plutarch - On the study of Poetry

This is probably a better choice than Penguin's volume of the same name which does not contain the works by Tacitus, Dio, and Plutarch, which are included in this volume.
__________
The editors are most grateful to Dr Catherine Whistler for suggesting the attractive cover illustration.

[John Devlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah, so I had to read this.

Old arguments best served in a late night bull session in college: what is art, is art truth, what’s acceptable art?

Plato’s a curmudgeon who sees art as weakening moral fiber and simply false.
Aristotle’s the hip 60s prof who thinks arts beautiful and speaks to the soul.

In between we have manufactured talks where Socrates disassembles a fictitious person argument and others where poetry, a la rock n roll, a la hip hop, is seen as dangerous to Roman youth.

I’ve become the curmudgeonly Plato who inveighs against the moral destruction caused by art.
It took a few thousand years but when today entertainers wear almost nothing and simulate sex acts or when a performer rips off his clothes and plays the piano with his penis to the cheers of the crowd we’ve finally gotten to the place Plato feared.

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of essential works of literary criticism by a handful of ancient Greco-Roman authors: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Tacitus, Loginus, Dio of Prussa, and Plutarch. The collection is ably translated and annotated by a pair of Oxford classicists. The selections give a representative sampling of the way the ancients understood poetry: its purpose, nature, composition, greatest practitioners, and dangers. These are pioneering selections; virtually all later poets and authors in Europe and America read, studied, and loved them, that is, until the barbarism of the twentieth century and the near-total death of culture of our current century.

Plato's reflections on poetry from Ion and Republic present us with many difficulties (as Plato probably intended in his exoteric, classroom dialogues): like painting, poetry also gives a copy of a copy. As such, it is operating at a lower level of reality, far-removed from ideal forms. However, Plato accepts that men love to hear poetry and that tragedy and epic can spur men to courage and moral actions. Plato leaves the door open for his later interpreters, such as Aristotle, who make no mistake that poetry is to entertain and teach, not "copies of copies" but ideals. Therefore, a way opens up in later platonism for the belief that the 'mimesis' (imitation) of reality one finds in poetry may be imitated by hearers and the higher, moral actions participated in.

The most fascinating work in this collection is the mysterious work by Longinus. Scholars don't know who this was and they don't know when exactly it was written. At any rate, Longinus takes up many of the strands of literary criticism present in the Hellenistic world (c. 100-200 A.D.) and provides an outstanding treatise, "On the Sublime." Unfortunately, about a third of the book is lost. What remains, however, is precious beyond words. This treatise was to have an astonishing impact on European poets, literary critics, and philosophers in the later part of the seventeenth century (when, in 1674, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux translated it) and the entirety of the eighteenth. Longinus's view of the sublime and his definition of genius was taken up and developed by everyone from Shaftesbury to Kant, Young to Hamann. For poets and writers, it is one of the greatest works to have miraculously survived from the ancient world.

I will conclude by quoting a handful of my favorite passages:

+++Plato+++
- "Now this is perfectly true, a poet is a light, winged, holy creature, and cannot compose until he is possessed and out of his mind, and his reason is no longer in him; no man can compose or prophesy so long as he has his reason... This is why god takes away their senses and uses them as servants, as he does divine prophets and seers, so that we who hear may realize that it is not these persons, whose reason has left them, who are the speakers of such valuable words, but god who speaks and expresses himself to us through them... Herein god seems to me to have shown, to prevent us being in any doubt, that these beautiful poems are not human and of men, but divine and of the gods, poets being merely interpreters of the gods, each possessed by his own particular god" (Ion, 5-6).

+++Aristotle+++
- "Mimesis is innate in human beings from childhood—indeed we differ from the other animals in being most given to mimesis and in making our first steps in learning through it—and pleasure in instances of mimesis is equally general" (Poetics, 54).
- "[P]oetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth whole than history, since poetry tends to make general statements, while those of history are particular" (Poetics, 62).
- "It is obvious from all this that the poet should be considered a maker of plots, not of verses, since he is poet qua maker of mimesis and the objects of his mimesis are actions. Even if it is incidentally true that the plot he makes actually happened, that does not mean he is not its maker; for there is no reason why some things that actually happen should not be the sort of thing that would probably happen, and it is in virtue of that aspect of them that he is their maker" (Poetics, 63).
- "Since a tragedy is a mimesis of people better than are found in the world, one ought to do the same as the good figure-painters; for they too give us the individual form, but though they make people lifelike they represent them as more beautiful than they are" (Poetics, 70).
- "[P]oetry is the work of a genius rather than of a madman; for the genius is by nature adaptable, while the madman is degenerate" (Poetics, 72).
- "[Metaphor] cannot be learnt from anyone else, and it is a sign of natural genius, as to be good at metaphor is to perceive resemblances" (Poetics, 80).

+++Horace+++
- "I get annoyed to hear something criticized, not for being grossly and disagreeably put together, but for being recent: to see honor and glory sought for the ancients, not merely allowance made" (Letter to Augustus, 92).
- "It is poetry that placates the gods of heaven and underworld" (Letter to Augustus, 94).
- "[The poet] is like a magician, who can transport me now to Thebes, now to Athens" (Letter to Augustus, 96).
- "It has always been, and always will be, lawful to produce a word stamped with the current mark. As woods change in leaf as the seasons slide on, and the first leaves fall, so the old generation of words dies out, and the newly born bloom and are strong like young men. We and our works are a debt owed to death... Many words which have fallen will be born again, many now in repute will fall if usage decrees: for in her hand is the power and the law and the canon of speech" (The Art of Poetry, 99).
- "It is not enough for poetry to be beautiful; it must also be pleasing and lead the hearer's mind wherever it will" (The Art of Poetry, 100).
- "I could write as good poetry as any; but nothing is worth that price, and so I'll play the part of the whetstone, that can sharpen the knife though it can't itself cut. In other words, without writing myself, I will teach function and duty—where the poet's resources come from, what nurtures and forms him, what is proper and what not, in what directions excellence and error lead" (Art of Poetry, 105-6).
- "My advice to the skilled imitator will be to keep his eye on the model of life and manners, and draw his speech living from there" (Art of Poetry, 106).
- "Poetry is like painting. Some attracts you more if you stand near, some if you're further off. On picture likes a dark place, one will need to be seen in the light, because it's not afraid of the critic's sharp judgment. One gives pleasure once, one will please if you look it over ten times" (Art of Poetry, 107).
- "In days of old, wisdom consisted in separating public property from private, the sacred from the secular, in checking promiscuity, in laying down rules for the married, in building cities, in inscribing laws on wooden tablets. And that is how honor and renown came to divine poets and poetry. After them came the great Homer and Tyrtaeus, who sharpened masculine hearts for war by their verses. Oracles were uttered in verse. The path of life was pointed out in verse. Kings' favors were won by the Muses' tunes. Entertainment was found there also, and rest after long labor. So there is no call to be ashamed of the Muse with her skill on the lyre or of Apollo the singer" (Art of Poetry, 108).
- "Do good poems come by nature or by art? This is a common question. For my part, I don't see what study can do without a rich vein of talent, nor what good can come of untrained genius. They need each other's help and work together in friendship" (Art of Poetry, 108).
- "Men of sense are afraid to touch a mad poet and give him a wide berth" (Art of Poetry, 109).

+++Tacitus+++
- "But the highest pleasure by far is that of the extemporary speaker, daring and even rash in his invention. In the mind, as in the soil, other things may be sown and worked over for a long time—but it is the spontaneous growths that are more satisfying" (Dialogue on Orators, 114).
- "Eloquence is something awesome and supernatural, and over the centuries it gives many instances of men reaching the heights by sheer natural ability..." (Dialogue on Orators, 115).
- "...I count it among the principal rewards of poetry that it is composed away from the bustle and the litigant at the door and the shabby and weeping defendants: the mind is free to withdraw to fresh innocent places, and enjoy a holy world. This is where true eloquence had its beginnings and its shrine—this the guise in which it first won over mortals and flowed into hearts still chaste and uncorrupted. This was the language of oracles" (Dialogue on Orators, 118).

+++Longinus+++
- "Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is the source of the distinction of the very greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given eternal life to their own fame. For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant" (On Sublimity, 143).
- "Sublimity...produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow" (On Sublimity, 144).
- "I should myself have no hesitation in saying that there is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit" (On Sublimity, 150).
- "Similarly, the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man—for he understood and expressed God's power in accordance with its worth—writes at the beginning of his Laws: 'God said'—not what?—'"Let there be light", and there was light; "Let there be earth", and there was earth'" (On Sublimity, 152).
-**"[T]he genius of the ancients acts as a kind of oracular cavern, and effluences flow from it into the minds of their imitators. Even those previously not much inclined to prophesy become inspired and share the enthusiasm which comes from the greatness of others... So, more than any, did Plato, who diverted to himself countless rills from the Homeric spring... In all this process there is no plagiarism. It resembles rather the reproduction of good character in statues and works of art. Plato could not have put such a brilliant finish on his philosophical doctrines or so often risen to poetical subjects and poetical language, if he had not tried, and tried wholeheartedly, to compete for the prize against Homer, like a young aspirant challenging an admired master" (On Sublimity, 158).
- "[Plato, Demosthenes, Thucydides] presented to us as objects of emulation and, as it were, shining before our gaze, will somehow elevate our minds to the greatness of which we form a mental image... It makes it a great occasion if you imagine such a jury or audience for your own speech, and pretend that you are answering for what you write before judges and witnesses of such heroic stature" (On Sublimity, 159)
- "Thus hyperbaton is a means by which, in the best authors, imitation approaches the effect of nature. Art is perfect when it looks like nature, nature is felicitous when it embraces concealed art" (On Sublimity, 167).
- "It is indeed true that beautiful words are the light that illuminates thought" (On Sublimity, 172).
- "Let us consider a really pure and correct writer. We have then to ask ourselves in general terms whether grandeur attended by some faults of execution is to be preferred, in prose or poetry, to a modest success of impeccable soundness. We must also ask whether the greater number of good qualities or the greater good qualities are relevant to a discussion of sublimity, and urgently require an answer. I am certain in the first place that great geniuses are least 'pure.' Exactness in every detail involves a risk of meanness; with grandeur, as with great wealth, there ought to be something overlooked. It may also be inevitable that low or mediocre abilities should maintain themselves generally at a correct and safe level, simply because they take no risks and do not aim at the heights, whereas greatness, just because it is greatness, incurs danger" (On Sublimity, 175).
- "[Demosthenes] concentrates it all in himself—they are divine gifts, it is almost blasphemous to call them human—and so outpoints all his rivals, compensating with the beauties he has even for those which he lacks" (On Sublimity, 177).
-**"What then was the vision which inspired those divine writers who disdained exactness of detail and aimed at the greatest prizes in literature? Above all else, it was the understanding that nature made man to be no humble or lowly creature, but brought him into life and into the universe as into a great festival, to be both a spectator and an enthusiastic contestant in its competition. She implanted into our minds from the start an irresistible desire for anything which is great and, in relation to ourselves, supernatural. The universe is therefore not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect. Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings" (On Sublimity, 177-8).
- "Other literary qualities prove their users to be human; sublimity raises us towards the spiritual greatness of god. Freedom from error does indeed save us from blame, but it is only greatness that wins admiration" (On Sublimity, 178).
-***"Impeccability is generally a product of art; erratic excellence comes from natural greatness; therefore, art must always come to the aid of nature, and the combination of the two may well be perfection" (On Sublimity, 179).
- "As I keep saying, acts and emotions which approach ecstasy provide a justification for, and an antidote to, any linguistic audacity" (On Sublimity, 180).
- "Composition...is a harmony of words, man's natural instrument, penetrating not only the ears bu the very soul. It arouses all kinds of conceptions of words and thoughts and objects, beauty and melody—all things native and natural to mankind" (On Sublimity, 181).
- "We ought to use words worthy of things. We ought to imitate nature, who, in creating man, did not set our private parts or the excretions of our body in the face, but concealed them as well she could..." (On Sublimity, 185).
- "Greatness of mind wanes, fades, and loses its attraction when men spend their admiration on their mortal parts and neglect to develop the immortal... Amid such pestilential corruption of human life, how can we expect that there should be left to us any free, uncorrupt judge of great things of permanent value? How can we hope not to lose our case to the corrupt practices of the love of gain?" (On Sublimity, 187).

+++Plutarch+++
- "When unmixed pleasure makes its fabulous and theatrical elements wax wanton and luxuriant, blustering violently for reputation, let us take hold and prune and constrain: but when [the vine of the Muse] touches poetry with its grace, and the sweet attractions of style and fruitful and purposeful, let us introduce some admixture of philosophy" (On the Study of Poetry, 193).
- "Future philosophers therefore must not avoid poetry. Rather should they be initiated into philosophy through it, becoming accustomed to seek and enjoy truth in pleasant surroundings—or to protest and be annoyed at the lack of it" (On the Study of Poetry, 194).
- "[P]oetry is an art of imitation, a capacity analogous to painting... [remember] the familiar dictum 'poetry is speaking painting and painting silent poetry..." (On the Study of Poetry, 197).
- "Philosophers use examples, admonishing and instructing from given facts, while poets do the same thing by inventing facts and spinning tales on their own" (On the Study of Poetry, 201).
- "The student who admires everything and makes it his own, and whose judgement is ensnared by th heroic names, will inadvertently fall victim to many faults: it would be like imitating Plato's stoop or Aristotle's lisp. There is no need to be cowardly about it, or shiver or fall down and worship in superstitious awe; we must accustom ourselves to commenting with confidence, and saying 'wrong' and 'inappropriate' as often as we say 'right' and 'appropriate'" (On the Study of Poetry, 213).
- "There is no need to listen to poets as though they were lawgivers or tutors unless their subject stands up to examination—which it will if it is good. If it is bad, it will be seen as vain and futile" (On the Study of Poetry, 216).

[Mehmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good collection that does a great job of bringing together the core texts of literary criticism in the ancient world. I greatly enjoyed Tacitus’s Dialogue (read it after Cicero’s Brutus), and Longinus is a very interesting text. Plato’s Ion, the excerpts from the Republic, and Aristotle’s Poetics can be found elsewhere, but still are crucial to the coherency of this collection as fundamental and excellent works. The texts from Horace are brilliant as ever, while I wish there were more from Dio and Plutarch (the selection from plutarch is actually only half the original text) I understand why they were excludes from a paperback edition. Similar is the issue with the critical apparatus, which is lacking for such heavy works, but that is mitigated by the excellent (and very expensive) commentary and companion also from the OUP.

[annabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read this for an exam and so I’m counting it towards my goodreads reading goal bc I READ IT FRONT TO BACK!!!!!

I find it really funny that ancient philosophers like invented conversations with people to prove themselves right. It’s like thinking of a comeback or planning an argument in the shower.

[Josie Rousseau · Rating 1 out of 5]

Only because I had to read it for a class and this is not my thing, so basically the biggest waste of time ever

Plato and Aristotle basically be two men asking themselves the most leading questions ever to get the answer they want to prove a nonsensical argument that has a million other holes

[Zachary Waltz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I acquired this in order to read Longinus' On the Sublime. Upon revisiting it for a third time, I came way unpersuaded and unsatisfied by the arguments and insights. Only the comments on Sappho (10.3) and Homer (10.6) moved me.

"Homer, on the other hand, does not banish the cause of fear at a stroke; he gives a vivid picture of men, one might almost say, facing death many times with every wave that comes. Notice also the forced combination of naturally uncompoundable prepositions: hupek, 'from under'. Homer has. tortured the words to correspond with the emotion of the moment, and expressed the emotion magnificently by thus crushing words together. He has in effect stamped the special character of the danger on the diction: 'they are carried away from under death'."

[Michael Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a very jovial read, but a useful book to own and consult. That's what it is really for, I guess: a reference book.

[Helena · Rating 3 out of 5]

1. ein skulle trudd at ein 39 sider lang tekst skriven av Aristoteles ikkje skulle teke så lang tid å lese, men der tek ein feil
2. det tok betydeleg mindre tid denne gongen