cites. However, the treatise On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to the rhetorician
Longinus and perhaps written in the first century AD, contains suggestive apprecia-
tions of Plato’s highly figured style.
Now although Plato... flows with such a noiseless stream, he none the less
achieves grandeur. You are familiar with his Republic and know his manner. ‘Those,
therefore,’ he says, ‘who have no experience of wisdom and goodness, and are
always engaged in feasting and similar pleasures, are brought down, it would
seem, to a lower level, and there wander about all their lives. They have never
looked up towards the truth, nor risen higher, nor tasted of any pure and lasting
pleasure. In the manner of cattle, they bend down with their gaze fixed always on
the ground and on their feeding-places, grazing and fattening and copulating, and
in their insatiable greed for these pleasures they kick and butt one another with
horns and hoofs of iron, and kill one another if their desires are not satisfied.’
(13)Longinian sublimity is not to be equated with Dionysius’ conception of the grand style;
the sublime is that moving quality in great literature that has the capacity to take us
out of ourselves in ekstasis, in ecstasy; passages that have this effect on diverse people
in diverse times can be called truly sublime. Such passages may be written in what
Dionysius calls the grand style, or the mixed or the plain style. This passage from
Plato is highly figurative in the modern sense that tends to restrict the word to signify
imagery. Ancient rhetoricians, as the work of Dionysius suggests, paid as much
attention to figures of sound and arrangement (the Gorgianic figures, for example,
like antithesis and isocolon) as to figures of sense and meaning (metaphor, simile,
metonymy, etc.). It may seem surprising that Plato, who distrusted rhetoric and feared
the power of poetry to the extent that he banished most forms of poetry from his ideal
Republic (see p. 203), should himself be the most poetical of philosophers, famous
throughout the ages for his imaginative presentation of ideas. His style in the Socratic
dialogues is rooted in familiar conversation that is designed to be comprehensible to
the general reader – he avoids jargon or technical terms – while at the same time
they are designed to make philosophy palatable and to entice the hearts and minds
ofthe sceptical. To this end, he uses many picturesque analogies and vivid images of
illustration, as in the above example. Nevertheless, Plato always exerts the kind of
rigid control over his own poetic powers that he required of poets in his ideal state,
who are to write not with an eye to pleasure but in an austere style that can be useful
(Republic 398a). Much of the beauty of his style stems not so much from the invention
of images as from the judgement with which he applies them. This is nowhere more
true than in the case of his most famous image, the allegory of the cave in the Republic
(514) discussed in chapter 4.
LITERATURE 171