Longinus

The author of On the Sublime is named in the medieval manuscript as 'Dionysius or Longinus', and later ages have called him Longinus, but who he was remains unknown. From the work itself he seems to have lived in the first century AD, a teacher of rhetoric deeply read in Greek literature, in Homer, Plato and Demosthenes, who even quotes the opening of Genesis. His life is lost, but his small book, once translated into French by Boileau in the seventeenth century, became a major source of European aesthetics and of Romantic poetics.