Victoria Hodges, Rutgers University
Timotheus’ Persians provides a dramatic example of the ways in which the theory of the sublime, couched in naturalism and blended reality, is contingent upon the reader’s confrontation with or dissimulation of the ‘Other’ within the narrative inscape. A first century C.E. treatise that espouses composite experiences, Longinus’ On the Sublime incorporates the heightened imagery favored by the New Music lyric poets in order to highlight the unification of and re-affectation between the author, audience, and text. Built not upon unidirectional narration—author exerting influence on listener through text—but upon experiential exchange between the three distinct players, the Longinian sublime exhilarates and conflates its narratival frames much as Timotheus does in his imaginative speeches. Using the sublime’s inherent dialogism between art and nature, Timotheus and his audience simultaneously create and recreate disembodiment and disillusionment in the text (for a similar use in Pindar, see Fowler). This paper argues that this triangulation of authorship, textual creation, and landscape is a particular innovation of New Music that scholars have only recently begun to consider (LeVen; Fearn; Csapo).
Replete with blended periphrases (Budelmann and LeVen) and compounded emotional registers—seen most clearly in the famous phrase “the gleaming white children of the mouth” (στόματος μαρμαροφεγγεῖς παῖδες, 91–92)—Timotheus’ Persians provides an energetic example of the New Musicians’ acute awareness of the core components of the Longinian sublime. Throughout his Persians, Timotheus explores the effects of a composite experience between author and audience in order to bring about a textual event that is predicated upon a reciprocal rediscovery and reinterpretation of emotion. As noted by Longinus, the sublime similarly drives the audience not to a persuasive reality (πειθώ), but to ecstasy (ἔκστασις), namely a state of co-created and co-interpreted displacement outside of the individual in the face of the abject. Timotheus explores this displacement most explicitly in his description of the sea as both “bristling surface foam” (βλοσυρὰν ἄχναν, 83–84) and “brine from the deep” (βρύχιον ἅλμαν, 85). The sea itself in the Persians embodies both the heights and the depths of the sublime, capable of enacting and restricting the motion of the image. As the water transects literary space by moving inwards and then upwards, restricting the sailor’s ability to breathe, so too do the audience and Timotheus himself move inwards, between, and then upwards again through the text. The audience-as-sea experiences the rage of author, character, and text alike in its incapacity to comprehend, digest, and ultimately be digested by Timotheus’ literary sublimity.
Ultimately, what is beyond nature, or perhaps what is between, pushes the audience towards the mirrored ἔκστασις of the author and text essential to the Longinian sublime (de Jonge). With its incomprehensible disillusion of bodies and motion, I assert that it is the text’s resistance movement and bodily integrity that puts Timotheus’ Persians in dialogue with the sublime. While vividness is certainly an established core component of New Music, it is the text’s dependency on both listener and author that creates a sensorial experience in the face of seeming incomprehensibility.