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Horace and Longinus
Decorum (from the Latin: "proper, fit, becoming") was a principle of classical rhetoric,
poetry and theatrical theory. The term is also applied to prescribed limits of
appropriate social behavior within set situations.
In rhetoric and poetry
In classical rhetoric and poetic theory, "decorum" designates the appropriateness of style to
subject. Both Aristotle (in, for example, his Poetics) and Horace (in his Ars Poetica) discussed
the importance of appropriate style in epic, tragedy, comedy, etc. Horace says, for example:
"A comic subject is not susceptible of treatment in a tragic style, and similarly the banquet
ofThyestes cannot be fitly described in the strains of everyday life or in those that approach
the tone of comedy. Let each of these styles be kept to the role properly allotted to it." [1]
Hellenistic and Latin rhetors divided style into: the grand style, the middle style and the low (or
plain) style; certain types of vocabulary and diction were considered appropriate for each
stylistic level. A discussion of this division of styles was set out in the pseudoCiceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium. Modeled on Virgil's three-part literary career
(Aeneid, Bucolics,Georgics), ancient, medieval and Renaissance theorists often linked each
style to a specific genre: epic (high style), didactic (middle style) and pastoral (plain style). In
the Middle Ages, this concept was called "Virgil's wheel". For stylistic purists, the mixing of
styles within a work was considered inappropriate, and a consistent use of the high style was
mandated for the epic.[2] However, stylistic diversity had been a hallmark of classical epic (as
seen in the inclusion of comic and/or erotic scenes in the epics of Virgil or Homer). Poetry,
perhaps more than any other literary form, usually expressed words or phrases that were not
current in ordinary conversation, characterized as poetic diction.
Concepts of decorum, increasingly sensed as inhibitive and stultifying, were aggressively
attacked and deconstructed by writers of the Modernist movement, with the result that
readers' expectations were no longer based on decorum, and in consequence the violations
of decorum that underlie the wit of mock-heroic, of literary burlesque, and even a sense
of bathos, were dulled in the twentieth-century reader.
In theater
In continental European debates on theatre in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance, the
expression decorum also refers to the appropriateness of certain actions or events to the
stage. In their emulation of classical models and of the theoretical works by Aristotle and
Horace (including the notion of the "Three Unities"), certain subjects were deemed to be
better left to narration. In Horace's Ars Poetica, the poet (in addition to speaking about
appropriate vocabulary and diction, as discussed above) counseled playwrights to respect
decorum by avoiding the portrayal, on stage, of scenes that would shock the audience by
their cruelty or unbelievable nature: "But you will not bring on to the stage anything that ought
properly to be taking place behinds the scenes, and you will keep out of sight many episodes
that are to be described later by the eloquent tongue of a narrator. Medea must not butcher
her children in the presence of the audience, nor the monstrous Atreus cook his dish of
human flesh within public view, nor Procne be metamorphosed into a bird, nor Cadmus into a
snake. I shall turn in disgust from anything of this kind that you show me. " [3]
In Renaissance Italy, important debates on decorum in theater were set off by Sperone
Speroni's play Canace (portraying incest between a brother and sister) and Giovanni Battista
Giraldi's play Orbecche (involving patricide and cruel scenes of vengeance).[4] In seventeenthcentury France, the notion of decorum (les bienséances) was a key component of French
classicism in both theater and the novel (see French literature of the 17th century).
Dionysius Longinus, or Pseudo-longinus name sometimes assigned to the author of
On the Sublime (Greek Peri Hypsous), one of the great, seminal works of literary
criticism. The earliest surviving manuscript, from the 10th century, first printed in
1554, ascribes it to Dionysius Longinus. Later it was noticed that the index to the
manuscript read “Dionysius or Longinus.” The problem of authorship embroiled
scholars for centuries, attempts being made to identify him with Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Cassius Longinus, Plutarch, and others. The solution has been to name
him Pseudo-Longinus.
On the Sublime apparently dates from the first century AD, because it was a response
to a work of that period by Caecilius of Calacte, a Sicilian rhetorician. There are 17
chapters on figures of speech, which have occupied critics and poets ever since they
were written. About a third of the manuscript is lost.
Longinus defines sublimity (Greek hypsos) in literature as “the echo of greatness of
spirit,” that is, the moral and imaginative power of the writer that pervades his work.
Thus for the first time greatness in literature is ascribed to qualities innate in the
writer rather than his art.
The author suggests that greatness of thought, if not inborn, may be acquired by
emulating great authors such as his models (chief among them Homer, Demosthenes,
and Plato). Quotations that were chosen to illustrate the sublime and its opposite
occasionally also preserve work that would otherwise now be lost; e.g., one of
Sappho's odes. See also sublime.
in literary criticism, grandeur of thought, emotion, and spirit that characterizes great
literature. It is the topic of an incomplete treatise, On the Sublime, that was for long
attributed to the 3rd-century Greek philosopher Cassius Longinus but now believed to
have been written in the 1st century AD by an unknown writer frequently designated
Pseudo-Longinus.
The author of the treatise defines sublimity as “excellence in language,” the
“expression of a great spirit,” and the power to provoke “ecstasy.” Departing from
traditional classical criticism, which sought to attribute the success of literary works
to their balance of certain technical elements—diction, thought, metaphor, music,
etc.—he saw the source of the sublime in the moral, emotional, and imaginative depth
of the writer and its expression in the flare-up of genius that rules alone could not
produce.
The concept had little influence on modern criticism until the late 17th and 18th
centuries, when it had its greatest impact in England. Its vogue there coincided with
renewed interest in the plays of William Shakespeare, and it served as an important
critical basis for Romanticism.