Greek · 50–120
The identity of 'Longinus' remains one of literary history's unsolved problems. The treatise On the Sublime was long attributed to Cassius Longinus, a third-century rhetorician and advisor to Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, but modern scholarship dates the text to the first century CE, making its author anonymous. Whoever wrote it produced the most passionate and psychologically acute work of ancient literary criticism.