Nonfiction:
Techne rhetorike, third century
Philologoi homiliai, third century
Ta prolegomena eis to tou Hephaestionos encheiridion, third century
Peri archon, third century
Peri telous, third century
The learned contemporaries of Cassius Longinus (lahn-JI-nuhs) included his teacher Origen (c. 185-c. 254), his student Porphyry (c. 234-c. 305), and his fellow philosopher, the great neo-Platonist Plotinus (205-270). Born in Athens, Cassius Longinus studied philosophy at Alexandria in Egypt, where he won Plotinus’s respect as a philologist but not as a philosopher. He returned to his birthplace to teach rhetoric and literary criticism and achieved repute as kritikotatos (most discerning critic). In his mid-fifties, about 268, he joined the royal court of Zenobia and Odenathus in Palmyra as tutor and political counsel. When Emperor Aurelian overcame the resistance of Zenobia to Roman rule, Cassius Longinus, subject to proscription, was executed.
Of the principal works completed by Cassius Longinus, only fragments are extant, the most substantial of these being twenty pages of his Techne rhetorike (rhetorical art), a standard handbook treating in standard fashion the subjects of Aristotelian rhetoric: proofs, lexis, diegesis, exordia, perorations, allegory, and the like. Among the opening remarks of his Ta prolegomena eis to tou Hephaestionos encheiridion (introduction to Hephaestion’s Encheiridion), he writes: “The father of meter is rhythm and God; for meter takes its origin from rhythm, and God articulates its measure.” Porphyry, in his biography of Plotinus, quotes a one-page excerpt of a letter from Cassius Longinus and a three-page essay prefatory to Peri telous (on the end); the letter venerates, and the preface extols, Plotinus as the best of the Platonists. None of the extant fragments offers any explicit evidence for his authorship of Peri hypsous (first century; On the Sublime, 1652), the great essay in literary criticism attributed to him until the early nineteenth century but subsequently ascribed with reasonable certainty to an anonymous critic, a “pseudo-Longinus” (also called simply “Longinus”), of the early first century
Although On the Sublime may not be considered his work–despite attempts by such scholars as G. M. A. Grube, Georg Luck, and G. W. Williams to prove that it is–and although his extant fragments are not stylistically distinguished, Cassius Longinus is known to have enjoyed considerable renown as a man of letters. Eunapius, a biographer of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, calls him “a living library and a walking museum” and adds: “Longinus was far and away the best man of his time in all [scholarly pursuits] and a great many of his works are available and admired. No critic’s negative judgment of any of the ancient writers was given credence until it was fully endorsed by Longinus.”