Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.

While it is common to compare Boethius’ philosophy with that of his intellectual predecessors and heirs, as far as I know there are no studies comparing Boethius and his most well-known Greek contemporary, Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet both were Christians who were inspired by Plato and deeply influenced by Proclean Neoplatonism. This chapter begins to fill this lacuna in the literature by comparing the way that Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy and Dionysius in On Divine Names employ key Neoplatonic ideas and metaphors in speaking and thinking about God’s nature and providence. The chapter compares how Boethius and Dionysius employ Neoplatonic sphere and circle metaphors (1) to illustrate how God is both completely simple and yet also has, or rather is, a multiplicity of “attributes” or activities, and (2) to articulate the relationship between God and creatures in terms of remaining, proceeding, and reverting.

Although Nietzsche rejects the Platonic legacy in the name of the earth, there are resonances between the two thinkers. They share a critique of the Western democratic city. Both carry out a transvaluation of values: rejecting received notions of truth and justice. Both reject the notion that art, drama and tragedy occupy a separate “spectacular” sphere over against the quotidian life of the city. Both advocate a reintegration of life with art. Yet Nietzsche’s naturalism apparently allows only for the supremacy of the middle rank of Indo-European tripartition, to which Plato appeals in Republic: the Kshatriya power of aristocratic thumos. There is no place seemingly for the Brahmanic class of wise priestly rulers. How to understand the role of Zarathustra: is his advocacy of pure generosity an appeal to transcendence and so an irreducible good to which the warriors must advert? Inversely, is Plato’s good that which offers nothing in itself because it is beyond being, but only illuminates the terrestrial that comes after it and shares in it? Is it possible to mediate the two thinkers in this way? To a degree I shall argue that it is, though also that it is Plato whose metaphysical framework is less dualistic, who sees generosity less as merely accidental and as necessarily oscillating with cruelty.

This chapter argues that the representation of the inhabited world by the Periegesis of Dionysius of Alexandria, dateable between 130 and 18, is not, as sometimes suggested, timeless, but very alert to the impact of Rome on peoples it has incorporated into its empire, and displays pride in the Hellenic culture that has spread even beyond that empire’s frontiers.

Dionysius endorses the Platonic position that love is a human response to beauty, and furthermore that the human quest for contemplation involves purification both of our understanding of beauty and of our experience of love. Dionysius’ understanding of both beauty and love goes beyond what we find in Plato; some of these changes belong to the development of the Platonic tradition, and especially to Plotinus, others to the Christian tradition. In the former case, beauty is understood less in terms of symmetry and more in terms of transparency to higher realities. This leads in Dionysius to a sense of beauty being a means of Theophany: God is manifest as beauty cascading through the different ontological levels of being. It is, however, crucial for Dionysius that this manifestation of beauty is seen in the way in which God’s love for all that exists is communicated through the ranks of being; this dimension he owes to his own Christian tradition. This enables Dionysius to integrate this understanding of being drawn to God through beauty with his understanding of the Church, both celestial and earthly, as essentially hierarchical, in which purification is experienced through participation in the rites of the Church.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus discusses the Athenian funeral orations in his Antiquitates Romanae and his literary-critical essays. He takes a negative view of both the Athenian public funeral and of three specific examples of funeral orations –the Periclean epitaphios in Thucydides, Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Menexenus, and the funeral oration ascribed to Demosthenes (Dem. 60). The nature of his negative pronouncements suggests that his moral aversion to the orations, and to what the public funerals had represented, guided his aesthetic responses to the individual texts. While the encomiastic commonplaces on view in the funeral orations provide the blueprint for Dionysius’ idealised conception of Athens, the speeches themselves are vehicles unworthy of conveying those ideals. The case of the funeral oration offers a good illustration of how Dionysius’ classicism is inherently, recursively nostalgic and so ultimately chimerical. His idealised view of Athens is defined not by the funeral orations themselves, but by the valorisation of authors who made a project of berating their compatriots for failure to live up to the example, and exempla, of earlier generations.

In 525 Dionysius Exiguus compiled his 95-year continuation of the Alexandrian Paschal table, which eventually scheduled the celebration of Pasch for the entire western Church. He also stated that the Council of Nicaea had authorized the 19-year Alexandrian Paschal cycle and that this had been maintained by subsequent Alexandrian bishops. These statements were challenged by Jan in 1718, and since then the question of Nicaean authority has been disputed. However, while the Synoptic Gospels agree that the Crucifixion took place on the day after the Jewish Passover, John’s Gospel places it on the day of the Passover and hence on the fourteenth day of the spring moon. Thus the Evangelistic accounts of Jesus’s Crucifixion conflict chronologically. Consequently, the Asian churches chose to emphasize the Crucifixion by celebrating Pasch on the fourteenth day of the moon, while other churches emphasized the Resurrection by celebrating it on Sunday. At Nicaea Constantine sought to resolve this conflict, and contemporaneous accounts agree that the Council decreed that Pasch be celebrated only on Sunday, and forbade celebration on the fourteenth day. This chapter concludes that the origin of the Alexandrian Paschal table lies rather with bishop Theophilus in the last decades of the fourth century.