Sublime monuments and sublime ruins in ancient aesthetics

Abstract

The Greeks and Romans produced monuments – monumental buildings, temples, tombs, inscription-bearing slabs and other structures – as a way of projecting themselves into their own present and into the future of others. Monuments are reminders, in enduring material, of the achievement of a collective, even when they appear to commemorate an individual. They are collective expressions with ideological force. This paper explores the interaction between materiality, language and architecture in a Greek tradition of the sublime that exalts monuments and their ruins. The paper begins by proposing an aesthetics of early sepulchral inscriptions; it then looks at selected Hellenistic epigrams. It culminates in Hellenistic poetics, Vitruvian architecture and the Longinian sublime, which looks directly back to earlier developments in the same tradition of verbal architecture. The sublime is generated at the nether ends of the spectrum that monuments can occupy – at their moment of greatest possible expansion (at the limits of the cosmos) and at the moment of their imminent collapse. From Homer to the postclassical eras, the traditions of sublime monuments and their ruins are ways of confronting and expressing the fragilities of time, matter and existence under changing cultural circumstances in a cumulative and self-reflexive fashion.