Vasiliu, Anca <br/><br/>
Emotion and evidence Echoes of the Phaedrus in On The Sublime 

 -  2020.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> Although the treatise On The Sublime is not a handbook of tropes, what does it deal with when it refers to different ways of producing a reality of speech capable of tearing its readers away from their own reality? The briefest answer would be: with the condition of language proper, but in a different way from that found in Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. The loss of sensory bearings caused by purposefully induced emotions is associated with the contrary motion, whose aim to stabilize the effect by stating the origin and the end of pathos. In the process of this interaction, a sudden change of register takes place. Whereas emotion such as turmoil reveals the soul, the speech that produces the effect participates in the implicit stability of the superior nature of the soul, whose universal and transcendent character it highlights. The speech that both awakens and enlightens is thus marvelous or sublime. More than a question of usage (and implicitly of style), it is a conception according to which language is intimately and inextricably linked to the soul, of which it is the most secret and faithful manifestation. A theory of the soul then emerges from the analysis of the links between the two conjoined productions that the treatise On The Sublime deals with–the effect of emotion (turmoil or stupefaction) and that of enlightenment (of undisputed evidence)–both impacting the reader in order to help them reach the marvelous or the divine which resides within them, provided that they can discover it, but to which they have access only through walking the external path laid out by someone else’s words, those of a past master of the logos that has been listened to or read. This process is the very one described by Plato in the Phaedrus. The treatise On The Sublime borrows from that dialog in a way that is sometimes explicit and sometimes implied, resorting to the power of language to mold and reveal images. The aim of our study is to indicate certain traces of the Phaedrus in the mid-first-century text, in order to direct readers toward the philosophical, rather than stylistic, nature of the treatise On The Sublime. Conversely, the latter text could become a reference point for understanding the significant role of the Phaedrus at a moment in time that was a turning point for the heritage of the Academy, opening the way to middle Platonism.