An Imperial Anti-Sublime

This essay argues that Homeric figures in Aristides’ grand encomium of Rome generate a strong undercurrent of disaffection. Although his many visual references – an optics of empire – suggest a magnitude and vastness characteristic of the sublime, a number of odd allusions to the epics create a sense of illegitimacy and desperation, along with an eerie, stifling homogeneity. My contention is that Aristides ultimately produces something like a negative or anti-sublime: a cynical or hollowed out shell of what an empire could or should be. The result is the figured implication of the failure of pax Romana to rise to its own vision of grandeur

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Empire · Literature · Roman Empire · Sublime · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Philosophy