Longinus' On the Sublime (date unknown) presents itself as a response to the work of the Augustan critic Caecilius of Caleacte. Recent attempts to reconstruct Longinus' intellectual context have largely ignored the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Caecilius' contemporary colleague (active in Rome between 30 and 8 B.C.E. ). This article investigates the concept of hupsos ("the sublime") and its religious aspects in Longinus and Dionysius, and reveals a remarkable continuity between the discourse of both authors. Dionysius' works inform us about an Augustan debate on Plato and the sublime, and thereby provide us with an important context for Longinus' treatise.

2 While preparing this paper for publication, I received a special issue of the journal Linguistica e Letteratura 29.1-2 (2004), in which the procedure of rewriting texts is discussed from various angles. See esp. the contributions by L. Spina, 'Esercizi di stile: riscritture e metamorfosi testuali. Un'introduzione' (9-12), and by M. Grimaldi, 'A proposito dell'esegesi retorico-grammaticale: qualche esempio di metafrasi/riscrittura' (21-49). On the various applications of the term 'metathesis' in ancient grammar and rhetoric, see U. Schindel, 'Enargia, Metathesis, Metastasis: Figurendefinitionen bei Isidor und Quintilian', Glotta 71 (1993), 112-19 at 113. In this paper, the word 'metathesis' refers to the technique of rewriting a given text, whether in prose or poetry, in order to make a comparison between the first and second version, thereby pointing to certain virtues, faults or particularities in the style of the original. Dionysius of Halicarnassus usually refers to this technique with the verb metatí qhmi ('to change', 'to transpose', 'to place differently'), but he also uses other verbs, such as aÒ lla´ttw ('to change', 'to alter') and other compound verbs with meta-, including metakine´w ('to change', 'to change places'), metapi´ptw ('to undergo a change') and metarruqmi´zw ('to change the form'). 3 The standard work on Dionysius' critical methods is that of Bonner (1939), who has shown that Dionysius' use of these methods became increasingly sophisticated in the course of his

This article argues that the modern notion of immersion, a reader being absorbed in a virtual world to such a degree that she experiences it as if it were the actual world, has a predecessor in the ancient notion of enargeia, "the power of bringing the things that are said before the senses of the audience." First, it discusses how ancient Greek literary critics theorized about enargeia. Since these critics praise Homer as an author who is particularly capable of achieving enargeia, its second objective is to examine the narrative techniques by which he immerses his audience in his story world.

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