In the estimation of many literary critics and critical historians who have surveyed the rich offerings of classical literary criticism and theory, the treatise On the Sublime, written probably in the first century A.D., often ranks second in importance only to Aristotle's Poetics (circa 335 B.C.). Aristotle's analytic work succinctly maps the terrain of literary genre, character, structure, and rhetoric; but the highly compact On the Sublime explores with intensity the nature and occurrence of a certain kind of writing -- specifically writing whose expressive power appears to transgress the rules of artistic and rhetorical composition and to achieve what in Greek is termed hypsos, a word that denotes greatness, excellence, or sublimity.

The author of this singular literary analysis, however, remains shrouded in such a veil of obscurity and competing claims regarding his identity that it may be impossible to know with certainty who he was...