1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bathos

BATHOS (Gr. βάθος), properly depth, the bottom or lowest part of anything. The current usage for an anticlimax, a descent “from the sublime to the ridiculous,” from the elevated to the commonplace in literature or speech, is due to Pope’s satire on Bathos (Miscellanies, 1727–1728), “the art of sinking in poetry.” The title was a travesty of Longinus’s essay, On the Sublime, Περὶ ὔψους.