The Poetics | Page 3

fare' either well or ill;
and Professor Margoliouth has pointed out that it seems more true to
say that tragedy shows how men 'fare' than how they 'act'. It shows
thei.e.periences
/ or fortunes rather than merely their deeds. But one
must not draw the line too bluntly. I should doubt whether a classical
Greek writer was ordinarily conscious of the distinction between the
two meanings. Certainly it i.e.sier to regard happiness as a way of
faring than as a form of action. Yet Aristotle can use the passive of
prattein for things 'done' or 'gone through' (e.g. 52a, 22, 29: 55a, 25).
The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern
attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word. Greek was
very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of
grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon
dictionaries. An instance is provided by Aristotle's famous saying that
the typical tragic hero is one who falls from high state or fame, not
through vice or depravity, but by some great hamartia. Hamartia
means originally a 'bad shot' or 'error', but is currently used for 'offence'
or 'sin'. Aristotle clearly means that the typical hero is a great man with
'something wrong' in his life or character; but I think it is a mistake of
method to argue whether he means 'an intellectual error' or 'a moral
flaw'. The word is not so precise.
Similarly, when Aristotle says that a deed of strife or disaster is more
tragic when it occurs 'amid affections' or 'among people who love each
other', no doubt the phrase, as Aristotle's own examples show, would
primarily suggest to a Greek feuds between near relations. Yet some of
the meaning is lost if one translates simply 'within the family'.
There is another series of obscurities or confusions in the Poetics which,
unless I am mistaken, arises from the fact that Aristotle was writing at a
time when the great age of Greek tragedy was long past, and was using
language formed in previous generations. The words and phrases

remained in the tradition, but the forms of art and activity which they
denoted had sometimes changed in the interval. If we date the Poetics
about the year 330 B.C., as seems probable, that is more than two
hundred years after the first tragedy of Thespis was produced in Athens,
and more than seventy after the death of the last great masters of the
tragic stage. When we remember that a training in music and poetry
formed a prominent part of the education of every wellborn Athenian,
we cannot be surprised at finding in Aristotle, and to a less extent in
Plato, considerable traces of a tradition of technical language and even
of aesthetic theory.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so
clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
But no writer, certainly no ancient writer, is always vigilant.
Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them
for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by
them. Thus there seem to be cases where he has been affected in his
conceptions of fifth-century tragedy by the practice of his own day,
when the only living form of drama was the New Comedy.
For example, as we have noticed above, true Tragedy had always taken
its material from the sacred myths, or heroic sagas, which to the
classical Greek constituted history. But the New Comedy was in the
habit of inventing its plots. Consequently Aristotle falls into using the
word mythos practically in the sense of 'plot', and writing otherwise in a
way that is unsuited to the tragedy of the fifth century. He says that
tragedy adheres to 'the historical names' for an aesthetic reason,
because what has happened is obviously possible and therefore
convincing. The real reason was that the drama and the myth were
simply two different expressions of the same religious kernel (p. 44).
Again, he says of the Chorus (p. 65) that it should be an integral part of
the play, which is true; but he also says that it' should be regarded as
one of the actors', which shows to what an extent the Chorus in his day
was dead and its technique forgotten. He had lost the sense of what the
Chorus was in the hands of the great masters, say in the Bacchae or the
Eumenides. He mistakes, again, the use of that epiphany of a God
which is frequent at the end of the single plays of Euripides, and which

seems to have been equally so at the end of the trilogies of Aeschylus.
Having lost the living tradition, he sees neither the