The Poetics | Page 6

a plurality of metres. This form of imitation is
to this day without a name. We have no common name for a mime of
Sophron or Xenarchus and a Socratic Conversation; and we should still
be without one even if the imitation in the two instances were in
trimeters or elegiacs or some other kind of verse--though it is the way
with people to tack on 'poet' to the name of a metre, and talk of
elegiac-poets and epic-poets, thinking that they call them poets not by
reason of the imitative nature of their work, but indiscriminately by
reason of the metre they write in. Even if a theory of medicine or
physical philosophy be put forth in a metrical form, it is usual to
describe the writer in this way; Homer and Empedocles, however, have
really nothing in common apart from their metre; so that, if the one is
to be called a poet, the other should be termed a physicist rather than a
poet. We should be in the same position also, if the imitation in these
instances were in all the metres, like the Centaur (a rhapsody in a
medley of all metres) of Chaeremon; and Chaeremon one has to
recognize as a poet. So much, then, as to these arts. There are, lastly,
certain other arts, which combine all the means enumerated, rhythm,
melody, and verse, e.g. Dithyrambic and Nomic poetry, Tragedy and
Comedy; with this difference, however, that the three kinds of means
are in some of them all employed together, and in others brought in
separately, one after the other. These elements of difference in the
above arts I term the means of their imitation.
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II. The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are
necessarily either good men or bad--the diversities of human character
being nearly always derivative from this primary
distinction, since

the line between virtue and vice is one dividing the whole of mankind.
It follows, therefore, that the agents represented must be either above
our own level of goodness, or beneath it, or just such as we are in the
same way as, with the painters, the personages of Polygnotus are better
than we are, those of Pauson worse, and those of Dionysius just like
ourselves. It is clear that each of the above-mentioned arts will admit of
these differences, and that it will become a separate art by representing
objects with this point of difference. Even in dancing, flute-playing,
and lyre-playing such diversities are possible; and they are also
possible in the nameless art that uses language, prose or verse without
harmony, as its means; Homer's personages, for instance, are better
than we are; Cleophon's are on our own level; and those of Hegemon of
Thasos, the first writer of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the
Diliad, are beneath it. The same is true of the Dithyramb and the Nome:
the personages may be presented in them with the difference
exemplified in the ... of ... and Argas, and in the Cyclopses of
Timotheus and Philoxenus. This difference it is that distinguishes
Tragedy and Comedy also; the one would make its personages worse,
and the other better, than the men of the present day.
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III. A third difference in these arts is in the manner in which each kind
of object is represented. Given both the same means and the same kind
of object for imitation, one may either (1) speak at one moment in
narrative and at another in an assumed character, as Homer does; or (2)
one may remain the same throughout, without any such change; or (3)
the imitators may represent the whole story dramatically, as though
they were actually doing the things described.
As we said at the beginning, therefore, the differences in the imitation
of these arts come under three heads, their means, their objects, and
their manner.
So that as an imitator Sophocles will be on one side akin to Homer,
both portraying good men; and on another to Aristophanes, since both
present their personages as acting and doing. This in fact, according to
some, is the reason for plays being termed dramas, because in a play

the personages act the story. Hence too both Tragedy and Comedy are
claimed by the Dorians as their discoveries; Comedy by the
Megarians--by those in Greece as having arisen when Megara became a
democracy, and by the Sicilian Megarians on the ground that the poet
Epicharmus was of their country, and a good deal earlier than
Chionides and Magnes; even Tragedy also is claimed by certain of the
Peloponnesian Dorians. In support of this claim they point to the words
'comedy' and 'drama'. Their word for the outlying hamlets, they say, is
comae, whereas Athenians call them demes--thus assuming that
comedians got the name