Expert: Maria - 2/27/2005

Question
I am trying to find out about Aristotle's views about tragedy in the Greek era. I have found some information but it's all very complicated and wondered if you know any good websites that would help me understand it...or if you could give a brief summary about what he means? Also do you know any other figures who have written about greek tragedy?
Hope you can help.
Kirsty

Answer
Hi Kirsty,

This is a very broad question indeed.

Anyway I'll try  to make a brief summary about Aristotle's views about tragedy.

In his Poetics (written in the late 4th Century BC)  Aristotle, who was the first to write a book on how to analyse plays, uses Sophocles'Oedipus the King as a paradigm of a perfect tragedy and  says that ” tragedy is an imitation [Greek ‘mimesis'] of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude...through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [Greek ‘catharsis'] of these emotions."
In fact he thinks that this purification brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension.

Moreover he lists 6 principal elements  in the structure of tragedy, i.e 1) plot (Greek ‘mythos'2) character 3)theme or thought 4) diction 5) music and 6) spectacle.

"Most important of all," Aristotle says, "is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality . . . ." .

In short Aristotle considers the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot.

Also, Aristotle thinks that  the tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a "character between these two extremes, ..a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty [Greek ‘hamartia']" .
This ‘hamartia'or 'hybris', also called Tragic Flaw , is an  inherent defect or shortcoming in the hero of a tragedy, who is in other respects a superior being favoured by fortune.
(See Oedipus who unwittingly  killed his father and married his mother).

Finally, the most  powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal  of intention or situation (Greek ‘peripeteia', i.e. a change from good fortune to bad fortune) and recognition scenes, and each is most effective when it is coincident with the other.
In Oedipus the King , for example, the messenger who brings Oedipus news of his real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden reversal of his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his wife Jocasta is also his mother.


As for other figures who have written about Greek tragedy, there is Plato, of course, who however in his Republic expressed the condemnation of art in general and also included critique of Greek tragedy and comedy as he saw this world as a shadow or image of the real world, the world of "Ideas".
So, according to Plato,  art is an imitation of an imitation and is therefore inferior.
In short Plato says that poetry as well as tragedy don't teach us anything but on the contrary encourage the wrong emotions in the audience.

To conclude we can say that Aristotle's Poetics, perhaps the most fundamental theoretical treatise on tragedy, must be understood  as a reply to a challenge issued by his teacher, Plato, in the Republic.

Hope this outline can give you a first insight on this interesting matter.

Best regards
Maria
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See also these web sites:

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2t.htm#poetics

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=aristot.+poet.+1447a&vers=gree...

-As for "hybris", also spelled "hubris",  that  literally means "Haughtiness, Arrogance ", in classical Greek religious  thought is  "overweening presumption suggesting impious  DISREGARD OF THE LIMITS  governing human action in an orderly  universe".
Therefore, when man goes too far  and  is beyond  those bounds  the gods have set to him, a punishment  is inflicted  on him.