path: root/aristotelian_theory_of_comedy_tractatus_coislinianus_edit.rst

An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy with an adaption of the Poetics and a translation of the ‘Tractatus Coislinianus’
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:author: Lane Cooper
:position: professor of the English language and literature in Cornell University
:place: New York
:publisher: Harcourt, Brace and company
:date: 1922


The expense of publishing this volume was in part borne by a grant
from the Heckscher Foundation for the Advancement of Research,
established by August Heckscher at Cornell University.

TO

EDWARD KENNARD RAND

PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY


PREFACE
-------


This book has a primary aim in general, and a secondary aim in part.
First of all, as a companion-volume to my ‘Amplified Version’ of
*Aristotle On the Art of Poetry*, it is intended to be useful to the
general student of literature. As the *Poetics* of Aristotle helps one
to understand Greek tragedy and the epic poem, and, if employed with
care, modern tragedy and the serious novel, so, it is hoped, the
present volume will help college students and others to imderstand
comedies, in particular those dramas that have in them something of
the Aristophanic type; and to help in that understanding, not by an
elaborate investigation of origins, and not with regard to dramatic
structure (so-called) apart from the design of the comic poet to
affect his audience, but directly and with reference to that design.
The work is practical, then, in its aim to serve students of '
English ' and the like. It is offered to the public by one who
actually believes in utilizing the riches of the ancient classics for
the direct benefit of contemporary life and culture. That the *Poetics*
is useful—^not merely interesting in historical perspective—^needs no
demonstration to those who have employed it with classes in the
ancient and modem drama. I can only hope that my ‘Aristotelian’
theory of comedy may prove useful in the same way, if not in the same
measure. In essential aspects, the comic drama, and especially
that of Aristophanes, is baffhng to modem students. To judge from my
own experience, there has hitherto been no really serviceable theory
of it at the disposal of teachers of literature. And, whatever the
value attaching to the rest of my book, I have at least made
accessible to classes in the drama and in literary types the
*Tractatus Coislinianus*, which, schematic though it be, is by all odds
the most important technical treatise on comedy that has come down to
us from the ancients. And modern times give us nothing of comparable
worth in its field.

My practical aim in turning the usually inviolable classics to
account will be an excuse, I hope, for a rather drastic
manipulation of the *Poetics*. But no doubt I should apologize
for this to classical scholars, since my work is also partly
intended for them, and since elsewhere in my work (as here and
there in the Introduction) I have had to reckon at some length
with scholarly opinions that are at variance with my own. The
concession to a scholarly purpose, I am aware, has brought into
the volume an amount of argument and citation that does not
promote the aim of direct utility to less mature students. But
I could not in these days of costly printing publish two books,
one for classical scholars, and the other for a more popular sort
of audience; very reluctantly I omit an appendix of critical
Greek passages (including the text of the *Tractatus
Coislinianus*) which in more auspicious times would have formed
a part of the volume. As matters stand, the teacher who wishes to
do so can easily save his pupils from imdue attention to
historical, textual, or bibliographical minutiae; after directing
them to some of the earlier sections of the Introduction, he may
send them to the material taken or adapted from Plato and
Aristotle, and to the Tractatus Coislinianus. To the technical
scholar I may say that the section called Aristotle and
Aristophanes, in the Introduction, and the remarks on comic
dancing and on the ‘parts of *dianoia*,’ included under the
Tractate, are the chief novel contributions, if there are any in
the volume, to special scholarship.

I have entitled the volume *An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy* for
reasons suggested in the Introduction, and have indeed included
ever3rthing I could find in Aristotle, in his teacher Plato, or in
his successors, that might aid us in reconstructing his views on
comedy. At times I have been content to gather materials for some one
in the future who may be more successful in abstraction and
S5aithesis than I, or to let them reveal their meaning without
compulsion. As for the *Tractatus Coislinianus*, having throughout
maintained an attitude of caution regarding its provenience, I am yet
warranted by the mere frequency of its discussion by scholars in
treating it as a part of the AristoteHan tradition.

The notion of bringing such materials together, and of attempting
to construct a theory of comedy from them, came to me some years
ago—before I had examined Bernays’ *Ergdnzung zu Aristoteles'
Poetik*. The execution of the plan demanded a happy interval for
the imaginative effort necessary to comprehend the details in
a single view, and to rearrange them, duly subordinating some,
and emphasizing others in an ideal outline sketch. The
elaboration of the plan demanded abundant leisure. Such effort
and elaboration might result either in the reconstruction of
a theory once existing in the past, or perhaps in a new synthesis
that would harmonize with a great tradition. Instead of
uninterrupted leisure and good spirits for this delicate work,
I have experienced initial delay and constant interruption from
a physical disability that prevented anjrthing like continuous
application at a desk, and latterly I have forced the labor
through, during partial respites, in order to begin other tasks
that have arisen, and must also, if possible, be brought to
a conclusion in this fleeting life. But I must not lament over
a work that has not been wholly devoid of satisfaction, beyond
saying that my original scheme was more ambitious than the
outcome, at least in the way of illustration. I had hoped in
supplying examples to lake more advantage of the fragments of
Greek comedy in the collections by Meineke, Kock, and Kaibel; to
make fuller use of recent scholarly work on Menander and the New
Greek Comedy; and to illustrate the categories of the *Tractatus
Coislinianus* more freely from these sources, from Plant us and
Terence, and, in EngHsh literature, from Chaucer. As it is,
I have limited myself for the most part to examples from
Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Molière. Perhaps, however, the
curtailment has ended in the advantage of illustrating the
principles of comedy from the greatest of the great comic poets.
From this point, the neglect of Chaucer remains a disadvantage,
and one that is increased because the book has a special function
for students of English literature.

From the circumstances of its composition there is some overlapping
in the different parts of the volume, as there is some repetition.
Occasionally the overlapping and repetition were unavoidable because
the same topic had to be touched on in different connections. In
revising, I have not scrupled to let repetitions stand where they
appeared to subserve either clearness or emphasis.

Because of the intermittent nature of my work, it is hard to give a
clear account of my indebtedness to books and persons. Criticisms
have reached me from various quarters, suggestions from friends and
pupils, additional illustrations sometimes I know not how. I may,
however, speak of my debt to Rutherford and Starkie for their
valuable elucidation of the *Tractatus Coislinianus*. From the
brilliant Starkie in particular I have helped myself freely to
illustrative examples; I have tried to indicate this indebtedness at
several points in the body of the work, but the specific references
do not exhaust the account, and hence I now desire to make
acknowledgment in full. At the same time I have tried to proceed
independently of both Rutherford and Starkie, and of others who have
studied the Tractate; here and there, I beheve, the reader will see
that I have continued the process of illustration to advantage, where
the scholars just mentioned desisted.

My discussion of Plato and comedy, and of Aristotle and Aristophanes,
I wrote before meeting with the monographs of Greene and Brentano
respectively; and since reading those monographs I am not conscious
of any substantial change in my remarks during the process of
revision. The dissertation of Schonermarck came to my attention when
my own book was ready for the printer; but it would not at any time
have been of special help to me.

Finally, I must express my gratitude to several persons who were
patient enough to read my manuscript in part or as a whole, and
encouraged me to seek a publisher for it. In particular, I wish
to thank my friend and colleague Professor Joseph Q. Adams, and
Professor Carl N. Jackson of Harvard University, both of whom
have given the work the benefit of a critical examination. From
both I have accepted numerous suggestions regarding small
details. But as I have not m all cases been able to side with my
critics, I must take full responsibility for any errors that may
vet remain in the book.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
------------

[Some of the following works, more or less frequently cited in the
Introduction and elsewhere, are there cited by the name of the author
or editor, or by an abbreviation of the title, or by both. As my
study and writing for the volume have been done at intervals over a
period of years, and in various places, absolute consistency of
citation has perhaps not been attained where it was otherwise
possible. Moreover, the usage of editors and translators of Aristotle
varies somewhat in regard to the titles of his works. The explanation
of catch-titles in the Bibliography will, it is hoped, obviate all
difficulty of reference.]

I. ARISTOTLE
~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Aristotelis Opera*, edidit Academia Regia Borussica (the text of
I. Bekker, ed. by C. A. Brandis, V. Rose, and others). 5 vols.
Berlin, 1831 (vols, i, 2, 3), 1836 (vol. 4), 1870 (vol.5,
containing *Aristotelis Fragmenia*, coll. by V. Rose, and *Index
Aristotelicus* by H. Bonitz).

[Where it has been desirable to refer very specifically to a brief
passage, or to a very few words, or a single word, in the . text of
Aristotle, I have cited the page-, column-, and line-number of this
edition of the Berlin Academy, following the custom of most
subsequent editors and commentators; thus : *Poetics* 6. 1449^21 (=
chapter 6 of the *Poetics*, and page 1449, column b, line 21, in the
said edition.]

*Aristotelis Fragmenta*, ed. by V. Rose. Leipsic, 1886.

*Aristotelis Fragmenta*, ed. by Heitz. Paris, 1869.

Bonitz, H,, *Index Aristotelicus*. Berlin, 1870. See above,
*Aristotelis Opera*, vol. 5.

*The Works of Aristotle*, translated into English under the
editorship of J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross. Oxford, 1908, etc. [In
course of publication, latterly (after Feb., 1913) under the
editorship of W. D. Ross. In the present volume I have made
frequent, but not invariable, use of the following parts,
referring to the whole as the ‘Oxford translation’ of Aristotle.]

*Atheniensium Respuhlica*, trans, by F. Kenyon. 1920.

*De Divinatione per Somnum*, trans, by J. I. Beare. 1908.

*De Generatione Animalium*, trans, by A. Piatt. 1910.

*De Partibus Animalium*, trans, by W. Ogle. 1911.

*De Sensu et Sensibili*, trans by J. I. Beare. 1908.

*Ethica Eudemia*, trans, by J. Solomon. 1915.

*Historia Animalium*, trans, by D. W. Thompson. 1910.

*Metaphysica*, trans, by W. D. Ross. 1908.

*Politica*, trans, by B. Jowett, revised by W. D. Ross. 1921.

*Poetics*, ed. by J. Vahlen. Third ed. Leipsic, 1885. [Contains,
pp. 78 — 80, text of *Tractatus Coislinianus*.]

*Poetics*, ed. and trans, by I. Bywater. Oxford, 1909. [Cited as
' Bywater.']

*Poetics*. S. H. Butcher, *Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine
Art, with a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics*.
London, 1907. [Cited as ' Butcher.']

*Poetics*. *Aristotle On the Art of Poetry: an Amplified Version,
with Supplementary Illustrations, for Students of English*, by L.
Cooper. Boston, [1913]; New York, [1921]. [Cited as ' Amplified
Version.']

*Poetics*. *Aristoteles iiber die Dichtkunst*, trans, by A.
Gudeman. Leipsic, 1921.

*Poetics*. See A. Gudeman, *Die Syrisch-Arabische Uebersetzung
der Aristotelischen Poetik*. In *Philologus* 76 (1920). 239 — 65.

*De Anima*, ed. and trans, by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, 1907,

*De Anima*. Aristote, *Traite de l’Âme*, ed. and trans, by G. Rodier.
2 vols. Paris, 1900.

*Nicomachean Ethics*, trans, by J. E. C. Welldon. London, 1892.

*Politics*, trans, by B. Jowett, ed. by H. W. C. Davis. Oxford, 1908.

*Rhetoric*, with a Commentary by E. M. Cope, ed. by J. E. Sandys.
3 vols. Cambridge, 1877.

*Rhetoric*, trans, by R. C. Jebb, ed. by J. E. Sandys. Cambridge, 1909.

*Rhetoric*, trans, by J. E. C. Welldon. London, 1886.

*De Sophisticis Elenchis. Aristotle on Fallacies, or the
Sophistict Elenchi*, trans, by E. Poste. London, 1866.


II. THE TRACTATUS COISLINIANUS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[This text is hereafter sometimes referred to as the *Tractatus
Coislinianus*, more commonly as the ‘Tractate.’ It has appeared in
the following works (the list is not exhaustive), the first edition
being that of Cramer, and the best either that of Kaibel or that of
Kayser.]

.. $$$ FIXME page xvii of the PDF

Cramer, J. A., ed. Anecdota Graeca e Codd. Manuscriptis Bibliothecae
Regiae Parisiensis. Oxford, 1839. (The Tractatus Coislinianus is at
the end of vol. i, pp. 403-6.) [Cited as 'Cramer.']

Kaibel, G., ed. Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta 1.50-3. [See Kaibel,
below under (V) Miscellaneous.]

Kayser, J. De Veterum Arte Poetica Quaestiones Selectae, pp. 6-8.
[See Kayser, below under (V) Miscellaneous.]

Vahlen, J., ed. [See his third edition of the Poetics, pp. 78-80,
above under (I) Aristotle.]

Bernays, J. Zwei Ahhandlungen, pp. 137-9. [See Bernays, below under
(V) Miscellaneous.]

Rutherford, W. G. A Chapter in the History of Annotation, pp. 436 7.
[See Rutherford, below under (V) Miscellaneous.]

Scholia Graeca in Aristophanem, compiled and ed. by F. Diibner, pp.
xxvi-xxvii. Paris (Didot), 1855.

[For comment on the Tractatus Coislinianus, see Cramer, as above ;
Starkie, Acharnians, below under (IV) Aristophanes ; and belo ' under
(V) Miscellaneous, Arndt, Bernays, Kaibel, {Die Prolegomena, etc.),
Kayser, McMahon, Starkie {An Aristotelian Analysis of ' the Comic,'
and Wit and Humour in Shakespeare), and Rutherford.]

III. PLATO
~~~~~~~~~~

Platonis Opera, ed. by J. Burnet. 5 vols. Oxford, [1902-1906].

The Dialogues of Plato, trans, by B. Jowett. Third ed. 5 vols.
Oxford, [1892]. [Cited as ' Jowett,' with volume- and page-number.]

FiNSLER, G. Platon und die Aristotelische Poetik. Leipsic, 1900.

Greene, W. C. The Spirit of Comedy in Plato. In Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 31 (1920).63-123.


IV. ARISTOPHANES
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Comedies of Aristophanes, ed. and trans, by B, B. Rogers. London,
1902-1916. Frogs, 1902 ; Ecclesiazusae, 1902 ; Birds, 1906; Plutus
(with a trans, of Plautus' Menaechmi), 1907; Knights, 1910;
Acharnians, 1910; Lysistrata, 1911 ; Peace, 1913 ; Wasps, 1915 ;
Clouds, 1916. [Cited as ' Rogers, Birds ' ; 'Rogers, Frogs'; etc.]

Acharnians, ed. and trans, by W. J. M. Starkie. London, 1909. (For
Starkie's use of the Tractatus Coislinianus in relation to
Aristophanes, see his Introduction, pp. xxxviii-lxxiv.) [Cited as '
Starkie, Acharnians.']

Clouds, ed. and trans, by W. J. M. Starkie. London, 1911. [Cited as '
Starkie, Clouds.']

Dunbar, H. A Complete Concordance to the Comedies and Fragments of
Aristophanes. Oxford, 1883.

Mazon, p. Essai stir la Composition des Comedies d'Aristophane.
Paris, 1904. [Cited as ' Mazon.']

[For the relation of the Tractatus Coislinianus to Aristophanes, see
also Rutherford, below under (V) Miscellaneous; and compare Scholia
Graeca in Aristophanem, above under (II) The Tractatus Coislinianus,
and likewise Tzetzes in Kaibel, Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, below
under (V) Miscellaneous.]

V. MISCELLANEOUS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Arndt, E. De Ridiculi Doctrina Rhetorica. Bonn dissertation, 1904.
(Contains an important discussion of the Tractatus Coislinianus.)
[Cited as ' Arndt.']

Bekker, I., ed. Anecdota Graeca. Berlin, 1814, (Vol. i, p. loi,
contains the reference of the Anti-Atticist to Aristotle's Poetics.)

Bernays, J. Erganzung zu Aristoteles' Poetik. In Zwei Ab-handlungen
iiber aie Aristotelische Theorie des Drama (pp. 133-86). Berlin,
1880. (Contains text and discussion of the Tractatus Coislinianus,
and is an attempt to reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of comedy.)
[Cited as ' Bernays.']

Brentano, E. Aristophanes und Aristoteles, oder iiber ein
Angeb-liches Privilegium der Alten Attischen Komodie. Berlin
Pro-gramm, 1873. [Cited as ' Brentano.']

Butcher, S. H. Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. [See
Poetics, Butcher, above under (I) Aristotle.]

By WATER, I. [See Poetics, By water, above under (I) Aristotle.]

CiCERONis Scripta Omnia, ed. by C. F. W. Miiller, R. Klotz, A. S.
Wesenberg, and G. Friedrich. 4 Parts in 8 vols. Leipsic, 1890-1896.

Cicero. De Officiis, ed. and trans, by W. Miller. London, 1913.

Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta. [See below, Kock.]

Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. [See below, Kaibel; and compare below,
Meineke.]

CoRNFORD, F. M. The Origin of Attic Comedy. London, 1914. [Cited as '
Cornford.']

Croce, B. Esthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic,
trans, by D. Ainslie. London, 1909.

Croiset, a. and M, Hisioire de la Litterature Grecque. 5 vols. Paris,
1896-9. [Cited as ' Croiset.']

Croiset, M. Aristophanes and the Political Parties at Athens, trans,
by J. Loeb. London, 1909.

Demetrius On Style. The Greek Text of Demetrius De Elocutione, ed.
and trans, by W. R. Roberts. Cambridge, 1902.

Eastman, M. The Sense of Humor. New York, 1921.

Egger, a. E. Essai sur I'Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs.
Third ed. Paris, 1887. [Cited as ' Egger.']

FiSKE, G. C. The Plain Style in the Scipionic Circle. In Classical
Studies in Honor of Charles Forster Smith (pp. 62-105). Uni' versity
of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 3, 1919. [Cited
as ' Fiske.']

Flickinger, R. C. The Greek Theater and its Drama. Chicago, [1918].

Forchhammer, p. W. De Aristotelis Arte Poetica ex Platone Illusiranda
Commentatio. Kiel, [1847].

Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum. [See below, Meineke.]

Freud, S. Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, trans, by A. A,
Brill. New York, 1916.

Grant, M. A. The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable in
Cicero and Horace. University of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation
(typewritten manuscript), 1917.

FiNSLER, G. [See above under (III) Plato.]

Greene, W. C. [See above under (III) Plato.]

GuDEMAN, A. [See Poetics, Gudeman, two entries, above under (I)
Aristotle.]

Haigh, a. E. The Attic Theatre. Third ed. by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge.
Oxford, 1907. [Cited as ' Haigh.']

HiRZEL, R. Der Dialog, ein Literarhistorischer Versuch. 2 parts.
Leipsic, 1895.

H6FFDING, H. Humor als Lebensgefiihl {der Grosse Humor), eine
Psychologische Studie, German trans, from Danish by H. Goebel. Berlin
and Leipsic, 1918.

Horace. Carmina, ed. by F. VoUmer. Editio maior. Leipsic, 1912.

Kaibel, G., ed. Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. i, fasc. prior.
Berlin, 1899. (Contains De Comoedia Graeca Com-mentaria Vetera,
including Tractatus Coislinianus, the Pro-oemia of Tzetzes, etc.)
[Cited as ' Kaibel.']

Kaibel, G. Die Prolegomena IIEPI KQ.M^T/1TaX. Abhand-lungen der
Koniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen.
Philologisch-historische Klasse. Neue Folge, Band 2, No. 4. Berlin,
1898.

Kallen, H. M. The Aesthetic Principle in Comedy. In American Journal
of Psychology 22 (1911)- 137-57-

Kayser, J. De Veterum Arte Poetica Quaestiones Selectae. Dis-sertatio
Inauguralis. Leipsic, 1906. (Contains text and an important
discussion of Tractatus Coislinianus.) [Cited as ' Kayser.']

KocK, K. T., ed. Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta. 3 vols. Leipsic,
1880, 1884, 1888. [Cited as ' Kock.']

KOrte, a. Die Griechische Komodie. Leipsic, 1914.

Legrand, p. E. The New Greek Comedy, trans, by J. Loeb. London, 1917.
[Cited as ' Legrand.']

Mazon, p. [See above under (IV) Aristophanes.]

McMahon, a. p. On the Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics and the
Source of Theophrastus' Definition of Tragedy. In Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 28 (1917). 1-46, (Gives some ditteniionto
th.eTractatus Coislinianus.) [Cited as ' McMahon.']

Meineke, a., ed. Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum, 5 vols, in 4. Berlin,
1839, 1840, 1841, 1857 (vol. 5 containing Comicae Dictionis Index by
H. Jacobi). [Cited as ' Meineke.']

Menander. The Principal Fragments, ed. and trans, by F. G. AUinson.
London, 1921.

Meredith, G. An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, ed.
by L. Cooper. New ^ ork, [1918]. (Contains, pp. 295-307, a
Bibliography of works on comedy.)

MoLiERE. J. B. P. CEuvres (in Les Grands Ecrivains de la France). 13
vols. Paris, 1873-1900. [But I have usually followed the text in the
Qiuvres Completes de Moliere, pub. by Didot, Paris, 1874.]

Prescott, H. W. An Introduction to Studies in Roman Comedy: the
Interpretation of Roman Comedy; the Antecedents of Hellenistic
Comedy. Collected, and reprinted for private circulation, from
Classical Philology ii (1916), 12 (1917), 13 (1918), 14 (1919).

QuiNTiLiAN. Institutio Oratoria, ed. by L. Radermacher. Leipsic, 1907
(vol. I, Libri 1-6).

QuiNTiLiAN. Institutio Oratoria, ed. by E. Bonnell. 2 vols. Leipsic,
1896.

QUINTILIAN. Institutes of Oratory, trans, by J. S. Watson. 2 vols.
London, 1875, 1876.

Rabelais, F, Tout Ce Qui Existe de ses QLuvres, ed, by L. Moland.
Paris, [n. d.]

Reich, H. Der Mirmis, cin Litterar-eniwickelungsgeschichtlicher
Versuch. Berlin, 1903.

Rogers, B. B. [See above under (IV) Aristophanes.]

Rutherford, W. G. A Chapter in the History of Annotation; being
Scholia Aristophanica, Vol. III. London, 1905. (Contains, pp. 435-55,
text (in part) and explanation of Traciatus Coislinianus. [Cited as '
Rutherford.']

Schmidt, J. Euripides' Verhaltnis zu Komik und Komodie. Grimma, 1905.

Schonermarck, K. L. Quos Affectus Comoedia Sollicitari Voluerit
Aristotelis, Quaeritur. [Dissertation.] Leipsic, 1889.

Shakespeare, W. [Usually cited in the three-volume edition, with text
of W. J. Craig and comments by E. Dowden, pub. b}^ Oxford University
Press.]

Stark IE, W. J. M. An Aristotelian Analysis of ' the Comic,'
Illustrated from Aristophanes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Moliere. In
Hermathena, No. 42 (Dublin, 1920), pp. 26-51. [Cited as ' Hermathena
42.']

Starkie, W. J. M. Wit and Humour in Shakespeare. In A Booh of Homage
to Shakespeare, ed b}^ I. Gollancz, pp. 212 226. Oxford, 1916.

Starkie, W. J. M, [See also his editions of the Acharnians and the
Clouds, above under (IV) Aristophanes.]

Theophrastus. Characters, ed. and trans, by R. C. Jebb. New ed. by J.
E. Sandys. London, 1909.

Volkmann, R. Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Romer in systemat-ischer
tjbersicht dargestellt. Second ed. Leipsic, 1885.

White, J. W. The Verse of Greek Comedy. London, 1912.

Zielinski, T. Die Gliederu7ig der Altattischen Komoedie. Leipsic,
1885.


INTRODUCTION
------------

So that as an imitator Sophocles will be on one side akin to Homer,
since both represent higher types of character ; and on another to
Aristophanes, since both represent persons as acting and doing.

Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 3.

I

THE INVESTIGATION OF LITERARY TYPES

An investigation into the nature of comedy falls within the province
of the study of literary genera or types, a subject in which students
of ancient, mediaeval, and modern literature should alike be
interested. And yet not many such types have been methodically
examined. We have, indeed, the masterly work of Hirzel entitled Der
Dialog ; with which, in point of excellence, we may class Rohde's Der
Griechische Roman, and perhaps The New Greek Comedy of Legrand. More
speculative, not to say fanciful, is the nevertheless valuable work
of Reich, Der Mimus, which is stimulating and not neglectful of
detail, though here and there building too elaborately where the
basis of fact is necessarily slender. To these we may add Das
Literar-ische Portrdt der Griechen by Ivo Bruns ; the Geschichte der
Autobiographie by Misch; and Werner's Lyrik und Lyriker. A few other
volumes might be noted, as that of Greg on Pastoral Drama, and that
of Anna Robeson Burr on The A utobiography. The list could not be
greatly

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extended, unless we chose to include works incidentally dealing with
a hterary type in order to explain some individual author or the
like; for example, Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy.

In the relatively few cases where we observe no such special
limitation, the investigator is likely to emphasize one of two
interests. First, he will concern himself with what we may term the
anatomy, the physical structure, of the literary type he has in view;
and will do so to the neglect (if we may carry on the figure) of its
physiological function. That is, he will try to show us the
quantitative parts that may be distinguished in a given kind of
literary work, without explaining the proper effect of the whole ;
and by this latter I mean the effect upon a duly qualified judge. Or,
secondly, with a mind still dwelling upon formal structure, rather
than proper function, he will trace the growth of the type from its
known, or, more probably, from its hypothetical, beginnings in the
past, in order to account for its anatomy in a later stage.

The emphasis upon structure is justified when formal dissection
becomes useful to the study of function. The emphasis upon origin and
growth is not astonishing in the present age, when so many scholars
and men of science are dominated by a philosophy of evolution. In the
time of Aristotle, certainly in Aristotle himself, a juster balance
was struck between the philosophy of change and the philosophy of
absolute values. If^ with our well-marked interest in growth and
structure, we must admit for our day a corresponding lack of interest
in the end and purpose of a given type when it has reached the
highest point of development we are aware of, the lack can not fail
to be a source of regret, as it can not fail to injure our
perspective. Not all the

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works I have mentioned are equally open to the implied objection; one
is reluctant to withhold the highest praise from such admirable
studies as those of Hirzel and Rohde. Nevertheless the fact remains
that, whether from the past or the present, we possess, all things
considered, but a single adequate investigation of a literary type
with regard to form and function; and that, too, in spite of the
numerous critical works that have sprung from its loins. This is the
examination of tragedy, in connection with the serious epic, by
Aristotle, in the work which we know as the *Poetics*. Even his
Rhetoric, though a more elaborate production as we have it, though
generally more readable, and though the most searching analysis of
human nature we have received from classical antiquity — even his
Rhetoric, though still the best work of its kind, may be thought, if
not inferior, to be more obviously and directly utilitarian in its
aim. The *Poetics*, fragmentary though it be, or at all events in some
sort an epitome, is scientific in the best sense of the word, while
remaining practical, too. There were critics in the Renaissance (not
in the Middle Ages) who deemed it infallible. Infallible it is not in
all details; yet for method and perspective it never has been equaled
in its field. With justice, therefore, Alfred Croiset, after
contrasting the dogmatism of a Scaliger or a Boileau with the
perspective of that Aristotle whom they regard as a master-critic,
observes:

\* Of late, certain scholars [as Mahaffy], perhaps through a natural
reaction against the former idolatry long accorded to the *Poetics*,
have seemed to take pleasure in depreciating the work. This new
exaggeration is not more reasonable than the other. The *Poetics* is a
masterpiece, in which the fundamental traits of Greek poetry,
considered in its evolution as

a 2

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well as in its essence, are noted with a precision that gives the
work a value well-nigh eternal.'^

However, the work as we have it touches upon lyrical poetry only in
so far as this is involved in a discussion of the dramatic chorus,
and of the musical element in the drama; and it touches upon comedy
either in an incidental way, or, otherwise, by implication only.

II

A LOST ARISTOTELIAN DISCUSSION OF COMEDY

It is generally believed that Aristotle included in his writings or
lectures a systematic treatment of comedy; so far as I have read, the
belief has never been seriously questioned, unless by McMahon.^ Nor
do I intend to do more than raise the question; though so long as no
clearly authentic work nor any distinct part of one, treating of this
genus and attributable by a good tradition to Aristotle, is known to
exist, there is always the possibility that he did not systematically
deal with the subject — save by implication in our *Poetics*. He might,
conceivably, have found that the emotions of laughter defied
analysis. Or, having dealt with comedy in his lectures, he might have
left no record of his discussion even in the shape of notes ; and it
might be that no student of his had made any record of a lecture or
lectures, or that all such records had quickly perished. But evidence
in the *Poetics*, references in his other works, evidence in other
writers

^ Alfred and Maurice Croiset, Hist. Lit. Grecque 4. 739-40. ^ E. g.,
McMahon, p. 28 ; but see ibid., p. 44.

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who refer to him, and general probabiHty, favor the view that he
discussed the subject in more than passing fashion in a written
record.

It is generally agreed that the loss of any discussion of comedy by
Aristotle is a very serious one to students of literature. Bywater
holds that the analysis appeared in Book 2 of a work in which the
extant *Poetics* constituted Book i; he says:

' Although Book 2 is now lost, there are indications in Aristotle
himself which may give us some idea of the ground it must have
covered. It may be taken to have comprised (i) the discussion on
comedy promised in *Poetics* 6. 1449^21, and (2) the catharsis theory
to which reference is made in Politics 8. 7. I34it>32.^ What we are
told in more than one passage in the Rhetoric ^ is enough to show
that ^a ^(zkoia, the appointed subject of comedy, must have been
considered and examined with the same analytical care as in the
treatment of Tcc (popspoc 7.ai zkzsv/d in the surviving theory of
tragedy. And if his theory of comedy was on much the same lines as
that of tragedy, Aristotle must have had something to say on the
[xuOoi of comedy, and also on the -^Goc and lihg of the comic
personages. The strange expression, ... to Bs Twav-rcov
/.yvTo^a-oOv,^ may perhaps have been in its original setting an
illustration of the possibilities in the way of diction in comedy. As
for the catharsis theory, the only place we can imagine for it would
be, as Vahlen {Aristotelische Aufsdtze 3, p. 10) has seen, at the end
of Book 2. In such a position it would come in naturally enough, as a
final word on the whole subject of the drama, justifying the
existence of both tragedy and comedy in reply to the polemic of Plato
in the Republic. The discussion itself can hardly have been a brief
one. The

^ See below, p. 130.

^ See below, pp. 123, 138-40.

^ See below, p. 150.

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subject was too large and too controversial to be disposed of in some
one or two short chapters.'^

With these bold conjectures of an ordinarily cautious

scholar we may compare the assurance of Rutherford,

who believes that the Tractatus Coislinianus^ represents

a lost section of the *Poetics* :

\* It is not that the laughter of comedy had not been properly
analyzed. Even the scrimp and grudging abstract, now sole relic of
the section in the *Poetics* concerned with comedy, will convince
anybody who keeps it in his head as he listens to Greek comic
TupocjwTua [the personages of Aristophanes] that a Greek had indeed
read for Greeks the most secret heart of " the mother of comedy,"
and, probe in hand, had made clear wherefore it beat, and what it was
made of — unconventionality, spite, malice, impudence, devilment,
ribaldry, whimsicality, extravagance, insincerity, non-sensicalness,
inconsequence, equivoque, drivel, pun, parody, incongruity in all
sorts and sizes. But Aristotle thought too much, and was too great an
observer, to be loved by commentator and rhetor.'^

Or again, take Starkie:

' The loss that literature has sustained through the disappearance of
the chapters of the Poetic of Aristotle dealing with comedy can be
estimated from a study of the Tractatus, which Cramer edited, from
the Codex Coisli[ni]anus, more than a half-century ago.'^

Of late there has appeared an able destructive argument by McMahon^
to the effect that there never was a second book of the *Poetics* ; but
the argument does not minimize the loss of an Aristotelian treatment
of comedy, if Aristotle produced one:

^ Bywater, p. xxiii. ^ See below, pp. 224-6. ^ Rutherford, p. 435.

^ Starkie, Acharnians, p. xxxviii. Starkie published in 1909, Cramer
in 1839.

^ See especially McMahon, p. 36.

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' Since the Renaissance any treatment of Aristotle's *Poetics* has
discussed and lamented the loss of a second book. Because this book
... is supposed to have contained a theory of comedy, its loss,
measured by the value of the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, is
incalculable.'^

The objections brought by McMahon against the

existence of a second book, while they reveal a bias

toward destructive criticism,^ are on the whole fairly

convincing, and we may accept his guarded conclusion :

' While we are, by the conditions of the problem, prevented from
making a categorical denial, we can, I feel sure, assert that
sufficient reason can not be shown to warrant the belief that such a
book ever existed.'^

But the question seems to be one of no great importance. The present
division of other works of Aristotle into ' books ' need not be, in
some cases can not be, ascribed to the author himself, and may have
been effected long after his time; witness the Metaphysics and the
Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. We see the same sort of thing in the
works of Plato : only a very mechanical editor would end Book 2 of
the Republic in the midst of the discussion of poetry. But the belief
that no editor ever divided the *Poetics* into \* books ' would not
compel us to deny that Aristotle ever wrote on comedy in a more
definite way than we observe in the extant treatise. Nor would the
doubt McMahon, following Shute, has thrown on the authen-

1 McMahon, p. i.

•^ See his unduly sceptical attitude (McMahon, p. 35) to the
credibility of the Anti-Atticist.

^ McMahon, p. 9. His argument is so condensed, and his citations of
the evidence, and of other scholars who have dealt with it, are so
full, that I can not attempt to give an abstract, but must refer the
student to the article itself; see the Bibliography, above, p. xx.

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ticity of the references from other works of Aristotle to this^
justify one in holding that the treatise now contains all it ever
contained on the subject. Take, for example, the statement in
Rhetoric i. ii that the forms of the ludicrous have been analyzed in
the *Poetics*,'^ and the still more specific assertion in Rhetoric 3.
18 that they have been enumerated in the *Poetics*? On the law of
chances, there being six references from the Rhetoric to the *Poetics*,
one of these two might have come from the author himself, and the
other from a subsequent editor — though the second is built into the
substance of a connected passage. The most unlikely assumption is
that Aristotle made none of the ' cross-references ' to be found in
works so intimately related in subject as the Rhetoric and the
*Poetics*. But on any assumption short of universal incredulity we must
contend that one person, or more than one, familiar with at least two
of the writings of Aristotle, interested in Rhetoric, and interested
in the ludicrous, was aware of a schematic treatment of the ludicrous
not then or now found in the Rhetoric, and not now found in our
*Poetics*, but then found in a work with some such title as the latter.
There might have been a confusion of the *Poetics* with Aristotle's
dialogue On Poets ; but the most natural explanation is that the
*Poetics* once included an explicit inquiry into the sources of comic
effect — something analogous to, or possibly in essentials identical
with, the analysis of the sources of laughter in the Tractatus
Coislinianus.'^

That explanation does not require the hypothesis of a second book of
the *Poetics*. This treatise has certain

1 McMahon, pp. 17-21.

^ See below, p, 123.

^ See below, p. 138,

\* See below, pp. 224-5, 229-59.

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characteristics, but not all, of a rounded whole. The outline, which
is excellent, is at times worked out with care, and at times has the
look of notes made in advance by a lecturer, or during the lecture by
one of the audience, or again, of an abstract from a dialogue.^ Or
the general effect may be likened to that of an imeven abstract taken
from the major part of a longer book and belonging to a later period.
The scheme is elastic enough to admit of expansions by the original
author in the substance, even of insertions of new but germane
material. Some such outline could have served Aristotle in his
teaching throughout a number of years. Whatever the history of the
work, what we now have is more likely to be a reduction than an
extension of his oral treatment of the subject. In comparison with
several other works of the same author — with the Constitution of
Athens, or the Nicomachean Ethics, or the Politics, or the first two
parts of the Rhetoric — we can hardly grant that the extant *Poetics*
constitutes a finished essay, duly revised for publication. The
Politics, though the end is missing, is far more like one. Meanwhile,
since the question of books or parts has been raised, we may note
that the cleavage between Books I and 2 of the *Poetics*, supposing
that there were two ' books,' need not have appeared at the close of
the present treatise ; it might com.e before that — for example,
between chapters 22 and 23. In other words, if the work was
originally longer than it is now, if it underwent compression
throughout, but more toward the end than in the earlier sections, and
if something has been lost at the end, still, granting for the moment
that there once were two ' books,' it would not be

^ See my 'Amplified Version,' pp. v, xxvi-xxviii.

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necessary to suppose that all of the second had been lost. At all
events, it would not be out of keeping with the scheme of our *Poetics*
if to the four sections into which it now readily divides^ there were
added a fifth, consisting of remarks on comedy, and related in
various ways to what went before.

But the mechanical division of Aristotle's works is a question of
secondary importance. It is obvious that a theory of comedy, if the
author elaborated one, would be associated in his mind, and in the
minds of his pupils and editors, with his sketch of tragedy and epic
poetry, even though such a theory, whenever produced, had no more
organic connection with the main work than the third book of the
Rhetoric has with the first two.

Ill

THE TRACTATUS COISLINIANUS

We turn now to the strange fragment or condensation of a theory of
comedy known as the Tractatus Coislini-anus, to which I shall not
seldom refer as the \* Tractate ' ; its obvious relation to the
*Poetics* of Aristotle was noticed by Cramer, who first printed it, in
the year 1839," from a manuscript of the tenth century. No. 120 in
the De Coislin collection at Paris. A better transcript of the
manuscript was utilized by Bernays for his Ergdnzung zu Aristoteles\*
Poetik (1853, 1880),^ and the text has been several times reprinted,
as by

1 Bywater, p. xvii, distinguishes five sections: chaps. 1-5, 6-22,
23-4, 25, 26. I include chaps. 25-6 under one head, that of problems
in criticism and their solutions.

2 Cramer i. 403-6.

^ Bernays, Zwei Ahhandlungen, 1880, pp. 133-86.

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Vahleni and by Rutherford,^ the best editions being that of Kaibel
(1899) in the only part issued of his Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta^
and that of Kayser (1906)^ in De Veterum Arte PoeticaQuaestiones
Selectae. Perhaps through a reaction from the effervescent style of
Rutherford,^'but mainly in order to strengthen his case against a
second book of the *Poetics*, McMahon goes far in depreciating the
significance of the fragment.^ On the other hand, Kayser, the results
of whose study of the Tractate McMahon deems ' the most credible of
all,' but whom he does not quote, declares that, ' Of the ancient
commentaries dealing with Greek comedy, as no one will fail to
perceive, the most valuable for an investigation into the history of
the art of poetry is the " Tractatus Coislinianus." '' Condensed,
then, though the fragment is, among the vestiges of a theory of
comedy that have come down to us in the Greek tradition (aside from
the *Poetics* of Aristotle and the Philebus of Plato) it is, not merely
for historical purposes, but in itself, by far the most important.
The antiquity of the original source for various parts of it is
reasonably clear. Perhaps we may grant that the treatise shows '
several different strata in its development to its present state ' ^;
that it betrays the hand, now of an industrious and faithful student
of Aristotle, now of a less intelligent imitator determined at all

1 In Vahlen's third ed. (1885) of the *Poetics*, pp. 78-80.

^ Rutherford, pp. 436-7.

^ Kaibel, pp. 50-3.

•\* Kayser, pp. 6-8.

^ See above, p. 6.

® McMahon, pp. 27, 29-34.

' Kayser, p. 5 : ' Commentariorum veterum, qui sunt de comoe-dia
Graeca, plurimum valere ad artis poeticae historiam investi-gandam
tractatum ilium qui vocatur Coislinianus nemo erit quin intellegat.'

^ McMahon, p. 27.

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costs to bring his work into line with the doctrine or the terms of
the *Poetics* ; and that the definition of comedy seems to merit the
censm*e passed on it by Bernays and Bywater.^ Nevertheless, from the
very natm^e of the fragment — from the fact that it is a fragment or
abstract, — every one of these three concessions may be questioned.
That tragedy has ' grief ' for its \* mother/ and that comedy has '
laughter ' for its \* mother' — as the Tractate informs us — seem to
be very un-Aristotelian conceptions. Yet they may be old; and,
besides, we know nothing of the kind of utterances Aristotle put into
the mouths of the speakers other than himself in his dialogues. The
division of comedy into ' Old,' ' New,' and ' Middle,' has been
thought to be manifestly post-Aristotelian. Of the division of poetry
into ' mimetic ' and ' non-mimetic ' we can not with certainty affirm
as much.^ It contradicts one of the central doctrines of the *Poetics*,
that a man is a poet only in so far as he is \* mimetic ' — in so far
as he keeps himself out of his poem and \* imitates ' his object, '
men in action.' But there are discrepancies just as glaring within
the extant *Poetics* ; ^ indeed, even in that work Aristotle
recognizes, in addition to the properly dramatic genius who keeps his
own sentiments in abeyance, the enthusiastic poet who gives way to
his own welling emotions.^ Of this kind, it may be, in his view, was
Solon, whose \* poems ' and ' poetry ' he repeatedly quotes in the
Constitution of Athens,^ and whom he cites in the Politics and
Rhetoric as one

^ Bernays, p. 145 ; Bywater, p. xxii. But see below, pp. 69-77 » and
see also Kayser, p. 31.

^ For all these allusions, see below, pp. 224-8. ^ See my ' Amplified
Version,' pp. xxvi-xxviii. \* *Poetics* 17; see my 'Amplified Version,'
p. 58. " Ed. by Sandys (1912), 5. 14 (p. 20), 12. 2 (p. 43).

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who had written poetry (Tuor/jo-oc?, zzoiy]Gz)^ And it will be
recalled that Aristotle's own verse is of the non-mimetic description
;2 in his well-known scolion, for example, he does not \* imitate '
the thoughts of some fictitious personage, but sounds the praise of
virtue in his own way. Again, the argument against the Tractate —
that it is un-Aristotelian, — on the ground that certain technical
terms are not there used in the same sense as in the Rhetoric, is
hardly valid, since the Rhetoric is not a treatise on comedy. Some
are so used, and some are not. Within the limits of a single work, in
the *Poetics*, for example, Aristotle does not always use a given term
twice in the same way.^ But I make no point of defending the Tractate
on the ground that any large share of it is very original. In it the
hand of an unskilful adapter may have levied upon an earlier, more
ample source, or more than one source; what he had before him may
have been an intermediate compilation lying between him and Aristotle
or Theophrastus or some later critic.

iParts of it may not ultimately derive from Aristotle ; others may
show an unintelligent use of the *Poetics*, or else a badly-mangled
tradition. But if in others there is a combination of materials from
the *Poetics*, Rhetoric, and Ethics, the adaptation has been made with
skill. When all possible objections have been urged against the
fragment, there remain certain elements in it that, we may contend,
preserve, if not an original Aristotelian, at all events an early
Peripatetic, tradition. If I may speak for myself, a study of the '
parts of dianoia '

1 Politics I. 8. I256b33 ; Rhetoric i. 15. 1375^34. ^ Aristotle,
Fragmenta, ed. by Rose (1886), 671-5 (X. Carmina, pp. 421-3; compare
frg. 676 {ibid., p. 424). ^ See below, pp. 54-5.

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has greatly increased my respect for the Tractate.^ And, to come back
to the hst of the sources of comic effect: however bald in its
present shape, it betrays the workings of a powerful mind anterior to
the age of the epitomator. Something might be said for the
attribution of this list, and the ' parts of dianoia,' (possibly with
other analyses and observations such as the differentiation of comic
' character ') to Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, and his
successor as head of the Peripatetic school; that is, if the
significant parts of the Tractate do not by some road go back either
to a *Poetics* of Aristotle more complete than ours, or to his dialogue
On Poets.^ It is this very list that, as we saw,^ most fully
satisfies the references from the Rhetoric to an enumeration of the
species of laughter in some work on poetry. And it is this list, the
most valuable part of the fragment, against which the destructive
critics have had least to say. Kayser, who has studied several items
in the list, but pays no attention to the ' parts of dianoia,'
wishes, however, to assign the original source of the Tractate to a
date not earlier than the first century b. c, assuming the existence
of a work on poetry from which not only the epitomator or excerptor
of the fragment, but other authors as well, drew their materials,^
and arguing from the appearance of technical terms in a sense too
late for the time of Aristotle. It may be seen that some of the terms
describing the parts of comic dianoia may have been used in a
technical sense before the time of Aristotle ;^ so that perhaps the
whole question should be reopened.

^ See below, pp. 265-81.

2 McMahon, pp. 27, 43-4.

^ See above, p. 8.

^ Kayser, p. 44.

^ See below, pp. 265-80.

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But speculation regarding the early history of the *Poetics* (with its
relation to the dialogue On Poets), and of the Tractate, is well-nigh
futile. Of greater significance is the actual correlation of the
Tractate, effected by Bernays, by Rutherford, and above all by
Starkie, with the thought of Aristotle and the phenomena of ancient
comedy. Through constructive effort, the fragment serves to explain
Greek comedy in the same way, if not to the same extent, as the
*Poetics* has served to explain Greek tragedy and the epic. By a
systematic application of the *Poetics* to Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides, the thought of the treatise is seen to be fundamental;
general truth and specific example mutually corroborate and delimit
each other ; and, with care, the application may be extended to
modern literature, even to other types than were known to Aristotle.
Similarly, the Tractate may be applied, as has been done by
Rutherford and Starkie, to Aristophanes, to Shakespearean comedy, and
to Moliere. The work of Starkie, and I believe my own on the 'parts
of dianoia,' will show that in certain essentials the Tractate has
the universal quality we ascribe to the generalizations of the
*Poetics*^

IV

THE NATURE OF THE PRESENT RECONSTRUCTION

In his Ergdnzung zu Aristoteles' Poetik, Bernays has attempted to
reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of

^ Starkie, Acharnians, pp. xxxviii-lxxiv; see also his article on
Aristophanes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Moliere, in Hevma-thena 42.
26-51, and his article in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. by
GoUancz, pp. 212-26.

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comedy from the Tractatus Coislinianus. He takes the Tractate as his
basis. Accepting the fragment as ultimately deriving from Aristotle,
he aims simply to explain and correct this in the light of other
AristoteHan works, including the Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics, but
especially, of course, the *Poetics*. He rightly assumes that we must
guard at every point against false additions and mistakes of the
epitomator — or, as may now be said, against a corrupt tradition in
general, if, to quote more fully the statement of McMahon,^ ' this
treatise, manifestly of Peripatetic origin,' gives evidence of '
several different strata in its development to its present state/ The
ingenuity and learning of Bernays as a pioneer in evaluating the
Tractate are on a level with his merit as an interpreter of the
*Poetics* ; and if a stratum of the fragment be Aristotelian, it might
seem that in a constructive way he left Httle to be done, apart from
the illustrative work of Rutherford and Starkie. Nevertheless at two
cardinal points he falls short. First, notwithstanding the frequency
of reference to the Old Comedy in the Aristotelian Didascaliae,^ and
the indications that the work of the scholiasts on Aristophanes had
its original impulse from Aristotle; notwithstanding the use by the
scholiasts, in commenting on this poet, of categories similar to
those of the Tractate; and notwithstanding the vital character of the
first reference to Aristophanes in the *Poetics*,^ Bernays thinks that
Aristotle underrated the Aristophanic drama in comparison with a
later type verging on the New Comedy. Now it is one of my assumptions
that Aristotle would include

^ McMahon, p. 27; see above, p. 11. ■^ See below, pp. 156-9. ^ See
below, p. 172.

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more than one type of comedy in his survey, and that he could not
possibly exclude Aristophanes; to the evidence for this view I shall
later return.^ Secondly, Bernays, making use of the few direct
references to comedy in the *Poetics* as a supplement to the Tractate,
subordinates the *Poetics* to the Tractate. But I subordinate the
Tractate to the *Poetics*. To me, whatever the authenticity of the
Tractate, by far the greater part of an Aristotelian theory of comedy
is to be found in the *Poetics* itself; to some extent, of course, in
the direct references, since their value can hardly be overestimated
; but also implicitly in the main conceptions of the work as a whole,
and, throughout the work, in many details of the discussion of
tragedy. The inference can hardly be challenged, if the two kinds of
drama were as intimately related in the mind of Aristotle as they
were in their actual existence.^

And hence I contend that, with a slight shift, which can be m.ade in
the light of the direct references, or in the light of similar
references in the Rhetoric and other works of Aristotle, the *Poetics*
can be metamorphosed into a treatise on comedy; whereupon the
authentic elements (if such there be) of the Tractatus Coislinianus
become an addendum, very significant in any case, but subordinate to
the main Aristotelian theory of comedy, and improperly estimated
unless viewed in a perspective of the whole. In such a perspective,
the

1 See below, pp. 19-41,

- Compare Croiset, Hist. Lit. Grecque 3. 424-5: 'L'histoire de la
comedie en Grece est plus intimement liee que nuUe part ailleurs a
celle de la tragedie. Non seulement, comme partout, ces deux genres
ont cohabite sur les memes scenes et ont exerce I'un sur Tautre une
influence constante, mais de plus, issus du meme culte, animes de la
meme inspiration religieuse, ils ont jusqu'^ la fin servi et honore
le meme Dieu. Au meme titre que la tragedie, la comedie grecque est
essentiellement dionysiaque.'

b

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categories of the ludicrous in the Tractate, whether they proceed
from Aristotle himself, or were merely produced under his influence,
fall into line as a part of a rational and helpful method in the
study of the drama.

Of course I do not wish to imply, either here or elsewhere, that
Aristotle's theory can thus be fully recovered ;^ or indeed that it
could be otherwise truly restored than by the reappearance of a more
complete work in manuscript. For example, if the notion of catharsis
really had for him the interest commonly supposed, we certainly can
not reproduce what he may have said or thought of it in regard to
comedy; his views on the emotional effect of comedy must remain
partly conjectural. Still, many other positive results can be
obtained, and yet more can be fairly inferred.

ARISTOTLE AND ARISTOPHANES

Before going further in our reconstruction, we must open a question
regarding the sort of examples Aristotle would use in illustration of
his theory. As in the case of tragedy and epic poetry, his
generalizations would have been abstracted from the works of comic
poets, while doubtless transcending the practice of any one author.

First, then, we must take issue with Meineke, Ber-nays, and such as
have followed them in contending that Aristotle would underrate
Aristophanes. Thus,

^ Let this be my general warning, so that the reader may be spared
the constant repetition of qualifying phrases in what follows; there
are enough of them as it is.

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according to Butcher: ' It is doubtful whether Aristotle had any
perception of the genius and imaginative power of Aristophanes.'^

Bywater is more cautious, but tends to a similar conclusion: \* If
his theory of comedy had come down to us, we should probably find it
more applicable to the New Comedy than to that of Aristophanes.'^ And
Bemays thinks it probable ' from all we know of Aristotle that he
regarded the innuendo of the Middle Comedy as the correct method in
general.'^ The opinion mainly rests on a passage in the Nicomachean
Ethics,"^ where the propriety of obscene or abusive wit is discussed
in relation, not to the stage, but to the habitual conduct of the
individual, the subject-matter of Ethics. It rests also to some
extent on a statement in the Politics,^ bearing upon the education of
youth, one of the main considerations in this science. The opinion
can not be supported by any utterance of Aristotle in the *Poetics*,
where, on the contrary, we find it distinctly maintained that the
standard of propriety in the conduct of fictitious characters in
poetry is different from the standard of conduct for the individual
in his private life (according to the ideals of Ethics), or for men
in their communal activities and their relations to the State
(according to the ideals of Politics). He mentions Politics in
particular, but the term really is a general one, embracing both
communal and individual rights and duties. The standard of conduct in
poetry, says Aristotle, is different from the standard of correctness
in Politics or any other field of investi-

^ Butcher, p. 380. 2 Bywater, p. ix; cf. ibid., p. 190. ^ Bernays, p.
150; see below, pp. 259-60. ^ See below, p. 120. , ^ See below, p.
125.

b2

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gation.^ Thus, whereas in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle advises
men to be perfect, in the *Poetics* he lets us see that the comic poet
should represent men as no better, but rather worse, than the
average.^

In other words, the propriety of the sentiments and utterances of
dramatic characters, like the propriety of the action as a whole, in
a comedy of Aristophanes or of any other poet, is to be judged, not
first of all by what is fitting in actual life, public or private,
but by a rule of art. With this, the supposed radical objection of
Aristotle to Aristophanes upon ethical grounds, because of the
obscene features in the Old Comedy, instantly disappears.^ Moreover,
the *Poetics* frankly recognizes the origin of comedy in the phallic
procession and dance, without the least indication of censure.'\* To
the mime, in which modern authorities find the other chief source of
the genus, Aristotle alludes in connection with the Dialogues of
Plato ; we may suppose that he thought well of the mime, which was
sometimes more decent than Aristophanes, sometimes far less.

Aristotle's main objection to Aristophanes, however, is supposed to
have arisen from the fact that the Old Comedy indulged in free
personal abuse of individuals ; whereas poetry tends to represent the
universal—in concrete form, to be sure. As the point is involved in
an imder-standing of the *Poetics* itself (and not of another work like
the Ethics or Politics) , I return to it when we come

^ *Poetics* 25. i46obi3-i5 ; see below, p. 218.

2 Ibid. 2. I448ai-i8, 5, i449a32-4 ; see below, pp. 169-70, 176.
Compare also *Poetics* 25. i46ia4-9 ; see below, p. 219.

2 Compare Brentano, p. 44 :' Die Frage nach dem kiinstlerischen Werth
der alten Komodie hat mit dieser ethischen Verurtheilung
schlechterdings nichts zu schaffen.' My judgment regarding
Aristotle's probable estimate of Aristophanes was reached and
formulated before I knew of the convincing Programm by Brentano,
whose argument in more than one detail coincides with mine.

\* See below, p. 176.

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to the passages in their actual setting.^ But here we may note, first
of all, that Aristotle nowhere — neither in the *Poetics* nor elsewhere
in his extant works — objects to Aristophanes for his ludicrous
treatment of Euripides, Aeschylus, Socrates, or any one else. In
fact, throughout the writings of Aristotle there is no censure of
Aristophanes in any way, shape, or form; just as there is none of
Plato for his use of a kind of generalized \* Socrates,' often comic,
in his Dialogues. To suppose that the critic must have condemned the
poet for insufficient generalization of his comic material is pure
inference. Upon what grounds is the inference based ?

Mainly upon the notion that Aristophanes may be included with the old
\* iambic poets ' (who devoted themselves to personal invective)
mentioned in *Poetics* 9.1451^14.2 But in the first reference to this
class of poets, in *Poetics* 4.1448^33—4, Aristotle is thinking, not of
dramatists, but of more ancient authors, in particular, it may be
supposed, Archilochus,^ and of mordant personal diatribes ; these
authors apparently belong to the age of Homer, according to the
method of reference in the *Poetics*. Aristotle has in mind such things
as the iambic poem of Archilochus in which the jilted bard attacked
the whole family of Lycambes, accusing the father of perjury and his
daughters of abandoned lives. And in this second instance (9.1451b
14) he is thinking of poets, probably dramatists, but possibly not,
anterior to Crates,^ who had become eminent by b c. 450, and died
(?)before b. c. 424. Aris-

^ See below, pp. 192-3, 259-60.

See below, p. 192.

^ See By water, p. 130; cf. Aristotle's Rhetoric 2. 23.

\* See below, pp. 177-8.

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tophanes was born in b. c. 445/4, the generally accepted date, or
perhaps ten years earher; according to Kent, he died in b. c. 375 or
later.^ He can not have seemed like a very ancient author to
Aristotle (born b. c. 384), who says in Poetics-4.144^^1—2 that the
archon did not grant a chorus to comedy until late in its history;
and it is held that the archon first granted a chorus to comedy in b.
c. 487 (Capps) or about b. c. 465 (By-water).^ Sixty, or not less
than forty, years after this ' late date ' occurred the first
presentation of a comedy by Aristophanes ; over one hundred years
after b. c. 487 occurred the last we know of in his lifetime^ —
possibly when Aristotle was about ten years old. In b. c. 340/39,
when Aristotle was at the height of his powers, there is an
indication of a revival of interest at Athens in the comedy of a time
preceding ;^ whenever the *Poetics* was written, we can see from the
reference in it to Aristophanes that he was then considered the
outstanding poet of his class. It is hard to think of any one
describing the most fertile and varied metrist of antiquity as a mere
' iambist '; but in any case the later plays of Aristophanes — for
example, the revised Plutus — could not by an^^ stretch of
imagination be included among the works of ' the old iambic poets '
who vented their spleen in direct abuse of persons. Nor is there
reason to suppose that the earlier PhUus (b. c. 408)

^ Roland G. Kent, When did Aristophanes Die? in The Classical Review
20 (1906). 153-5; cf. ibid. 19 (1905). 153-5.

^ Haigh, p. 20, gives the date as fixed by Capps, B. c. 487 ;
Bywater, p. 142, citing Wilamowitz, says 'probably about B. c. 465';
Cornford, p. 215, accepts B. 0. 487; Flickinger, The Greek Theater
and its Drama, p. 135, gives B. c. 486,

^ I refer to the presentation of the Cocalus and the Aeolosicon ; see
Kent, as above {Classical Review 20. 154) : 'These two plays . . .
did not appear before 375.'

^ Haigh, p. 22 ; cf. the inscription in Urkunden Dramatischer
Aitftiihrungen in Athen, ed. by Adolf Wilhelm, pp. 27-9.

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could be included among them. The last plays, the Cocalus and
Aeolosicon, are regarded as distinct forerunners of the New Comedy.
Platonius recognizes the Aeolosicon as belonging to the type of the
Middle Comedy;^ but according to a Greek biographer,

' Aristophanes . . . was the first who exhibited the manner of the
New Comedy, in the Cocalus ; from which drama Menander and Philemon
took their origin as playwrights. . . . He wrote the Cocalus, in
which he introduced the seduction, and the recognition of identity,
and all the other artifices that Menander emulated.'^

Had the two plays been preserved, we should doubtless see that, from
first to last, Aristophanes ran the gamut of possibilities in Greek
comedy.

We must now observe that the terms ' old ' (TuaXaidc) and ' new '
(vsoc), familiar to us in the writings of later critics, are not
applied to comedy in the *Poetics* ; though a distinction between ' old
\* or ' ancient ' (TuaT^atwv) and' recent ' (/.aivwv) comedies is
made in Nicomachean Ethics 4.9 (=14) ;^ while the stages or varieties
of Old, New, and Middle Comedy (;caXata, vsa, [iscty]) are recognized
by the epitomator in the Tractatus Coislini-anus.^ In the *Poetics*, '
old' {%oCkoLioi, 14.1453^27) and ' new ' (vsoi, 6.i45oa25) — not \*
recent ' (xatvoi) — are loosely used to differentiate an earher class
of tragic poets, including Aeschylus and Sophocles, from a later,
beginning with Euripides ; and there is a similar distinction
(6.i45ob7—8) between ol oLpynxXoi, including Sophocles, and oi vuv.
including Euripides and his followers or imitators.^ Now the lives of
the three

^ In Kaibel, p. 4.

^ Vita AHstophanis, in Prolegomena, No. 11, Diibner ; cf. Rogers,
Pluius, pp. xxiii-xxiv. " See below, p. 120. ^ See below, p. 226. ^
Cf. Bj'^water, p. 167.

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tragic poets overlapped (Aeschylus, circa b. c. 525—456 ; Sophocles
B. c. 497 or 495 — 405; Euripides, b. 0. 480—406). And the change in
type of the comedies of Aristophanes shows itself as early as b. 0.
393, when the Ecclesiazusae was exhibited. The death of Euripides,
then, antedates the composition of the *Poetics* by perhaps seventy
years, while the Ecclesiazusae antedates it by perhaps fifty-five;
that is, if we agree with Croiset that most of the extant works of
Aristotle probably belong to the period b. c. 335—323,^ assuming,
too, that the *Poetics* was among the earliest of them. If it was one
of the later or latest, the intervals between it and the dates of
Euripides and Aristophanes are longer. If Sophocles was one of the '
old ' tragic poets, and Euripides one of the ' new,' though their
activities coincided over a period of fifty years, and if
Aristophanes was exhibiting comedies during the last twenty years of
that period, and continued to be productive for twenty years more,
why should not Aristotle find the turning-point between the earlier
(not the archaic) and the later comedy where it is even now most
apparent, in the time, and even in the works, of Aristophanes himself
?

We see, in the main from Aristophanes, that the transition from the
earlier type of Attic comedy went hand in hand with the circumstances
of the Pelopon-nesian war. The Ecclesiazusae and the Plutus, as is
noted by Rogers, \* are the only extant comedies which were produced
after the downfall of the Athenian empire.'^ From these the
development went on, in the Aeolosicon and the Cocalus, in the
direction of Philemon and Menander; then followed the bulk of what we
now

^ Croiset 4. 693.

2 Rogers, Plutus, p. xiii.

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call the Middle Comedy, which Aristotle doubtless would include with
the later plays of Aristophanes as ' new '; then came the New Comedy
proper, as we term it, the high tide of which Aristotle did not live
to see. Yet apart from the fact that he could study both an earher
and a later type in Aristophanes, his situation is analogous to that
of a critic born in the Jacobean period of English comedy, and hence
familiar with the Elizabethan type, who lived on to the time of the
Restoration and its drama. There is a difference, in that the drama
paused with the closing of the English theatres, whereas Greek comedy
went on without cessation. But we have a political break in England,
with the troublous times of the Commonwealth to match the fall of
Athens ; and the interval between the Elizabethan drama and the drama
of the Restoration just about matches the interval between the death
of Euripides, or the midway point in the career of Aristophanes, and
the age of the *Poetics*.

There may be yet another parallel. The distinction which Aristotle
draws in the Ethics^ between the 'old ' and the \* recent ' comedies
is possibly much the same as the difference between the broad humor
of the Elizabethans and the innuendo of a Congreve. The innuendo of
the Restoration is more like the language a gentleman would permit
himself to use in private than are the obscenity and personal abuse
of a Falstaff. But we need not on that account imagine that a good
Greek critic, surveying both periods, would on every ground prefer
Congreve, let alone Wycherley, to Shakespeare. The late Middle Comedy
of Greece had its Wycherleys, too. And the Middle Comedy did not

^ See above, p. 19; below, p. 120.

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renounce the satire of well-known individuals. Legrand remarks upon
the number of comedies of the Middle period having as title ' the
name of a politician, of a man-about-town, or of a courtesan/^ One
fragment of Epi-crates is a long and dull attack, meant to be funny,
on Plato and his school for their investigations into botany and
zoolog}/.- To Aristotle the mention of Plato, and of Speusippus,
whose hbrary he purchased after its owner's death, might not be
gratif3ring, in view of his relations to them and of his own
scientific interests. We should not jump to the conclusion that he
would find nothing in the comedy of his own age that did not meet his
approval. We should not run to any extreme in our speculations
regarding his likes and dislikes. He mentions a verse in Anaxandrides
as an ' iambic ' line"; but it is probable that he liked it. His own
jokes (if we accept a passage in Demetrius \*) resembled banter, did
not always differ from gibes, and sometimes ran close to buffoonery.
He relished the tragic address of Gorgias to the swallow, ' when she
dropped her leavings on him as she flew over ': ' " For shame,
Philomela \\ " ' \* In a bird, you know,' says the Stagirite, ' it
would not be disgraceful, but in a maiden it would.'^ Indeed, we
should expect from him a theory elastic enough to embrace the
excellences of each type of comedy, both ' the old ' and \* the
recent ' (? our ' Middle '). With his affection for the intermediate
between two extremes, he might be conceived as inventing the terms '
Old,' ' New,' and ' Middle '; and we

^ Legrand, p. 299.

2 Athenaeus 2. 59c; cf. Kock 2. 287-8. Compare also Usener, Vovtrdge
und Aufsdtze, 1907, p. 83. ^ See below, pp. 159-60. " See below, pp.
102-3. ^ Rhetoric 3. 3.

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might fancy that these obtained their present appH-cation from
critics after the time of Menander. There is a haze surrounding the
terms ; we can but speculate concerning their origin.^ In discussing
tragedy, while Aristotle manifestly thinks of Sophocles' Oedipus the
King as a close approximation to the ideal, it is clear that he has a
high regard for Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taiirians. Certainly
there is one characteristic he would approve if he found it in the
poets of his own generation; a later authority says :

'The poets of the Middle Comedy did not aim at poetic diction, but,
following the custom of ordinary speech, they have the virtue of good
sense, so that the poetic quality is rare with them. They all pay
attention to plot."

If we had Aristotle's estimate of several ' recent ' comedies, we
should know more than we do of that Middle Greek Comedy which for us
is intermediate as well in type as in point of time. Perhaps his
ideal in comedy would be a compromise between the best of the earlier
and the best of the later plays. If Aristophanes is both \* old ' and
' new,' the Birds might be thought to combine the largest number of
his excellences on either side — as Sophocles is a kind of golden
mean betwixt the older Aeschylus and the more modem Euripides, or as
The Tempest is the golden mean in Shakespearean comedy.

Little as we know of Aristotle's preferences in comedy, it is not
idle to speculate about them from such data as we possess. Bywater,
we recall,^ conjectures that the Aristotelian theory would have been
more

^ See below, p. 285. Plautus comes nearer than Terence to the Middle
Comedy.

2 Anonymus in Kaibel, pp. 8-9. 2 See above, p. 19.

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applicable to the New Comedy; this conjecture is in line with the
notion of Bywater that in the extant *Poetics* Aristotle writes with an
eye to the practice of the tragic authors of his own day — that he
writes to be useful. Doubtless he did write with a practical as well
as a theoretical aim, and accommodated his theory to current usage.
Nevertheless the main principles of the work are derived, for tragedy
and epic poetry, from Homer and Sophocles. There is no question that
Aristotle deemed these two authors pre-eminent in their respective
fields. Like all other great critics, he is conservative in his
attitude to the past, while tolerant of the new when it is good, and
benevolent toward the future. His first and only reference to
Aristophanes in the *Poetics*, linking this poet with Homer and
Sophocles, shows Aristotle to be conservative in his estimate of the
comedy preceding his own time.

Important or unimportant, his references to comic poets, so far as we
can identify them, if they indicate anything, show that he paid more
attention to the authors of what we call the Old Comedy than to those
of the next succeeding stage. The colorless citations in the remnants
we have of the Didascaliae, and in fragments therewith associated,
yield the names of Aristophanes [Clouds, both first and second
version. Peace, two versions, Frogs, Storks, and apparently
Daedalus), Eupolis (Maricas and Flatterer), Ameipsias [Conmis),
Cratinus [Flagon), Leucon [Clansmen), Ar-chippus [Ass's Shadow), and
Strattis.^ In the *Poetics* there is mention of Aristophanes, Crates,
Chionides, Epicharmus, Hegemon, Magnes, and Phormis. The

^ For all references in Aristotle to comic poets, see below, pp.
140-161.

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comic poet Plato (unless the reference be to the philosopher) is
cited in the Rhetoric, and Strattis is quoted with approval in De
Sensu et Sensihili. The sole early writer of comedy whom Aristotle
names in a fashion that may imply disapproval is Ecphantides,
mentioned in Politics 8.6, in a discussion of the flute; yet the
objection to the music of the flute is on the score of its
undesirability in the education of children and youths, and does not
touch its recognized use in the realm of poetry. Crates evidently
stands high in the opinion of Aristotle, since Crates attended to the
construction of comic plots '} and Epicharmus seems to be a favorite
with Aristotle as with Plato.^ But for the significant reference to
Aristophanes in the *Poetics*, we might take Epicharmus to be
Aristotle's prime favorite among comic authors, for there are, all
told, perhaps thirteen references to Epicharmus or lines of his
throughout Aristotle's works. The remaining allusions to Aristophanes
by name are two : examples of comic diminutives from the Babylonians
are given in the Rhetoric ; and the imaginary discourse attributed to
the poet by Plato in the Symposium is noted, without bias, in the
Politics. Further, the illustration of paromoiosis in Rhetoric
3.9.1410 a 28—9 seems to come from an unidentified play of
Aristophanes. I lay no stress on the possibility that the
Anti-Atticist's excerpt from the *Poetics*, to Bs TuavTtov xuvTOTairov,
may be an Aristophanic formation.^

When Aristophanes has so notable a place near the beginning of the
*Poetics*, why are the references to him elsewhere in Aristotle so few
? One answer is that

^ See below, pp. 177-8. - See below, pp. 111-2.

^ See above, p. 5, below, pp. 150, 233 ; cf. Starkie, Acharnians, p.
liii, No. 4.

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chance often governs in such matters. The name of Virgil, a favorite
author with Wordsworth, appears but once in the poetry of Wordsworth,
and then only in the adjective \* Virgihan/ In like manner, though
Aristotle esteems Sophocles, and doubtless esteems Aeschylus, too,
above Euripides, yet throughout his works he cites Euripides
something hke twice as often as Sophocles, and more than four times
as often as Aeschylus. In the Politics he refers to Sophocles once,
to Aristophanes once, and to the quotable Euripides six times. No
inference to the disadvantage of Aristophanes should be drawn from
the paucity of allusion to him outside of the Didascaliae. If the
valuable categories in the Tractatus Coislinianus come from
Aristotle, he could have deduced and illustrated them all from
Aristophanes, as the work of Rutherford and Starkie abundantly shows.

We turn to the next generation of comic poets, and first of all to
the citations from Anaxandrides. He is cited once in the Ethics, and
thrice certainly, and a fourth time possibly, in the Rhetoric ; at
best, five times in all (as compared, for example, with thirteen
allusions to Epicharmus). From this (' ex jrequenti Anaxandridis
commemoratione ' !) Meineke^ concluded that Aristotle thought highly
of the poet, and a belief to this effect has since prevailed.^ The
one possible and three certain references to Anaxandrides in the
Rhetoric are close together in the third book;^ all we can infer from
them is that Aristotle (if the third book be his) found Anaxandrides
quotable in illustrating

^ Meincke i. 369.

^ But the error can be traced back to the Renaissance.

^ Within three chapters, and within three pages in Bekker's
numbering: Rhetoric-i. 11. 14121)27 (the doubtful citation) ; 3. 10.
I4iiai8; 3. 11. 1412^16; 3. 12. 1413^25.

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a few closely related points in rhetorical theory; they tell us
almost nothing of this poet in relation to Aristotle's theory of
comedy. The doubtful quotation, indeed, ■— ' A worthy man should wed
a worthy wife ' — he condemns for its tameness; one of the others
(3.10.1411^18) he calls an \* iambic ' line; and in Nico-machean
Ethics 7.11 he describes the poet as \* scoffing ' or ' jeering.' He
does speak in Rhetoric 3.11 of the ' admired ' line in Anaxandrides:
' Well is it to die ere one has done a thing worthy of death.' Let us
grant that he joined in admiring it. Yet were we to follow Butcher
and others in attributing to Aristotle a dislike of Aristophanes for
jeering and scoffing, for ' iambizing,' the balance of the references
to Anaxandrides should tell against the latter also. If at most we
believed that Aristotle found Anaxandrides generally quotable, yet he
found Euripides more so, citing him six times in the Rhetoric, and
many times elsewhere — for example, seven times in the Nicomachean
Ethics.

Of the other poets belonging to what we term the ' Middle ' Comedy,
he distinctly mentions none save Phihppus; the sole reference, in De
Anima, may point to a confusion with Eubulus. The absence of
indubitable allusion to Antiphanes,^ the most fertile writer of this
class, is at least worth noting. From the group of poets of the
Middle Comedy, Croiset^ singles out for brief treatment Antiphanes,
Anaxandrides, Eubulus, and Alexis, and in that order. It has quite
gratuitously been supposed by Meineke" that a comedy alluded to in
*Poetics* 13.1453^37\* was the Orestes of Alexis;

^ See below, pp. 34, 149.

^ Croiset 3. 60^-9.

^ See Kock 2. 358.

\* See below, p. 201.

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if only one play is meant, we can not be sure that the comedy
belonged to the age of Aristotle, though this seems likely, and much
less can we determine its authorship. As for Eubulus and the
reference in De Anima to a comedy on the tale of Daedalus, by'
Philippus' (the son of Aristophanes), the attribution is at best
obscure } the Daedalus of Aristophanes himself may in some way be
involved. The reference to Xenarchus in the *Poetics*^ is to the author
of mimes, who must not be confused with the comic poet of the same
name.

These meagre and partly doubtful references to Middle Comedy do not
argue any great concern with it on the part of Aristotle. However, I
desire not so much to belittle his concern with it as to stress his
probably greater interest in Aristophanes; and will even bring
forward a neglected piece of evidence that he may have had Antiphanes
in mind at one point in the *Poetics*. In chapter 9,^ where he speaks
of history as characterized by particular statements, and poetry by
universal statements, he continues : ' In comedy this has already
become clear; for the comic poets first combine plots out of probable
incidents, and then supply such names as chance to fit the types — in
contrast with the old iambic poets, who, in composing, began with the
particular individual.' The illustration does not necessarily point
to his immediate contemporaries, but, if it includes them, there is
an interesting parallel in a fragment of Antiphanes' Poiesis. The
parallel might be striking enough from the title of the comedy but
for the frequency of such titles; Kock lists, in addition, a Poiesis
by Aristophanes, a Poietai and a Poietria by

^ Meineke i. 340-3; Kock 2. 172-3. ^ See below, p. 168. ^ See below,
p. 192.

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Alexis, a Poietai and a Poietes by Plato, another Poietes by Biottus,
another by Nicochares, and yet another by Phoenicides.^ It is more
striking from what Aristotle says in the same chapter 9, and in
chapter 13, about the familiar stories to which the practice of the
tragic wTiters in his time had narrowed down. The thought of
Antiphanes is sufficiently trite :

' Tragedy is in every respect a fortunate type of poetry. First of
all, the stories are familiar to the spectators before any of the
characters begins to speak. The poet has only to revive a memory. If
I merely name Oedipus, the spectators know the rest: his father
Laius, his mother locasta, his daughters, his sons, his sufferings
and all he did. Simply mention Alcmaeon, and the very children will
promptly tell you the whole story — how in a fit of madness he slew
his mother, and straightway, having done the deed,^ he came and went,
back and forth. Again, when they [the tragic poets] have nothing more
to say, and have exhausted their dramatic invention, as easily as
lifting a finger they raise the machine, and the spectators are
content with the solution.

' We [comic poets] lack these resources. We have to imagine
everything — new names, what went before, what happens now, the
change of fortune, and the opening of the play. If a Chremes or a
Phido makes a slip in one of these points, he is hissed. A Peleus or
a Teucer may safely make one.'^

If there is a debt on either side, the dates would favor a borrowing
from Antiphanes [circa B.C. 404—330) by Aristotle, whose *Poetics* may
have been composed near the latter date; though the reverse borrowing
is possible.

^ Kock 3. 704.

- Accepting Kock's conjecture of 6k dqaaag for tf ^A^Qctarog. 2
Antiphanes, frg. 191, Kock 2. 90-1 ; compare Aristophanes, frg. 528,
Kock I. 526.

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Kock takes the Peparethia mentioned in Rhetoric 2.23 to be the title
of a comedy, and guesses at Antiph-anes as the author.^

Besides the maxim (' A worthy man/ etc.) doubtfully assigned to
Anaxandrides, Kock lists some fifteen passages of unknown authorship
which he treats as quotations or reminiscences from the comic poets
in Aristotle. None of the sixteen ^ does he ascribe without question
to the Old Comedy; six he places among fragments from the ' New '
(which with him includes the ' Middle ') ; six are among the
fragments concerning which he is doubtful whether they come from the
New {' Middle ') or the Old ; one^ in his opinion may or may not have
its source in a comic poet; and the remaining three\* contain mere
chance-associations with the language of Cratinus, Aristophanes, and
Strattis respectively.

What principle governs this distribution when there is no evidence ?
Apparently no true principle, but the presupposition that Aristotle
necessarily leaned away from the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, and
leaned toward the New. How far this belief has carried scholars may
be seen in the following two cases. First, in Politics 1.7.1255^29—30
Aristotle quotes as a familiar proverb the saying, \* Slave before
slave, master before master.' And what Aristotle calls ' the proverb'
(ty)v :iapot[j.iav) Bonitz [Index Aristotelicus, s. v. OiXyjijlwv)
regards as a quotation from the Pancratiastes of

^ Kock 3. 463, frg. 302.

^ Kock 2. 164, Anaxandrides, frg. 79; (the following all ot unknown
authorship) 3. 448, frg. 207, 208, 209, 210; 3. 463, frg. 302; 3.
493, frg. 446, 447, 448, 449; 3. 524, frg. 650a; 3. 545, frg. 779.
See also 3. 612, frg. 1229; 3. 712, frg. 243; 3. 724, frg. 684; 3.
730. frg. 38.

•^ Kock 3. 612, frg. 1229.

\* Kock 3. 712, frg. 243 ; 3. 724, frg. 684 ; 3. 730, frg. 38.

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Pliilemon, where the proverb certainly was used. Secondly, in De
Sophisticis Elenchis 4.y.i663.;^6—y appears the line, syw c-"\*
sOrjxa BouXov ovt' sXsuOspov, from an original that later was
probably known to Terence (cf. Andria i. i. 10) ; the substance of
the Andria being drawn from Menander, Bonitz {Index, p. 454, s. v.
Menandri) represents Aristotle as quoting from him. How likely is it
that our author quoted from either Philemon or Menander ? Aristotle
taught at Athens from B.C. 335 to 323; he left Athens in 323, and
died in 322. Philemon began to present comedies at Athens about B.C.
330 ; he died, b. c. 262, at the age of ninety-nine years ; in that
interval he is said to have produced cither ninety or ninety-seven
plays, sixty of vrhich are known to us by title or by fragments. To
suppose that Aristotle quoted from him is to suppose that De
Sophisticis Elenchis was written within the last five years of
Aristotle's activity — but we know virtually nothing about the
sequence of his numerous writings; that the Pancratiastes was one of
the first five or six comedies of Philemon; and that the proverb
about slaves and masters was not a popular saw, and was not common
property. As for Menander (? born b. c. 342), his first play was
given in b. c. 322/1,^ the year after Aristotle left Athens — the
year of or after his death. Aristotle could not well have known any
play by Menander ; rather, he knew the sources and models, including
plays of Aristophanes, which Menander followed. Yet Egger, sharing
the prejudice of Bonitz and the rest, adduces the Plutarchian
Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander as evidence of an
Aristotelian tradition in Plutarch, antagonistic to the Old Comedy !
^ If we make

^ Clark, Classical Philology 1 (1906). 313-28, argues for b. c. 324;
this date would not spoil 1113- case. 2 Egger, p. 411.

c 2

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the triple distinction between Old, Middle, and New Comedy, the
generation of Menander, chief representative of the New in our sense,
could have had no influence upon Aristotle's theory of poetry.^

Doubtless the extant works of Aristotle contain still other, as yet
unidentified, allusions to the comic poets ;2 and doubtless the lost
works contained other allusions. His industry and flexibility as a
student and writer were such that, when he devoted himself to a
special investigation of comedy, he might frequently illustrate from
an author, or from groups of authors, seldom alluded to in his other
works. I have intimated that, if the Tractahis Coislinianus contains
Aristotelian matter, we may suppose that various generalizations in
it were originallj/ provided with examples from Aristophanes, to
judge, not merely from the chance illustrations preserved by
Tzetzes,^ but from the wealth of the examples adduced by Rutherford
and Starkie, and from evidence on the relation between ' opinion '
and ' proof,' on the one hand, in the Tractate and the Rhetoric, and
the corresponding devices, on the other, in Aristophanes.^ Or again,
take the statement of the Tractate on the language of comedy: \*
Comic diction is customary and popular.' The description would fit
the poet of whom Maurice Croiset says: ' The diction of Aristophanes
represents for us the very perfection of the Attic dialect in its
familiar cast.'^ Quintilian speaks of the poet in similar fashion.^
As to character

^ The propriety of the distinction has been discussed by Legrand, pp.
4-12.

2 See my article, A Pun in the Rhetoric of Aristotle, in The American
Journal of Philology 41. 48-56.

^ See below, pp. 288-9.

^ See below, pp. 265-80.

^ Croiset 3. 580.

^ Instituiio Oratoria 10. i. 65-6; see below, p. 92.

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and plot, the following opinions recorded by Platonius

and Tzetzes may embody something of the original

Aristotelian theory:

'In the delineation of human character Aristophanes preserved the
mean ; for he is neither excessively bitter like Cratinus, nor
over-kindly like Eupolis; but he has the vigor of Cratinus toward the
erring, and the tolerant kindness of Eupolis.'^

'And the Old Comedy itself is not uniform ; for they who in Attica
first took up the production of comedy (namely Susarion and his
fellows) brought in their personages in no definite order, and all
they aimed at was to raise a laugh. But when Cratinus came, he first
appointed that there should be as many as three personages in comedy,
putting an end to the lack of arrangement; and to the pleasure of
comedy he added profit, attacking evil-doers, and chastising them
with comedy as with a public whip. Yet he, too, was allied to the
older type, and to a slight extent shared in its want of arrangement.
Aristophanes, however, using more art than his contemporaries,
reduced comedy to order, and shone pre-eminent among all.'^

Thus far I have tried to show som.e particular grounds for believing
that Aristotle would be interested in Aristophanes ; that he did not
underestimate him in comparison with the so-called Middle Comedy, or
with the New. We now come to the question of general proba-bihty,
keeping in mind, how^ever, the text which links this poet with
Sophocles and Homer. Other things being equal, is it on the whole
likely that Aristotle w^ould fail to recognize the genius of
Aristophanes ? Is it not more likely that, if he recognized it, but
if no record of his opinion were preserved, some one w^ould accuse
him of wanting the necessary insight, and others would repeat the
accusation ? A similar want of insight

^ Platonius, in Kaibel, p. 6.

2 Tzetzes, ibid., p. 18; see below, p. 288.

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regarding Aristophanes has been ascribed to Plato ; it is common to
patronize any great thinker or man of taste for some such alleged
defect of judgment.

The relation of Plato to comed^^ is reserved for another section ;^
but the reader will excuse a few anticipatory remarks on this head.
The bias of the philosopher is supposed to be shown in the Republic
and the Apology. In the Republic he makes Socrates include the comic
poets in the Socratic attack upon imitative art; and in the Apology
he makes the same dramatic personage complain of ill usage at the
hands of Aristophanes in the Clouds. But what Plato makes Socrates
affirm in the Dialogues, and what Plato himself thought and did, are
not identical. The attack upon imitative art would exclude the
imitative dialogue containing it from the ideal State of Socrates.
Not only that, but it would exclude virtually all the Platonic
Dialogues; and among them the Symposium, in which Plato gives us a
fictitious Aristophanes, devising for him a highly Aristophanic
speech that must have convulsed the hearers with laughter. In the
Republic, the Guardians are not to laugh immoderately. Could anything
more clearly reveal the inner sympathy of Plato with the great comic
poet than the ludicrous yet imaginative myth in question ? However,
we have the testimony of Olympiodorus that Plato ' greatly dehghted
in the comedies of Aristophanes and the mimes of Sophron; so much so
that, when he died, these works, we are told, were discovered in his
bed.'^ He bears no malice for the good-natured mockery of the
Republic, if such there be, in the Ecclesiazusae, and must have seen
in the Birds a great comic-Utopia not inferior in

^ See below, pp. 98-132.

2 Quoted from Rogers, Clouds, p. xxix.

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its kind to his own; tradition has it that he sent the Clouds to
Dionysius, t3n"ant of Syracuse, as an indication of the spirit of
Athens, and that he composed the epitaph (eleventh Platonic Epigram
in the Greek Anthology) :

The Graces, desiring an imperishable shrine, chose the soul of
Aristophanes.^

Aristotle counts as an even more objective critic than his master.
Arguing from general probability, we may say that, of all the
literary critics the world has seen, he is the one most likely to
have appraised the worth of Aristophanes correctly. His opinion of
Homer and Sophocles has stood the test of time. His analysis of
tragedy has been the foundation of all subsequent inquiries, and has
not been superseded. He is the master of critical analysis. The
chances are a thousand to one that his insight into Greek comedy was
superior to that of modern scholars like Meineke and Butcher. Cicero
and Quintilian, who owe much to him, and have the same standard of
refinement, recognize the value of the Old Comedy and its leading
poet ;2 Sir Thomas Elyot, an Aristotelian in spirit and training,
prefers Aristophanes to Lucian on moral grounds.^ Was Aristotle
inferior as a critic to them ? Or was he less likely than St. John
Chrysostom, or Bishop Christopher Wordsworth,\* or Jeremy Taylor, to
make

^ Cf. Croiset 3. 532.

■^ Cicero, De Legibus 2. (15)37, ^^ Officiis 1. {29) (see below, p.
91) ; Quintilian, Insiiiutio Oraioria 10. i. 65-6 (see below, p. 92).

^ Elyot, The Governour 1. 10. . In speaking of Elyot as an
Aristotelian, I refer to his political theory.

\*\* See Rogers, Acharnians, pp. li-lvi. Rogers would like to believe
the statement of Aldus Manutius, made, in the ^''ear 1498, 'as though
it were a matter of common notoriety,' that 'Saint Chrysostom is
recorded to have set such store by Aristophanes that twenty-eight of
the poet's comedies were never out of his hands, and formed his
pillow when he slept; and that from this source

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allowance for those elements, the origin of which he knew, the
vestiges in Aristophanes of the traditional phallic procession whence
the Old Comedy in part arose ? In our time we have no great
difficulty in allowing for them, or for the broad humor and worse in
Shakespeare; are we more objective than Aristotle ? He must also have
perceived a great literary critic at work in the Frogs, and doubtless
in the lost Potests. He might, indeed, have found fault with various
details in the comedy of Aristophanes, as he does with details of
procedure in Sophocles, and even in Homer. He might, like Rogers,
have regretted ' that the phallus-element should be so conspicuous'
in the Lysistrata, when, as Rogers adds, ' in other respects there
are few-dramas — ancient or modern — which contain more noble
sentiments or more poetic beauty.'^ He might well have offered
discrepant views in accounting for various excellences of different
comic poets or schools of comedy; as he does in making out a case for
the tragic quality in Oedipus the King, and again, contradicting the
former argument, for the handling of the tragic incident in Iphigenia
among the Taurians,^ But could the author of the Rhetoric and *Poetics*
have failed to see the power of the literary critic at work in the
Frogs ? Could the zoologist Aristotle have overlooked the exact and
far-reaching knowledge of ornithology displayed in the Birds ? Would
the economist Aristotle miss the keen understanding of wealth and
poverty beneath the laughter of the Plutus ? The architectonic power
of

he was thought to have drawn his marvelous eloquence and austerity.'
Manutius' authority for his statement is unknown. Compare Anton
Naegele, Johannes Chvysostomos und sein VerhcUtnis zum Hellenismus,
in Byzantinische Zeitschrift 13 {1904). 73-T13.

^ Rogers, Lysistrata, p. ix.

^ See my 'Amplified Version,' pp. xxvi-xxviii.

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PRINCIPLES OF OUR RECONSTRUCTION 41

Aristophanes would net have escaped Aristotle, nor the play of
imagination and inventive genius working freely and surely within the
rigorous traditional scheme of the Old Comedy ;i the skilful
adaptation of means to ends for the arousal of mirth and joy in the
Birds would not have escaped him; or else the judgment of the ages on
Aristotle's eminence as a literary critic, and the judgment of Cicero
and Quintilian regarding his ability as a stylist, are sadly at
fault. The guess of Butcher — 'it is doubtful whether Aristotle had
any perception of the genius and imaginative power of Aristophanes '
— is, to say the least, highly improbable. The probabilities are
that, in his judgment of Aristophanes, Aristotle was the same
penetrating and incisive critic as in his judgment of Sophocles and
Homier.

VI

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE PRESENT RECONSTRUCTION

We may assume, then, that Aristotle would not neglect Aristophanes
and the contemporaries of that author; and we may assume that he
would not neglect the poets (little as we know concerning them) of
the ' Middle ' Comedy — the direct forerunners of Philemon and
Menander. To adapt what Bywater says of the *Poetics* and tragedy ; ^
His ideal comedy would probably be a compromise between the comedy of
the great era and that of his own day.

^ See below, pp. 56-9. ^ Bywater, p. viii.

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Partly to recapitulate, but also advancing, let me state my main
assumptions as follows.

(i) Bernays makes the Tractatus Coislmianus central. I make the
*Poetics* as it stands central, and the schematic Tractate subsidiary.

(2) The scientific method employed by Aristotle in his investigation
of tragedy remains the same in his examination of epic poetry, and
would not be greatly modified in its application to comedy. So far as
we now can discover, his fashion of investigating tragedy must have
been somewhat as follows.^

Starting with the Platonic-Socratic contention^ that a literary form
— an oration, for example, or a tragedy — has the nature of a living
organism, Aristotle advanced to the position that each distinct kind
of art must have a definite and characteristic activit}^ or function,
and that this specific function or determinant principle is
equivalent to the effect that the forni produces on a competent
observer; that is, form and function being as it were interchangeable
terms, the organism is what it does to the person capable of judging
what it does or should do. Then further, beginning again with the
general literary estimates, in a measure naive, but in a measure also
technical,^ that had become more or less crystallized in the interval
between the great age of the Attic drama and his own time, and that
helped him to assign tentative values to one play and another, the
master-critic found a way to select out of a large extant literature
a small number of dramas that must

^ The next paragraph is taken with some modification from my notice
of Anna Robeson Burr, The Autobiography, in the Philosophical Review
19 (1910). 344-8, esp. p. 345.

^ See Phaednis 264c.

^ See *Poetics* 15 (end), 17 (referenceto Polyidus) — in my ' Amplified
Version,' pp. 53, 59 ; see also above, pp. 32-3, below, pp. 126-7.

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PRINCIPLES OF OUR RECONSTRUCTION 43

necessarily conform more nearly than the rest to the ideal type. As
in the Politics, which is based upon researches into a large number
of constitutions and municipahties, yet with emphasis upon a few, so
in the *Poetics* his inductions for the drama must repose upon a
collection of instances as complete as he knew how to make it without
injury to his perspective; that is, his observation was inclusive so
that he might not overlook what Bacon termed ' crucial instances.'
Through a scrutin}' of these crucial instances in tragedy, and
doubtless through a study of the actual emotions in audiences at the
theatre, he still more narrowly defined what ought to be the effect
of this kind of art upon the ideal spectator, namely, the catharsis
of pity and fear — the relief of disturbing emotions, and the
pleasure attendant upon that relief. Then, reasoning from function
back to form, and from form again to function, he would test each
select drama, and every part of it, by the way in which the part and
the whole conduced to this emotional relief. In this manner he
arrived at the conception of an ideal structure for traged}^ a
pattern which, though never fully realized in any actual play, must
yet be the standard for all of its kind. He proceeded, if we have
given the steps correctly, as does the sculptor, who after long
observation, com-^ parison, and elimination, by an imaginative
s^mthesis combines the elements he has seen in the finest specimens
of humanity into a form more perfect than nature ever succeeds in
producing; or as does the anatomist, whose representation of the
normal bones and muscles is likewise an act of imagination, ascending
from the actual to an ideal truth, and is never quite realized in any
one individual, though partially realized in what we should call a '
normal' man.

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(3) Much of the *Poetics* as it stands is impHcitly apphcable to
comedy; with a httle manipulation it becomes directly applicable, and
not merely to Aristophanes, but, such is its universality, to the
fragments of Menander, and to Plautus and Terence, who restore to us
some part of the lost Greek comedies intervening, and also to the
modern comic poets.

The essence of my procedure, accordingljs is to make the necessary
shift in the *Poetics* ; to work back and forth from principles in that
work to examples in com-ed}^; and to use the Tractate as important
but subsidiary, adding examples to illustrate it, after the fashion
of Starkie, from Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Moliere, and other
sources.

Since the foundations of modern science and scholarship w^ere laid
down by Aristotle, this procedure will, as I trust, tend to produce a
more illuminating theory of comedy than any hitherto put forward. If
my own effort should strike the reader as but partly successful, then
I hope that effort yAW stimulate some expert classical scholar to
apply more happily what seems to be a correct method. Rightly
utilized, the method should lead to a more helpful theory than, for
example, that of Cornford in The Origin of Attic Comedy, or that of
Zielinski in Die Gliederung der Altattischen Komoedie. Cornford is
ingenious and suggestive, Zielinski both brilliant and solid; but the
aim of each is different from that of Aristotle. Cornford lays all
the emphasis upon the ritual origins of the type ; as his title
indicates, he is an evolutionist; and he is well aware that ' in the
*Poetics* [Aristotle] was not concerned with ritual origins. . . . How
much more he knew or might have inferred

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PRINCIPLES OF OUR RECONSTRUCTION 45

about the earliest stages of comedy we can not tell.'^ Zielinski is
occupied with his well-known theory of the agon, or contention, as
the basic element of comedy, and with questions of mechanical
structure — with external form rather than essential function; that
is, with what Aristotle would call the quantitative,^ rather than the
qualitative, parts of comedy, and not with the psychological effect
of the whole. Every student of comedy is much indebted to the Russian
scholar. But, as we may learn from Aristotle,^ in art, just as in
life, the end or aim — the function — is all-important. Aristotle
does not altogether forget the evolutionary process by which Greek
comedy came into existence; still, his historical sketch is
subordinate to the question of the effect produced by the best
comedy. Nor does he overlook the quantitative parts of tragedy,
though thev are for him a minor consideration.

VII FUNDAMENTAL DEMANDS OF ARISTOTLE

To judge from the *Poetics*, what would Aristotle demand of a comedy as
conducing to the function of a perfect work of art in this kind ?

(i) First of all, organic unity. To him, a work of art is like a
living animal in that it is a unified organism. Even though the
scheme of the whole were distorted for comic purposes, still it would
be complete and imi-fied ; we might compare it to the outline of a
ludicrous animal, which does not lack a sort of comic perfection.

^ Cornford, p. 219; compare Egger, p. 250, ^ See below, p. 198. ^
*Poetics* 6.

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Or we might compare it to a comic mask, which, though distorted, is
not disorganized, but is complete and a whole.

(2) Again, if a given drama is to be classed as a comedy, Aristotle
w^ould demand that it produce the proper effect of comedy — not any
chance effect, but a calculated one, and the right one. And the end
or aim will determine the means.

(3) The correct means may be various, chiefly consisting in what is
said and done in the play, and secondarily in the emplo^mient of
music and spectacle. But underneath all lies the proper use of the
law of proportion, and the law^ of probability or necessity in the
sequence or order of details. That is, whether he keeps things in
proportion, or throws them out of proportion, the writer of comedy
must understand true perspective. He must understand the law of
proportion as surely as any other artist, as the tragic poet, in
order to deviate from it in the right way, at the right time, and to
the right extent.

(4) Similarly with the law of probable or necessary sequence, to
which Aristotle attaches so much weight in considering tragedy and
epic poetry. The comic poet must work with this law clearly in mind,
in order to deviate from it, when deviate he may or must, in the
right way, and not in some inartistic fashion.

(5) According to Aristotle, in every drama there are six constitutive
elements, to each of which the poet must give due attention. These
are : (a) plot; (b) ethos or moral bent (shown in the kind of choices
made by the personages of the drama) ; (c) dianoia or ' intellect '
(the way in which the personages think and reason, their
generalizations and maxims, their processes in

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going from the particular to the general or from the general to the
particular, and their efforts to magnify or to behttle the importance
of things) ; (d) the diction, the medium in which the entire stor^^^
is worked out by the poet through the utterance of the personages;
(e) melody or the musical element in the drama (including the chants
of the chorus, individual songs, and the instrumental accompaniment);
(f) ' spectacle ' (all that appertains to costume, stage-setting,
scenery, and the like). The composing dramatist obviously does have
to attend to these six elements, and the list, as Aristotle correctly
observes, is exhaustive. It would be the same for a comic as for a
tragic poet.

(6) As in tragic and epic poetry, so in comedy Aristotle would regard
the plot, or general structure of the whole, as the chief of the
qualitative or constituent parts of the play, since everything else
depends on that. He would deem the plot, or plan, or outline of the
Frogs, let us say, to be fundamental, and might add that a poet
should make a generalized sketch of his comedy before working out the
details; for example, thus:

The god who presides over the musical and dramatic contests in a
certain city, finding that all the good tragic poets are dead, goes
to another world to bring back one poet — and brings back another.
There is a comic reversal of fortune. All the other incidents depend
upon this main story.

And similarly he might sketch a somewhat different type of comedy,
like the Plutus, which we have, or the Cocalus, which is lost.

Under this head some explanation is called for. As opposed to the
episodic structure in many plays of the Old Comedy, the development
of a more closely-knit

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comic entanglement and unraveling, on the order of the involved
action in tragedy, began early, and seems to have led from Sicily and
Epicharmus through Crates, through the later plays of Aristophanes,
and through some, but not all, of the plays of the Middle Comedy, to
Philemon, Menander, and Diphilus.^ In spite of what Cornford and
others think, the intricate plot of Menander is not an inheritance
from Euripides ;2 as Prescott rightly argues,^ the debt of Menander
to Euripides has been overestimated. Menander is said to have learnt
much from the practice of Aristophanes.'\* He may owe more to the
*Poetics* than to Euripides, since he was a pupil of Theophrastus, who
studied under Aristotle and was his successor as head of the
Peripatetic school. Further, in the growth of comedy the existence of
an intermediate between it and tragedy — that is, the sat3n:-drama, —
and the gradual approximation of all three from constant mutual
influence, must not be left out of account. We observe, too, that
Aristophanes was a careful student, and an excellent critic, not only
of Euripides, but of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well; that he admired
Sophocles above all is evident in the Frogs.^

Accordingly, the preference by Aristotle, in *Poetics* 10 and 13, of
the \* involved' over the \* episodic ' action in tragedy would, as
some believe, make a similar preference not unnatural for him in
comedy; yet it may be thought that at this point his treatment of

^ See above, pp. 27, 29.

^ Cornford, p. 198.

^ Henry W. Prescott, The Interpretation of Roman Comedy, in Classical
Philology 11 (1916). 146.

^ See above, p. 23.

^ See my article, Greek Culture, in the Encyclopedia Americana {1919)
13. 384-7; and compare below, pp. 251, 255.

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comedy might diverge from his treatment of tragedy, and the more so
if he drew much of his theory from the plays of Aristophanes that are
known to us. At the same time I must dissent from a common opinion/
and surely from exaggerated forms of it, as to the relative
unimportance, as is alleged, of the main action in the works of
Aristophanes taken generally. The fundamental thing in each of his
plays as we know them is a great comic idea or substantial form which
gives rise to all the details of each ; it is, even more than the
wealth of imagination with which he renders it incarnate, the primary
mark of his genius.

This form may be called either a l^o-^oc, or a pGoc, since Aristotle
uses either word for the plot or fable of a drama, and since plot in
its most general sense means to him the basic idea of a play.
Cornford is mistaken when he asserts that ' the proper term for the
comic plot is not mythos, but logos \* \\^ and Zielinski is correct
in holding that the terms are interchangeable, but hardly so in
thinking that, because Aristophanes repeatedly describes the content
of his plays by logos, this word is therefore specially applicable to
the argument in the Old Comedy.^ Aristotle speaks of the Sicilians
Epicharmus and Phormis as composing plots (|jLtjOou^ TuoisTv),\* and,
in a passage to which we have referred,^ he mentions Crates as the
first Athenian to drop the comedy of invective, and to frame stories
of a general and non-personal sort, that is, to make T^oyou? -/tai
[luGou^. And, again, in Rhetoric 3.14.

^ Cf. Croiset 3. 513; Zielinski, pp. 30-2; Cornford, pp. 198-9;
Shorey, in Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature (s. v.
Aristophanes) 2. 760.

^ Cornford, p. 199.

^ Zielinski, p. 32 and footnote.

■\* See below, p. 177.

■'' See above, p. 29, below, pp. 177-8.

d

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I4I5ai2 (sv Bs 'ZOIC, Xoyoic, xai Itzzgi BsTyixoc zg'zi tou \\6you^)
logos stands for plot, tale, fable, argument, in a very elastic
sense, certainly including heroic and mythical stories as handled by
the poets. Further, if Aristophanes used logos for the content of a
comedy, Antiphanes referred to the fables of tragedies as logoi.^
Popular usage could not have been very strict. ' It ought to be
noticed, however,' says Rutherford, ' that scholiasts, like all the
later Grecians, never speak of the plot of a comedy as pGoi;, but
invariably call it 07:6-Gs(7t?.'^ Perhaps in the time of Aristotle, '
fables ' (pGoi) could be more suitably applied to legendary material
adapted by the poet, and loyoi to his own inventions, when there is a
sharp distinction between two sorts of comic play. However, in
Aristophanes and others, down to Plautus and Terence, we find
traditional tales of gods and heroes, and the like, intermingled with
the new devices of the author — as in the Birds, Frogs, and Plutus,
and in the Amphitryon. In spite of Cornford, then, the fable of the
Plutus might be indifferently termed a logos or a mythos. And, to
repeat, this mythos or logos would for Aristotle be the very soul of
the comedy. Further, the assumption would agree well enough with
modern theories concerning the agon or ' debate ' as the centre of
the Aristo-phanic drama. Thus, according to Rogers, the debate
between Just Reason and Unjust Reason in the Clouds ' is the very
core of the play. Every preceding scene leads up to it; every
subsequent scene looks back to it. ^ In referring to plot, the
epitomator in the Tractate boldly offers the expression ' comic myth
' (pOoc

^ Sec below, p. 140.

^ See above, p. 33.

^ Rutherford, p. 454.

\* Rogers, Clouds, p. xvi.

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%&)[jLt}i6?). ^ In the scholia on Dionysius Thrax, and again in
Tzetzes, the word :;>.aG-[j.a is found as a technical term for the
substructure of comedy, in contrast with the ' story ' (t(7T0pi(x) of
tragedy; the term no doubt is derived from some early, perhaps very
early, source in literary criticism; if not Alexandrian, it may be
Attic. The scholiast says: ' Tragedy differs from comedy in that
tragedy has a story (iG-Topiav) and a report (aT^txYys^tav) of deeds
that are past, but comedy embraces fictions (7:AaG-[j-aTa) of the
affairs of everyday life.'^ Tzetzes echoes the same source, adding a
slight qualification in regard to tragedy, but with no variation in
regard to comedy.^ Aristotle does not use the word tOsIg^^sj, in his
critical writings ; we meet it once in his Physica Aiisctdtatio
8.252^5, and twice in De Caelo 2.289a6, 289^25, in the depreciatory^
sense of ' fiction.'

(7) If the constituents of comedy are plot, character, intellect,
diction, music, and spectacle, and if plot were not the most
important of these six, then one of the other five would have to be
more important. It would not be fair to argue that any two, or three,
or four, or all five, of the others were more important; for
Aristotle does not think of balancing one against two or more of the
elements which severally require poetic art.

It might seem at first glance that ' intellect ' {di-anoia), or the
way in which the comic personages reason, would demand more skill
than the general plan of the comedy. Yet on reflection it is clear
that their comic inferences, maxims, exaggerations, and

^ See below, p. 226.

'^ Kaibel, p. 11 ; cf. Tzetzes, 'lauiSol tspnuol neql xw^wwcfrnf,
line 76, in Kaibel, p. 42, and the anonymous writer IIsqI
xQ)(x([)dic(g, line 49 (§ 12), in Kaibel, p. 8.

^ Kaibel, p. 17 ; see also below, p. 86.

d2

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diminutions — their use of \* opinion ' and ' proof ' — might be
shghted by the poet with less injury than would ensue from negligence
with respect to ethos. It is the ethos or moral bent of the agents
that in Aristotle's view makes a characteristic difference between
comedy and tragedy. And to him ethos would have the same relation to
plot in comedy as in tragedy; it would be second in importance to
plot.

Or again, it might seem that the musical element, or the spectacular,
would have a greater relative value in comedy; one thinks of the
contribution made to the general effect of the Birds or the Frogs by
the music and the spectacle — now largely impossible to reconstruct
even in imagination. But, after all, the play can and does exist
without them, as it could not without the diction. The Birds could be
read with enjoyment, and now must be read and enjoyed, when deprived
of stage-setting (including costume) and music. Though in one sense
it is direct presentation in a theatre, by actors, and with
stage-accessories, that makes the comedy a play, and to the full
extent a piece of \* mimetic ' art; and though Aristotle for this
reason includes ' spectacle ' with music among the constituent parts;
yet the play does not cease to give the effect of comedy when they
are lost. Without diction it could not have been transmitted to us at
all.

Even so, in the scale of values diction can not take precedence of \*
intellect ' (any more than \* intellect ' can take precedence of
ethos), however much the comic effect may depend upon word-play,
comic metaphor, verbal diminutives and superlatives of a ludicrous
sort, and the like.

In analyzing the constituents of the drama, Aristotle proceeds from
what is more inward to what is more

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superficial, from what comes first in the mind of the poet to what
comes later, and from what directly concerns the poetic art to what
incidentally concerns it, or partly requires the help of another art
such as that of the costumer. It follows that in ranking the several
elements in comedy he would give them the same relative positions as
in tragedy: first, plot; second, ethos ; third, dianoia ; fourth,
diction ; fifth, the musical element; sixth, the spectacular.

(8) The synthesis of these six elements will produce the comedy, and
the order of their importance is determined also by the contribution
they severally make to the effect of the whole. The comedy is judged
hy its total effect, ^^^lat, according to Aristotle, should the
effect of the best comedy be ? This difficult question, if soluble at
all, requires extended treatment, which must be postponed to a later
section.^ Meanwhile let us take up the analysis of comedy from
another side.

VIII

THE QUANTITATIVE PARTS OF COMEDY

Aristotle distinguishes between the qualitative elements, which
jointly constitute the essence of a play, and the quantitative parts,
which we should call the mechanical divisions of it. The six
qualitative or constituent elements, which we have just examined, we
may liken to the tissues of a living organism — bone, muscle, nerve,
skin, for example; whereas the quantitative parts are like the head,
trunk, and limbs, v/hich, taken together, by another kind of
S5mthesis, also form

^ See below, pp. 60-98.

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the whole. This dual distinction of parts, according to quality and
extent, may be observed in anything that is one and entire, since an
object may be regarded as a unit in that it has one special function
which all its constituents subserve — as a horse is a unit in that
all its tissues subserve the act of running ;^ or it may be regarded
as a unit in that, being distinct from all other objects, it is a
continuous whole, having a beginning, middle, and end.

In this sense, the beginning, middle, and end are the quantitative
parts in any vv^ork of art. But in a more technical sense Aristotle
gives as the quantitative parts of tragedy the recognized divisions
into which a Greek tragedy falls : prologue, episode, exode, and
choricon, the last-mentioned, the choral portion, being further
divided by him into parode and stasimon. Even in the use of a term
like ' prologue,' however, he is sometimes more, and sometimes less,
exact. The word as it first occurs in the *Poetics*^ may refer to a
statement made before the opening of the drama proper; later in that
work it is defined as ' all that precedes the parode of the chorus.'^
In the Rhetoric, again, it is used very loosely in the sense of
beginning; if Aristotle had the same text as we of Oedipus the King,
he could speak of a passage half-way along in the tragedj^ (lines 774
ff.). though still in the complication, as in the ' prologue."^ In
like manner he gives a technical definition of episode for tragedy,
and also loosely employs ' episodes,' and a related verb, to describe
the elaborations, or filling,

^ Horse (= courser) is etymologically related to Latin currere. I
here elucidate the familiar distinction of Aristotle in a way that
has proved helpful to modern university students.

^ *Poetics* 5. I449b4.

^ Ibid. 12. 1452IJ16, 19-20.

\* See below, p. 141.

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QUANTITATIVE PARTS OF COMEDY 55

with which an outline sketch may be lengthened out into an epic
poem.^

In the Tractatus Coislinianus the epitomator gives us the same four
quantitative parts for comedy that we have just noted as the
Aristotelian divisions of tragedy, in this order: prologue, choricon,
episode, and exode.2 In the *Poetics* an \* episode ' is defined as '
all that comes between two whole choral songs.'^ Now, the relation
between the choral parts and the incidents being different in the
Greek comedies we possess from what it is in the tragedies, suspicion
has been cast on the term ' episode ' in the Tractate, and hence on
the whole scheme of parts given by the epitomator ; it is argued that
the scheme has been crudely transferred from the analysis of tragedy,
in the *Poetics*, to that of comedy.^ But our ignorance of the body of
plays which Aristotle and his followers had under observation should
make us w^ary; his own varying use of terms we have noted. If he
tried to generalize from the practice of authors all the way from
Epicharmus to Anaxandrides, he might have called a portion of a
comedy intervening between two portions more distinctly musical an
episode.

Under the circumstances, it seems best to note, as we have done, the
divisions given in the Tractate, and then to present a brief account
of the quantitative parts of the Old Comedy as viewed by modern
scholarship. In recent years much attention has been paid to this
kind of anal3^sis with regard to Aristophanes, under the impulse of
Zielinski.^ Here fol-

^ *Poetics* 17; see below, pp. 206-7.

- See below, p. 226.

^ See below, p. 198.

^ Zielinski, pp. 3-4.

^ See Bibliography^, above, p. xxi.

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lows, in substance, the adaptation of Zielinski by Mazoft :^

' Some [of these terms] go back to antiquity, but in large part they
are the invention ... of Ziehnski himself,

\* Comedy has some parts in common with tragedy: prologue, parode,
exode.^ . . .

' The songs of the chorus (chorica) which in comedy correspond to the
tragic stasima are varied in nature. They may consist of reflections
by the chorus on the preceding action; or they may be interludes pure
and simple, and in that case they most often take the shape of short
satirical songs. [Aristotle, howeyer, objects to choral interludes in
the drama, or to anything in a play that is not organically related
to the idea of the whole, and is not in its right place; see below,
p. 209.] But the point to remember is that the term choricon should
not be applied to all the songs of the chorus; it appertains only to
those that mark a pause in the action, or that form part of a series.
The strophe which opens an agon, for example, can not be called a
choricon.

' Greek tragedy also admits parts sung by the actors, lyric
monologues ([xovwBiai), and lyric dialogues (zo[j.p.oi^) —whether
between two actors or between an actor and the chorus. These devices
were known to comedy also, where they were frequently employed. But,
to tell the truth, when employed, they seem always to parody tragedy,
or at least to imitate it very closely, and much more often than not
some definite passage in a new tragedy. Accordingly, they are not the
elements of tragedy which the comic drama essentially transformed and
adapted to its own nature.

\* On the other hand, there are two parts of comedy that are peculiar
to it alone, and these we must therefore subject to a precise
analysis. They are the parabasis and the agon.

^ See Bibliography, above, p. xviii.

^ But see below, pp. 198-9.

^ 'This is the term now generally adopted to designate all dialogue
that is sung. Actually, the ancients restricted the term to duos
composed as lamentations only.' —Note by Mazon.

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' The parabasis is ordinarily placed at the middle of the comedy. The
actors go back again into the hut ((Ty.'r)VTQ) ; the chorus take off
their mantles, and turn toward the audience.

' The parabasis comprises six^ parts.

\* (i) The commation, a brief bit of transition generally containing
an adieu to the actors, who retire from the stage, and an invitation,
addressed to the audience, to hear the parabasis. The commation is
most often a system of anapaestics; but it could be written in
anapaestic tetrameters, sometimes even in glyconics.

' (2) The parabasis proper, almost always in anapaestic tetrameters —
so often, in fact, that the ancients commonly referred to it as ol
ava7iai(7TOL It is for us the most curious feature of the Old Comedy.
The poet, through the mouth of the leader of the chorus, appealed
directly to the public, made his complaints to it, set forth his
claims, and, above all, sought to present himself as its most
benevolent and enlightened counselor. The parabasis ends with the
macron, an anapaestic system which the actor must recite without
taking a second breath even if he should lose his wind — whence its
other name, pnigos, i. e., '\* suffocation." It is a sort of
brilliant finale, a '\* bit of bravura," which we meet again in the
agon.

' (3) The ode could be written in the most diverse Ijnric metres. It
is sometimes an invocation to the gods; often a satirical song, now
frank and almost brutal, again disguised as an imitation of the
tragic style.

' (4) The epirrhema, in trochaic tetrameters. The number of these
tetrameters is always a multiple of four. It is probable that this
law was imposed on the poets by the dance which accompanied the
epirrhema, since the tetrameters are a dancing-measure, and no doubt
some rhythmic order of dancers required this quadruple arrangement.
Having danced out the ode, the chorus took to dancing while the
leader gave the epirrhema in recitative. The subject of the epirrhema

^ But see below, p. 199.

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was most often a complaint of the poet; but the tone is less personal
than in the anapaests ; politics are more in evidence, and now the
chorus speaks in its own character.

\* (5) The ant ode.

\* (6) The antepirrhema.

\* The earhest comedies of Aristophanes are the only ones with
complete parabases. In the Peace, epirrhema and antepirrhema are
already missing; in the Frogs, it is the anapaests that are lacking.
Finally, the Ecclesiazusae and the Pluhis contain no parabasis
whatever.

\* Besides the main parabasis, the earhest comedies of Aristophanes
have a secondary parabasis, which most often is composed of an ode
with antode, and an epirrhema with antepirrhema. In reality it is not
a true parabasis, since it lacks the essential element of one, namely
the anapaests; a mere external similarity has given it the name. Yet
it has this in common with the parabasis that the epirrhema often
deals with the same topics as the epirrhema of the parabasis. But
again, we must note that this epirrhema is not necessarily in
trochaic tetrameters; it is sometimes written in the rhythm of the
paeon.

[The term agon, and the names given to its parts, were invented by
Zielinski.]

' Agon is the name given to a combat in the form of a dialogue,
between two personages each of whom supports a thesis opposed to that
of the other. One thesis is often the case of the poet and the
subject of the comedy itself; and hence the importance of the agon,
its place at the centre of the comedy, and its frequently
long-drawn-out developments.

' The agon is generally composed as follows. It is double, each of
the two interlocutors having to plead his cause in turn; in which
case it is commonly wTitten in two different metres. . . .

\* The agon begins \\vith a song by the chorus. Then the leader of
the chorus gives the note to the actors in two tetrameters, the
rhythm of which the actors instantly adopt. As these tetrameters
always begin

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with the word ocKkd — " Now then !" — they have been called the
cataceleusmos.

' The scene proper, the epirrhema, is composed with no little freedom
; but it nearly always begins with the words, xai [r/jv — " Well then
! " — and ends in a pnigos. In general, when the agon is double, each
of the epirrhemas belongs to one of the interlocutors, while the
other indulges only in brief interruptions. A third personage plays
the part of buffoon, and enlivens the somewhat rigorous scheme with
casual jokes, commonly announced by expressions such as s/apTjV youv,
or y^g-Gt;/ Y''^^'^-

' Then there is an ant ode corresponding to the ode, an antepirrhema
corresponding to the epirrhema, an antipnigos corresponding to the
pnigos, and finally the leader of the chorus sometimes briefly
formulates the conclusion of the dispute (sphragis).

' The agon is not always double. When it is single, and wTitten in
one metre throughout, the verse is generally anapaestic tetrameter.'^

I give this analysis mainly in order to fill out the perspective of
our subject. It is by no means certain that Aristotle would concern
himself with all the details of the comic chorus. The *Poetics* casts a
rapid glance at the tragic chorus, but, as a practical treatise for
authors, does not delay over a function that in Aristotle's time was
falhng, or had fallen, into disuse. In his time there may have been
little need for a long treatment of the choral element in comedy. He
stands midway between Aristophanes, with whom this element gradually
diminishes, and Menander, in whose plays, according to Legrand, the
performances of the chorus had nothing to do wdth the action, being '
interludes, in the strictest sense of the word.'^ Besides, Aristotle
is less interested in the quantitative than in

\* Mazon, pp. 10-13. - Legrand, pp. 336-8.

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the qualitative aspects of poetry. For him, the effect is the
paramount consideration.

IX THE EFFECT OF COMEDY

What did Aristotle think was the function of comedy ? The problem, as
we have said,^ is at best only partly soluble. Let us begin with what
can be ascertained, before proceeding to what is more or less
h5^othetical.

(i) For Aristotle each kind of art has its own special quality,
connected with its specific effect. The characteristic of tragedy is
the arousal of pity and fear in such a way as to relieve the
spectator of these emotions. The characteristic of comedy, then, is
not the arousal and relief of pity and fear.

(2) The specific effect of each kind of mimetic art is some kind of
pleasure — the kind of pleasure appropriate to that art. The proper
effect of comedy, then, is some form of pleasure; not necessarily
some one single form — in Aristotle's view, for aught we know, it
might be single, or it might be compounded of two or more forms.

(3) Whether simple or compound, the effect of comedy for Aristotle
would be the pleasure aroused by the right means in the right sort of
spectator. His ideal spectator is the mature man of sound reason and
correct sentiment; not necessarily an expert, but at all events a man
of taste and culture.

(4) The spectator beholds in comedy an imitation of men in action. He
perceives a resemblance between

^ See above, p. 53.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — ARISTOTLE 6i

the comedy and human Hfe. He thinks to himself, ' This is Uke that.'
His inference gives him pleasm^e; for all learning is pleasant, since
it is a satisfaction of the universal desire of mankind to know.

(5) The pleasure of comedy is associated with the perception of a
defect or ugliness that is neither painful nor injurious. 1 It is
associated with our sense of disproportion.

(6) It is a pleasure similar to that produced in us by the Odyssey,
save that the outcome of the Odyssey, while a happy one for Odysseus
and his household, is disastrous to the wooers of Penelope. It is the
pleasure aroused by the story of Orestes and Aegisthus when treated
in such fashion that these heroes, legendary foes in the tragic
poets, at the end of the comedy walk off the stage as friends,
without any one slaying or being slain.

(7) The pleasure of comedy is the actual effect produced upon the
audience. It is something capable of being observed in the theatre,
or in the man who reads the comedy away from the theatre. This effect
may be described as psycho-physiological. An outwear d aspect of it
is laughter.

(8) Among accessory means to the effect of comedy, the musical
element is very helpful, as is also the spectacular, the latter, one
may imagine, especially in comedies where the scene is laid in
another world ^ — as in the Birds or the Frogs.

(9) There is a pleasure arising from the marvelous, and the marvelous
is to some extent admissible in-

^ The word cpO^agTixov is often translated 'destructive,' the usual
meaning in Aristotle \*(see Bonitz, s. v. f^ft^a^jzixU) ; but here
perhaps we should say 'corrupting.' See below, pp. 87-8, 176.

^ Cf. *Poetics* 18; see below, p. 208.

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comedy. Wonder gives rise to learning, and learning is pleasant.

(lo) Discoveries (recognitions, whether of persons or things, or of
deeds, but especially of the identity of persons) afford pleasure in
all stories, and hence in comedy; so also reversals of fortune. In
the most amusing situations, discovery is attended by such reversal.
In comedy the reversal will be from worse fortune to better; or, if
from better to worse, at all events it will not be serious or
painful.

(ii) As in tragedy there is a kind of incident having the technical
name of pathos or ' suffering ' (such as wounds, violent deaths, and
the like), so in comedy there will be an incident or incidents of a
ludicrous or especially hilarious or joyful sort.

(12) In Rhetoric i.ii we meet several of the foregoing points, with
additions. At the beginning of the chapter Aristotle defines pleasure
as ' a certain motion of the soul, and a settling, sudden and
perceptible, into one's normal and natural state.' Further on he
says: ' Wonder and learning, too, are generally pleasant ; wonder,
because it involves the desire to learn, and hence the wonderful is
an object of desire ; and learning, because it involves a settling
into one's natural state.' At the end of the chapter he alludes to
the pleasure of the laughable: \* Since amusement and relaxation of
every kind are among pleasant things, and laughter, too, it follows
that the causes of laughter must be pleasant — namely, persons,
utterances, and deeds. 1 But the forms of the ludicrous have had a
separate treatment in the *Poetics*.'

^ AvS-oMTiovg xal Xoyocg xal soyrc.' Jebb translates Xoyovg by '
words'; Welldon renders the phrase by ' whether a person or tale or
circumstance.' In *Poetics* 20 we sec that a '/.oyog may

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — ARISTOTLE 63

More of this chapter, and other extracts from Aristotle on pleasure
in general, will be found in a later section.1

So much, I believe, may fairly be asserted or inferred regarding the
effect of comedy in the light of the *Poetics*, with the help of one or
two general notions familiar to every student of Aristotle.

When we approach the crucial question, however^ we are on uncertain
ground. What in an Aristotelian theory of comedy would correspond to
the catharsis of pity and fear which is the proper effect of tragedy
?

(i) Perhaps nothing definite; we may as well begin sceptically.
Perhaps like Cicero, Aristotle approved laughter merely \* because it
softens or unbends sorrow and severity.'- Possibly, as McMahon
contends, ' the significance of the theory of catharsis was small in
Aristotle's view' ;^ scholars may have too readily assumed the
existence of a comprehensive and searching treatment of the subject,
differentiated for tragedy and comedy. The Politics sends the reader
to the *Poetics* for a fuller account of catharsis,^ but the reference
may be an interpolation, casual and misleading. Or, accepting the
authenticity of the reference, possibly we may argue thus : Aristotle
noted the fact of the catharsis as something ultimate; in medicine
one is less concerned with the process of purgation, so long as it
duly occurs, than with the means of effecting it;

include anything from a single statement up to the entire Iliad. See
my 'Amplified Version,' p. 69; and compare below^ p. 211.

1 See below, pp. 132-40.

2 See below, p. 88.

^ McMahon, pp. 23-5. '^ See below, p. 130.

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having noted it as a fact in tragedy, in the *Poetics* he elaborates
upon the means by which it is to be produced, without hammering at a
plain and accepted observation. In this way, much of the work may be
said to deal with the tragic purgation, and, tragedy being for him
the representative type of poetry in general, the reference from the
Politics is justified as matters stand. When he dealt with comedy, he
might, according to this view, have little to say about the fact of a
comic catharsis, and yet dwell sufficiently upon the means by which
laughter is properly aroused. As Bywater believes,^ Aristotle, though
a systematic philosopher, was not systematic, as a modern writer
would be, in attempting to harmonize all his utterances on related
topics as they were taken up in different connections, or even under
different associations of thought in the same work.

If he actually defined comedy in terms of its effect, it is strange
that no intelligible, clearly-marked vestige of his definition has
come down to us. The definition in the Tractate^ offers no safe
foothold; it seems, though scholars are not unanimous in this
opinion," to be imitated (not by Aristotle) from his definition of
tragedy, at least so far as concerns the catharsis. The remarks of
Cicero^ indicate that, conversant as he was with Peripatetic
writings, he was unacquainted with any good scientific treatment of
the ludicrous as a means of purgation. Nor does the evidence of
Proclus Diadochus help us more.^ There is no aid from antiquity,
early or late. It may be, then, that

^ Bywater, pp. xiii-xvii. ^ See below, p. 224. ^ Kayser, p. 31, \*
See below, pp. 87-9. ^ See below, p. 84.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — ARISTOTLE 65

Aristotle, like the modern psychologist,^ was baffled, could not
explain the nature of comedy by its effect upon the human organism
(soul and body), and hence could give no definition of comedy
parallel to his definition of tragedy.

Nevertheless, while realizing that we are treading uncertain ground,
we may consider the problem from various sides.

(2) The function of tragedy is to arouse, and by arousing to relieve,
two of the common disturbing emotions of daily life. Aristotle, it
would seem, believed that men in general suffer from pity and fear,
and other latent emotions, and may be relieved from the burden of
pity and fear through witnessing the artistic representation of
things piteous and fearful in tragedy. The cure is homeopathic. We
may therefore examine the Nicomachean Ethics, where pity and fear are
discussed at some length with other emotions, in order to see which
of these latter conceivably might take the place of tragic pity and
fear in a definition of comedy. In Book 2, chapter 4, Aristotle says:

\* By the emotions I mean desire, anger, fear, courage, envy, joy,
love, hatred, regret, emulation, pity — in general, whatever is
attended by pleasure or pain.'

The list, while ending in an et cetera, can hardly be supposed to
omit any emotion regarded by the author as habitual among men.

To Aristotle, almost any emotional excess is objectionable, and in
need of restraint or correction. But

^ Compare L. Dugas, Psychologic du Rire, Paris, 1902, pp. 166-7 : '
Le rire n'est pas un genre, mais une collection d'especes. II n'est
pas une entite psychologique, mais une particularity qui se rencontre
en des etats diff6rents et contraires. . . . Un accident . . . n'est
point proprement objet de science. . . . C'est done k une conclusion
toute negative que notre 6tude aboutit.'

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if we must find in the list two emotions equally common with pity and
fear, and specially capable of relief through comedy, why not take
anger and envy ? Plato associates these two with comedy in the
Philehus.^ And Aristotle, in beginning a similar list in the
Rhetoric, says:

\* The emotions are those things, being attended by pleasure and
pain, by which men are altered in regard to their judgments — as
anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites.'^

Further on he notes that

\* We are placable when we are in a condition opposed to angry
feeling, for example, at a time of sport or laughter or festivity ';
^

and later he takes up the discussion of envy and emulation.^ The
analysis of anger and envy in the Rhetoric has many points of contact
with that in the Philebus ; but we must forego the comparison. Let us
observe instead that both emotions are rather constant in daily life;
nearly every one cherishes at least a latent anger against some one
most of the time ; and the same is true of envy. They are, like pity
and fear, intimately related; both are disturbing emotions; and their
catharsis would amount to a form of pleasure as distinct as is the
catharsis of the tragic emotions. Further, they are the chief
manifestations of what we still term ' ill humor '; the ancient
theory of disquieting bodily and mental humors, an excess of which it
may be desirable to purge away by specifics, thus lives on in popular
linguistic usage. And Aristotle himself was thinking in terms of the
Greek ' humoral ' medicine when he marked the cathartic effect of

^ See below, pp. 114-6. 2 Rhetoric 2. i. ^ Ibid. 2. 3.

\* Ibid. 2. lo-ii.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY —ARISTOTLE 67

tragedy. Now it is obvious that, if you succeed in making an angry or
envious man laugh with pleasure, he ceases for a time to be angry or
envious. Thus anger and envy might be said to be purged away by
comedy. There can be no doubt that comedy does have an influence of
the sort. And it is the outstanding facts of experience, and of
dramatic art, that are uppermost in the *Poetics* of Aristotle.

It may be objected, however, that in this view the cure wrought by
comedy is not, like the cure effected by tragedy, homeopathic, but,
on the contrary, is allopathic. The generalized emotions of pity and
fear in a tragic poem are a specific for the pity and fear of the
individual in the audience ; whereas anger and envy in the individual
may be removed by something very unHke them in comedy. The comic poet
may represent irascible and envious men, but will not necessarily do
so ; he may choose other types, as the ironical man, the braggart,
and the buffoon. To this we might answer that, comedy being in many
ways the reverse of tragedy, its effect may well be allopathic rather
than homeopathic. The comic catharsis may be more direct, and more
violent, too, than the tragic.

(3) But let us go a little deeper. Anger and envy are emotions that
arise from a sense of injury or injustice, or, more generally stated,
from a sense of disproportion. You have so much income, I but half as
much ; the disproportion is painful to me, since I think myself quite
as intelligent as you, and believe I am in various ways the better
man of the two. You also, disregarding me, suffer from a mental
comparison of your fortune and deserts with those of some one else.
These fancied or real disproportions — and they are numberless in
daily life — become oppressive as we meditate

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and exaggerate them. Take us both to witness a comic drama — the
Plutus of Aristophanes, where the universal inequahties of wealth and
poverty, the accidents of distribution, are still further exaggerated
on the stage, and become ludicrous to all. As the play advances, we
begin to see the law of proportion in a clearer light. At the end we
are free from the accumulated burden of painful emotion, are relieved
of the sense of disproportion — and by a homeopathic means. Through
the generalized representation the spectator loses what was before
merely individual in his own experience ; the painful element is
gone; and a harmless pleasure has ensued.

If we admit the reality of a comic catharsis, we must grant that the
effect proceeds from the use, in comedy, of dramatic suspense, and
from the arousal and defeat of our expectations in various ways. The
principle has a wide range of manifestations; it may show itself in
the action, when the sequence of events is other than we anticipated
; or in the characters, when, without belying their nature, they
nevertheless surprise us; or in the course of a speech, when the
argument seems to follow some sort of law, yet issues in something
unexpected ; or in the diction, when we await one combination of
words, and meet another. The function of suspense in the tragic
catharsis has been examined by an ingenious critic, who, rightly, I
believe, maintains that this function is not duly reckoned with in
other explanations of the Aristotelian term.^ The function in comedy
of suspense, with a cheated expectation ending in a release of mental
energy,^ is hinted

^ W. D. Moriarty, The Function of Suspense in the Catharsis, Ann
Arbor, 1911.

2 Sec below, pp. 77-9.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — ARISTOTLE 69

at by a number of passages in Aristotle, as, for example, in the
Rhetoric and the Problems.'^ The relation between suspense and
surprise is much the same in comedy and tragedy; the difference grows
out of the seriousness or triviality of the incidents, and out of the
misery or joy of the event. In Problems 35.6 laughter is defined as '
a sort of surprise and deception.'

(4) In the foregoing we assume that the end of comedy is pleasure.
But there is another possibility, if the definition in the Tractate
is worth considering — if it has more than a superficial relation to
the works of Aristotle, and particularly to the Ethics. According to
the definition, comedy ' through pleasure and laughter ' effects a
'catharsis of the said emotions.'^ Now to Aristotle the end of life
is not pleasure; it is a serious end.^ The highest activity of man is
found in the life of philosophic contemplation, the speculative life.
Such a life, of course, is not devoid of satisfaction ; it is in
itself the noblest and fullest satisfaction of human nature, human
desire. It does not exclude harmless recreation; recreation, a
sufficient activity of the emotional nature (such as comes with the
artistic arousal of pity and fear in tragedy), and indeed the
exercise of all our lower faculties within reasonable limits — all
these are not merely countenanced b}^ him, but encouraged. Yet in the
last analysis he looks upon recreation, not as an end in itself, but
as a means to an end. This end, once more, is the free play of our
highest faculties in the life of contemplation. In this way he would
think that comedy in providing us with its specific pleasure, and by
arousing laughter,

^ See below, pp. 146-7, 163-5. 2 See below, p. 228. ^ See below, p.
134.

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gave occasional vent to certain passing emotional states, and thus
left us free for the serious concerns of life. By comedy, then, we
should be cured of a desire to laugh at the wrong time, and at the
wrong things, through being made to laugh at the proper time by the
right means.

These considerations, we must allow, are remote from the *Poetics*,
where Aristotle is concerned with poetry in and for itself. In this
work he is not concerned with the end of private life, as he is in
the Ethics, or with the end of public life, as he is in the Politics,
but with the end of poetr}- and the ends of its several species.
True, he honors poetry — comedy as well as traged}' and the epic —
because it is by nature philosophic and universal; it is just as
concrete as history-, and yet more general. But if anything is
certain about his view of comedy, it is that the comic poet must aim
at producing a definite pleasure. And thus the most unlucky guess of
the epitomator in the Tractate would seem to be ^ that comedy, viewed
in relation to its own end, aims at the purgation of pleasure. Yet
his connection of both \* pleasure ' and ' laughter ' with the end of
comedy may be helpful, as we shall see.^

(5) It is possible, again, that Aristotle would, under different
circumstances, recognize different effects of comedy ; that in one
connection he would note a catharsis of troublesome emotions like
anger and envy, and in another a catharsis of laughter itself. We
have seen that in studying tragedy, since he is unhampered by our
modern standards of consistency, but always bent on finding out what
happens or should happen in a given instance, he has worked out a
quite flexible theory.

^ See below, pp. 71-6.

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Thus — to revert to a familiar example — he is elastic enough to
praise Euripides for his imhappy denouements ; and yet, among the
dramas of this author, to have the highest regard for Iphigenia among
the Taurians, which, by avoiding the deed of horror within the family
circle, produces one kind of tragic effect; and yet finally to award
the palm to Sophocles in Oedipus the King, which produces another. If
the type of comic action known to us through Menander and Terence was
sometimes or often adopted by writers of the Middle Comedy, and may
go back to Crates, or even beyond him to Sicily,^ Aristotle in any
systematic treatment of comedy would hardly fail to reckon with that
type, or to account for its effect; while he certainly would not
neglect the special quality of Aristophanes when this was different.
(6) With the mention of Aristophanes we return to the dual effect
noted by the epitomator, in a Tractate which doubtless has this poet
steadily in view.^ The ' pleasure ' and ' laughter ' sundered in the
definition may through artistic synthesis unite in one single comic
effect. For example, an Aristophanic pun might be expressed in
embellished language, or a ludicrous fowl might join in an enchanting
chorus in the Birds ; the union of the two factors is illustrated
both in the beautiful and the ludicrous costumes, and in the
beautiful and the ludicrous metres and music, of that play. But for
analytical purposes the two elements may also be considered apart.^

^ See H. W. Prescott, The Antecedents of Hellenistic Comedy, in
Classical Philology 12 (1917). 405-25, esp. 421-5.

2 For the relation of pleasure to laughter, see Demetrius De
Elocutione 128-142, esp. 130, 132, 133, and 150, 151, 152, 153, 161,
163, 169.

^ Compare Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy, ed. by Cook, pp. 50-1.
It would be interesting to trace the acute (but partly

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There is some advantage in separating them, for, if I am not
mistaken, editors of Aristophanes have not given attention enough to
the element of beauty in the Old Comedy, or not enough in comparison
with the trouble they take in explaining the purely laughable
element, so that what strikes them as merely ridiculous receives
disproportionate notice. If this remark is true in the case of the
Birds, where pleasure reigns, it is even more true with reference to
the other plays of the same author. As Rogers says:

\* It is perhaps natural that commentators should have taken less
trouble about the Lysistrata than about the more widely-read comedies
of Aristophanes. Yet it seems almost incredible that they should as a
rule have overlooked the broad distinction, which pervades the play,
between the old women in the orchestra and the young women on the
stage. Indeed the latest editor. Professor Van Leeuwen, in his search
after novelties, dignifies with the titles Fpatjc A, ['.oaDr B, rpau^
r [First, Second, and Third Hags) Lysistrata's comrades whose youth
and beauty are the very qualities relied upon for bringing about a
termination of the war. Nor does Lysistrata herself fare much better.
Notwithstanding the encomiums passed upon her personal
attractiveness, notwithstanding the fact that Calonice, herself a
young woman, addresses her as " child," almost all recent editors
depart from the Mss., depart from the Scholiast, depart from common
sense, for the sole purpose of styling her " most mannish of
grandmothers."''^

It can not with equal justice be said of various translators that
they miss the element of beauty in Aristophanes, since they are
forced to imitate as well as

mistaken) remarks of Sidney (esp. p. 51) to Continental, and,
notably, Italian, theories of poetry, and to follow these last back
to classical sources.

^ Rogers, Lysistrata, pp. xli-xlii.

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they can the quaHty of his diction and metres. It is not wholly
missing in the versions of the Birds by Frere and Rogers. But of
Rogers as editor the criticism may be made : he does not neglect the
element of ' pleasure/ but he does overemphasize the element of the
ridiculous in comparison with it.

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The defect is partly due to the loss, already noticed, of the music,
the nature of which can but faintly be imagined from the words and
metre; and to the loss of almost everything in the way of '
spectacle.' Only the slightest hints concerning the dress of the
chorus in the Birds and the Clouds, for example, are to be gathered
from decorations on vases, chance remarks of scholiasts, and the
like.^ For an abundance of grace and charm, the outstanding comedy
should be the Birds, with its choral odes and solo to the
Nightingale, its fantastic imagery and ethereal setting, with
particolored Iris, messenger of the gods, and with the splendid
goddess Sovereignty arrayed for her marriage with the hero. Some
notion of the musical accompaniment may be gained from the
instructive letter of Welch to Rogers.^ But there was much of the
element of \* pleasm^e ' in other comedies, as in the Frogs, a comic
imitation — turned toward the worse, but not debased — of the
Dionysiac contests, musical and dramatic, and the Dionysiac
procession, at the Athenian festival. One need not instance the
possibihties of beautiful as well as ludicrous representation in the
processional h5niin of Aiistophanes' underworld, but we may think of
the chorus of Frogs earlier in the play. I believe it is usual to
regard this latter as wholly ludicrous. Yet, to the lover of sounds
in external nature, the cry of the

1 Haigh, pp. 295-7.

2 Rogers, Birds, pp. Ixxxv-lxxxix.

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single batrachian is a very musical note, and the chant of many frogs
together is highly gratifying to the attentive ear. Now the ear of
the Greeks, and certainly of Aristophanes, was appreciative of many
natural sounds to which in modern times few save zoologists and
entomologists listen with satisfaction, at least in our Western
nations. It is said that the Japanese take a special delight in the
cries of insects, discriminating them with a very critical taste. We
do not know what instruments accompanied Aristophanes' batrachian
chorus; the text of Frogs 228—234 ^^^Y i^pH' the use of the lyre and
the flute or syrinx.

(7) The tragic poet has various means of rendering an otherwise
painful story pleasing. Of these, the most obvious is metre, with the
embellishments of a euphonious, elevated, and ornate diction. The
adjuncts of music, dancing, and costume tend to the same purpose. The
comic poet embellishes, not the painful, but the ugly, and may avail
himself of the same or similar means. He may also introduce pleasing
episodes, such as marriages, feasts, sportive victories, and the
like, which in themselves are joyful; the preoccupation of
Aristophanes with treaties of peace^ is a sign of his dramatic
instinct rather than his political tendencies. But it seems that the
element of \* pleasure ' in which the ' laughter ' of the Old Comedy
was incarnate had the function of embellishing much that would
otherwise be objectionable. Through the loss of the music, and of
other devices contributing to ' pleasure,' the grosser and more
trying aspects of Aristophanes become unduly obvious to the modern
reader.

(8) Here I do not so much allude to his occasional sharp treatment of
contemporaries, though his ' attacks '

^ See below, pp. 271-2.

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upon individuals must, like his obscenity, be viewed in perspective.
The Socrates of the Clouds, for example, a generalized representation
in which the philosopher is more of a type than an individual, moved
in an atmosphere of beautiful words and choral music. The aerial and
fantastic setting, and the wonderful song of the Clouds, as well as
the instrumental accompaniment, gave a different tone to the
delineation of this character even where it had the marks of a
portrait. More especially I have in mind the allusions to the
reproductive and excretory functions of man. Of course we should make
the usual allowance for the obscene in view of the origins of comedy
in the phallic procession, and should not forget the different
attitude of the pagan world to a realm of thought to which the modem
author does not give free expression; though here the age of
Aristophanes differed less from the age of Shakespeare than the
latter does from ours, and the taste of Athens was not so remote from
that of Paris as the taste of Paris is from that of Boston. But, when
the usual allowance is made, we may, without holding a brief for what
is gross in the Old Comedy, venture to assert that the element of
beauty with which that gross-ness was combined made a difference in
the total effect of the play. If the catharsis involved in laughter
has something to do with the reproductive and excretory fmictions,
with our thoughts about them, or with the subconscious or unconscious
aspects of them, then the element of ' pleasure,' to which beauties
of structure, of persons, of diction and metre, of melody and \*
spectacle,' contribute, plays its part in this catharsis. In this way
we may be able to explain a riddle in the Tractate, where the
epitomator remarks of some previous writer on Aristotle or else of
Aristotle himself:

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' [He says] that it [tragedy] aims at having a symmetry
[(Ti>[X[jxTpia, ' due proportion '] of fear '; and, as the Tractate
later puts it: \* As in tragedies there should be a due proportion of
fear, so in comedies there should be a due proportion of laughter.'^
By ' symmetry ' we may perhaps understand \* reduction to measure '
from excess. The combination of beauty with the lower forms of the
ludicrous gives rise to a catharsis differing from the effect of the
obscene when unalloyed. Thus art follows nature. Reproduction and
excretion are in nature and life united with beauty; and comedy is an
idealized representation of all the elements in life and nature.

But for the ends of analysis, as we have said, the purgation involved
in laughter may be considered apart from the embellishments; not, of
course, apart from pleasure in a wide sense, for the release of
energy in laughter may be the chief constituent in the pleasure of
com.edy.

Herewith we reach the point where a modern discussion of laughter may
possibly aid in reconstructing an Aristotelian theory. The
explanation of the comic by Freud in the.main is a theory of
catharsis; to a large extent the Freudian theory is concerned with
the sexual and excretory functions oi man, with the inhibition of
desire, and with its release in channels sometimes more, sometimes
less, obscure or indirect. Freud tends to reduce all the phenomena of
desire to manifestations of the sexual libido, instead of regarding
desire (after the fashion of Plato, Aristotle, and Dante) as an
inclusive term, and libido as one main species under it; he does not
even recognize that the instinct of self-preservation is primary, and
libido secondary to that.

1 See below, pp. 224, 226, 228, 262; cf. Kayser, pp. 30-1.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — FREUD ^^

I shall not enter into the details of the Freudian theory ; on the
present topic the reader may consult them in the volume called Wit
and its Relation to the Unconscious ;^ we must here be content with a
few citations from this. Freud himself cites Herbert Spencer on the
psychological situation which discharges itself in laughter, and then
quotes Alexander Bain on ' Laughter a relief from restraint/ and
Dugas^ to the effect that laughter is a \* detente,' \* a
manifestation of release from tension.'

Freud then explains:

' We would say that laughter arises when the sum total of psychic
energy, formerly used for the occupation of certain psychic channels,
has become un-utilizable, so that it can experience absolute
discharge.'"

Further :

' And since not all laughter (but surely the laughter of wit) is a
sign of pleasure, we shall be inclined to refer this pleasure to the
release of previously existing static energy. ... When we see that
the hearer of the witticism laughs, while the creator of the same can
not, then that must indicate that in the hearer a sum of damming
energy has been released and discharged, whereas during the
wit-formation, either in the release or in the discharge, inhibitions
resulted. One can characterize the psychic process in the hearer, in
the third person of the witticism, hardly more pointedly than by
asserting that he has bought the pleasure of the witticism with very
little expenditure on his part. One might say that it is presented to
him/^

And finally:

' The comical appears primarily as an unintentional discovery in the
social relations of human beings. It is found in persons, that is, in
their movements, shapes, actions, and characteristic traits. In the
beginning it

1 Translated by A. A. Brill, New York, 1916. - See above, p. 65 f. n.
^ Freud, p. 226.

^ Ibid., pp. 228-9.

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is found probably only in their physical^ peculiarities, and later on
in their mental qualities, especially in the expression of these
latter. Even animals and inanimate objects become comical as the
result of a widely-used method of personification.'-

If we apply Freud's theory to the drama — an application he does not
make,^ — we may obtain some such result as follows. In Aristotelian
terms, comedy provides for the audience a harmless discharge of
emotions which, when pent up within the individual, occasion various
sorts of distress or irregular and imperfect activity. Comedy, like
the Roman Catholic confessional, affords an outlet for disturbing
emotion, and for disquieting remembrances that lie, sometimes
festering, at the bottom of the soul.

The excerpts from Freud may be supplemented by the effective summary
of Croce, who is sceptical, however, of generaHzations regarding the
comic, and finds repose only in the individual artistic fact:

' The comic has been defined as the displeasure arising from the
perception of a deformity immediately followed by a greater pleasure
arising from the relaxation of our psychical forces, which were
strained in anticipation of a perception whose importance was
foreseen. While listening to a narrative, which, for example, should
describe the magnificent and heroic purpose of a definite person, we
anticipate in imagination the occurrence of an action both heroic and
magnificent, and we prepare ourselves to receive it, by straining our
psychic forces. If, however, in a moment, instead of the magnificent
and heroic action, which the premises and the tone of the narrative
had led us to expect, by an unexpected change there occur a slight,
mean,

1 In the German : korperlichen ; the American translation reads '
psychical' — an obvious misprint.

^ Freud, p, 302.

^ Dugas, however, has an interesting section on the aesthetic
function of laughter {Psychologic du Eire, pp. 159-65).

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foolish action, unequal to our expectation, we have been deceived,
and the recognition of the deceit brings with it an instant of
displeasure. But\* this instant is as it were overcome by the one
immediately following, in which we are able to discard our strained
attention, to free ourselves from the provision of psychic energy
accumulated and henceforth superfluous, to feel ourselves reasonable
and relieved of a burden. This is the pleasure of the comic, with its
physiological equivalent, laughter. If the unpleasant fact that has
occurred should painfully affect our interests, pleasure would not
arise, laughter would be at once choked, the psychic energy would be
strained and overstrained by other more serious perceptions. If, on
the other hand, such more serious perceptions do not arise, if the
whole loss be limited to a slight deception of our foresight, then
the supervening feeling of our psychic wealth affords ample
compensation for this very slight displeasure. — This, stated in a
few words, is one of the most accurate modern definitions of the
comic. It boasts of containing, justified or corrected, the manifold
attempts to define the comic, from Hellenic antiquity to our own day.
It includes Plato's dictum in the Philebus, and Aristotle's, which is
more explicit. The latter looks upon the comic as an ugliness without
pain. It contains the theory of Hobbes, who placed it in the feeling
of individual superiority ; of Kant, who saw in it a relaxation of
tension ; and those of other thinkers, for whom it was the contrast
between great and small, between the finite and the infinite. But, on
close observation, the analysis and definition above given, although
most elaborate and rigorous in appearance, yet enunciates [sic']
characteristics which are applicable, not only to the comic, but to
every spiritual process ; such as the succession of painful and
agreeable moments and the satisfaction arising from the consciousness
of force and of its free development. The differentiation here given
is that of quantitative determinations, to which limits cannot be
assigned. They remain vague phrases, attaining to some meaning from
their reference to this or that single comic fact.

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If such definitions be taken too seriously, there happens to them
what Jean Paul Richter said of all the definitions of the comic:
namely, that their sole merit is to he themselves comic, and to
produce, in reality, the fact which they vainly try to define
logically. And who will ever determine logically the dividing line
between the comic and the non-comic, between smiles and laughter,
between smiling and gravity; who will cut into clearly divided parts
that ever-varying continuity into which life melts ? ' ^

One may rejoin : Why distinguish, as Croce has just done, between the
conceptions of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and \* other thinkers
' ? Human analysis, like the rest of human art (including comedy), is
imperfect — that is, less successful, and more successful. There are
better theories of comedy, and worse. The analysis set forth by Croce
is wcrth while, if only to the student of Aristotle.

(q) One other modern theory we may barely refer to, that of George
Meredith. Among modern literary critics this writer has the
distinction of singling out the effect of comedy upon the audience,
and the right sort of audience, as the true criterion of comic
excellence. His emphasis so far is like that of Aristotle. Meredith,
however, describes the effect as if it were, or should be, chiefly
intellectual rather than emotional, thus : ' To touch and kindle the
mind through laughter.'^ And when he demands, as a final' test of
true comedy,' that it shall \* awaken thoughtful laughter,'^ the
restriction is too narrow. Writers from Aristophanes to Shakespeare
and Moliere have employed every sort of means to arouse laughter —
lofty wit, and naughty as well, — tending only to avoid what is
painful or

^ Croce, Aesthetic, trans, by Ainslie, pp. 148-51, ^ See my edition
of Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, New
York, 1918, p. 76. ^ Ibid., p. 141.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — MOLIERE 8i

corrupting. But the preference of Meredith reminds one of the
supposed preference of Aristotle for comic ' innuendo.'

That the effect of comedy includes more than a stirring of the mind
we may gather from the comic poet whom Meredith calls most
successful. Moliere, who reveals his own opinion through some of the
speakers in La Critique de VEcole des Femmes, evidently thinks that
for him ' the great art is that of pleasing.'^ And he clearly regards
the accessories of music and dancing as very import ant. ^ The
attempt to make the honorable public laugh is not altogether an
affair of the mind : ' II y faut plaisanter; et c'est une etrange
eritreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens.'^ Yet, as the
Critique shows, conscious art is a necessary adjunct to natural gift
in the poet. Further, for Moliere, comedy has a sanative effect. So
Uranie judges with regard to L'Ecole des Femmes : ' As for me, I find
that comedy more capable of curing people than of making them ill.'^
To the same purport Clitandre, as he introduces the element of song,
instrumental music, and dance at the close of L'Amour Medecin : '
These are persons that I bring with me, whom I constantly employ to
quiet [pacifier] with their harmony and their dances the troubles of
the soul.' Whereupon the personages of ' Comedy,' ' The Ballet,' and
' Music ' sing as follows :

Sans nous, tons les hommes Deviendraient malsains, Et c'est nous qui
sommes Leurs grands medecins.

^ Speech of Dorante, scene 7. 2 See the Avertissement to Les Facheux.
^ Another speech of Dorante, as above. ^ La Critique [etc.], scene 3.

f

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Then \* Comedy ' in a solo tells us that, if we wish by gentle means
to reduce the splenic vapors that prey upon us all, we must come to
her and her companions :

Veut-on qu'on rabatte Par des moyens doux, Les vapeurs de rate Qui
vous minent tous ? Qu'on laisse Hippocrate, Et qu'on vienne k nous.^

Perhaps the genius of Moli^re has here, out of experience and
observation, as well as from a considerable knowledge of poetic
theory, actually hit upon the Aristotelian notion of the comic
catharsis, or something very near it.

(lo) It has been remarked that we have no unmistakable vestiges of a
theory of comic catharsis by Aristotle, or of a definition of comedy
by him implying such catharsis.2 We realize that any views he may
have had on the subject are for us problematical; and any opinion we
may form concerning them is wholly inferential. However, in addition
to the evidence in the Tractate and similar documents on comedy,
there are other indications of an ancient theory of the effect of
comedy, and of a comic catharsis, which may or may not heighten the
probability that Aristotle discussed the question.

In the work now known as De Mysteriis, doubtfully attributed to
lamblichus (died circa a. d. 330), the author, having alluded to the
phallus as symbolic of ' the generative energy of the world,'
proceeds :

' Most of these things [phalli, in particular] are consecrated in the
spring, because the whole world then receives from the gods the power
which is productive of all generation; and I take it the obscene
language that is uttered indicates the privation of the beautiful in
the

^ L'Amour Medecin 3. 7, 8. ^ See above, p. 64.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — lAMBLICHUS 83

world of matter, and the previous deformity of all things that are to
be variously adorned; for, these material things being in need of
adornment, they long for it the more, the more they despise their own
un-comeliness. Again, therefore, they pursue after the causes of
specific forms and of the beautiful, since from the mention of ugly
things they perceive the ugly; and although they avoid the doing of
deeds that are ugly, they manifest their knowledge thereof through
the words, and transfer their longing to the opposite of the ugly.

\* These things afford still another argument, as follows. The forces
of the human emotions in us, if entirely restrained, bestir
themselves more vehemently ; while if stirred into action but
gradually and within measure, they rejoice moderately and are
satisfied; and, thus purified, they become obedient, and are checked
without violence. It is on this account that, when we witness the
emotions of others, in both comedy and tragedy, we halt our own
emotions, work them off more moderately, and are purged of them. In
the sacred ceremonies also, by certain spectacles and by hearing
things that are ugly, we are released from the harm that would come
from the deeds themselves.

' Things of this sort, therefore, are introduced for the cure of our
soul, and in order to moderate the evils adhering to the soul through
generation, and also to loose and release it from its bonds. And on
this account Heraclitus very properly terms them ' cures,' meaning
that they will cure dreadful ailments, and render the soul free from
the calamities incident to generation.'^

Proclus Diadochus (a. d. 410—85), in his commentary on the Republic
of Plato, seems to have in mind the *Poetics* of Aristotle at first or
second hand, but his allusion to a catharsis of comedy may proceed
from the other \* champions ' of tragedy and comedy; that is, it may
or may not point to a discussion of a comic catharsis in Aristotle :

^ lamblichus De Mysteriis i. 11, ed. by Parthey, 1857, pp. 38-40.

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' We must tell, . . . secondly, why, in particular he [Plato] does
not admit [into the ideal State] comedy and tragedy; and that, too,
when they contribute to a purgation of those emotions which it is
neither possible wholly to choke in, nor yet safe to gratify
completely, since they in fact require a movement, as it were, at the
proper time, and this movement, being effected when we hear a recital
of these emotions, renders us undisturbed by them for the rest of the
time. . . .

' As for the second problem : this was his rejection of tragedy and
comedy — an absurd rejection if it be true that, through these, [the
players] can measurably satisfy the emotions, and in thus satisfying
them render good service to the cause of education by healing what is
painful in those emotions. Be that as it may, although this rejection
has afforded ample grounds of complaint both to Aristotle and to the
champions of these forms of poetry against the arguments of Plato, I
for my part shall, in accordance with my previous utterances, solve
the problem somewhat as follows. Everything that tends to imitate all
sorts of characters is most alien to the induction of youth into
virtue ; since through its imitation it enters into the thoughts of
the hearers, and also through its artful diversity becomes hurtful to
them ; for, whatsoever be the things imitated, such must the one who
is peculiarly sensitive to the imitation become. For virtue is
simple, and very like to God himself, to whom we say the term unity
is especially appropriate. So, then, the person who would become like
to such a one must flee from the life that is opposed to simplicity,
and therefore it will be necessary to purge him of all diversity;
and, if so, it will also be necessary for him when he is a youth, and
when because of his youth he is impressible, to stand utterly aloof
from all pursuits that drag him down into diversity. Clearly, then,
we should beware of both tragedy and comedy, since they imitate all
sorts of characters, and assault the hearers with pleasure ; lest
what is seductive in them drag into accord that in the soul which is
easy to seduce, and thus fill up the life of the children with the
evils which the imitation effects ; and lest, instead of the

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — PROCLUS 85

measurable purgation appertaining to the emotions, these forms of
poetry beget in their souls a bias that is evil and hard to cleanse
away, since that bias causes the traits of unity and simplicity to
disappear, and from the fondness for all sorts of imitations their
souls are stamped with the opposite impressions. Moreover, since
these two kinds of poetry notably reach out toward that in the soul
which is most exposed to the emotions — comedy rousing in us the love
of pleasure and drawing us into absurd bursts of laughter, tragedy
fostering in us the love of grief and dragging us down to ignoble
outbursts of tears, and each of them nourishing the emotional element
in us, and so much the more as each accomplishes its special
function; therefore I, too, say that the statesman should devise
excretions, as it were, of these emotions, yet not in such a way as
to intensify the special passions connected with them, but on the
contrary to curb these passions, and in a suitable way to regulate
their movements. But since, after all, those forms of poetry, in
addition to their diversity, lack measure in their appeals to these
emotions, they are far from being useful for purgation; for
purgations consist, not in excessive movements, but in contracted
actions which have but a slight resemblance to those emotions of
which they purge.'^

It is tantalizing to have Proclus just miss divulging whether or not
he actually knew of an Aristotelian comic catharsis. Other hints of a
theory respecting the end of comedy — one that may have originated
with Aristotle or his immediate successors — are found in the
treatises edited by Kaibel. Thus the scholiast (either Melampus, of
the third century a. d., or Dio-medes, of the fourth) on Dionysius
Thrax {circa b. c. 170—90) remarks:

\* And the aim of tragedy is to move the hearers to tears, while the
aim of comedy is to move them to

^ Proclus Diadochus In Platonis Rem Publicam 360, 362, ed. by Kroll,
i. 42, 49-50.

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laughter. Wherefore, they say, tragedy dissolves life, and comedy
consolidates it.'^

Again, John Tzetzes {circa a. d. mo— ii8o) has caught up the
following:

' Comedy is an imitation of an action, . . . purgative of emotions,
constructive of life, moulded by laughter and pleasure. Tragedy
differs from comedy in that tragedy has a story and a report of
things [or ' deeds '] that are past, although it represents them as
taking place in the present, but comedy embraces fictions of the
affairs of everyday life; and in that the aim of tragedy is to move
the hearers to lamentation, while the aim of comedy is to move them
to laughter.'-

Another passage from the same Tzetzes reads :

' The peculiar characteristic of comedy is the mixture of laughter
with gibes, while tragedy has sorrow and misfortunes. The
characteristic of the satyr-drama is not a change from grief to joy
(as, for example, in the Orestes and Alcestis of Euripides, and the
Electra of Sophocles in part), as some say, but it has unmixed and
joyous and boisterous laughter.'^

And a final one from Tzetzes, who has gathered from various sources:

' The comic poet, ridiculing in his comedies some plunderer and
evil-doer and pestilent fellow, for the rest settles all into
decorum. Thus tragedy dissolves life, while comedy founds it firmly,
and renders it solid, as does the satyr-drama together with comedy,
being compounded of gloom and joy.'\*

The inconsistency of Tzetzes need not detain us; he put together his
scraps of information in his own uncritical way. The last passage
begins with a statement which we find also in Horace (b. c. 65—8),
and which probably came to him from an Alexandrian writer.^

1 Kaibel, p. 14. ^ Kaibel, pp. 36-7.

- Ibid., p. 17; see below, p. 287. ^ Horace, Satires i. 4. 1-5.

^ Kaibel, p. 21.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — CICERO ^y

But Horace, in whose criticism we should expect to find something on
the emotional function of comedy, if a definite Greek theory was
known to his time, gives us nothing to build on in this particular;
even his knowledge of x\ristotle on tragedy comes to him at second or
third hand. Cicero (b. c. 106—43) refers to the theorists on laughter
in a slighting manner that he would hardly use if he were acquainted
with a comic catharsis in Aristotle. But he is familiar with certain
doctrines of the *Poetics*, seemingly in a more extended form than we
now possess, and with distinctions which we find in the Tractatus
Coislinianus. Of course he is familiar, too, with the Aristotelian
Rhetoric. Indeed, being preoccupied with rhetorical theory and
practice, he makes a distinction which we must not fail to observe,
between what is suitable to forensic eloquence, and what to comedy
proper:

' In regard to laughter, there are five points for investigation;
first, what it is; secondly, whence it arises; thirdly, whether it
behoves the orator to provoke laughter; fourthly, to what extent;
fifthly, what are the several species of the ridiculous. As to the
first, what laughter is: by what means it is raised, wherein it
consists, in what manner it bursts out, and is so suddenly discharged
that, though we were willing, we have no power to stifle it, and in
what manner it all at once takes possession of our sides, our mouth,
our veins, our eyes, our countenance — let Democritus explain all
that. They are not to my present purpose, and if they were, I should
not at all be ashamed to say that I did not know them; for even they
who pretend to account for them know nothing of the matter. But the
place and, as it were, the province of the ridiculous (for that is
the next question) lies within the limits of ugliness and a certain
deformity; for those expressions are alone, or especially, ridiculous
which disclose and represent some ugliness in a not unseemly fashion.

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But, to come to the third point, it is evidently an orator's business
to provoke a laugh . . . above all because it softens or unbends
sorrow and severity. . . . Neither an eminent or flagitious villain
nor a wretch remarkably harassed with misfortunes is the proper
subject of ridicule. . . . (59) Moderation, therefore, is chiefly to
be observed in matters of wit. And the objects that are most easily
played upon are those that deserve neither great detestation nor the
greatest compassion. Hence it happens that the whole subject of the
ridiculous lies in the moral vices of men who are neither beloved nor
miserable, nor deserving to be dragged to punishment for their
crimes. . . . Deformity and bodily defects are likewise happy enough
subjects for ridicule. But let us consider what ought to be the main
object of investigation in other respects — how far we ought to go.
Here we must make it a rule to do nothing insipidly, nor to act like
a buffoon. An orator must avoid both extremes; he must not make his
jests too abusive nor too buffoonish. . . . There are two kinds of
humor; one arising from the thing, the other from the diction. . . .
(61) There is no kind of wit, in which severe and serious things may
not be derived from the subject. And we must take note also that not
everything that is ludicrous is refined wit. What can be more
ludicrous than a buffoon [sannio] ? His mouth, his face, his mimicry,
his voice, in short his whole body, is laughter itself. I might call
him witty, but then his wit is of that kind which I would recommend,
not to an orator, but to a player. (62) When a laugh therefore is
raised by this first kind, which is the greatest source of laughter,
and consists in representing the morose, the superstitious, the
suspicious, the vaunting, the foolish, it is not owing to our wit,
for these qualities are in their own nature ridiculous.'^

^ Cicero De Oratore 2. (58) 235 - (62)251 ; I have altered the
translation {1847) in The Classical Library, No. 37. Sec the whole
passage on the laughable, De Oratore 2. (54) 216-(71)289, esp. 235,
238, 239, 248, 251, 264, 266; of. Orator (26) 87-90.

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Cicero's allusion to Democritus, the ' laughing philosopher/ leads
nowhither; and his earlier reference to ' certain books in Greek'
(apparently several alike entitled On the Laughable), from which
Caesar had no hope of learning anything,^ is scarcely more useful —
though Theophrastus is said to have produced a work of that name.2
For much of his thought Cicero is indebted to post-classical Greek
scholars such as Panaetius (b. c. 189—109), who came to Rome about B.
c. 146.^ It is impossible to draw a sharp line between what he owes
to Aristotle and what he has absorbed from Panaetius and other late
authorities. His restriction of the ludicrous within the province of
\* ugliness and a certain deformity ' directly or indirectly takes us
to the *Poetics* ;^ but his brief treatment of comic characters is
fuller and more precise than the general statements we now find in
that work. His two sources of the ludicrous — from things, and from
the diction — appear also in the Tractatus Coislinianus.^ His final
list of comic characters reminds one of the sketches in Theophrastus
and the personages of the New Comedy, but probably emanates also from
literary critics. A well-read critic himself, who assimilated all the
learning of his age, and was grounded in the writings of the
Socratics, Cicero in this passage no doubt combines elements from
several or many originals, unless he borrowed from a theorist who had
already combined them. But he has nothing to give us on the effect of
comedy in an Aristotelian sense. In him we are no

^ De Oratore 2. (54) 217.

2 Diogenes Laertius 5. (2) 46.

^ See G. C. Fiske, The Plain Style in the Scipionic Circle, in
Classical Studies in Honor of Charles Forster Smith, Madison, Wis.,
1919, PP- 62-105, esp. pp. 71-8.

\* See below, p. 176,

^ See below, pp. 224-5.

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nearer to the main object of our search than in Proclus, perhaps not
so near as in Tzetzes and the Tractate. For other chance hints in
Aristotle himself the reader must turn to the Scattered Passages on
Laughter at the end of the Introduction.^ Here, then, we take leave
of this part of our inquiry, without having reached a very positive
conclusion.

But as Cicero embraces both Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines, and
mediates between them, I can lead up to the next topic (Aristotle and
Plato on Comedy) by citing from him a few other passages.

These all concern Aristophanes. The modern scholar who talks of
'Aristotle's condemnation of Old Comedy ' will also inform us that
the same condemnation ' did not prevail generally among later
theorists and critics,'-and will thus account for the unexpectedly
favorable attitude of Cicero to the elder poet. But we have seen that
Aristotle nowhere condemns the comedy of Aristophanes.^ The view of
Cicero, that the Old Comedy is the representative of the liberal and
refined style of wit, is rather an argmnent for a continuous
tradition, beginning with Aristotle, or even with Plato, in favor of
Aristophanes. The reference to the latter in the *Poetics*, if it shows
nothing else, shows that his supremacy in his kind is already a
commonplace in Hterary criticism. The Plutarchian Abstract of a
Comparison between Aristophanes and Menander, giving the preference
to Menander, is necessarily later than Aristotle, and, if it be
earlier than Plutarch, yet comes from a new stream of thought that
arose after critics had begun to work on the New Comedy. The new
stream ob-

^ See below, pp. 162-5.

^ See Fiske (who cites Hendrickson), p. 84.

^ See above, p. 21 ; compare below, pp. 155-7.

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viously runs counter to an established tradition, which nevertheless
prevails down to Tzetzes and the Tractate, and extends to our own
day. The reason why it has prevailed lies in the transcendent genius
of Aristophanes. All through the scholiasts, commentators, and
critical treatises, the New Comedy takes second place; for the most
part the criticism of it is a kind of appendage to the criticism of
the Old, save in Roman writers mainly deahng with Latin comedy, and
with Terence in particular.

For Cicero, \* Comedy is an imitation of life, a mirror of custom, an
image of truth ' ^; — as, according to Aristotle, Alcidamas called
the Odyssey ' a fair mirror of human life.'^ And Cicero links comedy
with the dialogues of Plato and others:

'There are, generally speaking, two sorts of jest: the one, coarse,
rude, vicious, indecent; the other, refined, polite, clever, witty.
With this latter sort not only our own Plautus and the Old Comedy of
Athens, but also the books of Socratic philosophy abound.'^

Among the poets of the Old Comedy, Aristophanes is easily first. His
modus is suavis and gravis, and Cicero notes in writing to his
brother Quintus:

' Your letter, which he had a little before received, he gave to me
to read — a letter in the Aristophanic manner, highly delightful and
highly serious, I declare ! I was tremendously pleased with it.''^

No wonder, when Aristophanes was ' the wittiest poet of the Old
Comedy,'^ and distinctly preferable to

^ Quoted by Donatus De Comoedia, in Kaibel, p. 67. - Aristotle,
Rhetoric 3. 3, thinks this metaphor unsuited to the style of an
oration.

^ Cicero De Officiis i. (29) 104, trans, by Miller, p. 107. \* Cicero
Ad Quintum Frafrem 3. i. (6) 19. ^ De Legihtts 2. (15) 37.

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Eupolis.^ Cicero has even got a little of the ^c/^ar maws (659-61) by
heart, though not very accurately.^ His interest in Aristophanes is,
of course, the interest of an orator ; perhaps the best parallel to
it is found in the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, who says :

' The Old Comedy retains, almost alone, the pure grace of Attic
diction, and the charm of a most eloquent freedom of language ; and
though it is chiefly employed in attacking follies, yet it has great
force in other departments ; for it is sublime, elegant, and
graceful; and I know not whether any poetry, next to Homer's (whom it
is always right to except, as he himself excepts Achilles), has
either a greater resemblance to oratory, or is better adapted for
forming orators. The authors of it are numerous; but Aristophanes,
Eupolis, and Cratinus are the principal.'^

And here we may add excerpts from another passage in Quintilian that
betray his dependence, direct or indirect, upon Plato and Aristotle,
and upon other Greek writers more nearly of his own time, but
probably dealing with the subject of the laughable in connection with
rhetoric rather than comedy. Of his debts to Latin writers, that to
Cicero is the greatest. Quin-tilian, like Plato, sees a relation
between laughter and the emotions of anger and hate or envy; like
Aristotle, he remarks upon the pleasantries suited and unsuited to
the man of refinement; and he gives us the same distinction as that
found in the Tractatus Coislinianus between laughter arising from the
diction and laughter arising from the things^ He naturally takes much
of his oratorical theory from Cicero :

^ Ad Atticum 12. 6. 3. ^ Ibid. 8. 8. 2. See also Orator (9) 29.

^ Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10. i. 65-6, trans, by Wat.-on, 2.
260-1.

'' See below, pp. 224-5.

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — QUINTILIAN 93

' Very different from this [the power of arousing compassion] is the
talent which, by exciting laughter in the judge, dispels melancholy
affections, diverting his mind from too intense application to the
subject before it, recruiting at times its powers, and reviving it
after disgust and fatigue. . . .

' But the chief difficulty in respect to jesting comes from this,
that a saying adapted to excite laughter generally contains a logical
fallacy, is often purposely lowered toward the worse, and never made
nobler ; and men's reaction to it will be varied, because we
appreciate a jest, not by any rational process, but by a mental
impulse that perhaps cannot be defined. At all events, although many
have attempted an explanation, I think it has never been adequately
explained whence laughter arises, which is excited not only by deed
or word, but sometimes even by bodily touch. Furthermore, laughter is
not habitually produced by a single cause ; for not merely witty and
agreeable utterances and actions are laughed at, but stupid, angry,
and timid ones as well, and hence the ludicrous has no fixed origin,
for risus is not remote from derisu. Thus, as Cicero says, the
ridiculous \* has its seat in a certain deformity and ugliness,' and
if these are made to appear in others the result is called raillery,
while if they recoil upon the speakers it is called folly.

' Though laughter seems like a trifle, and is something that may be
aroused by buffoons, mimics, and often even by fools, yet it has a
power perhaps more despotic than anything else, and one that is
well-nigh irresistible ; for it bursts forth in people not seldom
against their will, and forces expression not merely through voice
and features, but shakes the whole body with its vigor. And, as I
have said, it often changes the tendency of the greatest affairs, as
it very frequently dissipates hatred and anger [odium iramque]. . . .

' Now as to this talent, whatever it is, I should not, of course,
venture to say that it is wholly independent of art; for it may to
some extent be cultivated by observation, and rules concerning it
have been put together by Greek and Latin writers both. And yet

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I distinctly affirm that in the main it depends on nature and
opportunity. . . . Still there would be no harm in collecting
exercises for the purpose; fictitious causes might be pleaded with an
admixture of jests ; or particular theses might be proposed to the
pupil for practice of this sort. Even those pleasantries (jokes as
they are, and are called) which we are accustomed to utter on days of
festal license might, with the addition of a little method, or with
the admixture of some element of the serious, prove of no small
utility to the orator; as it is, they are merely a diversion of youth
or of men at play. . . .

' But the proper field of the matter we are now discussing is the
laughable, and accordingly the whole subject is entitled by the
Greeks izzpi ysXoio'j. The first way of dividing this subject is the
one that pertains to discourse as a whole, according as the laughable
is found in things and words. But the application certainly is
triple: we try to raise a laugh at others, or at ourselves, or at
affairs that are neutral. What proceeds from others we either blame,
or refute, or make hght of, or rebut, or elude. As to what concerns
ourselves, we remark on the laughable, and, to use a phrase from
Cicero, utter subabsurda ; for the same things which, if they fell
from us inadvertently, would be foolish are, when simulated, deemed
amusing. The third class, as Cicero says, consists in cheated
expectations, when things are said in one way and taken in another,
and the like; since neither person is concerned, I call such matters
\**neutral." Further, we either do or say laughable things. . . .

' But it makes a difference where we indulge in jests. In social
intercourse and daily talk less dehcacy is allowable to the humbler
class of mankind, amusing discourse to all. ... To an orator,
distorted features and the gestures it is our habit to laugh at in
mimics are wholly unsuited. So with scurrilous jests from the comic
stage; they are absolutely out of character in him. As for obscenity,
he should avoid it not only in word, but in allusion. . . .

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THE EFFECT OF COMEDY — QUINTILIAN 95

' I may say that laughter is educed either from the corporal
pecuHarities of him against whom we speak, or from his ethos, which
is to be gathered from his acts and utterances, or from external
circumstances relating to him. . . .

' But as there are innumerable topics from which jokes may be drawn,
I must repeat that they are not all suited to orators. Unsuitable,
first, are jokes arising from ambiguities ; and similarly, obscene
jests such as are usually aimed at in Atellan comedy; and again, such
as are bandied about by individuals of the lowest class, when
ambiguities are promptly turned into personal abuse. . . . Nor do
ambiguous terms always only signify several things ; they may signify
things of the most diverse sorts. . . .

\* This kind of jest is as poor as is the formation of names by
adding, subtracting, or altering letters — as, for example, . . .
turning the name Placidus into " Aci-dus," because the man had a sour
disposition. . . .

' Those jokes are more choice and pointed which draw their force from
external circumstances. Here resemblance is of the utmost value,
especially if it can be turned toward the worse and more trivial
object. The ancients were given to this sort of pleasantry, calling
Lentulus " Spinther " and Scipio " Serapion." Such jokes are derived,
however, not only from human beings but from animals as well. . . .
This mode of exciting laughter is now very common. Such comparisons
are sometimes made openly, sometimes insinuated through a parallel. .
. . Still more ingenious is the application of one thing to another
because of a similarity between them, when we attribute to this case
what commonly happens in that. . . .

' Are not many jokes made through the use of hyperbole ? For example,
Cicero says of a very tall man that " he had struck his head against
the arch of Fabius." ... As for irony, is it not, when employed very
gravely, a species of jesting ? . . .

' The subject includes all figures of thought ■— (7)^Y)[j.aTa
BiavoCa?, as they are called, — into which some authorities divide
the modes of spoken utterance ; for we ask

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questions, and express doubt, and affirm, and threaten, and wish, and
we say some things in the mode of compassion, and others in the mode
of anger. But everything is laughable that is obviously pretended. .
. .

' To joke upon oneself is hardly fit for any one but a buffoon, and
is by no means allowable in an orator. It may be done in as many ways
as we jest at others, and accordingly, in spite of its frequent
occurrence, I will not discuss it. And whatever is said scurrilously
or in passion, however laughable, is unfit for a refined gentleman. .
. .

' There remains to be noticed the kind of joke that consists in a
deceived expectation, or when words are meant to be taken in one way,
and we take them in another; and these are the happiest of all. . . .

' As for subabsurda, they consist in a pretence of folly, and would,
if not pretended, be foolish. . . .

\* So far as I have learnt from others or discovered for myself, the
foregoing are the most usual sources from which jests may be
derived.'^

He has learnt much from the Aristotelian Rhetoric at first or second
hand; and he has much in common with the Tractate ; but his view of
laughter is, first, ethical rather than mimetic, and, secondly and
mainly, forensic. The moral, utilitarian view of Cicero, Quintil-ian,
and the Romans in general, has been ably set forth by Fiske in his
treatment of satire, with its mixture, ' now grave, now gay,' and its
position in \* the larger literary family of the a-xouBaioysXotov,'
the common object of which is \* to convey philosophic truth under
cover of a jest.' The ' Socratic books ' were the best models for the
satire, ' which should be easy and not too aggressive, and should
have the spice of wit.' The tone of the conversation \* should vary
with the subject '; herein \* lies the psychological justi-

^ Translated from Quintilian, Instiiutio Oratoria, ed. by
Rader-macher, 6. 3. i, 6-9, 11, 15-6, 22-5, 28, 29, 37, 46-7, 50, 53,
57, 38-9, 61, 67. 68, 70, 82-3, 84, 99, loi.

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fication for the apparently informal, yet subtly artistic,
development of the cxouBaioYsXoiov by the Greek Cynics and Stoics,
and by the Roman satirists, their successors.' But ' a sharp
distinction must be made between the province of humor and that of
invective.' Thus ' the spirit of the Old Comedy, ... in distinction
from the spirit animating the iambic verses of Archilochus, or the
poetry of Hipponax,' may be classed with the spirit of the
o-xoa^atoyslotov in ' the later popular Cynic and Stoic
philosophers,' who constantly traced their descent from the Old
Comedy. But ' perhaps it would be more correct to say that the Old
Comedy was the precursor of the Socratic literature,' to the tone of
which Cynicism owed so much. In Horace, Satire 1.10.10—16, we see
that ' the Old Comedy has a style, now . . . tristis, now suggestive
of the rhetorical and poetical, now acer — all words associated with
the seriousness of the grand style, — but now iocosus, urhanus, and
ridicuhis, that is, smacking of true comic informahty, ease, and
charm.' And the latter qualities are associated with the conception
of the ironical man (6 Eipwv), \* because Socrates best realized in
actual life this type of humor, a type bound up with the conception
of the plain style from the days of Socrates and Plato on.'
Naturally, therefore, Cicero (in the Orator 60) ' distinctly
indicates Plato as the master of this style and its appropriate type
of humor ' (\* et gravitate et sttavitate frinceps '). And in
accordance with the practice of Latin literary criticism — that is,
\* of seeking national parallels to the representative writers of
Greek literary forms ' — Plautus ' is regarded by Cicero as the Latin
representative of the type of liberal humor affected by the Old
Comedy.'^ Language unfit

1 Fiske, pp. 77, 79, 85-6.

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for a gentleman is discovered by Cicero, not in Aristophanes, but, as
by Cicero's authority, Panaetius, in \* such coarse and careless
Cynic or Stoic predecessors as Diogenes the Cjmic, Zeno, or
Chrysippus/ Panaetius \* assails the aesthetic and moral coarseness
of Cynic speech which sins equally against linguistic propriety and
social decency/^

X

ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY

In Cicero we have the chief exponent at Rome of Aristotelian, and
still more of Platonic, doctrines. We may now consider more fully a
topic on one side of which we have touched before in a passing
allusion to Plato and Aristophanes.^ As we have seen in the foregoing
section, any reconstruction of Aristotle's views on the specific end
of comedy is tentative; and hence an estimate of the similarities and
differences between his views and those of his master, Plato, on the
general tendency and value of this form of drama, must hkewise in
many respects be problematical. Yet here, as there, we are not
without some means of forming a judgment, and various important
details are reasonably or quite certain. We should expect
similarities as well as differences; and such there are. But before
investigating either, we may sum up the ancient theories of the
laughable in writers before Plato. I quote from Miss Grant, who has
studied the subject in the pre-Socratic philosophers:

' To summarize these fragments of the early philosophers, we may say
that in general they illustrate

1 Fiske, pp. 75, 73. ^ See above, pp. 38-9.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 99

conventional morality of conduct as regards friendship, self-control
in anger, and avoidance of evil-speaking and slander. A theory of the
laughable is not definitely formulated, but there are suggestions
which later find an important place in the theory, such as the
necessity of relaxation and laughter as a preparation for serious
pursuits, avoidance of excess in laughter, condemnation of laughter
directed at the unfortunate, necessity for the reformer to be free
from serious faults himself. The philosophic attitude of laughter at
the faults of mankind is illustrated in the character of Democritus,
while in several of the fragments the typical reaction of the people
toward the jester, evil-speaker, and reformer is shown.'^

And for another preliminary step we may use the

summary of Miss Grant regarding the conceptions found

in Plato himself:

' In these passages of Plato, several important ideas are brought
forward : the kinship of the ridiculous with what is morally or
physically faulty; the justification of laughter as a means of
understanding serious things, and the beginning of the conception of
o-TuouBaioysXoiov ;^ the need of restraint in laughter in everyday
conduct; the distinction of the good-natured and ill-natured je^ts ;
and, finally, the justification of the use of laughter against vice
and folly.'^

We should bear in mind, however, that the views thus abstracted are
scattered through the Platonic Dialogues, that they mostly arise
almost by chance in the treatment of other subjects, and that perhaps
in no-Dialogue save the Laws can we completely identify the utter-

1 Mary A. Grant, The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable in
Cicero and Horace, University of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation,
1917 (in manuscript), pp. 6-7.

^ Compare Horace, Satire i. i. 24-5 : \* Quamquam ridentem dicere
verum quid vetat?' And see Plato, Symposium 197 e, Phaedfus 234d,
Apology 20d. These passages are noted by Miss Grant.

^ Miss Grant, p. 14.

g 2

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ances of any speaker with the thoughts of the author himself. In the
Philebus alone is there anything hke a consideration of comedy in and
for itself; and even here the treatment by Socrates occupies but a
small fraction of the Dialogue, which as a whole is concerned with
the meaning of the general term pleasure.

The type of writing which Plato chose for his medium of expression,
the dialogue, is one that enables an author to approach the truth
from various sides, and by gradual stages. In the preliminary stages
the speakers may offer tentative expressions of the truth, or
half-truths, or positive untruths. The argument advances by
elimination of the false and a convergence upon whatever survives the
test of dialectic. The result may or may not be expressly stated in
sober prose. In general we may believe that the ultimate truth is
seldom reached in the discussion proper, but is finally caught
together and embodied in the myth, this last being the most
imaginative part of a whole (namely, the Dialogue) which is itself an
imaginative or poetical creation. The poetical quality of the
Platonic Dialogues has been recognized by many writers, from
Aristotle to Shelley.

Thus, in the *Poetics*} Aristotle groups ' Socratic Conversations '
with the mimes of Sophron and Xenar-chus as a type of mimetic
composition which thus far had received no common name. And again,
according to Diogenes Laertius, \* Aristotle says that the type of
his [Plato's] Dialogues is between a poem and ordinary prose. '2
Cicero thinks the style of Plato more poetic than that of comedy.^ In
modern times, Shelley regards Plato as first of all a poet.^ And
Egger says of the Platonic

^ See below, p. i68.

^ Diogenes Laertius 3. 37; Aristotle, frg. 73, Rose {1886), p. 78.

' Cicero, Orator (20) 67.

\* Shelley, Defence of Poetry, ed. by Cook, p. 9.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY loi

Dialogue: \* It is the drama of the school; as comedy is the drama of
public life, and of private.'^

Again, the works of Plato not only belong to the general family of
the dialogue; most of them also fall under a definite species of this
genus, which Aristotle calls \* Socratic Conversations,' a type of
literature that was produced by other authors as well as by Plato,
and even before him. On this head we have the testimony of Diogenes
Laertius and Athenaeus, both of them citing Aristotle:

'They say that Zeno of Elea was the first to write dialogues; but
Aristotle in the first part of On Poets says it was Alexamenus of
Styra, or of Teos, as Favorinus records in his Commentaries.'^

So Diogenes Laertius; Athenaeus gives more:

\* He [Plato] elaborately praises Meno, though he condemns the others
one and all, in the Republic banishing Homer and imitative poetry,
although he himself wrote dialogues which themselves were imitative.
Yet he was not the inventor of the type, for before him Alexamenus of
Teos invented this type of argument. ... Aristotle in his work [ ? or
' dialogue '] On Poets writes as follows: " Accordingly, though the
mimes, as they are called, of Sophron can not be included under the
head of metrical compositions, may we not term them dialogues and
imitations, and similarly the Dialogues of Alexamenus of Teos, which
were the first Socratic Dialogues to be -v^nritten ? " In these words
the most learned Aristotle plainly declares that Alexamenus wrote
dialogues before Plato/^

In this species ot writing a kind of literary and traditional
Socrates is the chief speaker; and the speeches are devised to fit
this traditional character, a wise man

^ Egger, p. 228.

2 Diogenes Laertius 3. 48 ; Aristotle, frg. 72, Rose, pp. 77-8. ^
Athenaeus 11. 505c; Aristotle, frg. 72, Rose, p. 78. For Alexamenus,
see Hirzel, Der Dialog i. 100-2.

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in search of truth and beauty, but one who at the same time is \*
ironical.' He is, in fact, the \* ironical man ' of all time. As
such, he is obviously related to one of the types of character proper
to comedy, a fact that seems to be recognized by Aristotle.^ On the
other hand, his manner of speech, plain and natural, is allied to the
style of the mime, a brief humorous or farcical dialogue using the
customary medium of prose ; while the mime, in turn, has its own
affiliation with comedy. Thus there is a triple interrelation between
the Platonic dialogue, the mimes of Sophron, and the mimes and
comedies of Epicharmus. Plato loves Sophron and Epicharmus as well as
Aristophanes.^

Accordingly, it is not by chance that Aristotle connects ' Socratic
Conversations' with the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus. His seemingly
casual reference implies no distaste for the popular farce. Rather,
we might judge from it that he was well-disposed to the farcical side
of Epicharmus and Aristophanes. The Stagirite's own jokes no doubt
met the Aristotelian and Ciceronian standard of what befits a
gentleman,^ departing far enough from pointless obscenity and cruel
invective — as the wit of Aristophanes was in this respect on a level
above that of his predecessor Cratinus, or of the Old Comedy in
general; yet the jokes of Aristotle are classed by Demetrius with
those of Sophron:

' Elegance of expression includes grace and geniality. Some
pleasantries — those of poets — are loftier and more dignified, while
others [in prose writers] are more

^ Nicomachean Ethics 4. 13; see below, p. 119.

2 See above, pp. 29-38, below, pp. 111-2. For Epicharmus' development
of the mime, see Reich, Der Mitnus, p. 246; for Plato's love of
Sophron, ihid., pp. 381-3, For Epicharmus and Sophron in relation to
the Platonic Dialogues, see Hirzel, Der Dialog I. 20-26.

^ See above, pp. 26, 88, below, pp. 119-20.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 103

commonplace and jocular, resembling banter, as is the case with those
of Aristotle^ and Sophron and Lysias. Such witticisms as " Whose
teeth could sooner be counted than her fingers " (of an old woman) .
. . differ in no way from gibes, nor are they far removed from
buffoonery [ysT^coiroTuoiia?].'^

The Platonic Dialogues, then, are for Aristotle ' mimetic ' — or, as
we should say, dramatic — and poetical in so far as they are '
mimetic '; ^ and from their relation to the mimes,^ as well as for
other reasons, the}^ may be classed with the comic rather than the
tragic part of literature. With their swift interchange of question
and answer, they resemble both the plays of Epicharmus and the mimes
of Sophron. Coming after the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes, who in his turn had
learned both from the tragic poets and from Epicharmus and the mimes,
the Dialogues of Plato, as the next great literary type struck out by
the Greek genius, are generically comic. The Symposium obviously may
be so classed, and the Ion, if we can surely attribute this to Plato;
the Phaedrus more readily than the Protagoras, and yet the
Protagoras, too. Even in the most serious of the Dialogues, as the
Apology, there are occasional touches betraying the kinship of Plato
with the comic genius. The exceptional tragic quality of the Phaedo^
by contrast proves the rule.

^ As Rhys Roberts, following Blass, points out, the reading of the
text must stand, Maslow's proposed substitution of'Aristophanes ' for
' Aristotle' being untenable, since the reference is to prose
writers.

2 Demetrius De Elocutione 128, ed. and trans, by W. Rhys Roberts, p.
131 ; I have slightly modified the translation. Compare above, p. 26.

^ Compare below, p. 192. •

\* Compare below, p. 168.

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In the Politics 2.1, Aristotle, when referring to statements made in
the Republic of Plato, cites and quotes, not the author, but the '
Socrates ' of that Dialogue. Observing a hke precision, and citing
the speaker, we may begin with the less favorable allusions to comedy
in the Dialogues, and then pass to these that are more tolerant and
less purely utilitarian.

In the Apology Plato makes Socrates say of the accusations issuing
from an earlier stage in his career :

' I do not know, and can not teU, the names of my accusers — unless
in the chance case of a comic poet.'^

The hero then recounts the present charge against him :

\* " Socrates is an evil-doer, and a meddlesome person who searches
into things imder the earth and in heaven, and makes the worse appear
the better reason; and he teaches the aforesaid things to others." '

And he adds:

' It is just what you [persons in the audience] have yourselves seen
in the comedy [the Clouds] of Aristophanes — a man named Socrates
there borne about [i. e., suspended in a basket], saying that he
walks the air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of
which I do not pretend to know either much or little.'2

However tense the situation, the reminiscence provokes a smile.
Moreover, the Socrates of the Apology is here made to employ a
rhetorical device familiar to later theorists, and doubtless alread}^
familiar to rhetoricians in the time of Plato. So Aristotle
recognizes the legitimate use in an argument of both ' ancient '

^ Apology 18; Jowett 2. no. In the succeeding quotations from Plato I
continue to make use of the translation by Jowett, occasionally
revising.

^ Apology 19; Jowett 2. in.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 105

and \* contemporary ' (or 'recent') witnesses, and therewith notes
the advantage of quoting from the poets:

' Thus Eubulus [the orator] . . . employed against Chares the saying
of Plato [the comic poet] against Archibius that " the avowal of
rascality has gained ground at Athens." '^

Again, in the Phaedo, when he is about to discuss the immortality of
the soul, Socrates is made to declare:

\* I reckon that no one who heard me now, not even if he were a comic
poet, would say that I talk idly [aBo-Xs(7/(o], or discuss matters in
wnich I have no concern.' ^

He had been respresented as \* garrulous ' by both Aristophanes^ and
Eupolis^ — garrulity [aBoXscr/ta] being comic material in all ages ;
but here the reference to comic poets may be thought to include
Ameipsias as well as Aristophanes, since the Connus of Ameipsias was
exhibited at the same festival as the Clouds, and in it ' Socrates '
appeared as one of the characters, while the title of the play was
the name of his music-teacher.^ The history of \* Socrates ' as a
personage in imitative literature begins with these two comedies,
twenty-five years before the death of the man himself; it had been
running thirty years, and probably more, when Plato wrote the
Apology.^ In this latter work the line is hard to draw between the
admixture of the comic element and that larger part of the Dialogue
which stirs our pity, hope, and admiration ; yet we are doubtless
justified in connecting the allusions to

^ Aristotle, Rhetoric i. 15. The 'Plato' of this passage has also
been taken to mean the philosopher; see below, p. 158. 2 Phaedo 70;
Jowett 2, 209-10.

^ Cf. Rogers, Clouds, pp. xxvii-xxx ; and see Clouds 1480. \*
Eupolis, frg. 352, Kock i. 351. ^ Starkie, Clouds, p. xxix. ^ Croiset
4. 279.

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Aristophanes and Ameipsias in the Apology and the Phaedo with the
remarks on comedy in the Republic.

In the Republic the discussion of poetry is incidental to the problem
of education. And this does not mean the education of all classes in
the State, but of one class in particular, namely, the Guardians, the
mihtary class. It means the education of these, mainly during
childhood and youth. Further, this State is not regarded as actually
possible; it is ideal, imaginary, at times fantastic — a magic
mirror, so to speak, by gazing at which we arrive at a new sense of
justice. The sections of the Dialogue that treat of poetry (the end
of Book 2, beginning of Book 3, and beginning of Book 10) chiefly
deal with Homer; tragedy and comedy are subordinate topics. Only one
tragic poet, Aeschylus, is mentioned by name; no comic poet is so
mentioned. The objection brought against poetry is threefold. It
misrepresents the divine nature; for Homer displays the gods as
subject to human fear, pain, and even lust, and to excessive
laughter. It is imitative: the distinction is made between pure
narrative, where the poet tells a straightforward story in his own
words; pure ' imitation,' where a dramatist, saying nothing himself,
presents the entire action through the utterances of his characters ;
and the mixed type, as in Homer, where some part of the story is
given by the poet speaking for himself, and the rest by the
characters. Finally, it represents emotions, such as fear, of which
the warlike Guardians should see and know as little as possible.
Poetry is therefore false to the nature of the divine, untrue also in
so far as it is imitative and unreal, and dangerous to the safety of
the State.

The triple distinction of i^nitative, narrative, and mixed is by some
scholars found again in the *Poetics* of

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 107

Aristotle ;^ though some such distinction may have been

a commonplace in Greek criticism before Plato, who

certainly did not invent, any more than did Socrates,

the notion that the drama is an \* imitative ' art.^ One

may add that the Republic is itself of the mixed type.

It begins with a narrative of the circumstances under

which the Dialogue ostensibly took place; and indeed

the entire narrative is related by one person as a story;

yet it is on the whole \* imitative,' since, after a brief

preliminary, the remainder is in the form of speeches

put into the mouths of various characters by Plato.

The Dialogue would therefore, as we have seen, be one

of the books that should be denied admittance to the

ideal State which it describes! It also contains a

choice collection of the passages from Homer that

would not be admitted. The Symposmm would be

excluded, both because it is imitative, and because of

the naughty utterances in it by Aristophanes and

Alcibiades. Nor would the other Platonic Dialogues

fare better, in so far as the author is an imitative artist.

We may now look at the five references to comedy

and laughter in the Republic, taken out of their context.

The first needs no further preamble:

' Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter; for a fit of
laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a
violent reaction. . . . Then personages of worth, even if only mortal
men, must not be represented as overcome by laughter, and still less
must such a representation of the gods be allowed.'^

The second propounds the main question:

\* You mean ... to ask whether tragedy and comedy shall be admitted
into our State ? '\*

1 But see Alfred Gudeman in Philologus 76 (1920). 245.

2 Cf, *Poetics* 3. i448a28-9; see below, p. 172. ^ Republic 3. 388;
Jowett 3. 71.

\* Republic 3. 394 ; Jowett 3. 79.

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The final answer is that they are not to be admitted until a better
defence is offered for them than is discovered by the speakers in the
Republic. Such a defence was, in effect, undertaken by Aristotle in
the *Poetics*. Some defence may or may not even then have been lying in
Plato's mind; the positions reached by the \* Socrates ' of the
Republic are modified by 'the Athenian ' of the Laws.

The third statement is diametrically opposed to an

utterance made by the Socrates of the Symposium. The

third is:

' For even when two species of imitation are nearly allied, the same
persons can not succeed in both, as, for example, the writers of
tragedy and comedy.'^

At the end of the Symposium, as we shall see, Socrates maintains the
opposite opinion.^

The fourth is:

\* Then the man was perceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of
his ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and vice/^

In the fourth there is a loophole for comedy.

The fifth and last is:

' And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the
sight of the misfortunes of others [in tragedy] is with difficulty
repressed in our own. . . . And does not the same hold also of the
ridiculous ? There are jests which you would be ashamed to make
yourself, and yet when you hear them in comedy, or in prose,\* you
are greatly amused by them, and are not at all disgusted by their
unseemliness. The case of

^ Fepuhlic 3. 395; Jowett 3. 79.

^ See below, p. 114.

^ Republic 5. 452; Jowett 3. 144.

^ Reich, Der Mimus, p. 383, thinks this a reference to the prose
mimes of Sophron. Jowett translates: 'and yet on the comic stage, or
indeed in private,' etc.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 109

pity is repeated: there is a principle in human nature which is
disposed to raise a laugh, and this, which you once restrained by
reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon
[(Do^o6[xzyo<; Bo'^av pco'xoXoj^ia^], is now let out again ; and,
having stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are
betrayed unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet at
home. . . . And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the
other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to
be inseparable from every action. In all of them poetry feeds and
waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule,
although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase
in happiness and virtue.'^

Most scholars have held that Aristotle took his departure from this
argument, to combat it; that, having justified the emotional relief
of pity and fear through tragedy, he went on to deal with the
emotional problem of comedy in a similar way; and that for him comedy
would afford the proper catharsis of laughter, so that the audience
by giving vent to the risible faculty at the theatre, would be less
likely to play the comic poet at home.^

In the Laws of Plato we have a less imaginative representation of the
State, and one that, while sufficiently ideal, is yet more nearly
adapted than the Republic to men as they are. The Laws being more \*
practical,' in various ways ' the Athenian ' of this Dialogue recedes
from the conclusions of \* Socrates ' in the Republic. His ideas may
come nearer also to the final beliefs of Plato, though they do not
wholly accord with the latter's practice. The passages which here
concern us are two.

^ Republic 10. 606; Jowett 3. 321-2. ■^ See above, pp. 5-7, 60-5.

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no INTRODUCTION

The first:

' It is necessary also to consider and know uncomely persons and
thoughts, and those which are intended to produce laughter in comedy,
and have a comic character in respect of style, song, and dance, and
of the imitations which these afford; for serious things can not be
understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without
opposites, if a man is really to have intelligence of either. But he
can not carry out both in action, if he is to have any degree of
virtue. And for this very reason he should learn them both, in order
that he may not in ignorance do or say anything which is ridiculous
and out of place. He should command slaves and hired strangers to
imitate such things, but he should never take any serious interest in
them himself, nor should any freeman or freewoman be discovered
taking pains to learn them. And there should always be some element
of novelty in the imitation. Let these, then, be laid down, both in
law and in our discourse, as the regulations of laughable amusements
which are generally called comedy.'^

The second passage is:

' Do we admit into our State the comic writers who are so fond of
making mankind ridiculous, if they attempt in a good-natured manner
to turn the laugh against our citizens ? or do we . . . allow a man
to make use of ridicule in jest and without anger about any thing or
person ? ... We forbid earnest. . . . But we have stiU to say who are
to be sanctioned or not to be sanctioned by the law in the employment
of innocent humor. A comic poet, or maker of iambic or satirical
lyric verse, shall not be permitted to ridicule any of the citizens,
either by word or likeness, either in anger or without anger. And if
any one is disobedient, the judges shall either at once expel him
from the country, or he shall pay a fine of three minae, which shall
be dedicated to the god who presides over the contests. Those only
who have received permission shall be

^ Laws 7. 816-7 ' Jowett 5. 199.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY iii

allowed to write verses at one another, but they shall be without
anger and in jest; in anger and in serious earnest they shall not be
allowed. The decision of this matter shall be left to the
superintendent of the general education of the young, and whatever he
may license the writer shall be allowed to produce, and whatever he
rejects let not the poet himself exhibit, or ever teach anybody else,
slave or freeman, under the penalty of being dishonored, and held
disobedient to the laws.'^

These more tolerant utterances in the Laws remind one of the rule
laid down by Aristotle in the Politics, that a youth shall not attend
the contests in comedy before he has reached the proper stage in his
education ;^ but neither in the Laws nor in the Republic have we a
detached inquiry into the essence of the comic drama. In both
Dialogues, as in the Politics, the treatment of comedy is incidental
to that of a leading topic; the function of the drama being judged by
the standard of utility in the State, and with special reference to
juvenile education.

Let us turn to allusions of another sort. The Symposium as a whole is
a comedy; and the comic myth which Plato as an imitative artist puts
into the mouth of the Aristophanes of this Dialogue deserves the same
measure of attention from us as the reference to Aristophanes by
Aristotle in the *Poetics*. But apart from the Aristophanic myth the
direct allusions by Plato to comic poets are limited, and his
quotations or adaptations of their language, so far as these can be
identified, are few. Nevertheless they have a value.

In the Theaetetus Socrates shows high regard for Epicharmus, ranking
him in comedy with Homer in epic poetry, at the summit in their
respective provinces

^ Laws II. 935-6; Jowett 5, 325. \* See below, p. 125.

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of art, and citing both for the idea that ' all things are the
offspring of flux and motion.'^ And in the Gorgias he asks : ' Must I
then say with Epicharmus, \*' Two men spoke before, but now one shall
be enough " ? '2 Hirzel makes much of the lively style of
conversation in the plays of Epicharm us, where one speaker catches
up his fellow in the middle of a verse; the poet has raised the wit
of the Sicilian mime to a higher level, introduces speculation, and
hence in more than one way has had an influence on the Dialogues of
Plat0.2 Epicharmus would also recommend himself to both Plato and
Aristotle through the strictly philosophical poetry that has been
attributed to him. Aristotle evinces his respect by citing Epicharmus
twice in the *Poetics*, apparently giving him, together with Phormis,
the credit for the invention of plots in comedy, and making him the
forerunner of the Athenian Crates in that notable matter.'\* A phrase
from Epicharmus seems to reappear at intervals in De Generatione
Ani-malium and the Metaphysics ; and he is otherwise remembered seven
or eight times in the extant works of Aristotle.^

In thQ First Alcibiades, if this be genuinely Platonic, Socrates
jocularly quotes an unnamed author: \* When you and I were born,
Alcibiades, as the comic poet says, \*' the neighbors hardly knew of
the important event."'^ On the authority of Olympiodorus the proverb
has been attributed to the comic poet Plato,

^ Theaetetus 152 ; Jowett 4. 206.

2 Gorgias 505 ; Jowett 2. 397.

^ Hirzel, Der Dialog i. 22-3.

^ See below, pp. 172, 177-8.

^ See below, pp. 152-5.

\* First Alcibiades 121 ; Jowett 2. 488.

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in some unidentified drama/ a writer who does not otherwise emerge,
if here, in the works of the philosopher, and who is possibly once
mentioned by Aristotle.^ A chance-allusion to the comic poets is
likewise to be noted in the Phaedrus, where the youthful orator
humorously accuses Socrates of resorting to a familiar expedient of
the stage : ' Do not let us exchange " Hi quoqiic " as in a farce.'^

Among the works of Plato the Symposium, the chief topic of which is
love, comes nearest to being both a discussion and an illustration of
the comic spirit; but it is not a discussion of comedy in the
narrower sense; and even the discourse of Aristophanes (containing
much that the Socrates of the Republic would exclude from his
commonwealth as unsuited to the education of the Guardians) is too
long to quote. Indeed, it needs only to be mentioned. We can notice
two allusions to comedy from other parts of the Dialogue. There are
those who think that Socrates' references to the Clouds in the
Apology and the Phaedo demonstrate the antagonism of Plato to that
drama. What, then, shall we say regarding Plato's use of a line from
the Clouds (362) in the Symposium ? Here he makes Alcibiades adopt
the very words of Aristophanes for a realistic description of
Socrates — \* in our streets, stalking and jetting like a
brent-goose, and casting his eyes about askance.'\* And what shall we
say of the contradiction between the argument in the Republic, that
the same persons can not succeed in writing both

■^ Plato, the comic poet, frg. 204, Kock i. 657-8. 2 See above, p.
105, below, p. 158. ^ Phaedrus 236; Jowett i. 441. ^ Symposium 221 ;
compare Starkie, Clouds, p. 95.

h

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tragedy and comedy/ and the opinion noted at the close of the
Symposium ? —

' The chief thing he [Aristodemus] remembered was Socrates compelling
the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same
with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an
artist in comedy also.'^

The truth is that Plato himself was a master in both the serious and
the comic vein, and that his characters say what is proper at a given
stage in any Dialogue. At length we come to the pregnant remarks on
comedy in the Philebus — pregnant, but still subordinate to the topic
of the Dialogue, namely, pleasure. Socrates is again the speaker, but
here the method is less dramatic, and the usual irony almost wholly
dropped. We may omit the brief intercalary answers of Protarchus,
since the Socratic questions are virtually progressive enunciations
of fact :

' And you remember how pleasures mingle with pains in lamentation and
bereavement ? . . . And you remember also how at the sight of
tragedies the spectators smile through their tears ? ... And are you
aware that even at a comedy the soul experiences a mixed feeling of
pain and pleasure ? . . .

' I have just mentioned envy; would you not call that a pain of the
soul ? ... And yet the envious man finds something in the misfortunes
of his neighbors at which he is pleased ? ... And ignorance, and what
is termed clownishness, are surely an evil ? . . .

\* From these considerations learn to know the nature of the
ridiculous. . . . The ridiculous is, in short, the specific name
which is used to describe the vicious form of a certain habit; and of
vice in general it is that kind which is most at variance with the
inscription at Delphi, ..." Know thyself." . . . And the opposite
would

^ See above, p. io8.

\* Symposium 223; Jowett i. 594.

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THE PHILEBUS OF PLATO 115

be, " Know not thyself." . . . Are there not three ways in which
ignorance of self may be shown ? ... In the first place, about money;
the ignorant may fancy himself richer than he is. ... And still more
often he will fancy he is taller or fairer than he is, or that he has
some other advantage of person which he really has not. . . . And yet
surely by far the greatest number err about the goods of the mind;
they imagine themselves to be much better men than they are. . . .

\* All who are silly enough to entertain this lying conceit of
themselves may, of course, be divided, hke the rest of mankind, into
two classes — one having power and might, and the other the reverse.
. . . Those of them who are weak and unable to revenge themselves,
when they are laughed at, may be truly called ridiculous. . . .
Ignorance in the powerful is hateful and horrible, because hurtful to
others both in reality and in fiction; but powerless ignorance may be
reckoned, and in truth is, ridiculous. . . .

' Let us examine the nature of envy. ... Is not envy an unrighteous
pleasure, and also an unrighteous pain ? ... There is nothing envious
or wrong in rejoicing at the misfortunes of enemies ? ... But to feel
joy instead of sorrow at the sight of our friends' misfortunes — is
not that wrong ? . . .

' And the three kinds of vain conceit in our friends, . . . the vain
conceit of beauty, of wisdom, and of wealth, are ridiculous if they
are weak, and detestable when they are powerful. May we not say as .
. . before that our friends who are in this state of mind, when
harmless to others, are simply ridiculous ? ... And do we not
acknowledge this ignorance of theirs to be a misfortune ? . . . Then
the argument shows that when we laugh at the folly of our friends,
pleasure, in mingling with envy, mingles with pain; for envy has been
acknowledged by us to be mental pain, and laughter is pleasant; and
so we envy and laugh at the same instant. . . . And the argument
implies that there are combinations of pleasure and pain in
lamentations, and in tragedy and comedy, not only on the stage, but
on the greater stage of human life; and so in endless other cases. .
. .

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\* I mentioned anger, desire, sorrow, fear, love, emulation, envy,
and similar emotions, as examples in which we should find a mixture
of the two elements so often named. . . . We may observe that our
conclusions hitherto have had reference only to sorrow and envy and
anger. . . . Then many other cases remain ? ... And why do you
suppose me to have pointed out to you the admixture which takes place
in comedy? Why but to convince you that there was no difficulty in
showing the mixed nature of fear and love and similar affections ? '
^

These extracts from the Dialogues of his master provide a general
background for the entire thought of Aristotle on comedy. But it
would be hazardous to attempt the establishment of many relations
between the two authors in detail. Having already indicated a few
points of similarity and difference between them, I shall confine
myself to a few additional remarks.

The main similarity between Aristotle and the chief interlocutors in
the Platonic Dialogues lies in the field of ethics, political
science, and rhetoric. One of the Aristotelian assumptions is that an
orator must be a good man,^ and, as we should say, a gentleman.
Aristotle likewise, no doubt, would subscribe to the notion,
generally held among the ancients,^ that in order to be a good poet a
man must be good himself; and this, in spite of what he says
regarding the origin of poetry, to the effect that the forerunners of
the comic poets were not on the same moral plane as the forerunners
of the tragic.^ But he does not hold that a poem must

^ Philehus 48-50 ; Jowett 4. 621-4. I i'lnd no better place than at
the end of these extracts from Plato to insert the maxim, attributed
to Socrates by Stobaeus {Anthologium 3. 34. 18) : 'One should use
laughter as one uses salt, sparingl}'^'; see Stobaeus, ed. by
Wachsmuth and Hense, 3. 686.

2 Aristotle, Rhetoric i. 2.

^ Cf. Aristophanes, Frogs 1008-12, 1482-1502 ; Strabo i. 2. 5.

'\* See below, pp. 174-5.

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satisfy the standards of Ethics and Pohtics, since, however ennobled
the agents in a tragedy may be, the hero must be depicted with a flaw
sufficient to bring about his downfall, and since the agents in
comedy have the faults of the average man, or are worse than the
average. 1 The comic poet may not, indeed, endow his characters with
any and every defect; he is limited to the kinds and degrees of
disproportion and ugliness that are not painful or injurious and
corrupting. Consequently he must be familiar with the variety and
extent of human aberrations from normal conduct. Yet it is not of the
public stage, but of individual ethics and social life, that
Aristotle says:

' In the matter of truth, ... he who observes the mean may be called
truthful, and the mean state truthfulness. Pretence, if it takes the
form of exaggeration, is boastfulness [av^a^ovsta], and one who is
given to it is a boaster [i. e., ' impostor ' (a7;aJo)v)], but if it
takes the form of depreciation it is irony [sipcovsta], and he who is
given to it is ironical [sipow],

' As regards pleasantness in amusement, he who observes the mean is
witty [su'rpdcTusXo?], and his disposition wittiness [suTpccT^sXia] ;
the excess is buffoonery [^(x)\i.oloyio(,], and he who is given to it
is a buffoon rj3o)[j.oX6/o?], whereas he who is deficient in wit may
be called a boor [aypoTxoc], and his moral state boorish-ness
[aypoixtoc].

\* As to the other kind of pleasantness, namely pleasantness in life,
he who is pleasant in a proper way is friendly [^-piXo?], and his
mean state is friendliness [cptXta] ; but he who goes too far, if he
has no ulterior object in view, is obsequious [oLpzGv.oo], while if
his object is self-interest, he is a flatterer [y.61(x,%], and he who
does not go far enough, and always makes himself unpleasant, is a
quarrelsome and morose sort of person [Budspi^ zic, Y.cd ^UG'AoXoq]
.' ^

^ See below, pp. 170-1, 176-7.

^ Nicomachean Ethics 2. 7; trans, by Welldon, pp. 51-2, revised.

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The preceding passage, and the following (likewise from the Ethics),
have perhaps a special interest because of their relation to the
Tractatus Coislinianus, where we have a parallel to three of the
characters here described :^

' It seems that the boaster [6 aXaJwv] is one who is fond of
pretending to possess the quaUties which the world esteems, although
he does not possess them, or does not possess them to the extent that
he pretends. The ironical person [6 sipwv], on the contrary,
disclaims or disparages what he possesses; while the intermediate
person, who is a sort of " plain-dealer," is truthful both in life
and in speech — he admits the fact of his possessions, he neither
exaggerates nor disparages them. ... A person who pretends to greater
things than he possesses, if he has no ulterior object in doing so,
seems to be a person of low character, as otherwise he would not take
pleasure in a falsehood ; but he looks more like a fool than a knave.
Supposing he has an object, if the object be glory or honor, the
pretentious person, like the boaster, is not highly censurable; but
if it be money, or the means of getting money, his conduct is more
discreditable. It is not a particular faculty, but a habit of choice,
which constitutes the boaster; for it is by virtue of his moral state
and his character that he is a boaster, as a person is a liar, if he
takes pleasure in falsehood for its own sake, or as a means of
winning reputation or gain. Thus it is that boastful people, if their
object is reputation, pretend to such qualities as win praise or
congratulation, but if their object is gain, they pretend to such
qualities as may be beneficial to their neighbors, and can not be
proved not to exist — for example, to skill in prophesying or
medicine. . . .

\* Ironical people, on the other hand, in depreciating themselves,
show a more refined character, for it seems that their object is not
to make gain but to avoid pomposity. They are particularly fond of
disclaiming the

^ See below, pp. 226, 262-5.

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same qualities as the boaster affects, that is, the qualities which
the world esteems — as was the way, for example, of Socrates. People
whose pretensions have to do with such things as are trivial and
obvious are called humbugs [PauxoTuavoupyoi], and are contemptible.
Sometimes irony itself appears to be boast-fulness, as in the dress
of the Lacedaemonians; for exaggerated deficiency is a form of
boastfulness, as well as excess. . . .

' As relaxation, no less than business, enters into life, and one
element of relaxation is playful diversion, it seems that here, too,
there is a manner of intercourse which is in good taste. ... In this
matter as in others it is possible to go beyond, or to fall short of,
the mean. Now they who exceed the proper limit in respect to the
laughable seem to be buffoons [pw[j,o>.6yoi] and clownish
[cpopTixot], as their heart is set upon raising a laugh at any cost,
and they aim at exciting laughter more than at decorous language and
not giving pain to the one who is ridiculed. On the other hand, they
who will never themselves say anything laughable, and are indignant
with those who do, may be classed as boorish [aypioi] and rude
[cr/Xripoi].

' People whose fun is in good taste are called witty [zuzpdzzkoi, '
lively'], a name which implies their happy turns of speech, as these
happy turns may be described as movements of the character; for
characters, like bodies, are judged by their movements. But as it is
never necessary to look far for the laughable, and as most persons
enjoy fun and ridicule more than is necessary, buffoons are also
termed ' witty,' because they are amusing. But it is clear, from what
has been said, that there is a difference, and indeed a wide
difference, between the two.

\* The characteristic of the mean [or ' intermediate '] state is
tact. A person of tact is one who will use and Hsten to such language
as is suitable to an honorable gentleman; for there is such language
as an honorable gentleman may use and listen to in the way of fun,
and the fun of a gentleman is different from that of a

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slavish person, and, again, the fun of a cultivated from that of an
uncultivated person. The difference may be illustrated from the old
comedies as compared with the recent; in the former it was scurrilous
[' abusive ' or ' obscene '] language [cdGy^^oXoyioc] that provided
laughter, but in the latter it is more the innuendo [uTuovoia]. As
regards decorum, the difference between scurrility [or ' obscenity']
and innuendo is considerable.

' Is it, then, to be the definition of a good jester that he uses
such language as befits a gentleman, or that he does not give pain,
or actually gives pleasure, to his listener ? Or is it impossible to
determine this point ? The same things are hateful or agreeable to
different people. But the language to which a person listens will
correspond to his nature ; for it seems that he will make such jests
as he can bear to listen to. There will be some kinds of jest, then,
that he will not make; for mockery is a species of reviling which
legislators prohibit; they ought perhaps to have prohibited certain
kinds of jesting as well.

\* Accordingly, this will be the moral state of the refined gentleman
; he will be, so to say, a law unto himself. Such, then, is the mean,
or intermediate, character, whether it be called "tactful " or "
witty." But the buffoon is the slave of the ludicrous ; he will spare
neither himself nor others, if he can raise a laugh ; and he will say
such things as no person of refinement would utter, and some that the
latter will not even listen to.

' The boor is one who is useless for such social purposes ; he
contributes nothing, and takes offense at everything. Yet it seems
that relaxation and fun are indispensable elements in life.'^

But the boor is useful to the comic poet, whether

in the Savages ('Aypioi) of Pherecrates ^ and in the shape

^ Nicomachean Ethics 4. 13-14; trans, by Welldon, pp. 127-31,
revised.

\* Cf. Croiset 3. 482-3.

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COMIC CHARACTERS IN ARISTOTLE 121

of the Triballian deity in the Birds of Aristophanes, or as the
Theophrastian Boor of the later comedy. The entire passage is of
great interest, and for several reasons. By its reference to '
legislators ' it takes us back to the extracts already given from the
Republic and the Laws of Plato.^ Moreover it clearly is full of
parallels to the views of Aristotle regarding comedy, and contains a
little gallery of characters suitable to the comic stage — not only
the boor (6 aypto?), the impostor (6 a>.a'((ov), the buffoon (6
P(opX6)(o?), and the ironical man (6 sipwv), but the clown (6
(popTixo^), the humbug (6 pauxo^ravoupY®*^)» ^^^ witty man (6
suTpaTcsXo?), and possibly others. Of these, only the ' witty' man is
ideal, and the ' ironical man ' tolerable, from the point of view of
Ethics ; but, as we have had occasion to notice, for Aristotle what
is ethically ideal is one thing, and what is suited to comedy is
another. The distinction is sharply brought out in the following
passage from the Eudemian Ethics :

' As to those who from insensibility are unmoved by these same
pleasures, some call them insensible, while others describe them as
such by other names ; but this state is not very familiar or common,
because all rather err in the opposite direction, and it is
congenital to all to be overcome by and to be sensible to such
pleasures. It is the state chiefly of such as the boors introduced on
the stage by comic ^\Titers, who keep aloof from even moderate and
necessary pleasures.'-

The buffoon and the boor are alike unethical; and the buffoon, with a
language suited to him, has the same right on the comic stage as the
boor with his insensibility to a joke. Yet the passage in the

^ See above, pp. 107-11.

^ Eudemian Ethics 3.2, trans, by J. Solomon (1915) in the Oxford
translation of Aristotle, ed. by W. P. Ross.

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Nicomachean Ethics on the difference between the ' old ' comedies and
the ' recent \* has been seized upon by scholars (perhaps not too \*
lively,' or quick in turning their minds) who are bound to make
Aristotle prefer the Middle Comedy to the Old, or Anaxandrides to
Aristophanes, or the like — a matter I have disposed of before.^ Must
we reiterate his injunction against taking the standard of propriety
in imitative art to be the same as that in morals ? At present we
need only observe that he here makes use of a distinction between an
earher and a later type of comedy, in order to illustrate a point in
everyday conduct. He is writing of ethics, not of comedy. It serves
his purpose to exemplify in this way, as it serves his purpose to
describe the buffoon, the impostor, and the ironical man, all three
of them alike common to earlier and later stages of comedy as he knew
it. All three are found in Aristophanes,^ in Theophrastus (with
variations), and in the Tractatus Coislinianus? By implication
Aristotle includes the ironical Socrates of literary tradition as a
fit personage for comedy. And he also implies that there are
occasions — the Dionysiac festival, with its comedy, doubtless being
one of them'^ — when an educated and liberal man may listen to the
sort of thing he would not utter in private life or in a public
speech. The Socrates of the Republic grants as much ;^ though he
seems to think the peril greater to the adult audience than does
Aristotle. No doubt the latter as well as Plato would allow a

^ See above, pp. 18-41.

2 See Cornford, Index, s. v. 'Buffoon,' 'Impostor,' 'Irony.\*

^ See below, p. 226.

\* See below, p. 125.

\* See above, p. no.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 123

relined gentleman to read the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium.
There is nothing worse in Aristophanes.

In other words, we should attend to the aim and purpose of a work
when we wish to interpret chance-details and momentary illustrations.
The caution applies as well to the following extracts from the
Rhetoric and Politics of Aristotle. They run parallel to utterances
in the Dialogues of Plato where considerations of ethics, moral
eloquence, and statesmanship are uppermost.

Of the various means of arousing laughter, says Aristotle, some may
be employed by the orator, and some may not. If either of two
references from the Rhetoric to the *Poetics* is genuine, all were
discussed in the *Poetics*. Of those that are denied to the orator,
should not some be granted to a poet when he is writing a speech for
a boaster or a buffoon ?

' Jokes seem to be of some service in debate ; Gorgias said that we
ought to worst our opponent's earnest with laughter, and his laughter
with earnest — a good saying. The various kinds of laughter have been
analyzed in the *Poetics*. Some of these befit a free man, and others
do not; one must take care, then, to choose the kind of joke that
suits one. Irony is more liberal [or \* refined '] than buffoonery;
the ironical man jests for his own amusement, the buffoon for the
amusement of another.'^

I take the passage to be genuine, the authenticity of Rhetoric 3 as a
whole now being fairly established; its character as a sort of
addendum to the first two Books should not weigh too heavily against
the other

1 Rhetoric 3. 18, trans, by Jebb, p. 197, revised. For the other
reference in the Rhetoric to a treatment of the forms of the
hidicrous in the *Poetics*, see below, p. 138.

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arguments in its favor. And if Book 3 is genuine, then it is more
nearly related to the *Poetics* than is any other work of Aristotle.
x\ssuming the genuineness of the whole, we see that neither in Book 3
nor elsewhere is there evidence of an objection on Aristotle's part
to the Old Comedy. But in Book 2, in an extended analysis of shame
and its causes, we find a brief reference to comic poets, with a
possible allusion to the injury which the Socrates of the Apology
says resulted to him from the Clouds of Aristophanes :

\* We feel shame, too, before those who give their whole minds to
their neighbors' mistakes — as scoffers and comic poets ; for these
are, in a way, evil-speakers and spreaders of reports.'^

But we should not be too certain about the allusion ; the tense would
fit the Middle Comedy better than the Old. And, indeed, the remark
appears among the instructions enabling the orator to arouse a sense
of shame in his audience or his adversary; though the orator would be
in a different situation from the comic poet as regards both the
means and the end of his endeavor.

So would he be, also, as regards the nobility of his cadences or
rhythms ; he could not freely use the metrical devices of comedy. The
forensic orator duly employs rhythm, but not strict metre, in his
periods and clausal cadences. For him, the heroic rhythm, analogous
to the metre of epic poetry, is too dignified and stately; while the
iambic rhythm is that of everyday speech, and not sufficiently
dignified or impressive. Accordingly, the paeon is, for him, the
correct rhythm.

\* The trochee, again, is too much akin to the comic

1 Rhetoric 2. 6, trans, by Jebb, p. 86. Compare above, p. 104.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 125

dance — as appears in the tetrameter, which has a tripping rhythm.'^

The point for us is that in Aristotle's view the trochaic metre,
unsuitable for oratory, is proper in the comic dance, including the
cordax, which at its worst was wild, coarse, and bacchanalian,^ and
doubtless was to be excluded from the State described in the Laws of
Plato.^ We need not fancy Aristotle countenancing the worst excesses
of the Old Comedy. But that he was not afraid of their effect upon
the morals of an educated man, and would not exclude broad comedy
from his State, mav be deduced from another reference to ' the
legislator ' :

' But the legislator should not allow youth to be hearers of
satirical iambic verses, or spectators of comedy, until they are of
an age to sit at the public tables and to drink strong wine ; by that
time education will have armed them against the evil influences of
such representations.''\*

Aristotle would banish ' pictures or tales which are indecent,' and
insists that ' the light utterance of shameful words is akin to
shameful actions '; yet even for obscenity he makes an exception in
favor of the festivals of the gods at which the law permits
ribaldry.^ While substantially agreeing with the legislators in the
Platonic Dialogues as regards the influence of Dionysiac comedy upon
youth, the proprieties for an educated

^ Rhetoric 3. 8, trans, by Jebb, p. 162.

2 Haigh, p. 318.

^ Laws 7, 816 a, d; see above, p. no.

^ Politics 7. 17, trans, by Jowett, p. 298. According to Egger (P-
157)' 'Aristophane disait que Tecole etait pour les enfants, le
theatre pour les hommes' — a statement that seems to rest on what
Aristophanes makes Aeschylus say in Frogs 1054-5: 'For to little
children whoever tells them something is their teacher; but to
adults, the poets.'

^ Politics 7. 17.

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man in ordinary life, the decorum of an orator, and the usual
activities of a citizen as a member of the State^ he still leaves
room in his scheme of things for the display of Aristophanic art; as
did Plato, who himself functions as a comic poet in writing the
Aristophanic myth, and the speech of the drunken Alcibiades, in the
Symposium.

1 have given the parallel passages from the two authors in such
fashion that the reader, if he choose, may disregard my tentative
inferences, and draw his own conclusions respecting the debt of
Aristotle to Plato on the subject of comedy. The reader will not
forget, however, the existence of other systematic treatises on
poetry and comedy, some of which Aristotle must have known. Besides
Plato, other disciples of Socrates wrote on topics connected with
literary criticism. According to Diogenes Laertius, Crito, Simmias of
Thebes, and Simon produced works discussing poetry and fine art.^ Of
the members of the Platonic school, according to the same authority,
the fertile Speusippus dealt with rhetoric and art, while Xenoc-rates
wrote on oratorical or literary problems, and the learned Heraclides
of Pontus on music, and on poetry and the poets.^ Among the
predecessors of Aristotle, there was a Democritus who composed a
treatise On Poetry, and another On Rhythms and Harmony. The *Poetics*
of Aristotle refers twelve, or perhaps thirteen, times to technical
authorities, mentioning Protagoras, Hippias of Thasos, Euclides,
Glaucon, and Ariphrades.^

1 Diogenes Laertius 2. 12 (Crito), 2.13 (Simon), 2.15 (Simmias) ; cf.
Egger, p. 131.

2 Diogenes Laertius 4. i (Speusippus), 4. 2 (Xenocrates), 5. 6
(Heraclides) ; cf. Egger, pp. 165-6.

^ Gudeman, pp. xxii-xxiii.

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 127

And further, Diogenes Laertius speaks of another Aristotle, a native
of Cyxene, who wrote On the Art of Poetry ; another, who wrote on the
Diad; and yet another, who left a treatise On Pleonasm. There were,
he says, eight Aristotles, beginning with \* the man himself.'^

The chief pupil of the Stagirite was Theophrastus, author of
treatises On Style, On the Art of Poetry, On the Laughable, and On
Comedy ; as they were fellow-students under Plato, and but a dozen
years apart in age, Theophrastus may have influenced Aristotle. The
influence of master upon pupil is seen in the relations between the
Rhetoric of Aristotle and the Characters of Theophrastus.

But, so far as concerns Plato, we must suppose that Aristotle in
dealing with comedy would start out either from the practice of the
Platonic Dialogues, or from the doctrines enunciated in the Republic
and the Laws, or from the discussion in the Philebus, or from two, or
from all, of these three sources. If his thought were mainly
stimulated by the Philebus, he might dwell upon comedy as a
corrective of envy and anger, or such like emotions, and upon the
removal of the painful sense of disproportion connected with them.^
If he partly accepted the positions reached in the Republic and the
Laws, but, going further in his qualification than the Athenian of
the Laws qualifies the doctrines set forth by the Socrates of the
Republic, he might arrive at a defence of comedy analogous to his
defence of Homer and tragic poetry — of the imitative arts in general
— in the *Poetics*.

Unfortunately the *Poetics* as we have it leaves us in doubt at the
critical juncture; for the promise of a

1 Diogenes Laertius 5. i. 35; cf. Egger, p. 185.

2 See above, p. 66.

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fuller treatment of catharsis — the promise given in the Politics —
is not redeemed in our *Poetics* to the satisfaction of most scholars.^
The dissatisfied are rather forced to consult the Politics for such
light, admittedly imperfect, as it may shed upon the term catharsis
in the *Poetics*. In the Politics, Book 8, the last, is entirely
occupied with the education of children and youth. The subject of
musical education is treated at some length, though Aristotle refers
the reader to technical authorities for more complete information. He
concludes that children ' should be taught music in such a way as to
become not only critics but performers '; ^ but he objects to the '
flute ' (aulo?) — that is, for educational purposes. In deference to
custom, both here and elsewhere I accept the usual translation of
aokoq by ' flute '; but it must be understood that Aristotle refers
to an instrument more like a clarinet or oboe, with a note, not soft
like that of a flute, but very rich (not necessarily loud) or, as he
says, ' exciting.' He does not object to it in the *Poetics*, where
flute-playing is taken as an example of imitative art, to illustrate
the general nature of poetry ]^ and we can see from the reference to
the comic poet Ecphantides, in the same chapter of the Politics, that
Aristotle associates the flute with comedy.\* But in education he
rejects it, partly because the instrument is not of the sort that has
a good moral effect:

' It is too exciting. The proper time for using it is when the
performance aims, not at instruction

[{jLaOY](7tv], but at the relief of the passions [/wOcOapatv].'^

^ But see above, pp. 63-4.

^ Politics 8. 6, trans, by Jowett, p. 311. '

^ *Poetics* I. 1447a14-16.

"\* Politics 8. 6; see below, p. 152.

^ Politics 8. 6; trans, b}'' Jowett, p. 312.

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There is a similar distinction, between his educational tenets and
his demands upon fine art, in regard to painting. As we note in the
*Poetics*, painters fall into classes by the same criterion that
divides writers of tragedy from writers of comedy, since Polygnotus
depicts men as \* better than we are,' and Pauson as \* worse/i The
tendency of Pauson is accepted, as the comic mask is later accepted
;2 they have their justification in art. But in the Politics
Aristotle says: ' Young men should be taught to look, not at the
works of Pauson, but at those of Polygnotus '; and he makes a similar
provision regarding sculpture.^

He has, then, a special objection to the flute; but he votes against
\* any other instrument which requires great skill' — they ' ought
not to be admitted into education.' He rejects not only ' the
professional instruments,' but also ' the professional mode of
education in music' ' The execution of such music is not the part of
a freeman, but of a paid performer ;\* and the result is that the
performers are vulgarized, for the end at which they aim is bad.'^
The passage mirrors the decline of art since the democratic age of
Pericles.

Our author next proceeds to rhythms and harmonies, referring us, for
technical details, to ' the more exact student of the subject,' and
himself professing to deal with it \* only after the manner of the
legislator.' He explicitly defers a treatment of it after the manner
of the student of poetry, according to the general principles of the
*Poetics* :

1 *Poetics* 2 ; see below, p. 169.

2 Ibid. 5; see below, p. 176.

^ Politics 8. 5, trans, by jowett, p. 310. ^ Cf. Plato, Laws 7. 816;
see above, p. no. '" Politics 8. 6; trans, by Jowett, pp. 312-4.

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\* We maintain further that music should be studied, not for the sake
of one, but of many benefits ; that is to say, with a view to (i)
education, (2) purgation (the word " purgation '\* we use at present
without explanation, but when hereafter we speak of poetry, we will
treat the subject with more precision) ; music may also serve (3) for
intellectual enjoyment, for relaxation, and for recreation after
exertion. It is clear, therefore, that all the modes must be employed
by us, but not all of them in the same manner. In education the most
ethical modes are to be preferred, but in listening to the
performances of others we may admit the modes of action and passion
also ; for feelings such as pity and fear, or, again, enthusiasm,
exist very strongly in some souls, and have more or less influence
over all. Some persons fall into a religious frenzy, whom we see as a
result of the sacred melodies ■— when they have used the melodies
that excite the soul to mystic frenzy — restored as though they had
found healing and purgation. Those who are influenced by pity or
fear, and every emotional nature, must have a like experience, and
others in so far as each is susceptible to such emotions, and all are
in a manner purged, and their souls lightened and dehghted. The
purgative melodies hkewise give an innocent pleasure to mankind. Such
are the modes and the melodies in which those who perform music at
the theatre should be invited to compete. But since the spectators
are of two kinds — the one free and educated, and the other a vulgar
crowd composed of mechanics, laborers, and the like — there ought to
be contests and exhibitions instituted for the relaxation of the
second class also. And the music will correspond to their minds ; for
as their minds are perverted from the natural state, so there are
perverted modes and highly strung and unnaturally colored melodies. A
man receives pleasure from what is natural to him, and therefore
professional musicians may be allowed to practise this lower sort of
music before an audience of a lower type. But, for the purposes of
education, as I have already said, those modes and melodies should be
employed which are ethical, such

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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO ON COMEDY 131

as the Dorian, as we said before; though we may include any others
which are approved by philosophers who have had a musical education.
The Socrates of the Republic is wrong in retaining only the Phrygian
mode along with the Dorian, and the more so because he rejects the
flute ; for the Phrygian is to the modes what the flute is to musical
instruments — both of them are exciting and emotional. Poetry proves
this, for Bacchic frenzy and all similar emotions are most suitably
expressed by the flute, and are better set to the Phrygian than to
any other mode. The dithyramb, for example, is acknowledged to be
Phrygian, a fact of which the connoisseurs of music offer many
proofs, saying, among other things, that Philoxenus, having attempted
to compose his Mysians as a dithyramb in the Dorian mode, found it
impossible, and fell back by the very nature of things into the more
appropriate Phrygian.'^

As a legislator, then, Aristotle takes issue with the Platonic
Socrates^ on a matter related to comic poetry. The flute, and the
Phrygian mode also, are too emotional and exciting for the education
of young citizens; but they are both suited to catharsis. That there
is a comic, as well as a tragic, catharsis may probably be inferred,
yet only from the allusion to the dithyramb and from the instance of
Philoxenus. This author, mentioned in *Poetics* 2, in his dithyrambic
tale of the Cyclops leaned to the side of comedy by representing
Potyphemus as worse than the average, while Timo-theus, also writing
dithyrambs, represented him as better.^ The reading of \* Mysians '
in the Politics is conjectural; the reference may be simply to the '
tales ' of Philoxenus. The whole passage contains no direct

^ Politics 8. 7 ; Jowett's translation revised by Ross, in the Oxford
translation of Aristotle. ^ /Republic 3. 399. ^ See Bywater, pp. 6,
7, 117.

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reference to comedy. The exhibitions suited to the vulgar crowd could
hardly mean the plays of Aristophanes (an author who has given
delight to the finest minds of all times), since Aristotle permits
the higher orders of society to witness comedy as soon as they have
reached a proper age.^ And besides, the legislator has in mind some
kind or kinds of exhibition current in his own day. The lower types
of mime might fit the case, if our author were not thinking of
performances partly musical. Yet, on the evidence of the *Poetics*, in
general he shows no animus against the mime.

XI

ARISTOTLE ON PLEASURE

As we have seen, Aristotle nowhere clearly reveals his conception of
the specific pleasure arising from comedy. He comes disappointingly
near to so doing in the last passage we have quoted. But, all told,
the most definite statement we have on this topic from his
unquestioned works is that the pleasure afforded by the Odyssey, an
epic with a double issue, happy for some of the characters, though
unhappy for others, resembles that of comedy ;2 we remember, too, his
saying that Alcidamas called the Odyssey \* a fair mirror of human
life ' ^ — a remark anticipating part of Cicero's definition of
comedy as recorded by Donatus.^ To this we may perhaps add that the
effect produced by the Homeric Margites — in the shape in which this

^ See above, p. 125.

2 See above, p. 61 ; below, p. 201.

^ Rhetoric 3. 3; see above, p. 91.

\* See above, p. 91.

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poem was known to Aristotle — must have been still closer to his
conception.^ But the epic poem, and similarly the mock-epic, lacks
the embellishments of music and spectacle, and is more diffuse than
comedy.^

What is his view of pleasure in general ? The answer must have a
bearing upon the more particular question, if we make allowance, when
necessary, for the sources of our quotations, as these come from the
*Poetics* itself, or the Ethics, or the Rhetoric. In chapter 6 of the
*Poetics*, if we accept with By water Vahlen's conjectural reading, v]
Bs suBatpvia, we learn that happiness is a form of activity.^ It
consists in action ; it is not a state of being. This is said with
reference to the personages of the drama, but since the drama is an
imitation of life,^ the statement applies also to the individuals in
the audience. The effect of comedy, then, is a form of activity.

Both pain and pleasure are forms of activity. The

contention in the *Poetics* is corroborated in De

Anima :

\* Sensation ... is analogous to simple assertion or simple
apprehension by thought, and, when the sensible thing is pleasant or
painful, the pursuit or avoidance of it by the soul is a sort of
affirmation or negation. In fact, to feel pleasure or pain is
precisely to function with the sensitive mean, acting upon good or
evil as such. It is in this that actual avoidance and actual
appetition consist. Nor is the appetitive faculty distinct from the
faculty of avoidance, nor either from the sensitive faculty; though
logically they are different. But to the thinking soul images serve
as present sensations ; and when it affirms or denies good or evil,

^ Cf. below, p. 175. ^ Cf. below, p. 223. ^ By water, pp. 18, 19. \*
See below, p. 184.

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it avoids or pursues ; this is why the soul never thinks without an
image.'^

But with respect to hfe as a whole we learn in the

Nicomachean Ethics :

\* Happiness [suBatpvia] . . . does not consist in amusement [sv
xaiBia]. It would be paradoxical to hold that the end of human life
is amusement, and that we should toil and suffer all our life for the
sake of amusing ourselves; for we may be said to desire all things as
means to something else, except indeed happiness, as happiness is the
end or perfect state.

\* It appears to be foolish and utterly childish to take serious
trouble and pains for the sake of amusement. But to amuse oneself
with a view to being serious seems to be right, as Anacharsis says ;
for amusement is a kind of relaxation, and it is because we can not
work for ever that we need relaxation.

' Relaxation, then, is not an end. We enjoy it as a means to
activity; but it seems that the happy life is a life of virtue, and
such a life is serious — it is not one of mere amusement.'^

In the Rhetoric, Book i, chapters 5 and 6, happiness (suBaipvia) is
described in terms of the things that produce it, and of its
constituent parts, and the question of the good and the useful is
discussed, since all these matters must be kept in view in a
hortatory or a dissuasive speech. For us, however, much more to the
point is the popular definition and analysis, in chapter 11, of
pleasure (-/]Bov^). The whole chapter should be consulted, both for
comparison with the analysis of mixed pains and pleasures in the
Philebus of Plato,2 and for the Aristotelian doctrine itself. In what
follows we must limit ourselves to extracts more or less directly
related to the *Poetics*. But we may

1 De Anima 3. 7, ed. and trans, by R. D. Hicks, p. 141.

2 Nicomachean Ethics 10. 6, trans, by Welldon, pp. 333-4. ^ See
above, pp. 114-6.

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preface these by two passages from the Rhetoric which account for
human activity in general. The first is:

\* The emotions (TuaGr^) are those things, being attended by pleasure
or pain, by which men are altered in regard to their judgments — as
anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites.'^

The second :

' So that every act of men must have one of seven causes — chance,
nature, force, habit, reason, passion, lust.'

\* To put it shortly,' says Aristotle, ' all things which men do of
themselves are good or apparently good, pleasant or apparently
pleasant '; for he counts among pleasures ' riddance from pain or
apparent pain, and the exchange of a greater pain for a less.' ^ And
so he leads up to the chapter in question :

\* Let us assume, then, that pleasure is a kind of motion [vlvfiGic]
of the soul, and a settling, sudden and sensible, into our proper
nature ; and pain the contrary. If pleasure is this kind of thing,
plainly the pleasant is that which tends to produce the condition
described; while that which tends to destroy it, or to produce the
opposite, is painful. It must be pleasant, then, as a rule, to
conform with nature, particularly when the things done according to
the general law have their special natures satisfied. Habits, too,
must be pleasant ; for an acquired habit comes to be as a natural
instinct — habit having a certain likeness to nature; for " often "
and \*\* always " are neighbors, and nature is concerned with the
invariable, as habit with the frequent. That is pleasant, too, which
is not done perforce ; for force is against nature; wherefore the
compulsory is painful, and it has rightly been said :

Every compulsory thing is grievous.^

^ Rhetoric 2. i, trans, by Jebb, p. 69, revised.

2 Ihid. I. 10, pp. 44-6.

^ A saying attributed to Evenus of Paros.

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Acts of attention, earnest or intense efforts, must be painful, for
they involve compulsion and force, unless one is accustomed to them;
and then the habit becomes a sort of pleasure. Again, the opposites
of these are pleasant; so opportunities of ease; moments of respite
from toil or attention, sports, seasons of repose and sleep, are
among pleasant things; for none of these is compulsory. Everything,
too, is pleasant of which the desire exists in one; for desire is
appetite of the pleasant. . . . All pleasures consist either in
perceiving things present, or in remembering things past, or in
hoping things future. . . .

\* Generally, all things which, when present, give joy, also supply,
as a rule, pleasures of memory or hope. Hence it is pleasant to be
angry —- as Homer said of passion that it is

Sweeter far than dripping honey; ^

for no one is angry with a person who seems beyond the reach of
vengeance, or who is greatly above himself in power; or, if angry at
all, he is less angry. And so most of the desires are attended by a
certain pleasure. .. .

' A certain pleasure follows on mourning and lamentation ; for, as
the pain consists in the loss, so there is a pleasure in remembering
the lost, and, in a manner, seeing him as he lived and moved. . . .
Also revenge is pleasant, since what is painful to miss is pleasant
to get; and angry men are pained above measure by the loss, as they
are rejoiced by the hope, of revenge. To conquer is pleasant, not
only to lovers of victory ; ... for it gives rise to an impression of
superiority. . . . And since to conquer is pleasant, it follows that
sportive fights and contests are so, as offering many opportunities
of victory. . . .

\* To learn and to admire [wonder] are pleasant, as a rule; for
admiring [wonder] implies desiring to learn, . . . and learning
involves a settling into one's proper natural condition. . . .

' Iliad i8. 109.

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\* And since the pleasant is that which benefits, it is pleasant to
men to set their neighbors right, and to complete imperfect things.
Again, since learning and admiring are pleasant, it follows that
pleasure is given by acts of imitation, such as painting, sculpture,
poetry, and by every skilful copy, even though the original be
unpleasant; for one's joy is not in the thing itself — rather, there
is a syllogism : " This is like that.'' And so it comes that one
learns something. Sudden reversals and narrow escapes are pleasant,
being all in the nature of marvels.

' Then, since that which is according to nature is pleasant, and
kindred things are natural to each other, all things akin to one and
like one are pleasant to one, as a rule — as man to man, horse to
horse, youth to youth; whence the proverbs; ''Mate delights mate"; ''
Like to hke " ; " A beast knows his fellow " ; " Jackdaw to jackdaw "
; and so forth. And since everything Mke and kindred to oneself is
pleasant, and a man is like nothing so much as himself, it follows
that everybody is more or less selfish, self being the very standard
of all such resemblances. And, since every one is selfish, it follows
that all find pleasure in their own things — for instance, in their
deeds and words ; whence people are fond, as a rule, of their
flatterers, of their lovers, of honor, of their children (for their
children are their own work).

\* So, to complete imperfect things is pleasant; for at this point
the work becomes one's own. And since to rule is most pleasant, to
seem wise is also pleasant; for intelligence befits a ruler ; and
wisdom is the knowledge of many admirable things. Further, since
people are, for the most part, ambitious, it follows that it is
pleasant to censure one's neighbors, as well as to rule. It is
pleasant also to spend one's time in the occupation in which one
seems to be at one's best; as the poet says:

Toward this he spurs, to it giving most of each day — To the work
that shows him at his best.^

1 Euripides, frg. 183, Nauck, second, ed.

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' In like manner, since amusement and relaxation of every kind are
among pleasant things, and laughter, too, it follows that the causes
of laughter must be pleasant — namely, persons, utterances, and
deeds. But the forms of the ludicrous have had separate treatment in
the *Poetics*.''^

A commentary might be written on the bearing of this extract upon the
*Poetics* ; but various relations are easily found. On the surface lies
the notion that our pleasure in literary and all other art is the
activity of discovering resemblances, with the human nature of the
observing individual as the standard of comparison. Even if the poet
— a comic poet, let us say — chose for his object of imitation one
that was not only ugly, but painful, still the observer could delight
in the successful representation; he would 'learn something.' The
reversals and escapes alluded to seem to be on the order of those in
comedy rather than tragedy. And the proverbs quoted are such as we
might find in a mime; Demetrius says that ' almost all the proverbs
in existence ' might be collected out of Sophron.^ But the close of
the chapter is of even greater interest. ' Persons ' (avOpo)7roi), '
utterances ' P^oyoi), and ' deeds ' (spya) have by some been taken to
correspond to the ' characters ' (^Oy]), ' diction ' (>.£'^i?), and '
things done ' (TupayjxaTa) of the Tractatus Coislinianus ,^ while the
correspondence is not exact,^ it is not negligible.

And the Tractate, in turn, sends us back to two other passages in
Aristotle which we have already noticed ; for the ' characters ' of
the \* buffoon ' (ira pcojj.o>.6)(a),

^ Rhetoric i. ii, trans, by Jebb, pp. 46-51, revised. Cf. above, pp.
62, 123.

^ Demetrius De Elociitione 156. ^ See below, pp. 225-6. ^ Cf. Arndt,
p. 13.

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the ' ironical man ' {-zk sipwvt/wdc), and the \* impostors ' {'zk
Twv aXa^ovwv) in the Tractate correspond to three of the characters
described in the Nicomachean Ethics 2.7 and 4.14.^

The simplest explanation of these correspondences, and of the
references from other works of Aristotle to the *Poetics*, is doubtless
the best. However much tampering with his text there may have been by
Athenian and Alexandrian (or later) students, editors, and copyists,
it is not to be supposed that the author himself made no such '
cross-references/ In chapter 6 of the *Poetics* he says that he
reserves comedy and epic poetry for consideration thereafter; the
promise is fulfilled for epic poetry in subsequent chapters, as it is
not for comedy. In his extant works Aristotle does not discuss the
satyr-drama; the type is barely mentioned in *Poetics* 4.i449a2o;
perhaps several specimens are cited in the course of the work — for
example, the Phorcides of Aeschylus; we should expect to find more
attention given to this type in a treatment of comedy. In chapter 19
Aristotle omits the analysis of \* thought ' (^lavoioc), and all that
appertains to the construction of speeches in poetry, contenting
himself with cursory remarks on the subject, as:

' The thought of the personages is shown in everything to be effected
by their language — in every effort to prove or disprove, to arouse
emotion (pity, fear, anger, and the like), and to magnify or minify
things/^

For a detailed treatment he refers us to the Rhetoric, and there we
are, in fact, fully instructed on such matters. In the Rhetoric there
are six references to the *Poetics*, two of them to the treatment of
the

^ See above, pp. 117-21. - Cf. Bywater, p. 55.

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laughable. The other four are satisfied, three of them completely,
one almost so, in our *Poetics*. The two references to this work for a
discussion of the ludicrous by species are not thus satisfied. It is
worth notice that both are measurably satisfied when we consult the
Tractate in the belief that it contains some of the lost substance
from Aristotle's writings on poetry.

Herewith I close my general introductory remarks, the next three
sections being in the nature of an addendum, though containing
materials which it is desirable to place before my adaptation of the
*Poetics*.

XII

SCATTERED PASSAGES IN ARISTOTLE WITH A BEARING ON COMEDY

In this and the following sections are collected various

passages (most of them not utilized in the foregoing

pages, and all taken from works other than the *Poetics*)

that directly or indirectly touch upon comedy, comic

poets, the comic chorus, and the subject of laughter.

It has not always been possible to reduce them to

order ; but it seems best to give all of them for the sake

of completeness.

(i) \* The proem is the beginning of a speech, and corresponds to a
prologue in poetry and a prelude in flute-playing. All these are
beginnings, and prepare the way, as it were, for what follows. ... As
for the proems of forensic speeches, it must be understood that they
are equivalent to the prologues in dramas and to the introductions of
epic poetry. ... In tales and epic poems we have an indication of the
subject,, so that the hearers may know what the story is about, and
the mind not be kept in suspense. ... Accordingly,

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SCATTERED PASSAGES IN ARISTOTLE 141

he who puts the opening, as it were, into the hand of the hstener
gives the latter a thread with which to follow the story. Wherefore:

Sing, Goddess, the wrath ;i

Tell me. Muse, of the man •,^

Lead me forth on another tale, how from Asia's soil There came a
great war into Europe.^

In the same way the tragic poets explain the action, if not at the
very opening, like Euripides, at all events somewhere in the
prologue. Thus Sophocles :

My sire was Polybus.^

And the same is true of comedy.'^

Leaving the Rhetoric for a moment, we may go to

Aristotle's De Interpretatione :

(2) ' By a statement [Xoyo?] is meant a significant synthetic
utterance, of which the several parts have each a meaning, but do not
severally affirm or deny. Thus the word \*' man " has a meaning, but
does not express affirmation or denial; in order to have a statement
some word must be added to " man." . . . Not every statement is a
proposition, but only such as imply affirmation or denial. This does
not occur in all cases ; for example, a wish is a statement, but
neither false nor true. Such forms we may set aside; an examination
of them belongs rather to rhetoric and the art of poetry. Our present
concern is with the categorical statement.'^

1 Iliad I. I.

^ Odyssey i. i.

3 From an epic poem by Choerilus.

^ Actually, Oedipus the King 'j'j/\. ! Here Aristotle uses the term
'prologue' very loosely.

^ Rhetoric 3. 14. To illustrate the use of introductory explanations
in Aristophanes, Cope {Rhetoric of Aristotle, ed. by Cope-Sandys, 3.
169) refers to the speech of Strepsiades in the Clouds (at the
opening), to that of Demosthenes in the Knights {40ff.), and to that
of Dionysus in th.Q Frogs (64 ff.). Cope follows Victorius,
correcting him.

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(3) ' Men are false in their statements, and their counsels, from all
or one of the following causes. Either, through folly, they have not
right opinions ; or, having right opinions, they say through knavery
what they do not think; or they are sensible and honest, but not
well-disposed — whence they may happen not to advise the best course,
although they see it. Besides these cases there is no other.'^

(4) ' It remains for us to discuss the general appliances. All men
are compelled in speaking to apply the topic of possible and
impossible ; and to try to show, either that a thing will be, or that
it has been. Further, the topic of size is common to all speeches ;
all men use depreciation and amplification in debate, in praising or
blaming, in accusing or defending.'^

(5) ' Another topic is taken from things said [by the adversary],
applied to our own case as compared with his. The ways of doing this
are various — as in the Teucer [of Sophocles]. Iphicrates used this
against Aristophon — asking whether Aristophon would betray the ships
for money, and, when he said " No," rejoining : "So you, being
Aristophon, would not betray them; would I, being Iphicrates ? " It
is necessary that the adversary should be more liable to the
suspicion of crime ; else, the effect will be ludicrous — as if one
were to say this in answer to the accusations of Aristides. The
argument is meant to create distrust of the accusers ; for, as a
rule, the accuser is by way of being better than the defendant. This
assumption, then, should always be confuted. Generally speaking, a
man is absurd when he upbraids others with what he himself does, or
would do ; or when he exhorts others to do what he himself does not,
or is incapable of doing.' \*

The topic of possible and impossible, the practice of magnifying what
is small and minifying what is great, and the ludicrous employment of
things said by the

^ Rhetoric 2. i, trans, by Jebb, p. 69. ^ Ibid. 2. 18, p. 107. ^
Ibid. 2. 23, pp. 122-3.

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SCATTERED PASSAGES IN ARISTOTLE 143

adversary, can all be illustrated from the Frogs of Aristophanes. In
general, the principles of forensic eloquence are travestied in the
comic agon or ' debate,' which is a typical element in the Old
Comedy. The use of depreciatory resemblances, common to all forms of
the ludicrous, is noticed in the following passage from Aristotle's
Topica :

(6) ' Another topic : what is nearer to the good is better and
preferable. And what is more like the good; as justice is more like
the good than the just. And what is more like the better than the
thing itself; as some say Ajax is better than Odysseus because he is
more like Achilles. The objection to this is that it is not true ;
for there is nothing to hinder Ajax being more like Achilles, not in
the point in which Achilles is best, while the other is good but not
like. We must consider whether the likeness subsists in those things
which are more ludicrous; just as the ape is more like the man, while
the horse is not like him; for the ape is not more beautiful, but
more like the man.'^

The demands of proportion in style, from the Rhet-

oric:

(7) \* Style will have propriety, if it express emotion and character
and be proportionate to the subject. This proportion means that
important subjects shall not be treated in a random way, nor trivial
subjects in a grand way, and that ornament shall not be attached to a
commonplace notion. Otherwise the effect is comic, as in the poetry
of Cleophon ; for some of his phrases were as if one should say, "
Venerable fig." '^

(8) ' If any one should say he had washed himself in vain because the
sun was not eclipsed, he would be laughed at, since, there is no
causal connection between this and that.'^

^ Topica 3. 2.

^ Rhetoric 3. 7, trans, by Jebb, p. 159, revised. For Cleophon, the
epic poet, see Bywater, pp. 115, 293. ^ Physica Auscultatio 2. 6.

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(9) \* Equivocal terms are the class of words most useful to the
sophist, for it is with the help of these that he juggles ; synonyms
are most useful to the poet. By synonyms in ordinary use I mean, for
instance, " to go " and " to walk " ; these are at once accepted and
synon3nnous terms.'^

(10) ' Faults of taste [or \* frigidities'] occur in four points of
style. First, in the use of compound words, such as Lycophron's "
many-visaged heaven [above] the vast-crested earth,'' and his "
narrow-passaged strand," or Gorgias' expressions, " a beggar-poet
flatterer " [xolccQ, or " forsworn and for-ever-sworn." ... A second
cause ... is the use of rare words, as when Lycophron called Xerxes "
a vasty man." ... A third fault lies in the misuse of epithets, that
is, in making them either long or unseasonable or very numerous. , .
. The consequence is that this poetical diction by its impropriety
becomes ludicrous and frigid, and obscure through its wordiness
[aBo7;S(7/ia]. . . . The fourth and last source of frigidity is
metaphor; for metaphors, too, may be inappropriate, either from their
absurdity (comic poets have their metaphors), or from an excess of
tragic grandeur.'^

(11) ' Our metaphors, like our epithets, should be suitable. This
will result from a certain proportion; if this is lost, the effect
will be unbecoming, since the contrast between opposites is strongest
when they are put side by side. As a crimson cloak suits a young man,
what, we must inquire, suits an old man ? The same dress will not
suit him. If we wish to adorn, we must take our metaphor from
something better in the same class of things; if to depreciate, from
something worse. Thus, opposites being in the same class, it would be
an example of this to say that the beggar \*' prays," or that the man
who prays " begs "; as both are forms of asking.'^

1 Rhetoric 3. 2, trans, by Jebb, p. 149.

^ Ibid. 3. 3, adapted from Jebb's translation, pp. 152-4, and
Welldon's, pp. 236-8.

^ Rhetoric 3. 2, trans, by Jebb, p. 149.

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SCATTERED PASSAGES IN ARISTOTLE 145

(12) \* And so the comic poets make a good metaphor in jest when they
call gray hairs " mould of old age " and " hoar-frost." ' 1

(13) 'As there can be both a real and a sham syllogism, it follows
that there can be both a real and a sham enthymeme — the enthymeme
being a sort of syllogism.

' Among the topics of apparent enthymemes is the topic from diction.
One department of this topic, as in dialectic, consists in making a
final statement, as if it were a logical conclusion, when no
reasoning process has been performed : " So it is not thus or thus "
; \*' So it must be thus or thus." And, in rhetoric, a compact and
antithetical expression has itself the air of an enthymeme ; such a
style is the province of the enth3mieme. The figure of the diction
[to (7/^[J-a tyj? XzizM^f seems to be the source of this fallacy. It
is a help towards a syllogistic style of diction to state the sum of
many syllogisms : " He saved some — he avenged others — he freed
Greece." Each of these points has been proved from other things; and
when they are put together, we have the effect of a fresh result.

' Another department of the topic consists in equivocation — as to
say that the mouse is a noble animal, since the most august of all
rites, that of the ilf ysteries, is derived from it. Or suppose that
the encomiast of a dog were to avail himself of the constellation so
called, or of Pindar's saying about Pan :

Blest one, whom the Olympians call the Great Mother's faithful hound,
taking all forms by turn.

Or one might argue : " As it is a great disgrace that there should be
no dog in a house, so it is plain that the dog is honorable." Or : "
Hermes is the most liberal of the gods ; for he is the only one about
whom there is such a proverb as ' Shares in the luck of Hermes! ' "
's

^ De Generatione Animalium 5. 4, trans, by Piatt in the Oxford
translation of Aristotle, ed. by Smith-Ross. The poets can not be
identified; see Meineke 4. 604.

^ Cf. Rhetoric 3. 10. 14101328-9 : xata 6e Tr)v ketiy z0 fj.iv
ffj(TJf^aTi.

^ Rhetoric 2. 24, trans, by Jebb, pp. 132-3, revised.

k

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Possibly we ought to consider a great many other passages on
fallacious reasoning; but we must not quote too much ol the Rhetoric,
nor all oiDe Sophisticis Elenchis ! For an examination of fallacies
Aristotle, in a discussion of comedy, would doubtless refer us to the
appropriate special treatises.

(14) ' Clever turns for the most part depend upon metaphor with the
addition of a deceptive element. That the hearer has learned
something is more obvious from its contrast with what he expected;
the mind seems to say, " How true ! And I did not see it." . . . Good
riddles are enjoyed for the same reason, for there is an act of
learning, and a metaphor is uttered. Similarly in the case of what
Theodorus [the rhetorician] terms " novelties of expression," since
these arise when there is an element of surprise, and, as he says,
the thing turns out contrary to what we were expecting, like the
jokes found in comic writers, produced by deceptive alterations in
words, and by unexpected words in verse, where the listener
anticipates one thing, and hears another. Thus :

Statelily stept he along, and under his feet were his —
chilblains.■•-

The anticipated word was " sandals." In this kind of joke, however,
the point must be caught instantly. Jokes arising from changes within
the word depend upon a twist of pronunciation which gives us
something different from the meaning we should naturally attach. An
example given by Theodorus is the joke on Nicon the harper: GpdcTTst
cs; for the speaker makes as if he would say GpocTTsi cs [? GpdcTTsi?
= \* You thrash the harp '] — and deceives the hearer, for he says
something else [? i. e., ©paTi:' sT = ' You are a Thracian scullion
']. When the point is caught, the joke is amusing ; if the hearer did
not know the man to be a Thracian, he would, of course, see no point
in the

^ Author unknown ; possibly an example taken from Theodorus, and
quoted by him from an earlier rather than a later comic poet.

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SCATTERED PASSAGES IN ARISTOTLE 147

joke.^ Another example [? from Theodorus] is : pouXst auTov
T.ipGOLi.^ Both kinds of pleasantry [changes of pronunciation in
individual words, and substitutions of one word for another] must be
used as is fitting [in oratory]. ... In all such cases, however, the
excellence of the pun, or of the metaphor, depends upon its being
apposite. For example : " Bearable [a man's name] is not bearable."
Here we have a pun formed by the use of a negative. But it is fitting
only if the man is disagreeable. Again:

Do not be more strange. Strange [Sipog], than you must.^

In other words, do not be more of the very thing [word, name, thing]
you are than you can help. And again : " Our stranger must not always
be a stranger " ; for here the word ?£vo? means alien, too. Of the
same sort is the line that has been admired in Anaxandrides:

Well is it to die ere one has done a thing worthy of death;\*

for this is equivalent to saying, "It is a worthy thing to die
without being worthy to die," or "It is worthy to die when one is not
worthy to die," or " doing nothing worthy of death."

\* In all these cases the species of diction is the same; but the
more concise and antithetical the saying, the more popular it is, for
the reason that our new perception is made sharper by the contrast,
and quicker by the brevity. Further, there should always be some
special application, or some particular merit of expression, if we
are to have truth as well as point; for these

\* On the joke in this doubtful passage, see my article, A Pun in the
Rhetoric of Aristotle, in The American Journal of Philology 41.
48-56; but compare also Rutherford, p. 444, f, n.

2 Jebb, translation of the Rhetoric, p. 174, illustrates the point by
rendering : ' You want him to find his Mede' (= ' meed'). But the
joke has never been satisfactorily explained. The change within
single words seems to be one affecting the last letter or so of the
word ; in like manner the substitution of one whole word for another
in the verse cited by Aristotle affects the end of the metrical line.

^ Listed as from an unidentified comedy in Kock 3. 448, frg. 209.

\* Anaxandrides, frg. 64, Kock 2. 161.

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qualities are not always combined. Thus " A man should die void of
offence " is true but trite, and so is "A worthy man should wed a
worthy wife."^ But a clever saying appears if you have truth and
point conjoined: " He dies a worthy death who is unworthy of dying."
And the more excellences you combine, the more vivacious the
expression ; for example, when the words are metaphorical, and the
metaphor is of such a kind, and there is antithesis with parallel
structure, and vividness as well.

' Effective similes . . . are in a sense metaphors, for, like the
proportional metaphor, they always consist of two terms. . . . There
are similes of the simple kind, such as the comparison of a
flute-player to an ape, or of a short-sighted man to a sputtering
lamp (for both wink). But in a first-rate simile there is a
proportional metaphor. ... It is here that poets are most loudly
condemned for failure, and applauded for success — as when they get
the two members of the simile to correspond :

Like stalks of curled parsley he carries his legs ;

Just like Philammon struggling with the sand-bag.^ . . .

\* It may be added that popular hyperboles are metaphors, as, for
example, the one about the man with the black eye: " You might have
taken him for a basket of mulberries "2 — the bruise being as purple
as a mulberry, while the quantity makes the exaggeration. And another
kind of phrase like the two we have given is a hyperbole with a
difference of expression. Thus, "Just like Philammon struggling with
the sand-bag " may be converted into, " You would have thought him

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^ Listed among the fragments of Anaxandrides, frg. 79, Kock 2. 164.
It can not be taken as an evidence of the alleged fondness of
Aristotle for this poet (see above, p. 30), since he calls the maxim
trite. It looks like a common proverb, the property of no one in
particular.

^ Iambic lines ; the author, or authors, can not be identified ; see
Kock 3. 448, frg. 207, 208. Aristotle seems to like 'iambic' lines
from comedy as illustrations of points in rhetoric.

^ Of unknown authorship ; perhaps from the Old Comedy. See Kock 3.
545, frg. 779.

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SCATTERED PASSAGES IN ARISTOTLE 149

to be Philammon struggling with the sand-bag " ; and " Like stalks of
curled parsley he carries his legs " into, " You would have thought
he had, not legs, but stalks of parsley, so curly were they." ' ^

I add six passages noted by Kock as containing probable or possible
reminiscences by Aristotle from comedies.

(15) ' Another topic of inference is by induction ; for example, in
the Peparethia : \*\* The women always distinguish the truth about
[the parentage of] the children." '^

(16) \* They . . . are liable to injury against whom others have any
available pretext [from alleged past injuries to ancestors or
friends] ; for, as the proverb has it, " Villainy only wants a
pretext." ' ^

(17) ' Whence the poet is impelled jestingly to say: " He has the end
\\_= the fate, the termination] on account of which he came to
exist." ' \*

(18) \* For in their case [that of dreamers who have visions that
come true] the saying holds : '\* If you make many throws, your luck
must change." ' ^

(19) From Demetrius: ' Who, now, in conversing with a friend, would
express himself like Aristotle in writing to Antipater on the subject
of the aged exile ? —

^ Rhetoric 3. 11. With the close of the extract compare Demetrius De
Elocutione 161 :

' The pleasantries of comedy arise especially from hyperbole, every
hyperbole being of an impossible character, as when Aristophanes
[Acharnians 86J says of the voracity of the Persians that

For loaves they roasted oxen whole in pipkins.\*

See Demetrius On Style, ed. and trans, by W. Rhys Roberts, p. 147.

2 Rhetoric 2. 23. Kock 3. 463, frg. 302, takes 'Peparethia' to be the
name of a comedy {WkeAndria, Perinthia, etc.), and suggests
Antiphanes as a possible author.

^ Rhetoric i. 12. Kock 3. 493, frg. 446; Kock is in doubt whether to
assign the proverb to the Old Comedy or to the New {= 'Middle').

\* Physica Auscultatio 2.2. Kock 3. 493, frg. 447 ; here again Kock
is similarly in doubt.

^ De Divinatione per Somnum 2. Kock 3. 493, frg. 448; Kock in doubt
as before.

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" If he be doomed to wander to the ends of the earth, a fugitive
hopeless of returning, it is clear that \* One can not blame such men
if they wish to descend to Hades' hall.' " ' i

(20) From Aristotle again : 'But the north-east wind is not a
clearing one, since it whirls around ; whence the saw: " Drawing
[evils] upon himself as the north-east wind draws a cloud." '^

We may close the section with the interesting gloss, not found in our
*Poetics*, of the Anti-Atticist: xuvTOTa^ov.

'ApiG"u"0T£XY]5 TCSpl 7U0tY]Tiyu%' TO Bs ::aVTC()V ZUVTOTaTOV.

It is supposed to be a reference to some comedy; I translate :

(21) 'Most dog-like [= \* shameless ']. Aristotle On the Art of
Poetry : " the most shameless of all." ' ^

XIII

REFERENCES TO SPECIFIC COMIC POETS IN WORKS OTHER THAN THE POETICS

In the *Poetics* Aristotle refers to the following comic poets:
Aristophanes, Crates, Chionides, Epicharmus, Magnes, and Phormis.^ He
alludes to a comedy (or perhaps to more than one) based on the tale
of Orestes and Aegisthus ;5 Meineke wished to identify this play with
the Orestes of Alexis, but the chances are against an}^
identification.^ And in the same work Aristotle mentions as comic
writers Hegemon, Homer, Nicochares,

^ Demetrius De Elocutione 225. Kock 3. 493, frg. 449 ; Kock in doubt
as before.

^ Aristotle, Meteorologica 1. Kock 3. 612, frg. 1229 ; Kock in doubt
as before.

^ Anti-Atticistain Bekker, AnecdotaGraeca i. loi. 32 ; Aristotle frg.
77, Rose, p. 81.

^ See below, pp. 172, 177-8.

° See below, p. 201.

® See Kock 2. 358, frg. 166.

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REFERENCES TO COMIC POETS 151

Philoxenus, Sophron, and Xenarchus.^ Were we to single out any one as
the favorite comic poet or comic writer of Aristotle on a basis of
the distribution and relative frequency of his allusions to that
author outside of the *Poetics*, the Didascaliae, and the Tractatus
Cois-linianus (if the last is in some sense Aristotelian), we
doubtless should hit upon Epicharmus (and not, for example,
Anaxandrides). The references, however, seem to betray as much
interest in the metaphysical poetry attributed to Epicharmus as in
his comedies; and yet we recall the laudatory reference to his
comedies in the Theaetetus of Plato, where Socrates, giving
Epicharmus the highest station among comic poets, cites him on a
point in metaphysics \\^ for various reasons we need not distinguish
too sharply between the comedies and the Carmen Physicum.^ As we have
seen, however, the frequency of allusion to an author by Aristotle
may tell us little about the latter's critical estimates ; ^ the
nature of the allusion, and of the work in which it is found, is more
significant. From the *Poetics*, the Didascaliae, and the applications
of the Tractate, we should infer a paramount interest in
Aristophanes. All told, in the *Poetics* as well as elsewhere, and
doubtful as well as certain, there are references to seventeen comic
poets whom we can name: (?) Alexis, Ameipsias, Anaxandrides, (?)
Antiphanes, Archippus, Aristophanes, Chionides, Crates, Cratinus,
Ecphantides, Epicharmus, (?) Eubulus, Eupolis, Leucon, Philippus,
Plato, Strattis. But we have only chance fragments of the
Didascaliae, which must have been a

^ See below, pp. 168, 170, 174-5.

^ See above, pp. 111-2.

^ See Kaibel, pp. 133-8.

\* See above, pp. 29-30.

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mine of information regarding everything connected with the Athenian
dramatic contests, and hence regarding the comedies and their poets,
but especially, it would seem, the Old Comedy and Aristophanes.
Besides, there may be, and probably are, many unidentified allusions
to comic poets in the extant works of Aristotle, as, for example, in
the Rhetoric. The references that follow are therefore at best
symptomatic of his interest.

Ecphantides

(i) ' The popularity [of the flute at Athens] is shown by the tablet
which Thrasippus dedicated when he furnished the chorus to
Ecphantides.'^

Epicharmus

(i) \* There are likewise false antitheses such as Epicharmus
produced:

Now on a time within their halls I was; But on a time beneath their
roof was I.'^

(2) ' In maxims that do not state something unexpected, no reason is
subjoined. Of these, some need no added reason, because they are
familiar beforehand ; for example:

To my mind, 't is best for a man to be healthy.*^

No reason is needed — this is the usual opinion.'^

(3) \* They [the most popular maxims, having the nature, but not the
form, of enthymemes] are the ones

^ Politics 8. 6. For Ecphantides, an early poet of the Old Comedy,
preceding Cratinus, cf. Meineke i. 35-8.

2 Rhetoric 3. 9. Cf. Cope-Sandys 3. 106; Epicharmus, frg. 147 (49,
Lorenz) in Kaibel, p. 118. It is thought that the poet ridiculed and
parodied the antitheses and other rhetorical tricks of Gorgias and
his school of oratory.

^ The scholiast on Plato, Gorgias 451 e, ascribes the line either to
Simonides or to Epicharmus. Meineke and Kaibel doubtfully attribute
it to Epicharmus: Kaibel, p. 140, frg. \*262.

\* Rhetoric 2. 21.

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in which the reason for the statement is imphed, as in

Nurse not immortal anger, being mortal.

To say that it is wrong to nurse one's anger for ever is a maxim; the
added words, '\* being mortal/' give the reason. Similarly:

A mortal should think mortal thoughts, not thoughts immortal.'^

(4) ' Accumulation, too, and climax — as used by Epicharmus — [serve
to magnify a subject]; partly for the same reason as the distributive
process, since the accumulation of details makes any pre-eminence
striking ; and partly for the reason that what you are magnifying
appears to be the origin and cause of many things.'^

(5) \* Now we speak of one thing coming from another in many senses.
. . . Thus we say that night comes from day, . . . meaning that A
follows B. Or, secondly, that a statue is made from bronze, . . .
meaning that the whole arises from something that exists and is
shaped. Or, thirdly, that a man becomes unmusical from being musical,
. . . and generally in the sense of opposites arising from opposites.
And, lastly, as in the climax, the poetical device of Epicharmus, "
from slander arises railing, and from this, fighting " ; and all
these from something which is the beginning of the motion [the
efficient cause]. In such cases the efficient cause may be in the
things themselves, as in the instance just mentioned (for the slander
is a part of the whole trouble), or it may be external to them, as
the art is external to the works of art or the torch to the burning
house.'2

(6) 'A " beginning " is that part of a thing from which one would
first proceed; ... or that from which

^ Rhetoric 2. 21. Aristotle's first quotation is regarded as a line
from some tragedy (see Jebb's translation, p. 114, f. n.); the second
was ascribed by Bentley to Epicharmus (Kaibel, p. 140, frg. \*263).

^ Rhetoric 1. 7; see Epicharmus, frg. 148, Kaibel, p. 118.

^ De Generatione Animalium 1. 18. Aristotle quotes, perhaps loosely,
from Epicharmus. Cf. Epicharmus, frg. 148, Kaibel, p. 118.

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a particular thing would best originate ; ... or that part from
which, when the part exists, a thing first arises; ... or that, not a
part of the thing, from which a thing first arises, and from which
the movement, the change, naturally first proceeds, ... as from
railing comes fighting.'^

(7) \* To come from something means, first, to arise from something
as from matter. . . . Secondly, as from the first moving principle ;
for example, from what does fighting come ? It comes from railing, in
that raihng is the origin of fighting.'^

(8) \* It seems that benefactors like those who receive their favors
more than the recipients like the benefactors. . . . The usual
explanation is that benefactors are creditors and the recipients
debtors. That is, as in the case of loans the debtors would be
pleased if their creditors ceased to exist, and the creditors are
anxious for the safety of their debtors, so the benefactors desire
the existence of the recipients with a view to subsequent favors from
the recipients in return, while the latter are not anxious to repay
the debt. Epicharmus doubtless would describe the persons who gave
this explanation as " looking on the bad side " ; but it appears to
be true to human psychology. ... Still, the true reason seems to lie
deeper down in the nature of things. . . . People who have conferred
benefactions upon others feel love and affection for the recipients
even if the recipients neither are nor can be of service to them; . .
. for every craftsman loves his own works more than these works, if
they were endowed with hfe, would love him. This doubtless is true,
above all, of poets; they have an extraordinary affection for their
own poems — an affection like the love of a parent for his
children.'2

(9) ' Wherefore, while they speak plausibly, they do not speak truly;
for it is more fitting to state the matter

^ Metaphysics 5 (^). i. 2 Ihid. 5 {/}). 24.

^ Nicomachean Ethics 9. 7. This passage is our source for Epicharmus,
frg. 146, Kaibel, pp. 117-8.

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thus than as Epicharmus put the case against Xenoph-anes. Further,
they held their view because they saw all this world of nature in
motion, and saw the impossibility of making a true statement about
that which is changing ; at least, concerning that which everywhere
in every respect is changing nothing could truly be affirmed/^

(10) 'The reason is that their hypotheses and their principles are
false.

When the grounds are not fine, it is hard to speak finely, according
to Epicharmus:

No sooner 't is uttered than \*t is seen to be wrong.' ^

(11) \* And since we do all things more by day than by night, the
intellect is concerned with the activities of the body. But when
sensation is separated from intellect, it has, as it were, a
non-sensational action; whence the sajdng:

Mind sees, and mind hears.'^

These references, with the two allusions to Epicharmus in the
*Poetics*,"^ make a fair showing for that poet in the works of
Aristotle.

Aristophanes

(i) \* In using epithets, too, we may characterize an object either
from its mean or ugly aspect — as " [Orestes] the matricide," — or
from its better aspect — as, " the avenger of his sire." Thus
Simonides, when the victor in the mule-race offered him a small fee,
declined to write an ode, affecting reluctance to write poetry on "
half-asses " ; but, when the fee was made large enough, he wrote :

Hail, daughters of storm-footed mares!

^ Metaphysics 4. (P). 5. Epicharmus, frg. 252, Kaibel, p. 138.
Compare the allusion to Epicharmus in the Theaetetus of Plato, above,
p. 111-2.

2 Metaphysics 13 {M). 9. Epicharmus, frg. 251, Kaibel, p. 138.

^ Problems ii. 33. Epicharmus, frg. 249, Kaibel, p. 137.

^ See below, pp. 172, 177.

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(But they were equally daughters of the asses, too.) Again, without
abandoning a given epithet, one may turn it into a diminutive. By a
diminutive I mean a form that lessens either the good or the bad in
the description; for example, the banter of Aristophanes in the
Babylonians, where he uses " coinlet " for coin, " cloaklet " for
cloak, " gibelet " for gihe, and " plague-let."'^

(2) ' Such, then, is the nature of antithesis. Pari-sosis is when the
members are equal; paromoiosis when each member has the extremes
alike. This must be either at the beginning or the end. At the
beginning, the likeness must always be between whole words ; and at
the end, it may be in the final syllables of words, or inflections of
the same word, or in the repetition of a word. Thus, at the
beginning:

aypov yap D^apsv apyov Tuap' auToU.' ^

(3) From the schoUast on Aristophanes' Clouds 552 : \* It is clear
that the first version of the Maricas [of Eupolis] was brought out
before the second version of the Clouds. Callimachus, says
Eratosthenes, censures the Didascaliae, because it is held that the
Maricas was brought out in the third year after the Clouds, while the
Didascaliae specifically state that it appeared before the Clouds. "
He fails to note," says he, " that, in the Clouds as exhibited, no
such thing as the following was uttered; but if the utterance is made
in the later revision, that occasions no difficulty. The Didascaliae
clearly refer to the play as exhibited." '^

(4) From Argument 5 (Dindorf) to the Clouds : ' The first version of
the Clouds was exhibited in the archon-

^ Rhetoric 3. 2, trans, by Jebb, pp. 151-2, revised. Aristophanes,
frg. 90, Kock I. 414.

2 Rhetoric 3. 9, trans, by Jebb, p. 166, revised. Aristophanes, frg.
649, Kock I. 553. Perhaps one may translate thus: 'Tilth he took, /
Tilled not, from him.'

^ Aristotle, frg. 621, Rose, p. 389.

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ship of Isarchus, when Cratinus won over it with the Flagon, and
Ameipsias with the Connus.'^

(5) From Argument 3 (Dindorf) to the Peace : \* It is said in the
Didascaliae that Aristophanes exhibited a play bearing the same name
as the Peace. And hence it is not clear, says Eratosthenes, whether
he exhibited the same play [revised] or brought out another that has
not been preserved. Crates,^ however, knew two plays, writing thus :
" Well then, in the Acharnians or the Babylonians, or in the other
Peace." '^

(6) From Argument i (Dindorf) to the Peace: ' The poet won with the
drama when Alcaeus was archon in the city. First, Eupolis with the
Flatterer ; second, Aristophanes with the Peace-, third, Leucon with
the Clansmen.'^

(7) From the scholiast on Plato's Apology, p. 330 (Bekker) : '
Meletus was an inferior tragic poet of Thracian stock, according to
Aristophanes in the Frogs and the Storks, who calls him " son of
Laius," since in the year when the Storks was exhibited Meletus
produced an Oedipodia, according to Aristotle in the Didascaliae.' ^

(8) From the scholiast on Birds 1379 : \* He [Cinesias] is mentioned
in the Frogs. In the Didascaliae Aristotle says there were two of the
same name.'^

1 Ibid. Regarding Cratinus, I will here record the parallel (to me, a
seemingly chance one) noted by Kock, between the reference to
Terpander and the Lesbian Ode in Aristotle, frg. 502. i56oai-3 (frg.
545, Rose), and the similar reference in Cratinus' Chirones, frg.
243, Kock i. 87. Cf. also the reference to this comedy in Zenobius,
Proverbs 2. 66 = Aristotle, frg. 616, Rose, p. 388.

^ Not the comic poet, but the later critic, of the second century B.
C.

^ Aristotle, frg. 622, Rose, p. 390,

•\* Ibid.

^ Aristotle, frg. 628, Rose, p. 392.

^ Aristotle, frg. 629, Rose, p. 392.

For a possible reference to the Daedalus of Aristophanes, see below,
p. 159, under Archippus. To the foregoing items I will add the fact,
noted by Kock, that Aristotle speaks of the Delphian knife in
Politics i. 2, and Aristophanes speaks of it in frg. 684, which
fragment Bergk assigns to the Aeolosicon (Kock i. 560, cf. 3. 724.)
For Aristotle's most significant reference to Aristophanes, see
above, pp. i, 29-30, below, p. 172.

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Strattis

(i) ' For the verse of Strattis ridiculing Euripides —

Use no perfumery to flavor soup —

contains a truth. Those who nowadays introduce such flavors into
beverages deforce our sense of pleasure by habituating us to them,
until, from two distinct kinds of sensation combined, pleasure arises
as it might from one simple kind.'^

(2) From the scholiast on Aristophanes' Frogs 404: ' In the
archonship of the said Callias, according to Aristotle, it was
decreed that two choregi jointly should defray the costs of the
chorus at the Dionysia for the tragedies and the comedies; so that
perhaps there was some reduction of expense for the contest at the
Lenaea. Not long after, Cinesias finally abolished the provision for
choruses; and hence in the drama aimed at him Strattis said: " The
stage of the chorus-killing Cinesias." '^

Plato [the comic poet)

(i) ' By ancient witnesses I mean the poets and other celebrities
whose judgments stand on record. . . . Recent witnesses are any
well-known persons who have decided a point, as their discussions are
useful to those who are contending about the same questions. Thus
Eubulus [the orator] employed against Chares the saying of Plato [?
the comic poet] against Archibius that " the avowal of rascality has
gained ground at Athens."'3

^ Aristotle, De Sensu 5, trans, by Beare, revised. The line is from
the Phoenissae of Strattis, frg. 45, Kock i. 724-5.

^ Aristotle, frg. 630, Rose, p. 392 (frg. 619, Heitz) ; cf. Haigh, p.
54.

The common proverb, \* Joining flax to flax,' occurs in Aristotle,

Physica Auscultatio 3. 6, and also in Strattis, Potamii, frg. 38,

Kock I. 722 (cf. Kock 3. 730) ; but, if Aristotle had to take it from

a literary source, he could find it in Plato, Euthydemus 298 c.

^ Rhetoric i. 15, trans, by Jebb, pp. 62, 63, revised. Meineke (2.
692, frg. 41) identifies the ' Plato' here mentioned with the comic
poet of that name, while Spengel takes the reference to be to the
philosopher; see Kock i. 660-1, frg. 219. And compare above, p. 105.

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Archippus

(i) From Photius, Lexicon, s. v. ovou (r/.ia: ' Aristotle in the
Didascaliae mentions the title of a drama, the Ass's Shadow.''^

Compare Zenobius, Proverbs 6. 28, 67U£p ovou gy.w.c, : ' And there
was a comedy by Archippus, the Ass's Shadow.' ^

To judge from Photius, the Didascaliae may have mentioned the
Daedalus of Aristophanes in the same connection. ^

Philifpus or Eubulus

(i) ' Some say that the soul in fact moves the body in which it is,
in the same way as it moves itself; so, for instance, Democritus. And
herein he resembled Philippus the comic poet; for the latter says
that Daedalus endowed the wooden Aphrodite with motion by pouring in
quicksilver/^

Ana xandr ides

It will be remembered that the third of the following references has
been connected with this poet by mere conjecture.

(i) \* Metaphors are of four kinds; of these the most popular are the
" proportional." Of this kind was the saying of Pericles that the
youth who had perished in the war had vanished from the city in such
sort as if the spring were taken out of the year. ... Or take the
iambic line in Anaxandrides about the daughters who had long gone
unmarried. [A speaker in the comedy says]:

^ Aristotle, frg. 625, Rose, p. 391.

2 Ibid.

^ See Aristotelis Fragmenta, ed. by Heitz, Paris, 1869, p. 304 (frg.
616).

\* De Anima i. 3. Aristotle refers to the comedy entitled Daedalus,
ascribed to Philippus, son of Aristophanes, or (preferably) to
Eubulus ; there may be some confusion of two plays with the same
name. See Meineke i. 340-3; Kock 2. 172-3.

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The marriage-bonds of the maidens [= spinsters], I believe, are
overdue.' ^

(2) \* Of the same sort [clever sayings] is the hne that has been
admired in Anaxandrides:

Well is it to die ere one has done a thing worthy of death ;

for this is equivalent to saying, " It is a worthy thing to die
without being worthy to die." '^

(? 3) \* " A worthy man should wed a worthy wife." But this is not
clever.' [That is, it is platitudinous.]^

(4) ' But when we employ reiteration, we must also vary. . . .
Philemon the actor did this in delivering the passage about "
Rhadamanthus and Palamedes " in the Gerontomania of Anaxandrides, and
similarly in varying the pronunciation of " I " in the Prologue to
The Good Men.'^

(5) \* The incontinent person, then, may be compared to a State which
passes all such bills as it ought to pass, and has excellent laws,
but does not carry them out — as Anaxandrides taunted:

'Twas the State's will; the State recks not of law.'"

For Alexis, see above, p. 150, below, p. 201. For Antiph-anes, see
above, pp. 34, 149. For Ameipsias, see above, p. 157, under
Aristophanes (4). For Chionides, see below, p. 172. For Crates, see
below, p. 177. For Cratinus, see above, p. 157 and footnote, under
Aristoph-

^ Rhetoric 3. 10. Aristotle quotes from an unidentified play of
Anaxandrides : frg. 68, Kock 2. 162. The conditions would be met by a
comedy on the tale of the Suppliant Maidens. In the American Journal
of Philology 41. 50 I suggest the Herald of King Aegyptus as a
possibility for the speaker.

^ Rhetoric 3. ii ; Anaxandrides, frg. 64, Kock 2. 161.

^ Rhetoric 3. 11. The line is attributed to Anaxandrides: frg. 79,
Kock 2. 164. Cf. Rhetoric, ed. by Cope-Sandys, 3. 137, bottom ;
Spengel, Artium Scriptores, p. 20; Meineke 3. 201. Kock (as before)
includes the line under the disputed fragments of the poet.

\* Rhetoric 3. 12. For the Gerontomania see Kock 2. 138-9, frg. 9 and
(especially) 10. Kock (2. 140) ascribes The Good Men {Evae^elg) to
Anaxandrides on the sole authority of this passage in Aristotle.

^ Nicomachean Ethics 7. 11, trans, by Welldon, p. 233, revised.

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REFERENCES TO THE COMIC CHORUS i6i

anes (4). For Eupolis, see above, pp. 156—7, under Aristophanes (3)
and (6). For Magnes, see below, p. 172. For Phormis, see below, p.
177.

Hegemon of Thasos, mentioned by Aristotle as a parodist (see below,
p. 170), was also a comic poet, and the Nicochares mentioned with him
may have been the comic poet of that name.

XIV

REFERENCES TO THE COMIC CHORUS IN WORKS OTHER THAN THE POETICS

(i) From Harpocration, Lexicon, s. v. BtBa(7)talo?: ' They give the
name " teachers " [BiBa(7xaXoi—i. e., of the chorus] to the poets who
are authors of dithyrambs, or of comedies, or of tragedies. Antiphon
in his work On the Choral Dancer says that Pantacles was an inferior
BiBciccrxa>.o?. And that Pantacles was a poet Aristotle has made
clear in the Didascaliae/^

(2) From the scholiast on Aristophanes' Frogs 404: \* In the
archonship of the said Callias, according to Aristotle, it was
decreed that two choregi jointly should defray the costs of the
chorus at the Dionysia for the tragedies and the comedies.' ^

(3) ' Next he [the archon] assigns choregi to the tragic poets,
choosing three of the richest persons out of the whole body of
Athenians. Formerly he used also to assign five choregi to the comic
poets, but now the tribes provide the choregi for them. Then he
receives the choregi who have been appointed by the tribes for the
men's and boys' choruses and the comic poets at the Dionysia.'^

^ Aristotle, frg. 624, Rose, p. 391. 2 Aristotle, frg. 630, Rose, p.
392. Cf. above, p. 158. ^ Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 56,
trans, by Kenyon, in the Oxford translation of Aristotle, ed. by
Ross, 1920.

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(4) ' Since the State is a partnership, and is a partnership of
citizens in a constitution, when the form of the government changes
and becomes different, then it may be supposed that the State is no
longer the same ; just as a tragic differs from a comic chorus,
although the members of both may be identical. And in this manner we
speak of every union or composition of elements as different when the
form of their composition alters; for example, a scale containing the
same sounds is said to be different, accordingly as the Dorian or the
Phrygian mode is employed.'^

(5) ' At Lacedaemon there was a choregus who led the chorus with a
flute, and at Athens the instrument became so popular that most
freemen could play upon it. The popularity is shown by the tablet
which Thrasippus dedicated when he furnished the chorus to
Ecphantides/2

(6) ' The vulgar man . . . spends large sums upon trifles, and makes
a display which is offensive to good taste, ... for example, ... if
he provides a comic chorus, by bringing the members of it on to the
stage in purple dresses, after the manner of the Megarians.' ^

XV

SCATTERED PASSAGES ON LAUGHTER

The Greek verb for ' smile ' does not occur in the writings of
Aristotle ; but we find a number of passages showing an interest,
more or less scientific, in the act of laughing, in the laughter of
infants, and in tickhng-matches.

(i) ' And when they are awake infants do not laugh, but asleep they
both weep and laugh.'\*

^ Politics 3. 3 ; Jowett's translation revised by Ross, in the Oxford
translation of Aristotle. ^ Ibid. 8. 6 ; same translation,

3 Nicomachean Ethics 4. 6, trans, by Welldon, p. iii. ■' De
Generatione Animalium 5. i.

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SCATTERED PASSAGES ON LAUGHTER 163

(2) ' Until the child is forty days old it neither laughs nor weeps
during waking hours, but at night it sometimes does both; nor for the
most part does it notice when it is tickled. In the main it spends
its time in sleep.'^

(3) ' That heating of it [the midriff] affects sensation rapidly and
in a notable manner is shown by the phenomena of laughter; for when
men are tickled they are quickly set a-laughing, because the motion
quickly reaches this part, and, heating it though but slightly, yet
manifestly so disturbs the mental action as to occasion movements
that are independent of the will. That man alone is affected by
tickling is due first to the delicacy of his skin, and secondly to
his being the only animal that laughs; for to be tickled is to be set
in laughter, the laughter being produced by such a motion as
mentioned of the region of the armpit. . . .

' Moreover, among the Barbarians, where heads are chopped off with
great rapidity, nothing of the kind [a dissevered head speaking] has
ever yet occurred. Why, again, does not the like occur in the case of
other animals than man ? For that none of them should laugh, when
their midriff is wounded, is but what one would expect; for no animal
but man ever laughs.'^

(4) ' Why is it that no one tickles himself ?

\* Is it not because one is tickled less even by another when the act
is expected, and more when one does not see the other person, so that
the effect is minimized when one is aware of the experience ?
Laughter is a sort of surprise and deception — and that is why people
laugh when they are struck in the midriff; for it is not by being
struck in any chance spot that we are made to laugh. What escapes
notice deceives us ; and that is why the same thing sometimes is, and
sometimes is not, a cause of laughter.'^

\* Historia Animalium 7. 10.

\* De Partibus Animalium 3. 10, trans, by Ogle in the Oxford
translation of Aristotle, ed. by Smith and Ross, 1911, revised.

\* Problems 35. 6.

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(5) \* Why is it that we laugh when we are tickled about the armpit,
and do not when tickled elsewhere ?' ^

The answer is given that, when too much breath accumulates, we expel
it.

(6) ' Why is it that in weeping the voice is higher, while in
laughing it is lower ?

' Is it not because, in the one case, we set the breath in motion
only a little, through weakness, and, in the other, much, with the
result that the breath is carried rapidly ? But the rapid air makes
the high tone; for that which is expelled from a tense body is put in
rapid motion. On the contrary, when we laugh we are relaxed. And when
men are sick the voice is high, for they set little air in motion ;
whereas the others move it above. Further, in laughing, the air we
throw off is hot. In weeping, on the other hand, the effect of grief
is, as it were, a cooling of the region of the chest, and the breath
that is expelled is cooler. Now the heat sets much air in motion, so
that it is carried far, but the cold sets Httle. The same thing is
observed in the case of flutes; for when the players are warm, and
blow warm air in, the sound they produce is much lower.' 2

(7) ' Why is it that in weeping the voice is higher, while in
laughing it is lower ?

' Is it not because in weeping one tightens and draws together the
mouth as one utters sounds ? By the tightening, then, the air within
is set in rapid motion, and is carried through the narrow opening of
the mouth, borne more rapidly. Through both causes it is that the
voice becomes sharper. On the contrary, in laughing the tension is
relaxed, and the mouth is opened wide. And when the air goes out in a
wide and broad stream, the sound is naturally low.'^

(8) \* It is no wonder [in respect to continence and incontinence],
if a person is mastered by strong and

^ Problems 35. 8.

2 Ibid. II, 13; cf. II. 50.

3 Ibid. II. 15 ; cf. II. 50.

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SCATTERED PASSAGES ON LAUGHTER 165

overwhelming pleasures or pains; nay, it is pardonable, if he
struggles against them like Philoctetes when bitten by the snake in
the play of Theodectes, or like Cercyon in the Alope of Carcinus, or
like people who in trying to suppress their laughter burst out in a
loud guffaw, as happened to Xenophantus.'"

(9) ' For as people can not be tickled if they are themselves the
beginners in a tickling-match, so some people if they anticipate or
foresee what is comings and have roused themselves and their reason
to resist it before it comes, are not overcome by their emotion,
whether it be pleasant or painful.' ^

(10) \* Why do we restrain our laughter less in the presence of
familiar friends ?

'Is it not the case that when the suspense is great, the release is
easily effected ? Now good will tends rather to the utterance of the
laughable, and hence effects the release/^

^ Nicomachean Ethics 7. 8, trans, by Welldon, p. 226. Nothing further
is known regarding the story of Xenophantus. 2 Ibid., trans, by
Welldon, p. 227. ^ Problems 28. 8.

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THE POETICS OF ARISTOTLE APPLIED TO COMEDY

[A theory of comedy derived from what Aristotle says of this form of
art, or inferred from what he says of other forms, in his *Poetics* ;
with additional comments, and illustrations from various sources. The
treatment in the main, and the wording to a considerable extent,
follow my ' Amplified Version.' Longer additions, and most of the
illustrations, are enclosed in square brackets; but it should not be
inferred that passages not so enclosed adhere to the letter, rather
than the spirit, of the original. The direct references to comedy in
the *Poetics* are printed in bold-face types.]

Chapter i In the '*Poetics* Aristotle offers to discuss the nature of
the poetic art in general, and to treat of the several species of
poetry, one of which is comedy; above all ''°eS' re ^ with regard to
the essential quality or ' power ' (= func-s?pucture and "^ tion) of
each species. Accordingly, he would (in all function probability) lay
stress upon the function of comedy

— that is, upon the characteristic effect produced by the work of the
comic poet on the trained sensibilities of the judicious spectator or
reader. And he would therefore examine that organic structure of the
comic play as a whole which is indispensable to the composition of an
ideally effective poem, including in his survey the number and nature
of the formative elements, and such other points as fall within the
same inquiry respecting form and function.

Following the natural order, we begin with what is fundamental to
poetry as a genus, namely the principle of \* imitation ' — that is,
of artistic representation. Comedy, like epic poetry, tragedy,
dithyrambic poetry, and most flute-playing and lyre-playing [as also
painting and sculpture], is in its general nature a

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form of imitation; [that is, the comic poet in his work
fh^o'thi/im-\* imitates ' or re-presents somethiner — his idea or
con- uative arts, re-

,^ K r r J. • 1, 1^ presents some

ception — through an arrangement 01 certain sj^qdois object in a such
as words or notes. Nowadays we should call the "^f^^l^^T formation of
his idea, and his \* imitation ' of the idea, an artistic creation.]
But, having this in common with other kinds of art that it is a form
of imitation, comedy differs from one or another of them in three
respects; for among the imitative arts there are differences in —

(i) The means by which they imitate — the \* medium.' [Thus comedy
employs language for its medium, while sculpture employs stone, and
painting employs pigments.]

(2) The objects as these are represented. [One art may represent the
same object as worse, and another may represent it as better, than
the object ordinarily is. Comedy and mock-heroic poetry, for example,
represent men and their actions as worse than they commonly are;
tragedy and epic poetry, as better.]

(3) The manner in which these objects are imitated. [Comedy, for
example, hke tragedy, directly presents the actions of men, whereas
epic poetry relates such actions.]

We may further explain the term means, or \* medium.' '• ^^^ ""^^"^
As painters (some by art [i. e., by theory], others by Examples

, ,., - from other

constant practice) represent the likenesses 01 many arts, as
paint-things through the medium of colors and lines, so there
instrumental

- -T c 1 • T ^ l^ • music, and

are those who for their medium employ the voice, as dancing in
singing. And so in the group of arts to which comedy belongs, the
imitation of the objects is produced in the medium of rhythm,
language, and harmony, these three media being used either singly or
in combination. For example, in flute-playing and Ijnre-playing the
media are harmony and rhythm combined; as in any other arts having a
similar effect — for

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instance, imitation on the Pan-pipes. [Thus a comic action might be
produced in unadorned prose (' language ' pure and simple), or in
metre (' language ' plus definitely recurrent ' rhythm '), or in
metrical language intended to be sung (' language ' plus ' rhythm '
plus sung ' harmony'). For the first case, see Shakespeare, Tempest,
scene one; for the second. Tempest, scene two ; for the third.
Tempest 1.2. 375—385.] In the art

of dancing, the medium is rhythm alone, without harmony; for in this
art the performers also represent human character, and what men feel
and do, and the medium of this imitation is rhythm in bodily
movement. [The remark has an additional value for comedy, as for
tragedy, since each may employ this art, as in the motions of the
chorus. Both kinds of drama likewise employ the singing voice as well
as the music of the flute and the lyre.]

An art with Then there is a form of art in which the medium of

the medium of

lanouaoe alone, imitation is language alone, without harmony, and
that,

whether met o o \* j'

ricai or not too, whether the language be metrical or not; if it be
metrical language, there may be one single sort of metre, or several
sorts in conjunction. This form of imitation thus far lacks a name;
since we have no term that might be applied in common to the mimes

mime*"an^d the ^^ ^ Sophron or Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues;

dialogue ^^^ should we have a term even if the imitation in these

cases employed the medium of iambic, elegiac, or any other such
metre. People have a way, it is true, of connecting the word ' poet '
(that is, maker) with the name of one or another kind of verse, so
that they talk of \* elegiac poets,' and ' epic ' (that is,
hexameter) \* poets,' as if it were not the principle of imitation
that characterized the artist — as if one might term them all poets
indiscriminately because of the metre. [But the question of
terminology growing out of metrical considerations is negligible for
comedy. As versified

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natural science is not poetry; as it is the principle of imitation,
not the metre, that differentiates poetry in general, and comedy as a
branch of it, from what is not poetry; so the comic prose mimes of
Sophron, and the Symposium of Plato (or \* Socratic Conversations'
generally — with their close relation to the mime), are in essence
allied to comedy. The word mime has the same root as mimesis (that
is, ' imitation '). No one word in Greek criticism answers to our \*
literature.']

But comedy is one of the arts which combine all the comedy em-media
enumerated, namely, rhythm, melody, and met- media:rhythm,

,, 1 1 ITT 1- 1 • melody, and

rical language ; as do tragedy and dithyrambic and nomic metre
poetry. Yet here again there is a difference; for in dithyrambic and
nomic poetry all three media are employed together, whereas in comedy
and tragedy ^ominuousiy they are brought in separately. [If
Aristotle's \* rhythm' here refers to the motions of the chorus, a
discrepancy in part disappears (see below, pp. 174,179); if not, we
must say, more strictly, that in Aristophanic comedy ' it is only the
music that comes in intermittently, in the choral parts ' (to adopt
the language of Bywater).]

We turn now to the objects which the poet or other Chapter 2 artist
represents: these are human beings in action— 2. The object: men and
women doing or undergoing something. And ^^^ '" ^°*'°" the agents
must be either of a lower or a higher type; for in virtually every
case the differences in the characters represented proceed from this
primary distinction, since it is the line between virtue and vice
that divides us all in real life. It follows that in the imitation
the agents must be represented as worse than i^^e agents

" -^ must be either

we ourselves, or some such men as we, or better than beiow the
average, or average we. Thus, to take our instance from the painters,
"len, or above

•^ the average

Pauson depicted men worse than the average, Dionys-

ius men like ourselves, and Polygnotus men better than

the average. [Or a modern parallel: the subjects of Hogarth are of a
lower type, and those of the Dutch

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170 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

and Flemish portrait-painters are near to the average level of
humanity, while those of Raphael are of a higher type. Aristotle has
in mind the tendency of one painter to lower, and of another to
ennoble, a given subject from the level of ordinary life; so a
caricaturist accentuates ugliness in men of his time.]

It is clear that each of the modes of imitation we

have noted will admit of these differences of elevation

in the object as imitated, and will be a separate art in

so far as there is this difference in representing the

Dancing and ^^^^j^^t as lower, or higher, or midway between the two

l^f.l'il!1I,l"J!L«u, extremes. Such diversities are possible even in
danc-

music may snow xr

?he"averaoe^ iug and flute-playing and lyre-playing; and similarly

in the above-mentioned nameless art (including prose

The diaieoue dialogues and prose mimes) without music, and in

and the mime , • i • • • ^ . ^. ,

iii<ewise metrical compositions without music. Thus the agents

represented by Homer are better than we; the agents in the epic of
the commonplace by Cleophon are on our level; and those in the
mock-heroic travesty of Jn^'^Heg^emon*^ Homer by HegemoH of Thasos —
the first author to an^d in'^Sfc?- take up parodj as a special form
of poetry — are below moTk-epic*'^ \*^'^ the average, as are the
personages in the mock-heroic Diliad of Meochares. [Diliad (with a
word-play on Iliad) —as it were, 'The Poltroniad.' Another
illustration would be this: the knights in Spenser's Faerie Queene,
or in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, are elevated and idealized; the
monks in Frere's King Arthur and his Round Table are of a lower type;
and the agents in the modern realistic novel are mostly persons like

ourselves.! The same distinction holds good in dith-

So also the . .

nome yrambs and in nomes; for example, in the lower types

in the nomes of Argas and the higher in those of . . .,

mmr-Vlin'!" ^^^ ^^ ^^^ dithyrambic tale by Philoxenus, who ren-

the"cydops"^ dcrcd the Cyclops ignoble, and that of Timotheus, who

elevated the type. [There is a gap in the text, and the

interpretation is doubtful. \* Argas ' is a conjecture,

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171

and what is said of Philoxenus is a plausible supposition. —
Polyphemus, already a half-comic personage in the Odyssey, became a
stock figure in various kinds of poetry. For the comic tradition,
compare the Cyclops of Euripides with the Cyclops in Theocritus,

Idyls 6 and 11.] Now in respect to the objects of imitation, this
difference sets comedy apart from tragedy. Comedy tends to represent
the agents as worse, and tragedy as better, than the men of our day.
[That is, the personages of comedy are more often below the average
than average — though the average is poor. Thus in Moliere the hero
of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is a kind of average citizen, made
ridiculous — that is, depressed below the average; while Harpagon in
UAvare and Tartuffe are types already below the average.]

There is yet a third among these differences, namely, a difference
touching the manner in which a given object [for example, a boor in a
contest with a buffoon] may be imitated. Let us suppose that the
object of the imitation remains the same [say, ludicrous men in a
contest], and likewise the medium [say, metrical language]. Under
these conditions, (i) the poet may produce his work in narrative,
either (a) as Homer does, in an assumed role, or (b) in his own
words, without changing his personality ; or, on the other hand, (2)
all the imitated personages may be presented as living and moving
before us. [Homer, in fact, sometimes speaks

in his own person, but for the most part makes fictitious personages
speak; see, for example, the Homeric description of Thersites,
followed by the speech put into the mouth of Thersites by the poet
(Iliad 2. 211—224, 225—242). The method of direct presentation is
illustrated by any-comedy of Aristophanes (as the Plutus) or of any
other comic poet (say, Moliere's L'Avare).]

These three differences there are, then, as was said at first, in the
nature of the imitation: a difference in

Comedy differs from tragedy in that its agents are worse rather than
better

Chapter 3 3. The manner

A comic story may be given as narrative, either in fictitious
speeches, or by the poet narrating throughout

Or it may be directly presented as drama

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172 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Aristophanes, like Sophocles, directly presents men In action

Digression on the etymology of comedy and drama

Claims of Megara, Sicily, and Athens to the invention of comedy

Epicharmus a Sicilian, eariier than Chionides and r^agnes of Attica,
according to the Dorians

the medium, a difference in the objects, and a difference in the
manner. The distinction enables us to indicate points of similarity
in certain kinds of art. Thus as an imitator Sophocles would be on
one side akin to Homer, since both represent agents of a higher type;
and on another to Aristophanes, since both represent personages as
experiencing and doing. [In this striking passage the emphasis has
been left where Aristotle puts it. He could hardly recommend
Aristophanes more signally as the leading comic poet than by thus
linking him with Homer, the fountain-head of Greek poetry, and with
Sophocles^ whose Oedipus the King counts in the *Poetics* as the nearly
perfect tragedy. But the shift of emphasis for comedy is easily made:
In respect to the objects imitated, the dramatist Aristophanes is
akin to the narrative poet Homer (in the Margites ; see below, p.
175), since both represent personages of a lower type; and in respect
to the manner of imitation, the comedies of Aristophanes are akin to
the tragedies of Sophocles, since both poets represent personages
directly as experiencing and doing.] Indeed, according to some,
herein lies the reason why comedies and tragedies are called '
dramas,' namely, because they represent men as ' doing' [BpwvTs?,
from the verb Bpav]. Hence also the Dorians lay claim to the
invention of tragedy as well as comedy ; for comedy is claimed by the
Megarians [= Dorians] — by those of Greece, who contend that it arose
among them at the time when Megara became a democracy, and on the
other hand by the Megarians of Sicily, on the ground that the first
true comic poet, Epicharmus, came from there, and was much earlier
than the Attic comic poets Chionides and Magnes; even tragedy is
claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese [i. e., the
Sicyonians]. Now these claims are put forward as resting upon the
etjonology of the words ' comedy '

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and \* drama/ They [the Dorians] say that their term for rural
hamlets is not demes, as with the Athenians, but comae ; and they
assume that ' comedians' acquired their name, not from xwjj.ajsiv ['
to revel'], but from their habit of strolling about from village to
village [zccTa YMimg], when a lack of appreciation forced them out of
the city. [' Comedy ' does, however, seem to be connected by
derivation with the verb yM[xdZ,ziv,' to revel,' and with the comus,
or wandering dance of the phallic worshipers.] As for the etymology
of ' drama,' they allege that the Dorian word for \* doing ' is not
TrpocT^siv, as with the Athenians, but Bpav, [Aristotle, however,

employs Bpccv (and also xpdcT^sLv) as a word in good usage at
Athens.]

As for its natural origin, comedy owes its being to Chapter 4

the two causes which have eiven rise to poetry in Poetry [and

^ r ^ hence corn-

general. Of these causes, each of them inherent in the edy] has its

^ origin in two

nature of man, the first is the habit of imitation : for natural
instincts

to imitate is instinctive with mankind from childhood; 1. The im-and,
among living creatures, man differs from the rest imitate in that he
is the most imitative, and learns at first through imitation.
Secondly, all men take a natural 5ei^*[,®t m^th?' pleasure in the
results of imitation — a pleasure to ""^suits which the facts of
experience bear witness; for even where the original objects are
repulsive, as the most fh7"pj'fna? objectionable of the lower
animals, or dead bodies, Jn^^ieasa^^t^ we still delight to
contemplate their forms in the most accurate representations. [For
comedy, compare the

huge beetle represented in the Peace of Aristophanes; the titles
(indicating the choruses) of his Wasps and Frogs; and the Corpse in
Frogs 169—177. Though Aristotle is not at this point thinking of
comedy, his remark has a wide range of application in that field,
when allowance is made for the comic modifications

of truth, once this is exactly observed.] The explanation

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174 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

The pleasure in the process of recognition

Imitation, music, and rhythm are innate in man

The first stages of poetry

improvisations

Two main divisions of poetry

IHymns Lampoons

The Homeric Margites

Origin and meaning of ' iambic'

of this delight lies in a further characteristic of our species, the
appetite for learning; for among human pleasures that of learning is
the keenest — not only to the scholarly, but to the rest of mankind
as well, however briefly the rest enjoy it. Accordingly, the reason
why men delight in pictures is that in the act of contemplating one
they are acquiring knowledge, and draw an inference to the effect
that ' This is So-and-so.' Consequently, if we happen not to have
seen the original, any pleasure arising from the picture will be due,
not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, or the coloring,
or some similar cause.

To imitate, then, is natural to us as men ; just as our sense of
musical harmony, and our sense of rhythm, are natural — and it is to
be noted that metre plainly falls under the general head of rhythm.
Accordingly, being from the outset possessed of these natural
endowments, and developing them by gradual and, in the main, slight
advances, men brought poetry into existence out of their
improvisations.

Poetry now split up into two varieties, corresponding to a difference
in the moral bent of the poets; for while the graver spirits
represented noble actions and the deeds of superior men, the lighter
represented the doings of the baser sort. And whereas others composed
hymns and panegyrics, these latter at first composed lampoons. We are
unable, it is true, to mention a poem in the lampooning vein by any
of the poets before Homer, though there probably were many such
authors among them. But beginning with Homer we have specimens, such
as the Margites and other poems of similar sort. In these, its
inherent suitability brought into use an iambic metre; and the reason
why we now employ the term ' iambic ' for satirical is that those
poets formerly

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175

lampooned, or \* iambized,' one another in this metre. Of the early
poets, accordingly, some became authors of iambic verse, and others
of heroic.

But Homer, who shared in both tendencies, was superior to the other
poets of either class. In the serious style he stands alone, not only
through the general excellence of his imitations, but through their
dramatic quality as well. So also was he superior in the comic vein,
since he first marked out the general lines of comedy, by rendering
the ludicrous dramatic — not composing personal invective ; for the
Margites bears the same relation to comedy as the Iliad and Odyssey
bear to tragedy. [The Margites, of post-Homeric origin, is known to
us only in a few scant fragments; Aristotle's estimate doubtless
rested upon his conception of the whole, and especially of the plot
in relation to the hero. In the Iliad and the Odyssey there are
incidents that betray the spirit of comedy; for example, the story of
Thersites (Iliad 2. 211 ff.), the exchange of gifts between Diomede
and Glaucus (6. 232—236), the deception of Polyphemus by Odysseus
(Odyssey 9. 353—374, 403—460), the grotesque episode of Aeolus and
the wind-bag (10. 17—76), and the fight between Irus and Odysseus
(18. i—107). Indeed, mainly because of the happy issue for Odysseus,
Aristotle says (see below, p. 201) that the pleasure arising from the
Odyssey is rather the one that belongs to comedy.]

When tragedy and comedy appeared, however, those poets with a natural
bent in one direction became authors of comedies, instead of iambs ;
and those with a natural bent in the other became producers of
tragedy, instead of epics; for these newer forms were greater and
were in higher esteem than the former.

Comedy originated in improvisations, as did tragedy also ; for
tragedy took its beginning from the improvising poet-leaders in the
dithyrambic chorus of sat^/rs ;

The Homeric Margites prefigures true comedy

In time, comedy, a more notable type, attracted poets with the
natural bent

Comedy began in the improvisations of the leaders in the phallic
procession

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176 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Chapter 5

The agents in comedy, and the nature of the ludicrous

The comic mask is an example

and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processional song and
dance, the performance of which continues as an institution in many
of the Greek cities.

[In addition to other gradual changes in tragedy,] there was a change
in the magnitude of the action represented, from the little plots of
the primitive form ; and, with its development out of the satyr-play,
tragedy also grew away from a ludicrous diction. Thus, at a late
period, however, it assumed its characteristic elevation of tone, and
the iambic metre repla.ced the trochaic tetrameter. Indeed, the
reason for the early use of the tetrameter was that tragedy had the
quality of the satyr-play, and was more on the order of dancing. But
as soon as the element of spoken discourse entered in, nature itself
found the appropriate metre — the iambic; for this is the readiest
metre in speaking.

Comedy, as has been said, is an artistic imitation of persons of an
inferior moral bent; faulty, however, not in any and every way, but
only in so far as their shortcomings are ludicrous; for the ludicrous
is a part or species, not all, of the genus ugly. It may be defined
as that kind of shortcoming and deformity [or disproportion] which
does not strike us as painful, and is not harmful [or ' corrupting
']; a ready example is afforded by the comic mask, which is
ludicrous, being ugly and distorted, without any suggestion of pain.

[The faults which it would appear were suitable for comic characters
might therefore be almost, if not quite, all the vices listed in
Nicomachean Ethics 2. 7, so long as these vices produced neither pain
nor harm; but, particularly, certain of the vices that were nearer to
the mean state, or state of virtue (rather than those less resembling
this), such as foolhardiness, prodigality, vulgarity, vanity,
impassivity, self-depreciation (= ' irony'), buffoonery,
obsequiousness or flattery, and bash-

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fulness. Yet the opposite and more extreme vices might be so
represented as not to be painful or injurious — as cowardice,
illiberality or avarice, boastfulness, boorishness; perhaps also
quarrelsomeness, licentiousness, and envy; possibly shamelessness and
malice. It has been thought by some that Aristotle deemed the buffoon
or low, jesting parasite, the ironical man or type of dissembled
ignorance, and the boastful man or type of impostors and braggarts,
as par excellence the characters {or ethe) of comedy; see above,
pp.118—9, and the Tractatus Coislinianus, below, pp. 226, 262—5. ^^
i^ often possible to reduce to one of these last three types a
character whose comic flaw at first might seem to be one of the other
vices ; so the incontinent Tartuffe of Moliere — as indeed the poet
suggests by appending the name, ' The Impostor.' In other cases, as
Har-pagon in Moliere's L'Avare, the flaw in character which gives
rise to the comic effect is clearly not one of these three, but, as
in L'Avare, avarice, or, as in Le Malade Imaginaire, cowardice or
some other vice.]

While the successive changes which tragedy under- tJJJlJn'^bout went,
and the authors of those changes, have not stagw'o'r escaped notice,
there is no record, says Aristotle, of '^•""^dy the early development
of comedy, for the reason that at first this form of drama was not
treated as a matter of much concern. Not until late in the progress
of comedy was the comic poet provided by the magistrate with a
chorus; until then the performers were simply unpaid volunteers. And
comedy had already taken definite shape by the time we begin to have
a record of those who are termed poets in this kind. Who was
responsible for introducing personages, or prologues, or additional

A • xi J Ti J X M . Sicilian origin

actors — concernmg these and like details we are m of comic plots:

ignorance. But the construction of plots came from and'^pUormis

Sicily, for Epicharmus and Phormis came from there; jhe Athenian

and, of Athenian comic poets. Crates was the first to ihTgenerai-

discard personal invective and to construct generaUzed fable'"*'\* ^^

m

|picture1|

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178 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Narrative [com ic] poetry com-pared with [comic] drama

A difference in the medium

A difference in the manner

A difference in length

Formative elements common to both species

plots and fables. [The active career of Crates just preceded that of
Aristophanes, the second of whose extant comedies, the Knights,
contains a reference to the elder poet, who probably was then dead.]

As may be seen [compare above, p. 172], mock-heroic poetry has thus
much in common with comedy: it is an imitation, in verse, of
ludicrous events. Still there is a difference (on the metrical side)
in the medium of imitation, as well as a difference in the manner ;
for the mock-epic employs one and the same metre throughout, whereas
comedy employs more than one metre; and the mock-epic is in the form
of a tale that is told, and not, like comedy, of an action directly
presented. And there is further a difference in length, since the
narrative poem is not restricted to any fixed limit of time, whereas
a comedy is restricted by the conventions of the stage.

[In Aristotle's view, the number of lines is related to the length of
time represented by the action. The narrative poem may represent a
long time, and hence may itself be long; whereas the drama commonly
represents a briefer time, and hence will be shorter. In speaking of
the epic poem and tragedy, he says that at first this difference did
not exist, neither being limited in point of time, but that later, in
his own day, writers of tragedy aimed to confine the action within
the limits of one revolution of the sun, or at all events not to
exceed this interval by very much. This is the only reference to what
long afterwards (never by him) was called the ' unity of time '; it
is not an injunction, but an observation subordinate to his
discussion of the length of a poem. He nowhere refers to anything
like a ' unity of place.' In fact, he mentions but two ' unities ' —
unity of action, and \* oneness ' of hero, which latter, he says,
does not constitute oneness of plot. It may be noted, however, that
the comedies of Aristophanes in general may be regarded as severally
occurring within the limits of one revolution of the sun.] Finally,
the comic narrative and comedy differ in respect to their

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179

formative elements; for four of these elements [plot, ethos, dianoia,
and diction] are common to both kinds of poetry, and two [music and
spectacle] are peculiar to comedy. [See below, pp. 215—6.] All the
formative elements of a comic narrative poem are to be found in
comedy; but not all the formative elements of comedy are included in
a comic narrative poem. It follows that a person who can tell what is
good or bad in the composition of a comedy can do the same for a
comic narrative, too.

... To define: a comedy is the artistic imitation of an action which
is ludicrous (or mirthful), organically complete, and of a proper
length; so much for the object imitated. As for the medium, the
imitation is produced in language with accessories that give
pleasure, one kind of accessory being introduced in one part, and
another in another part, of the whole. As for the manner, the
imitation is itself in the form of an action carried on by persons —
it is not narrated. [(?) And

as for the end or function resulting from the imitation of such an
object in such a mediiun and in such a manner, it is to arouse, and
by arousing to relieve, the emotions proper to comedy. (See above,
pp. 60—98, below, pp. 224,228.) At all events, the end of comedy is
to arouse laughter by the right means, and to give pleasure to

the judicious.] By language with accessories that give pleasure is
meant language which is simply rhythmical or metrical, language which
is delivered in recitative, and language which is uttered in song
(with music). And by the separate introduction of one kind of
accessory in one part, and of another in another part, is meant that
some parts of the comedy are worked out in verse alone, without being
sung or chanted, and others again in the form of singing or chanting.

[Gudeman, p. 11, f. n., thinks that the more exact

A good judge of [comic] drama is a good judge of [comic] narrative

Chapter 6

[Aristotie's definition of tragedy adapted to comedy]

m 2

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i8o THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

explanation of catharsis referred to in Politics 8. 7 has been lost
from the *Poetics* at this point, immediately following the definition
of tragedy. The application to comedy might be expected at a later
point in the work. As we have noted in the Introduction, it has been
generally assumed that, as Aristotle thought the arousal and relief,
or \* catharsis,' of pity and fear, and the resultant pleasure, to be
the proper effect of tragedy, so he would recognize some sort of
catharsis, and the resultant pleasure, to be the proper end of
comedy, basing his opinion upon the observable effect of the best
comedies on the spectator or reader. And this effect would be, so to
speak, both psychological and physiological — as in tragedy we have
the bodily shiver accompanying fear, and the flow of tears
accompanying pity. The inward feeling displays itself outwardly,
emotion and bodily reaction being in fact so closely allied as to be
virtually one and the same thing. The observable effects of comedy
are on the one hand a heightened sense of well-being, accompanied by
a thrill of joy, and even cries of joy, such as cheering, and on the
other hand the phenomena of laughter. According to Aristotle, the
pleasure derived from tragedy is partly direct, partly indirect.
There is the direct pleasure we derive from beholding a good
representation ; this, the satisfaction of the universal desire for
learning, arises from the play, or ' imitation,' as a whole, but also
from particular elements in the play such as \* recognitions,' or
discoveries of identity. And there are additional direct pleasures
arising from rhythmical or metrical composition, from the musical
element (which contributes much to the effect of the whole), and from
the element of ' spectacle ' (costume, painted scenery, and the
like). This last, though adventitious, and not properly the concern
of the art of poetry, still is not negligible. Then there is the
indirect satisfaction, peculiar to tragedy, arising from the relief
or \* purgation ' of pity and fear. In comedy, therefore, we might
expect him to appreciate both positive and negative sources of
pleasure. The pleasures connected with imitation, with discoveries or
recognitions, with

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rhythm, music, and spectacle, would be positive. And there is also
the positive satisfaction arising from the happy issue of the story.
On the negative side, and doubtless more especially, there would be
the relief of one or more emotions, associated with the outward act
of laughter. The question is, what will be the emotional state or
inward tension which is relieved by the laughter of comedy, as the
overplus of pity and fear common to everyday life is relieved by the
suspense and tears of tragedy ? The matter has been discussed at some
length in the Introduction (pp. 63— 76). Here we shall assume that,
as men in daily life are accustomed to suffer from a sense of
disproportion, it is this that is relieved or purged away by the
laughter of comedy; for comedy (witness the comic mask) distorts
proportions; its essence is the imitation of things seen out of
proportion. By contemplating the disproportions of comedy, we are
freed from the sense of disproportion in life, and regain our
perspective, settling as it were into our proper selves. To
Aristotle, the process of settling into om\* true selves is pleasure;
that is his definition of pleasure.

We must again note the relation of suspense to catharsis. The use of
suspense is common to tragedy and comedy. The tragic poet keys his
audience up to a high state of tension by half-revealing,
half-concealing, the final discovery and outcome of the story ; when
we are duly prepared, and yet not quite expecting the piteous
revelation, all is suddenly made manifest, and we dissolve in tears.
Such is the catharsis that takes place in the theatre — an effect
that probably must be differentiated from the emotional state of the
audience when it has left the theatre and is dispersed. So also in
comedy there may be a critical point toward which the poet conducts
his audience by artistic steps ; there will be a main disclosure that
is most directly concerned with the relief of comic suspense — with
the comic catharsis. But whereas in pure tragedy the spectator (who
indeed fears from the beginning) does not weep throughout the play,
but only after the revelation, in pure comedy he laughs from the
outset.

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i82 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

The six constituent elements [of comedy] wtiich demand attention from
the poet

I. Spectacle

2. Music

3. Diction: composition in metre

The catharsis is effected by a series of explosions, doubtless
culminating in one final laugh when the situation is cleared; that
is, if the plot is ' involved.' As for the after-effect of comedy, it
may not be wholly different from that of tragedy: an elevated calm,
or tranquillity of soul, with clear mental perspective and freedom
from disturbing emotion. Probably the arousal and relief of emotion
of any one sort would tend to free the soul from harmful emotion in
general.

If Aristotle regarded the latent tendency in man either to dangerous
inhibitions and repressions, or to an undue laxity of expression, as
harmful, certain licenses of comedy — for example, in Aristophanes —
might readily accord with his homeopathic view as to the curative
value of artistic representation or externalization. Thus the
elements in comedy that derive from the phallic procession might be
defended upon the ground that they furnished a catharsis of the
mental disturbances associated with such stimuli in life.]

From the definition of comedy we proceed to analyze the elements in a
comedy that demand the attention of the poet. Since there are
dramatis personae who. produce the author's imitation of an action,
it necessarily follows that (i) everything pertaining to the
appearance of actors on the stage — including costume, scenery, and
the like — will constitute an element in the technique of comedy; and
that (2) the composition of the music, and (3) the composition in
words, will constitute two further elements, since the music and
diction comprise the medium in which the action is imitated. By
diction is meant the fitting together of the words in metre; as for
the musical element, the meaning is too obvious to call for
explanation.

But, furthermore, the original object of the imitation is an action
of men. In the comedy, then, the imitation, which is also an action,
must be carried on by agents, the dramatis personae. And these agents

J

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183

must necessarily be endowed by the poet with certain distinctive
characteristics both of (4) moral bent {ethos) ^' ^^^°^ and (5)
intellect (dianoia); since it is from a man's 5. oianoia moral bent,
and from the way in which he reasons, that we are led to ascribe
goodness or badness, success or failure, to his acts. Thus, as there
are two natural causes, moral bent and thought, of the particular
deeds of men, so there are the same two natural causes of their
success or failure in life. And the comic poet must take cognizance
of this.

Finally, the action which the poet imitates is represented in the
comedy by (6) the plot or fable. And, 6. Plot according to our
present distinction, plot means that synthesis of the particular
incidents which gives form or being to the comedy as a whole ;
whereas moral bent [ethos) is that which leads us to characterize the
agents as worse or better; and intellect (thought, or dianoia) is
that which is shown in all their utterances — in arguing special
points, or in avouching some general truth.

In every comedy, therefore, there are six consti- summary of

•^ \*^ the six ele-

tutive (or formative) elements, according to the quality ments of
which we judge the excellence of the work as a whole : plot, moral
bent, intellect, diction, the musical element, and spectacle. Two of
them, the musical element and diction, concern the medium of
imitation; one, spectacle, the manner; and three, plot, moral bent,
and intellect, the objects. There can be no other elements. Of these
constitutive elements, accordingly, the judicious comic poet will
make due use; for every drama must contain certain things that are
meant for the eye, as well as the elements of plot, moral bent,
intellect, diction, and music.

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i84 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

The most important element [in comedy] is the structure of the whole

The moral bent of the agents is subsidiary to what is done

Form is soul

The most important of the constitutive elements is the plot, that is,
the organization of the incidents of the story; for comedy in its
essence is an imitation, not of men as such, but of action and of
life. Consequently in a play the agents do not do thus and so for the
sake of revealing their moral dispositions; rather, the display of
character is included as subsidiary to the things that are done. So
that the incidents of the action, and the structural ordering of
these incidents, constitute the end and aim of the comedy. [That is,

the structure of the comedy as a whole, the ' form ' of it, is
equivalent to the main effect upon the audience.]

Here, as in everything else that we know of, the final purpose is the
main thing. We may see the importance of this element from the fact
that, whereas without action a comedy could not exist, it is possible
to construct a comedy in which the agents have no distinctive moral
bent.

Again, one may string together a series of speeches in which the
moral bent of the agents is delineated in excellent verse and
diction, and yet fail to produce the effect of comedy. One is more
likely to produce the effect with a comedy, however deficient in
these respects, if it has a plot — that is, an artistic ordering of
the incidents. In addition to all this, the most vital features of
comedy, by which the interest and emotions of the audience are most
effectively stirred — that is, discoveries, and reversals of fortune
— are parts of the plot or action. It is significant, too, that
beginners in the art become proficient in versification, and in the
delineation of personal traits, before they are able to combine the
incidents of the action into an effective whole.

(i) The plot, then, is the first principle, and as it were the very
soul, of comedy.

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(2) And the characters of the agents come next in Elements in

^ ' . . . the order of

order of importance. — There is a parallel in the art of importance

painting : the most striking colors laid on with no order

will not be so effective as the simplest caricature done

in outline. — Comedy is the imitation of an action: , p^^^

mainly on this account does it become, in the second 2. ^fhos

place, an imitation of personal agents.

(3) Third in importance comes the element of intel- 3, oianoia led,
the faculty in the agent of saying what can be

said, or what is fitting to be said, for the ends of comedy,

in a given situation. It is that element in a comedy

which is supplied by the study of politics, rhetoric,

[and sophistical arguments]. This intellectual element ^f/jos and

must be clearly distinguished from the ethical element ferent/Sed^by

(moral bent) in the drama, for the latter includes only
malJifJslations

such things as reveal the moral bias of the agents —

their tendency to choose or to avoid a certain line of

action, in cases where the motive is not obvious. The

intellectual element, on the other hand, is manifest

in everything the poet makes the agents say to prove

or disprove a special point, and in every utterance

by way of generaJization.

[The way in which the moral and intellectual elements unite in the
speech and action of the agent is often imperfectly grasped by
readers of Aristotle. Together, the two elements form the personality
of the agent. In a sense, every utterance of a speaker in a comedy
illustrates his moral bent, and likewise shows the workings of his
intellect; so that, like the other constitutive elements (save that
music is intermittent), these two enter into every part of a play.
The constitutive elements might, in fact, be compared to the various
kinds ol tissue in a living organism, all being found in any part.
Thus in the Frogs of Aristophanes the decision of Dionysus to visit
the underworld in search of Euripides is shown in a succession of
speeches

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i86 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

in which he argues the necessity of his quest, uttering a mixture of
general statements and particular inferences ; his bent and his
thinking are displayed together; and the plot begins with his
decision. Commonly, of course, the decision to choose or avoid a line
of action is first emphasized, and then the arguing proceeds ; but,
as in life, both elements run continuously throughout the play — just
as the plot runs through the play, being in the narrower sense like
the bony framework of a living animal, but in a more inclusive sense
the governing idea of the whole, which comprehends every detail. So,
obviously, the element of diction runs throughout the play; plot,
moral bent, and intellect being imitated in this mediimi.]

4. Diction (4) Next in importance among the constituents comes

the diction. This, as has been explained, means the interpretation of
the sentiments of the agents in the form of language; it is
essentially the same whether the language is metrical or not.

(5) Of the two elements remaining, the musical is the more important,
since it furnishes the chief of the accessory pleasures in comedy.

(6) The element of spectacle, though stimulating, is last in
importance, since it demands the lowest order of skill, and has least
connection with the art of poetry as such. A comedy can produce its
effect independently of a stage-performance and actors — that is,
when it is read ; and besides, the preparation of the stage and the
actors is the affair of the stage-manager rather than the poet.

Chapter 7 Having thus distinguished the six constitutive elements, we
are now to discuss, as the first and most important consideration in
the art of comed}^, the proper organization of the incidents into a
plot that shall have the ideal comic effect. According to the

5. Musical composition

6. Spectacle

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187

definition (p. 179), a comedy is an imitation of an action
g'^c^omedy? ^°\*

that is complete in itself, forming a whole of a sufficient ^ompiefe
^

magnitude or extent; for a thing may be a whole, and ajfe°Quate\*

yet wanting in magnitude. [By magnitude Aristotle ®'^*®"\*

primarily means extent, which for a comedy could be measured by the
number of lines in it; thus the Birds of Aristophanes, consisting of
1765 lines, is of somewhat greater extent than Oedipus the King of
Sophocles, which contains 1530 lines. But if there is also involved
in ' magnitude ' the idea of the seriousness and importance of the
action, of the greatness and significance of a heroic tale, then in
this sense the conception needs to be specially interpreted for
comedy. The plot of the Birds, being ludicrous, can not precisely be
great in itself, but is a travesty of a great theme, namely, the
founding of a State. Such a theme when more seriously treated has
greatness, as in the Republic of Plato or the Aeneid of Virgil. Thus
considered, the plot in each of the comedies of Aristophanes is a
comic imitation of a great idea.

Similarly, what comes next in Aristotle, on the law of necessary or
probable sequence in the incidents of the drama, may need special
interpretation when we shift from tragedy to comedy. It holds for the
New Greek Comedy, as we see in the Latin adaptations by Plautus and
Terence. And there is an underlying rationality of procedure in
Aristophanes; but it is clear that the sequence of incidents in
comedy must often run counter to'! the law of necessity and
probability. Yet it is equally clear that the comic poet must keep in
mind the law of a necessary or probable sequence, and must suggest
it, in order to depart from it in the right way for the ends of
comedy, showing that he observes the law by his method of violating
it.]

A whole is that which has (i) a beginning, (2) a middle. Definitions:
a and (3) an end.

(i) A beginning (= x) is that which does not itself a beginning come
after anything else in a necessary sequence, but

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i88 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

after which some other thing (= y) does naturally exist or come to
pass.

^^ «"«\* (3) An end (= z), on the contrary, is that which nat-

urally comes after something else (= y) in either a necessary or a
usual sequence, but has nothing else following it.

A middle (2) A middle (== y) is that which naturally comes

after something else (= x), and is followed by a third thing (=z).

A well-constructed comic plot, therefore, can neither begin nor end
where and when the poet happens to like. It must conform to the
principles just enunciated.

Plot [in com- And, further, as to magnitude : in order to be beauti-

edy] IS like °

the structure ful, a living organism, or any other individual thing

of a living ' o o ' j o

oroanism made up of parts, must possess not only an orderly

arrangement of those parts, but also a proper magnitude ; for beauty
depends upon size and order. Beauty is impossible in an extremely
minute creature, since we see the whole in an almost infinitesimal
moment of time, and lose the pleasure arising from a distinct
per-muMt'^must ception of order in the parts. Nor could a creature
anrolrder!'y^el^ of vast dimensions be beautiful to us — an animal,
large*^ ^^^ ^^Y> 1.000 miles in length ; for in that case the eye
could not take in the entire object at once — we should see the
parts, but not the unity of the whole. In the same way, then, as an
inanimate object made up of parts, or a living creature, must be of
such a size that the The natural parts and the whole may be easily
taken in by the eye, just so must the plot of a comedy have a proper
length, so that the parts and the whole may be easily embraced
Artificial by the memory. The artificial limits, of course, aS

these are determined by the conditions of presentation on the stage,
and by the power of attention in an audience, do not concern the art
of poetry as such. The

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artistic limit, set by the nature of the thing itself, is The
artistic

this : So long as the plot is perspicuous throughout, the

greater the length of the story, the more beautiful

will it be on account of its magnitude. But to define

the matter in a general way, an adequate limit for the A^.a^'efluate

magnitude of the plot is this: Let the length be such

as to allow a transition from better to worse fortune,

or from worse to better, through a series of incidents

linked together in a sequence based upon the law of

probability or necessity.

The unity of a plot does not consist, as some suppose, Chapter s in
having one person as subject; for the number of umty of hero things
that befall the individual is endless, and some unity of plot of them
can not be reduced to unity. So, too, any one man performs many acts
from which it is quite impossible to construct one unified action.

[Aristotle goes on to speak of the faulty choice of fhe*5n?|f|kB\*
subject made by poets who have written a Heracleid, a Theseid, and
the like, and who suppose that, since Heracles or Theseus was a
single person, the story of Heracles or Theseus must have unity. But
here again we may say that while a comedy should be an organic whole,
and while the comic poet must work with the law of unity of action
before him, his special purpose might justify a mere pretence that
the things his hero does or undergoes are strictly unified. That it
is possible for the comic poet intentionally to violate the law may
be seen in Byron's Don Juan, where, however, there is also much
careless neglect of it. What Dionysus, masquerading as Heracles,
suffers and does in the Frogs of Aristophanes constitutes a fairly
unified action — a single descent of the hero into Hades for a
definite purpose, with incidents thereto appertaining. That the law
may hold as strictly in comedy as in tragedy may be seen in the
Plutus of Aristophanes, and in Plautus, Terence, and Moliere
generally. Aristotle, indeed, illustrates the law by the Odyssey,
which in his

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igo THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

opinion (see below, p. 201, and compare above, p. 175) has to some
extent the nature of comedy.

That oneness of hero is not the same thing as imity of plot, either
in comedy or tragedy, needs perhaps still further comment. The plot
may be unified when there is no central figure in the play; see, for
example, the Trinummus and the Menaechmi of Plautus, the Comedy of
Errors of Shakespeare, and plays in which the chorus has a leading
part. It has already been noted that the two ' unities ' mentioned in
the *Poetics* are the unity of action, upon which Aristotle insists,
and the unity of hero, to which he attaches at most but a secondary
importance. As we have seen, there is no allusion to any ' unity of
place.' This, and the so-called ' imity of time,' are not
Aristotelian. The discussion of them first appears in Italy during
the Renaissance ; and it was from Italian commentators on the
*Poetics*, not from Aristotle, that French theorists and playwrights
derived them.]

Homer did Homer, whether through conscious art or native in-

not make it • -, , • -, ^ -, -, -, 11^^

Sight, evidently understood the correct method. Thus

in composing a story of Odysseus, he did not make his plot include
all that ever happened to Odysseus. For example, it befell this hero
to receive a gash from a boar on Mount Parnassus; and it befell him
also to feign madness at the time of the mustering against Ilium. But
what he suffered in the former case, and what he did in the latter,
are incidents between which there was no necessary or probable
sequence. Instead of joining disconnected incidents like these, Homer
took for the subject of the Odyssey an action with the kind of unity
here described. Accordingly, as in the other imitative arts, so in
poetry, the object of the imitation in each case is a unit; therefore
in a comedy the plot, which is an imitation of an action, must
rep-that*^of"a^ resent an action which is organically unified, the
order living body ^f ^^^ incidents being such that transposing or
removing

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191

any one of them will dislocate and disorganize the whole.

Every part must be necessary and in its place, for a

thing whose presence or absence makes no perceptible

difference is not an organic part of the whole.

[The counsel of perfection just enunciated is warranted by the
success of Sophocles in Oedipus the King, by that of Moliere in
Tartuffe, and, in the main, by that of Homer and Aristophanes. Yet
almost any one of the minor contests between a Greek and a Trojan in
the Iliad might be removed without disorganizing the whole story; and
the same is true of minor incidents in the wanderings of Odysseus. So
also in the Birds of Aristophanes, the best that may be said
regarding the sequence of one or another incident of a minor sort,
after the founding of the aerial city, is that the incident naturally
arises from the general situation, and does not conflict with those
that are in juxtaposition with it. See what is said of the episodic
plot, below, p. 194.]

From what has been said, it is clear that the office Chapter 9 of the
poet consists in displaying, not what actually has happened, but what
in a given situation might happen — a sequence of events that is
possible in the sense of being either credible or inevitable. [For
Aristophanic comedy, the stress clearly must be, not upon the
probability of the story as a whole, but upon the \* probability '
found in the relation of one incident to another. Given the initial
assumption in the Birds, the sequence of events becomes ' probable '
in the sense Aristotle chiefly has in mind; for he thinks of \*
probability ' less (as we commonly and vaguely do) with reference to
things in general, and more with reference to specific antecedent and
consequent within the limits of a particular play or tale.] In other
words, the poet is not a historian; for the two differ, not in that
one writes in metrical, and the other in non-metrical, language. For
example, you might turn the amusing parts of Herodotus into verse,
and you would still have a

The [comic] poet represents ideal truth

He is not a historian

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192 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Metre not the

essential

distinction

Poetry [including comedy] more philosophic than history: it is
universal. History deals with the particular

Comedy has become universal, representing the general rather than the
particular

species of history, with metre no less than without it. The essential
distinction lies in this, that the historian relates what has
happened, and the poet what might happen — what is typical. Poetry is
therefore something more philosophic and of greater significance than
history; for poetry tends rather to express what is imiversal,
whereas history relates particular events as such. By an exhibition
of what is universal is meant the representation of what a certain
type of person is likely or is bound to say or do in a given
situation. This is the aim of the poet, who nevertheless attaches the
names of specific persons to the types. As distinguished from the
universal, the particular, which is the subject-matter of history,
consists of what an actual person, Alcibiades or the like, actually
did or underwent. This [that poetry represents general truth rather
than particular fact] has already become manifest in comedy; for the
comic poets, having first combined the plot out of probable incidents
[incidents in a natural sequence], supply the names that chance to
fit the case, and do not, like the iambic [lampooning] poets, take as
their subject the [actual deeds and experiences of the]

indiyidual person. [It is assumed by certain scholars, among them
Bywater, that Aristotle here draws a distinction between the Old
Comedy, as represented by Aristophanes, and the New, as represented
by Menander. But the assumption needs to be tested. Aristophanes was
but recently dead when Aristotle was in the earlier stages of his
education, and Menander was but twenty years old when Aristotle died
— possibly ten years old when the *Poetics* took shape. If there be a
sole direct reference in the work to any comedy of this time, it is '
probably to the Orestes of Alexis or some other comedy on the same
subject ' (B5^water, note on 1453^36; cf. below, p. 201). It would
seem, then, that the present reference might be to an inter-

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193

mediate stage of comedy preceding Menander ; it would seem also that
the allusion to the \* iambic poets' might take us to a stage earlier
than that of Aristophanes — certainly earlier than that of his
Plutus. It is true that Aristophanes does make use of the names of
Socrates, Euripides, Aeschylus, and other historical personages,
though often, as in the case of Socrates, as representatives of a
class. At all events he does not subject them to harsh invective, nor
deal largely with the actual events of their lives, after the fashion
of Archilochus ( ? for Aristotle the old \* iambic poet ') ; and he
does not begin with them, and then form a plot. He begins with a plot
of a general nature; nor is it easy to see how, as the master of
varied metrical and other effects in comedy, he could be labeled an '
iambic poet,' and included among primitives. The employment of agents
bearing historical names as the chief personages in comedy is rare
with Aristophanes, his reference to actual persons, frequent as it is
in some of his plays, being mainly incidental to momentary comic
purposes. For the most part, his chief agents are fictitious
personages, whose names — as Peisthe-taerus, Euelpides, Dicaeopolis
(\* Talkover,' ' Hopeful,' ' Mr. Civic-Justice ') — might be said in
Aristotelian parlance to have been devised after the plot and for the
sake of it, and not the plot for them; the Plutus of Aristophanes
would illustrate the point of Aristotle quite as well as any play
from the New Comedy of Greece or from Plautus and Terence.]

From all this it is evident that the comic poet (poet The [comic] = '
maker ') is a maker of plots more than a maker of verses, inasmuch as
he is a poet by virtue of imitating some object, and the object he
imitates is an action. And even if he happens to take a subject from
what actually has happened, he is none the less a poet for that;
since there is nothing to hinder certain actual events from
possessing a comic sequence governed by the law of probability or
necessity; and it is by virtue of representing the quality in such
events that he is

poet is a \* maker' of plots

Universality sometimes found in actual events

n

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194 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Purely episodic [comic] plots are the worst

The emotions 'M comedy] are aroused liy an unexpected outcome in a
csusal sequence

their poet. [Thus, for the series of contests in the Frogs, ending in
the dramatic contest between Euripides and Aeschylus, Aristophanes
takes the sequence of events at the City Dionysia, generahzing it for
comic purposes.]

Of imperfect plots and actions the episodic are the worst, a plot
being called ' episodic ' when there is no observance of probability
or necessity in the sequence of incident. Inferior poets construct
this kind of plot through their own fault; good poets, in order to
meet the requirements of the actors. Since his work must be presented
on the stage, and occupy a certain length of time, a good poet will
often stretch out the plot beyond its natural capacity, and by the
insertion of unnecessary matter will be forced to distort the
sequence of incident. [The comic poet might reckon

with the principle by not introducing the irrelevant without an air
of relevancy. Otherwise we have the fault illustrated by the
insertion of Polichinelle and his adventures in Le Malade Imaginaire
of Mo-liere.]

But to proceed with the parts of the definition of comedy. Comedy is
an imitation, not only of a complete action, but of incidents that
arouse pleasure and laughter; and such incidents affect us most when
we are not expecting them, if at same time they are caused, or have
an air of being caused, by one another ; for we are struck with more
amusement if we find a causal relation in unexpected comic
occurrences than if they come about of themselves and in no special
sequence; since even pure coincidences seem most amusing if there is
something that looks like design in them. Plots therefore that
illustrate the principle of necessity or probability in the sequence
of incident are better than others.

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195

But comic plots are either uninvolved or involved, since the actions
which are imitated in the plots may readily be divided into the same
two classes. Now we may call an action uninvolved when the incidents
follow one another in a single continuous movement; that is, when the
change of fortune comes about without a reversal of situation and
without a discovery. [Such

a plot is represented in the main action of the Birds of Aristophanes
— though there are incidental recognitions or discoveries, and
temporary dangers threatening a reversal in the fortunes of the
hero.] An involved action is one in which the change of fortune is
attended by a discovery or a reversal, or by both together. And each
of these two incidents should arise from the structure of the plot
itself; that is, each should be [or there should be a comic pretence
that it is] the necessary or probable result of the incidents that
have gone before, and should not merely follow them in point of time
— for in the sequence of events there is a vast difference between
post hoc and propter hoc.

A reversal of situation is a change in some part of the action from
one state of affairs to its precise opposite — as has been said, from
better fortune to worse, or from worse to better; and a change that
takes place in the manner just described, namely, with reference to
the law of probable or necessary sequence. [To illustrate: in the
Frogs of Aristophanes the god Dionysus visits Hades for the purpose
of bringing back the tragic poet Euripides to Athens, but after
discovering the greater weight of the verse of Aeschylus, and his
superior political sentiments, brings back the latter poet instead. A
reversal may constitute the main turning-point in a comedy, as in the
instance just noted, or as in Moliere's Tartuffe, where the discovery
of the impostor (4. 7) is attended by a reversal of his fortunes

Chapter 10

Uninvolved and involved [comic] plots

Uninvolved action

Involved action

Chapter ii

Reversal of fortune

From better to worse

n2

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196 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Or from worse to better

Discovery or recognition

Discovery of things

Discovery of deeds

(5. 7) ; or it may be subsidiary, as earlier in the Frogs, where we
have an extended episode of discovery concerning the identity of
Dionysus, involving him in temporary comic misfortune.]

There is also the opposite change, from worse fortune to better. [So
the discovery of the regal nature of the Hoopoe by Peisthetaerus, and
of the anti-dicast Peisthetaerus by the Hoopoe, in the Birds of
Aristophanes, is attended by a change to better fortune for both.
With the discovery at the end of the Frogs comes worse fortune for
Euripides, and better for Aeschylus. — But the worse fortune of
comedy is not painful.]

A discovery, as the word itself indicates, is a transition from
ignorance to knowledge, resulting either in friendship or in enmity
on the part of those agents who are designed for better or worse
fortune. The most artistic form of discovery is one attended by a
reversal of fortune — [such a reversal as attends the mutual
recognition of Peisthetaerus and the Hoopoe in the Birds]. There are,
of course, other kinds of discovery besides that of the identity of
persons ; a transition from ignorance to knowledge may come about
with reference to inanimate, even casual, things. [The discovery of
an inanimate thing may be illustrated in the finding of Euclio's pot
of money by Strobilus in the Aulularia of Plautus, or the finding of
Harpagon's cash-box by La Fleche in Moliere's L'Avare ; and the
discovery of something casual is seen in the recognition by various
persons in Hades of the lion-skin and club of Heracles borne by
Dionysus in the Frogs of Aristophanes.] It is also possible to
discover whether some person has done, or not done, a particular
deed. [For

example, in the Frogs, whether it was the god, or his slave Xanthias,
who had, as Heracles, harried the underworld; the disclosure that
Asclepius and his servants had restored the sight of Plutus, god of
wealth, in the Plutus of Aristophanes, is another instance.]

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197

But the discovery bringing friendship or enmity, and

the reversal bringing success or failure, will most

effectively occasion the pleasure and laughter which

it is the function of comedy to arouse. Furthermore,

this kind of discovery will be instrumental in bringing

about the happy ending of the action as a whole. Now

since, in this case, the discovery means a recognition

of persons, rather than of objects or deeds, there are

two possibilities : (i) X may learn the identity of Y,

when Y already knows the identity of X; or (2) X and

Y may each have to learn the identity of the other.

[Thus, at the opening of Aristophanes' Plutus, Chrem-ylus must learn
the identity of the blind god, while in Shakespeare's Comedy of
Errors Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse must each
learn the identity of the other.]

Two parts of the plot, then, reversal and discovery, represent these
things in the action, and have been sufficiently explained. A third
part would be the comic incident. This might be defined as an
occurrence of a specially ludicrous or joyful sort. [Such

would be harmless beatings or losses, gains and successful devices,
victories in contests, marriages, feasts, and the like. The comic
incident would be the parallel to Aristotle's third part, ' suffering
' {pathos), in the tragic plot. — We naturally think of the main
reversal, or discovery, or comic incident, as the reversal, or
discovery, or comic incident in the play; but in so doing we may fail
to grasp the analytical method of Aristotle. The fact is, wherever we
find one of these, whether of major or minor significance, there we
have one of the three elements of plot. Aristotle notes, for example,
that the Odyssey is full of discoveries. Compare what is said above
(pp. 185-6) of moral bent and intellect and their occurrence
throughout a play. The comic incident may be illustrated by the
alternate beatings given by Aeacus to Xanthias and Dionysus in the
Frogs, the

The best kind of discovery

Two possibilities in the discovery of persons

Parts of the plot

I. Reversal

2. Discovery

3. [The comic incident]

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198 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Formative elements [of comedy]

Quantitative parts [of comedy]

restoration of sight to the god of wealth in the Plufus, the
regaining of his youth by Demus in the Knights, the feast at the end
of the Frogs, loss and gain of treasure in Plautus (in the Trinummus
and Aulularia) and Moliere (in UAvare), and the marriages with which
most of the comedies of Aristophanes, and indeed comedies in general,
end. The chief comic incident of an Aristophanic play may be the
contest or agon ; for example, perhaps, the dramatic contest between
Aeschylus and Euripides in the Frogs.']

Chapter 12 Mention having been made of the six formative [\*
constitutive ' or \* qualitative '] elements of comedy, we now come
to the division of comedy into its quantitative elements — the
separate sections into which a play is divided. [In a modern comedy
the quantitative parts are simply the acts, or acts and scenes, the
division into five acts being earlier than the Renaissance, certainly
as early as Varro, probably discoverable in Plautus, and doubtless as
old as Menander. As comedy (or tragedy) may be resolved by analysis
into constituent elements comparable to the formative tissues of an
organism, so it may be divided quantitatively, as we may divide an
organism at the junction of the visible parts — as one might divide a
creature of five segments into five. As for the quantitative parts in
Aristophanes (compare above, pp. 56—9), his comedy has the following
divisions: prologue, parode, agon, parabasis, episode, choricon, and
exode. Five of these are found also in Greek tragedy: prologue,
parode, episode, choricon, and exode. The prologue is that entire
part of the comedy from the beginning to the parode of the chorus;
the parode is the first whole statement of the chorus; the choricon,
sung by the chorus, corresponds to the stasimon of tragedy; in
Aristophanes, the exode, with which the comedy ends, can not be
precisely equated with the exode of tragedy. In addition, there are
two parts of comedy which are not found in tragedy : parabasis and
agon. The parabasis is ordinarily placed in the middle of the comedy;

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199

if complete, and if we regard the pnigos as a separate subdivision
(see above, p. 57), the parabasis comprises seven subdivisions: the
commation, the parabasis proper, the pnigos, the ode, the epirrhema,
the antode, the antepirrhema. The agon or debate is an argument in
which two persons contend for the mastery; one of the contestants may
be the chorus, as in the Birds of Aristophanes. When complete, the
agon consists of nine parts, the second four of these being paired
with the first four: ode, cataceleusmos, epirrhema, pnigos, antode,
anticataceleusmos, antepirrhema, anti-pnigos, sphragis. One may add
the following from J. W. White, p. 21: ' Another division which, like
the parabasis and the debate, is wholly peculiar to comedy is the
syzygy, thus named because it consists regularly of four balanced
parts, a song and a spoken part united with a second song and a
second spoken part. A syzygy may occur in either half of the play.
The action of the play is at a standstill during the debate and the
parabasis, and a division, called scene, was gradually developed, the
purpose of which was chiefly to adjust these larger divisions to the
action. It is normally a spoken part, and generally occurs ... in the
first half of the play. The action of the second half of the play is
carried forward mainly in a division consisting of episode and
stasimon, which in their form and function resemble the corresponding
parts of tragedy.']

Such, then, are the parts into which comedy is divided
quantitatively, or according to its sections. The parts which are to
be employed as formative elements have already been mentioned.

After what has been said above (esp. pp. 195—8), we Chapter 13 must
next discuss the following points : (i) What is the The ideal

° ^ ^ ' structure [for

comic poet to aim at, and what is he to avoid, in the the function

^ . of comedy]

construction of his plots ? In other words, (2) what are the specific
sources of comic effect ?

In the perfect comedy, as we have seen, the synthesis of the
incidents must be, not uninvolved, but involved.

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200 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Forms of plot to be avoided

The preferable situation

Ttte single liappy issue is best

and this synthesis must be imitative of occurrences that arouse
pleasure and laughter — for therein lies the distinctive function of
this kind of imitation. Good and just men are not to be represented
as ultimately unfortunate, for this is not ludicrous, but painful.
Nor must evil men be represented as ultimately successful ; nor,
again, may an excessively wicked man be represented as falling from
prosperity into misfortune. These situations are neither ludicrous
nor pleasing, for laughter is aroused by a defect or disproportion
which is not painful, and we are pleased at observing the success of
one like ourselves. But an excessively wicked man deserves misery in
proportion, and since his wickedness exceeds the average, he is not
like one of ourselves. There remains, then, the case of the man
intermediate between these extremes: a man not excessively bad and
unjust, nor yet one whose career is marked by virtue and prudence,
but one whose actions become ridiculous through some ordinary
shortcoming or foible — one from the number of everyday citizens,
such as Peisthetaerus, Chremylus, Dicaeopolis, and men of that sort.
To be perfectly comic, accordingly, the plot must not have a double
issue, fortunate for the better, unfortunate for the worse. And the
change of fortune must be, not a fall from happiness to misfortune,
but a transition from ill success to good. And the action must come
about, not through great excellence or depravity of character, but
through some ludicrous defect or shortcoming in conduct, in a person
either no better than the average of mankind, or rather worse than
that. [To the foregoing one should perhaps add, as possibly
Aristotelian, the analysis of Cicero (see above, p. 88) : ' Neither
an eminent or flagitious villain nor a wretch remarkably harassed
with misfortunes is the proper subject of ridicule. . . . And

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the objects that are most easily played upon are those that deserve
neither great detestation nor the greatest compassion. Hence it
happens that the whole subject of the ridiculous lies in the moral
vices of men who are neither beloved nor miserable, nor deserving to
be dragged to punishment for their crimes/]

Second in excellence comes the form of construction

where the thread is double, and there is a happy and an

unhappy ending for the better and the worse agents

respectively. Such is the outcome in the Odyssey.

The pleasure arising from this double structure is not

the distinctive pleasure of tragedy; it is rather one

that belongs to comedy, where the deadliest of legendary edVdeanng"

with Orfifitfis

foes, like Orestes and Aegisthus, become friends, and and Aegisthus
quit the stage without any one slaying or being slain.

The effect of comedy may be produced by means Chapter 14

that appertain simply to presentation on the stae:e [Comic] effect

, r , , . r , 1 , ,. through spec-

[as by the costumes, partly beautiful, partly ludicrous, tacuiar
means in the Birds of Aristophanes]. But it may also arise tistic
from the structure and incidents of the comedy, which is the
preferable way, and is the mark of a better poet [— and such really
is the case with the Birds] ; for the plot should be so constructed
that, even without help Jh^®uid"|rise from the eye, one who simply
hears the story must {r°^ \*[J5 ?^" thrill with pleasure, and be
moved to laughter, at what psycho-phys-

ir ' o ' lological

occurs. In fact, these are just the emotions one would feel in
listening to the story of the Birds off the stage. To bring about the
comic effect by spectacular means is less a matter of the poetic art,
and depends upon adventitious aid. But those who employ the means of
the stage to produce what is grotesque, without being ludicrous, are
absolute strangers to the art of comedy; for not every kind of
pleasure is to be sought from a comedy, but only that specific
pleasure which is characteristic of this art. •

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202 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Chapter 15

The ei/ios of the agents

It must be [inferior]

[The comic poet must Iceep In mind] the principle of truth to type

The principle of truth to life

Since the pleasure which is characteristic of comedy comes from the
arousal of laughter, and since the poet must produce this pleasure
through an imitation of some action, it is clear that the comic
quality must be impressed upon the incidents that make up the story.
Let us consider, then, what kinds of occurrence strike us as
ludicrous. [For this topic, see perhaps the Tractatus Coislinianus,
below, pp. 225, 229—59 ; according to that, however, comic effect
would seem to arise in possibly equal measure from the occurrences
represented, and from the diction.]

We turn to the moral dispositions of the agents. In respect to these,
there are four things for the poet to aim at. First of all, (i) the
agents must not be good. The ethical element will be present if, as
already mentioned (pp. 183,185), by speech or act the agents manifest
a certain moral bent in what they choose to do or avoid ; and the
ethos will be inferior if the habit of choice is so. [' Good' means
good in its kind, performing its function, good for something; and
inferiority will mean falling short of this.] Such inferiority is
possible in all types of humanity, not merely in a woman or a slave —
woman being perhaps an inferior type, and the slave quite worthless —
[but also in a citizen or a traditional hero.] Secondly, (2) the
comic poet in representing the agents must keep in mind the law of
truth to type. There is, for example, a type of manly valor and
eloquence; [and the poet would have this type in mind when
representing such a personage as Dionysus in the Frogs of
Aristophanes ; nor for comedy would it be inappropriate to represent
a woman as valorous in this way, or as masterly in argument — as

in the Lysistrata.] Thirdly, (3) there is the principle of truth to
life, which is different from the principle of common inferiority, or
from that of truth to type. Fourthly, (4) the comic poet must keep in
mind the

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203

principle of consistency in the ethos. [If the characters

are not true to their nature as first presented, their inconsistency
must not be accidental. Departures from the norm must not be made
without suggesting the norm. The chorus in the Acharnians is
ludicrously inconsistent.]

As in combining the incidents of the plot, so also

in representing the agents, the comic poet must bear

in mind the principle of a necessary or probable relation

between one thing and another. That is, a certain

kind of person must speak or act in a certain fashion

as the necessary or probable outcome of his inward

nature ; [or, if not, still the deviations must be made

with an eye to the principle.] Even in comedy it is

desirable that the solution of dramatic situations should

come to pass through the progress of the story itself;

[though the use of a mechanical device like the deus ex machina is
permissible if the effect of the device in itself is comic].

Since comedy is an imitation of men worse than the average, it is
necessary for the comic poet to observe the method of successful
caricaturists ; for they reproduce the distinctive features of the
original, and yet, while preserving the likeness of a man, render him
ludicrous and distorted — though not painfully so — in the picture.
So, too, the comic poet, in imitating men of the common sort, must
represent them as such, and yet as ambitious, irascible, or faulty in
some other way; [but not painfully so — men like Peisthetaerus and
Dicaeopolis in the Birds and the Acharnians of Aristophanes].

These principles the comic poet must constantly bear in mind, and, in
addition, such principles of stage-effect as necessarily concern the
art oi poetry [as distinct from the technique of the costumer, or the
like]; since

The principle of consistency

The inner man and the succession of his words and acts

Natural sequence rather than mechanical artifice

The [comic] poet must depict flaws of character, and yet preserve
average morality

The [comic] poet must give due attention to stage-effect

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204 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Chapter i6

Discovery: six species

I. By marl<s or tol<ens

2. Arbitrary discoveries other than by tolcens

3. Discovery

through

memories

here also mistakes can often be made. But on this head enough has
already been said in a work already published. [The reference may be
to a lost dialogue of Aristotle On Poets.]

The general nature of discovery has been explained above (pp. 196—7).
We may now examine the several species. The first, and [for tragedy]
the least artistic, kind of discovery is recognition by marks or
tokens, which may be either congenital or acquired after birth —
whether bodily marks, as scars, or external tokens.

[Such would be the club and lion-skin of Heracles borne by Dionysus
in the Frogs. The objection to such means of discovery on the ground
that they are arbitrary and mechanical (not logical and directed at
the faculty of reason), which holds for tragedy, does not hold in the
same way for comedy, since here the arbitrary or mechanical device
may be employed, as such, for a comic purpose. However, they may be
used in a better or a worse fashion, since it is better that they
should appear in the natural course of events, as in the case
mentioned in the Frogs.]

The second kind are discoveries arbitrarily introduced by the poet
[that is, again not growing out of the sequence of events], and for
that reason less artistic. [An example is the arbitrary disclosure
respecting Aeschylus and Euripides in the Frogs 758 ; another, the
arbitrary recognition of Iris in the Birds 1204 (but here a joke is
involved in the method).]

The third kind is discovery through memory, when

the inward man, stirred by hearing or seeing something

familiar, is led to display his feelings. [And so his

identity is revealed. One of the two examples given in the *Poetics* is
that of Odysseus at the Court of Alcin-ous. When Odysseus hears the
minstrel chant the adventure of the Wooden Horse, he is reminded of
the past, and his weeping leads to the disclosure of his identity. In
the Biblical story of Joseph, the hero

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205

weeps at the sight of his brother Benjamin, but retires to hide his
emotion, so that the discovery at this point is merely suggested, to
be effected later in another way. In pure comedy, the laughter of X
at the recital of an episode in which he had taken a leading part
could be used to effect his recognition by Y.]

The fourth kind is discovery by a process of reasoning. [Thus the
identity of the twins Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of
Syracuse, and of their twin slaves, is made clear to the Duke, in
Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, Act 5, by a process of reasoning.]

Allied to this is (fifth) discovery by false inference, where the
poet causes X to be recognized by Y through the false inference of Y
[whether through an unintentional fallacy on either side, or through
a logical deception practised upon one by the other. (See Appendix,
below, pp. 290—305.)]

But of all discoveries, the best is the kind that grows out of the
very nature of the incidents, when an amusing revelation comes about
from suitable antecedents [as in the recognition of the God of Wealth
by Chrem-ylus in the Plutus of Aristophanes. — So also the discovery
of Tartuffe as an impostor, by Orgon, in

Moliere]. The next best are those that come about through a process
of reasoning, [or through false inference, well handled by the comic
poet].

When actually composing his comedies, and working out the plots in
the diction, the poet should endeavor to the utmost to visualize what
he is representing. In this way, seeing everything with all possible
vividness as if he were a spectator of the incidents he is
portraying, he will devise what is fitting for comedy, and run the
least danger of overlooking unintended inconsistencies. [See below,
pp. 244—9, 257—9.]

As far as possible, the comic poet should also assume the very
attitudes and gestures appropriate to the

4. Discovery by inference

5. Fancied

discovery

through

sophistical

deception

6. The best form of discovery grows out of the action itself

Chapter 17

Practical hints for the work of composing [comedies]

How to avoid [unintentional] incongruities in the action

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206 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

How to succeed in delineating [comic] characters and tlieir feelings

Two kinds of [comic] poets

First, one must make an outline sketcli of the whole [comedy]

Then fill in the episodes

agents; for, of authors with the same natural abihty, they will be
most effective who themselves experience the feelings they represent.
The poet who himself feels the impulses to irony or garrulity will
represent irony or garrulity in the most lifelike fashion. Hence the
art of comedy requires either a certain natural plasticity in the
poet, or a personal tendency to be ironical or the like. Poets of the
first sort readily assume one comic personahty after another; those
of the second naturally pass into intensified modes of their own
habitual reactions. [One might instance Aristophanes, Shakespeare,
and Moliere as comic poets of the plastic sort, Plautus and Swift as
possessed of a comic bias.]

As for the plot, whether it be his own invention or a traditional
story, the comic poet should first make a reduced sketch of the
whole, generahzing it, and then fill in and expand this by developing
the episodes. How one may take a generalized view of the plot may be
illustrated from [the Frogs of Aristophanes,] the plan of which is
this : [A certain god who presides over comedy as well as tragedy,
perceiving that a city is by their death bereft of all its superior
tragic poets, decides to visit the underworld to bring one back to
life. With a servant he consults a hero, victor in many contests,
and, disguised as this hero, after various struggles, arrives at his
destination, to find that a contest has been instituted between the
poet he seeks and a rival tragic poet. As judge of the contest the
god decides in favor of the rival poet, and with a reversal of
intention brings him back to earth.]

When the general outline has been determined, and fitting names have
been supplied for the agents, the next thing is to elaborate the
episodes. Now care must be taken that the episodes are suited to the
comic action and the comic agents. [In the Frogs, for example, the
contest between Dionysus and the ' frog-

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207

swans ' is an appropriate episode, since it comes in the natural
order of events, since it is a prelude to the contest between the
tragic poets, and since the whole play is an imitation of a Dionysiac
competition in music and drama; and the encounter of Dionysus and
Xan-thias with Aeacus is likewise appropriate, since it is in keeping
with the tradition of Heracles, and leads to the discovery of the
contest between Euripides and Aeschylus. And this contest is likewise
an appropriate episode.] The episodes must also be of an appropriate
length. In comic dramas they are short; in a comic narrative it is
they that serve to extend the work. [The main plan of Fielding's Tom
Jones, for example, is not long : A certain foundling is through
guile estranged from his benefactor, and driven from his home and his
love, and is secretly dogged by his rival. After many adventures he
is imprisoned, a conspiracy having meanwhile been formed to marry his
love to his rival. At length he is released, and his real identity
disclosed, the outcome being that he is restored to his home and
united to his love, and his rival banished. This is the essential
argument of the story; all the rest is in the nature of episode.]

Every comedy consists of (i) a complication, and (2) Chapter 18 an
unraveling. The incidents lying outside the action complication

and denoue-

proper, and often certain of the incidents within it, ment form the
complication ; the rest of the play constitutes the unraveling. More
specifically, by complication is meant everything from the beginning
up to that incident, the last in a series, out of which comes the
change of fortune ; by miraveling or denouement, everything from the
change of fortune to the end of the play. [In the Frogs, the
complication embraces everything up to the weighing of the lines of
the two poets, and the denouement everything from that point to the
end. In the Pluttcs, the ccmpHcation includes everything up to the
restoration oi sight in the God of Wealth, and the denouement
consists of the remainder of the play.]

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2o8 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Four species [of comedy] according ta sources of [comic] effect

[Comedy] of plot

[Of ludicrous incident]

Of character

Of spectacle

Unfair demands of criticism

Tlie fair basis of comparison is mastery of plot

The [comic] poet must not fail in the unraveling

A multiple story is to be avoided [in comedy]

Four different parts of the play have been discussed as factors in
comic effect, namely: reversal and discovery ; [the comic incident];
moral bent, or character, in the agents; and spectacular means.
Corresponding to the relative prominence of one or another of these
factors in a play, there are four species of comedy : (i) The
involved, where the whole play is a recognition with change of
fortune. [This is substantially the case in the Plutus of
Aristophanes, the Tartuffe of Moliere, and Shakespeare's Comedy of
Errors.'] (2) The comedy of ludicrous incident; [for example, the
Frogs of Aristophanes.] (3) The comedy in which the nature of the
agents is paramount; [for example, the Misanthrope of Moliere]. Then
(4) there is a fourth kind in which the spectacular element is very
important, [as in the Birds of Aristophanes, and Rostand's
Chantecler]. But the poet should do his best to combine every element
of comic effect, or, failing that, the more important ones, and the
major part of them. The effort is very necessary in a time of unfair
criticism. Since in previous times there have been authors who were
successful, one in the use of one source of effect, another in the
use of another, critics expect a new poet to surpass them all in
their several lines of excellence. But in comparing one comedy with
another, the fairest wa}^ is to begin with the plots as a basis of
criticism; and this amounts to a comparison of complication with
complication, and of denouement with denouement. Many authors succeed
in the complication, and then fail in the unraveling. But the comic
poet must show mastery of construction in both.

The poet must likewise remember not to employ a multiple story, like
that of a mock-epic, for the subject of a comedy. In the mock-epic,
owing to its scale.

1^^ OF^ W£OM^

s^

JuUt.Q£

|picture2|

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209

every part assumes its proper length; but when the

entire scheme is reduced to the scale of a drama, the

result is unsatisfactory. [Thus Moliere properly takes

but a part of the legend of Don Juan for the subject of his comedy;
and again, following Plautus, in Amphitryon he dramatizes but a part
of the story of Heracles.]

The comic chorus should be regarded as belone^ine: The [comic] to the
dramatis personae ; it should be an integral part treat the of the
whole, and take its share in the action. [The among the model is the
practice of Aristophanes ; for example, his use of the chorus in the
Birds^ the Acharnians, and Lysistrata.] In certain later comedies the
songs have no more connection with the plot than with that of any
other play ; the chorus sing mere interludes. [This seems to have
been true of plays by Menander. A modern instance is the intercalated
choral matter of the Second Intermede in Le Malade Imaginaire. The
Troisieme Intermede is more directly related to the substance of the
play. In the Avertissement to Les Facheux Moliere apologizes for
certain places where the ballet functions less naturally.] And yet,
what real

difference is there between introducing a song that is foreign to the
action and attempting to fit a speech, (or a whole episode,^) from
one drama into another ?

The other formative elements of comedy having now chapter 19 been
discussed, it remains to speak of diction and intellect. As for the
intellectual element, we may assume what has been said in the
Aristotelian treatise on Rhetoric, to which inquiry the topic more
properly

belongs. [For comedy the poet needs an understanding of rhetorical
principles and practice, since he must sometimes positively observe
them, and sometimes (as in representing garruhty or nonsense)
knowingly depart from them.] The intellectual element includes every-

1 The expression in parentheses is probably an interpolation in the
text of the *Poetics* ; see Gudeman, Philologus 76. 258-9.

On dianoia consult Arls-toWsRhe/oric

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210 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Proof and refutation

The arousal of emotion

IVIagnlfying and minify' ing [in comedy]

Ttie [comic] poet's use of dianoia in wliat the agent says or does

Diction

Remote considerations

thing that is to be effected by the language of the agents — in their
efforts to prove and to refute, to arouse one another's emotions,
such as love, or cupidity, or anger, or the like, and to exaggerate
or diminish the importance of things. [See, for example, the speeches
of

proof and refutation employed by Chremylus and Poverty in discussing
the advantages and disadvantages of a redistribution of wealth, in
the Plutus of Aristophanes ; the efforts of the chorus to augment the
emulation of Euripides and Aeschylus in the Frogs ; and the processes
of magnifying and minifying, in the same play, which the two poets
make use of in estimating, each of them, his own tragedies and those
of his rival.] It is evident, too, that the same underlying forms of
thought must be in operation whenever the comic poet makes the agents
try by their acts to arouse emotion in one another, or to give these
acts an air of importance or naturalness. [An example would be the
alternate blows inflicted by Aeacus upon Dionysus and Xanthias, in
the Frogs, with a view to eliciting a cry of pain from the one who is
not a god, and the efforts of the victims to make their reactions
seem natural

or unimportant.] The only difference is that with the act the
impression has to be made without explanation ; whereas with the
spoken word it has to be made by the speaker, and result from his
language; for what would be the function of the speaker if things
appeared in the desired light quite apart from anything that might be
said ? [In the example just given, the explanations of Xanthias and
Dionysus supplement their actions.]

Under the head of diction, one subject for inquiry is the modes of
spoken utterance — the difference between command and entreaty,
declaration and threat, question and answer, and the like. Such
distinctions, however, concern, not the poet, but the interpreter.

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211

and the student of elocution. Whether the poet knows these things or
not, they do not directly concern his art, nor do they offer a basis
for criticizing him. The diction proper, taken as a whole, is made up
of the following parts. [The list begins with the smallest elements,
and proceeds synthetically to the largest composite factors of
discourse — running from the indivisible sound and the syllable to
the entire poem regarded as a continuous and unified utterance.]

(i) The ultimate element (virtually letter); (2) the primary
combination of ultimate elements (not quite a \* syllable '); (3) the
connective particle; (4) the separative particle; (5) the noun (or
name-word, including adjectives as well as nouns); (6) the verb; (7)
the inflection ; (8) the speech (or unified utterance, from a phrase
to a poem). [? See below, pp. 225, 229—39.

What is said in the *Poetics* regarding the parts of diction is so
general in its bearing on the art of composition that there is no
need of repeating all of it here. Only a few passages are utilized in
the following.] A

speech (logos, or unified utterance) is a composite

significant sound, which may be a unit in either of

two ways. It may signify one thing, as the definition

of man : ' A biped land-animal.' Or the unity may be

brought about through the conjunction of more than

one utterance. [Thus the Odyssey, or the serenade

of the Hoopoe in the Birds of Aristophanes, is one utterance through
the binding together of a number.]

Nouns (or name-words) are of two kinds, simple and compound. By
simple are meant those that are formed of non-significant elements,
as the word yri (earth). A compound noun may be made up of a
significant and a non-significant part [as ocBixo? (unjust)], though
the distinction is lost when the parts are united; or it may be made
up of two parts, both of which, taken by

Chapter

20

Diction proper as related to tlie art of [comedy]

The parts of diction

Chapter 21

Nouns [or names] are simple or compound

02

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212 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Multiple [as in comedy]

1. Current terms

2. Strange words

3. Metaphor: four kinds

4. Ornamental words

themselves, are significant, [as dcepopaxw {air-tread = \* I tread
the air ')]. A compound noun may also be triple or quadruple or
multiple in form. [Compare (7aX7utYYo-XoY)(-u7UY]va-bai ('
long-beard-lance-and-trimipet-men') in Frogs 966;
(Tap)ta<7(j.o-TCn:uo-xa[j,7UTat (' flesh-tearers-with-the-pine'),
ibid.; (TcppaYiB-ovu/-apYO->top-Y)'ra? (' lazy long-haired fops with
rings and natty nails '), Clouds 332; and also Poly-machaero-plagides
(Pseudo-lus 988) and Thesauro-chrysonico-chrysides {Captives 286),
facetious proper names taken over by Plautus from the Middle or the
New Greek Comedy.]

Whatever the formation, a noun (or name) is either (i) the current
term for a thing; or (2) a strange (or rare) word; or (3) a metaphor;
or (4) an ornamental word; or (5) a newly-coined word; or a word that
is (6) lengthened, or (7) curtailed, or (8) altered.

By a current term is meant the word used by people

about us; by a strange (or rare) word, one that is used

in another region. Obviously the same word may be

both strange or current, though not with reference to

the same region. [Thus -/oCicc {Ly si strata 91) would be

current in Sparta, but rare at Athens, where the word for ' good '
would be 6iiy(x,%<;.]

Metaphor (including figures of speech generally) consists in the
application to one thing of the name that belongs to another, (i) The
name of the genus may be applied to a subordinate species. (2) The
name of a species may be applied to the inclusive genus. (3) Under
the same genus, the name of one species may be applied to another. Or
(4) there may be a transference of names on grounds of analogy (or
proportion).

[The ornamental word is listed, but not defined, in the *Poetics*. It
may mean the superior or more beautiful word, when there is a choice
of synonyms; see, for example, the use of 7u>.a(7TiY? (' scale ')
instead of a-TaG{x6? in the Frogs 1378.]

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POETICS 21, 22

213

A newly-coined word is one that is wholly unknown to any region, and
is applied to something by an individual poet, for there seem to be
words of this origin [—as koax, representing the call of the frogs,
in Aristophanes].

A lengthened word is one in which a customary short vowel is made
long, or in which an extra syllable is inserted [—as Nugtqiov {Frogs
215) for Ntjatov].

A curtailed word is one from which some part has been removed; [for
example, (fzo (Peace 1164) for (piTU[j;.a].

An altered word is one which the poet, having left some part
unchanged, remodels the rest; [for example, xtffTTt^ [Acharnians
1137) from xiaTY]].

In respect to diction, the ideal for the poet is to be clear without
being mean. The clearest diction is that which is wholly made up of
current terms (the ordinary words for things). But a style so
composed is mean. But the language attains a distinction [suitable to
comedy] when the poet makes use of terms that are less familiar, such
as rare words, metaphors, lengthened forms — everything that deviates
from the ordinary usage. Yet if one compose in a diction of such
terms alone, the result will be either a riddle or a jargon — a
riddle if the language be nothing but metaphors, and a jargon if it
be nothing but strange words (dialectal forms and the like). [Compare
the metaphorical utterance of the oracle as given by Demosthenes to
the Sausage-seller in the Knights of Aristophanes [Knights 197-201);
and the jargon uttered by Pseudartabas in the Acharnians 100, 104.]
The comic poet should employ a certain admixture of these expressions
that deviate from the ordinary; for distinction and elevation of
style will result from the use

5. Coined words

6. Lengthened words

7. Curtailed words

8. Altered words

Chapter 22

Choice of words

The idea! is clearness and distinction

Riddles

Jargon

How to secure distinction

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214 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

How clearness

Lengthened words for comic effect

Metaphors, strange words, etc., for comic effect

A command of metaphor Is the mark of genius

Varieties of diction for different kinds of poetry

of such means as the strange word, the metaphor, the ornamental word,
and the rest; and clearness will arise from such part of the language
as is in common use. Very important in helping to make the style
clear without loss of distinction are the lengthened, curtailed, and
altered forms of words. Their deviation from the customary forms will
lend the quality of distinction; and the element they have in common
with ordinary usage will give clearness. An obtrusive employment of
the device of lengthening words will, of course, become ludicrous,
[and hence will serve the ends of comedy]; and the same thing is true
of any similar stylistic procedure. With metaphors also, and strange
words, and the rest, a like effect will ensue if they are used
improperly, and with the aim of causing laughter. [The language of
Aristophanes is in the main pure Attic and clear, attaining
distinction, without affectation, and without coarseness, where the
comic purpose allows.]

It is, indeed, important to make the right use of each of the
elements mentioned — lengthened, curtailed, and altered words — as
well as of compound and strange words. But most important by far is
it to have a command of metaphor, this being the one thing the poet
can not learn from others. It is the mark of genius, for to produce
apt metaphors requires an intuitive perception of resemblances.

Of the several kinds we have noted, [current words are best adapted
to comedy,] compound words to the dithyramb, strange words to heroic
metre [that is, to epic poetry], and metaphors to iambic metre [that
is, to the tragic dialogue]. In heroic poetry, it is true, [and in
comedy,] all special forms may be used. But iambic verse in comedy
represents the spoken language,

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POETICS 22, 23, 24

215

and tends to employ the current term, the metaphor, and the
ornamental word [or its opposite].

Herewith we close the discussion of comedy as an art of imitation in
the form of action.

And now for the comic narrative. In this, as in

comedy proper, the story should be constructed on

dramatic principles: everything should turn about a

single action, one that is a whole, and is organically

perfect — having a beginning, and a middle, and an

end. In this way, just as a living animal, individual

and perfect, has its own excellence, so the narrative

will arouse its own characteristic pleasure. In other

words, the plot of a comic narrative must be unlike

what we ordinarily find in histories, which of necessity

represent, not a single action, but some one period,

with all that happened therein to one or more persons,

however unrelated the several incidents may have

been. Thus two ludicrous incidents might occur on

the same day without converging to the same end;

and similarly one such incident may directly follow

another in point of time, and yet there may be no

sequence leading to one issue. Nevertheless, one may

say that most writers of comic narratives commit

this very fault of making their plots like chronicles.

[Compare Byron's Don Juan, which illustrates the fault, with
Fielding's Tom Jones, which avoids it.]

Further, the varieties of comic narrative must be

similar to those of comedy proper. That is, the story

must be (i) uninvolved or (2) involved, or else must be

(3) one of [comic incident], or (4) of [comic] character.

[Aristotle's division of narrative poetry corresponds in the last
three points with the similar division under drama (p. 208), but not
in the first. The narrative with an uninvolved plot might rank with
the kind of

Chapter 23

What the [comic] narrative has in common with [comedy proper]

ft is not a chronicle; it must have organic unity

Chapter 24

Four varieties [of comic narrative]

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2i6 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

drama in which the effect is mainly dependent upon

\* spectacle,' the story being, perhaps, \* episodic,' with

much description ; otherwise there is a more troublesome

Constituents discrepancy.] The constituent parts also must be the

common to a . , -,■,■,

[comic] narra- same as m comedy proper — save that the author

tlve and , , i , r • ^

[comedy] does not employ the elements of music and spectacle;

for there are reversals and discoveries [and comic incidents] in this
form of composition as in that. And the intellectual processes and
the diction must be artistically worked out. [Thus Don Quixote is a
story with an uninvolved plot, and one of comic incident; and Tom
Jones is, hke the Odyssey, an example of an involved plot — since
there are discoveries throughout, — and is a story of character].

narrat'iv?'*'^ As for the length, an adequate limit has already been

fcomedyrin Suggested: it must be possible for us to embrace the
length beginning and the end of the story in one view. But,

through its capacity for extension, the narrative form oMength "*^^^
has a great and peculiar advantage ; for in a comedy it is not
possible to represent a number of incidents in the action as carried
on simultaneously — the author is limited to the one thing done on
the stage by the actors who are there. But the narrative form enables
him to represent a number of incidents as simultaneously occurring;
and these, if they are suitable, materially add to the production.
The increase in bulk tends to increase the variety of interest
through diversity of incident in the episodes. Uniformity of incident
quickly satiates the audience, and makes comedies fail on the stage.

not%o"obtfuife The master of comic narrative will not be unaware

hirtcom'ic] ^^ ^^^ P^^t to be taken by the author himself in his

narrative work. The author should, in fact, say as little as may

be in his own person [save possibly for the comic effect

arising from intentional and obvious disregard of the

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217

principle], since in his personal utterances he is not an imitative
artist. In mediocre comic narratives the authors continually express
their own sentiments, and their snatches of artistic imitation are
few and far between. But a masterly author [as Chaucer], after a
brief prehminary, will straightway bring on a man, or a woman, or
some other type, no one of them characterless, but each sharply
differentiated.

An element of the marvelous unquestionably has a place in comedy;
[and the irrational (or illogical), which is the chief factor in the
marvelous, and which must as far as possible be excluded from
tragedy, is more freely admitted in comedy as well as in comic

narrative.] That the marvelous is a source of pleasure may be seen
from the way in which people add to the story; for they always
embellish the facts with striking details, in the belief that it will
gratify the listeners. Yet it is Homer above all who has shown the
rest how a lie should be told ; for example, in the Bath Scene in the
Odyssey (see below, pp. 295—303). The essence of the method is the
use of a logical fallacy. Suppose that, whenever A exists or comes to
pass, B must exist or occur; men think, if the consequent B exists,
the antecedent A must also — but the inference is illegitimate. For
the poet, accordingly, the right method is this : if the antecedent A
is untrue, and if there is something else, B, which would exist or
occur if A were true, one must elaborate on the B; for, recognizing
the truth of the added details, we accept by fallacious inference the
truth of A. [The method has an extensive application in

Aristophanic comedy. Thus, by elaborating the details of the aerial
city, the poet, in the Birds, leads us to accept the figment that
such a polity has come into existence.]

A sequence of events which, though actually impossible, seems
plausible should be preferred by the poet

The place of the marvelous and even the Irrational

Why people tell lies

How to represent a lie artistically

The principle of \* probability '

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2i8 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Chapter 25

Problems and their solutions

I. Principle of the object of imitation

2. Principle of the medium

3 Principle of artistic correctness: poetry [including comedy] has a
standard of its own

Two l<inds of errors in [comedy]

to what, though really possible, seems incredible.

[Even the incredible incidents in comedy should receive an air of
probability from the elaboration of \* true ' details, and from a
skilfully devised relation to one another.]

We come to problems and their solutions. [Aristotle's problems in
criticism, and the principles of their solution, mainly concern the
poetry of Homer, though they are stated in a general way; but at
certain points what he says may take on a bearing upon comedy.]

(i) The poet is an imitator, like a painter or any other maker of
likenesses. Accordingly, he must in all cases represent one of three
objects: (a) Things as they once were, or are now; (b) things as they
are said or thought to be ; (c) things as they ought to be for the
ends of art. (2) His medium of expression is the diction, unadorned,
or with an admixture of strange words and metaphors, or otherwise
modified. (3) Further, the standard of correctness is not the same in
Poetry as in Politics; it is different in Poetry [and imitative art
generally] from that in any other field of study.

[A citizen who fulfilled his duty to the State and in private life
would satisfy the standards of Politics and Ethics; but in order to
satisfy the conditions of comedy, a personage must be made to display
some

ludicrous shortcoming.] Within the limits of comedy there can be two
kinds of error, the one (a) directly involving the art, the other (b)
adventitious. If the comic poet has chosen something for the object
of his imitation, and fails properly to represent what he has in
mind, this is (a) a fault in his art itself. But if he has made an
incorrect choice in the object he wishes to represent, so long as he
succeeds in properly imitating [for the ends of comedy] the object he
has in mind, his mistake is not one that concerns his art; it is (b)
adventitious. Such are the considerations from which

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one must proceed in dealing with the strictures of critics.

First, then, the strictures relating to the art itself.
j't1i?°may''be If impossibilities have been unwittingly represented,
{,8^*'®"'" the poet is open to criticism. Yet impossibilities may be
justified, if their representation subserves the purpose of the art —
for we must remember what has been said of the end of comedy; that
is, they are justified if they give the passage they are in, or some
other passage, a more ludicrous or surprising effect. Yet
j^^fno*itii^*^!"^" if the ends of comedy could have been as well or
better Jo"°makrno subserved by scientific accuracy, the error is not
justi- mistakes fied; for the poet ought if possible to make no
mistakes whatever.

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Again, when an error is found, one must always ask : jstjie; fault

^ ' \* J intrinsic or

Is the mistake adventitious, arising from ignorance in adventitious
some special field of knowledge, or does it concern the art of
imitation as such ? If a caricaturist thinks that a female deer has
horns, for example, that is less of an error than to fail in
representing the object as he conceives it.

Again, it may be objected that the representation of Pfe*'c . the
poet is not true [to things as they are, or as they tfuth have been].
The answer may be that they are represented as they ought to be.
[That is, as they ought to be

represented for the ends of comedy. Thus Aristophanes represents
Aeschylus and Euripides as worse

dramatists than they were.] But if the representation be true neither
to fact nor to the comic ideal, the answer may be that it accords
with current legends and popular belief: ' People say so.' The
unedifying comic tales about the gods, for instance, are, very
possibly, neither true nor the preferable thing to relate; in fact,
they may be as false and immoral as Xenophanes

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220 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

Artistic [comic] propriety

An appeal to tiie nature of the medium

declares. But they certainly are in keeping with popular belief. Of
still other things which are objected to in comedy, one may possibly
say, not that they are worse than the fact here and now, but that the
fact was so at the time.

As for the question whether something said or done by some one in a
comedy is proper or not; to answer this we must not merely consider
the intrinsic quality of the act or utterance, in order to see
whether it is noble or base in itself; we must also consider (a) the
person who does or says the thing, (b) the person to whom it is done
or said, or (c) when, or (d) in whose interest, or (e) with what
motive, it is done or said. Thus we must examine any questionable
word or act, to see whether the motive of the agent is to increase
his advantage or to decrease his disadvantage. [Thus,

in the Frogs, the political wisdom uttered by Euripides or Aeschylus
is not to be judged at its face value. For example, the speech of
Euripides in Frogs 1427—9, taken out of its surroundings, is almost
sound advice; but in its place it is the school-boy rhetoric of a
ludicrous personage striving to win a ridiculous advantage over
another personage of a similar sort, Aeschylus, from a god who plays
the part of a buffoon. See also the seventh speech of the Impostor in
Tartuffe 4.5, and Moliere's note: \* C'est un scelerat qui parte.']

The justice or injustice of other criticisms must be decided by the
principles of poetic diction. For example, a mistaken objection may
be raised to a passage because the critic fails to see that the comic
poet is using a strange word, or a metaphor, or fails to discover the
correct pronunciation, or the correct punctuation, or to observe that
a grammatical ambiguity is possible, or that the custom of the
language has changed, or that there is more than one possibility of
meaning in the same word.

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That is, the right procedure [in deahng with a great Riflht and comic
poet] is just the opposite of the method con- cedure in demned by
Glaucon, who says of certain critics : ' They begin with some
unwarranted assumption, and, having pronounced judgment in a matter,
they go on to argue from this; and if what the poet says does not
agree with what they happen to think, they censure his imaginary
mistake. [Thus it is often asserted that the

singing-contest between Dionysus and the Chorus of Frogs has nothing
to do with the rest of the play called the Frogs ; there being a
false assumption that the basis of the the play is an attack upon
Euripides. But the object of imitation for Aristophanes is the
Dionysiac musical and dramatic competition, transferred from Athens
to the underworld, and otherwise distorted with comic intent — for
example, by assimilation to one of the labors or contests (the
suitable one) of Heracles. Throughout there is the notion of musical
and literary emulation, exaggerated or attenuated. Accordingly, the
singing-contest near the beginning is a suitable pre-Uminary to the
main episode of the comedy, the froglike contest ol the tragic poets
at the end.]

In general, questions as to the poet's use of im- Jiiegedlm-"^
possibiUties must be decided by an appeal either (a) to possibilities
the end of comedy, or (b) to the comic ideal, or (c) to what is
commonly beheved. For the ends of comedy, (a) a thing really
impossible, but made plausible, is preferable to one that, though
possible, does not win belief. And if such men as Pauson painted be
called too ugly, the pictures may be defended as (b) true to the
comic ideal; for the comic type is necessarily inferior to the
average and the actual.

What the critics term improbable one must judge by JJJJpJbJJfif. an
appeal to the end of comedy, or by (c) an appeal to \*"»s popular
behef, and by an attempt to show that on occasion the thing may not
be improbable; for [as

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222 THE POETICS APPLIED TO COMEDY

For alleged contradictions in language

Where the critic had best look for errors [In comedy]

Chapter 26

A general problem: [which Is superior, comic narrative or comedy
proper]

[Comedy] can produce its effect when merely read

Agathon suggested] it is likely that something improbable will now
and then occur.

As for alleged [unintentional] contradictions in the comic poet's
language, these we must scrutinize as one deals with sophistical
refutations in argumentation. Then we can see whether the poet in his
several statements refers to the same thing, in the same relation,
and in the same sense, and can judge whether or not he has
contradicted what he himself says, or what a person of intelligence
normally assumes as true.

The censure of the critic is justified, however, when it is directed
against faulty sequence in the plot, and against nobility or
depravity in the comic agents; that is, when there is no inherent
necessity for excellence or baseness in the agents, and when the
irrational sequence serves no comic purpose.

The question finally suggests itself: Which is the superior form of
art, comic narrative or comedy proper ? Those who favor the long
narrative may argue thus: The less vulgar form is superior; and that
which is addressed to the better audience is the less vulgar. If this
is so, it is obvious that a pantomimic art such as comedy (on the
stage) is exceedingly vulgar. So we are told that the comic narrative
is addressed to a cultivated audience, which does not need gestures
and postures, and comedy to an audience that is inferior and does
need them. Accordingly, if comedy is a vulgar art, it evidently is
the lower form.

But in reply we may say that it is quite possible for comedy to
produce its characteristic effect without the appeals connected with
presentation on the stage, in just the same way as a comic narrative
; for if a comedy be merely read, its quality becomes evident.

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Ae:ain, one must arefue in favor of comedy proper that [Comedy] is

° \*-\* . more Inclusive,

it contains every element found in the comic narrative, compact, and

• •111 ^'^"'

and that in addition it has elements, not inconsiderable,

of its own in spectacle and music — and through the music the
characteristic pleasure is distinctly heightened.

Further, the greater vividness of comedy is felt when the play is
read as well as when it is acted.

Still further, in comedy the imitation attains its end

in less space. And this may be deemed an advantage,

since the concentrated effect is more delightful than one

which is long-drawn-out, and so diluted. [Consider the

result, for example, if one were to lengthen out the Clouds of
Aristophanes (1510 lines) into the number of lines in the Odyssey
(12,110 lines).]

And ae^ain, the unity of action is less strict in the The action

° -^ . [In comedy]

comic narrative : for if a narrative writer takes a strict- '«Jess

diffuse

ly unified story, either he will tell it briefly, and it will seem
abrupt, or he will make it conform to the usual scale of a long
narrative, and then it will seem thin and unsubstantial.

If, then, comedy proper is superior to comic narrative [Comedy is in
all these respects, and particularly in fulfilling its comic
narra-special function as a form of poetry; and if we recall, as we
must, that the two kinds of literature are to give us, not any chance
pleasure, but the definite pleasure we have mentioned; it is clear
that comedy proper, since it attains its poetic end more effectively
than comic narrative, is the superior form of the two.

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THE TRACTATUS COISLINIANUS TRANSLATED

[See above, pp. 10-15. The translation is mainly based upon the text
of Kaibel, with use of the text and apparatus of Kayser. But I have
discarded the schematic arrangement of the original, supplying such
words as 'is divided into' in place of the oblique lines and
horizontal braces which there indicate divisions and subdivisions
under the various heads, and likewise adding appropriate numerals and
letters in parentheses.]

Poetry is either (I) non-mimetic or (II) mimetic.

(I) Non-mimetic poetry is divided into (A) historical, (B)
instructive. (B) Instructive poetry is divided into (i) didactic, (2)
theoretical.

(II) Mimetic poetry is divided into (A) narrative, (B) dramatic and
[directly] presenting action. (B) Dramatic poetry, or that [directly]
presenting action, is divided into (i) comedy, (2) tragedy, (3)
mimes, (4) satyr-dramas.

Tragedy removes the fearful emotions of the soul through compassion
and terror. And [he says] that it aims at having a due proportion of
fear. It has grief for its mother.

Comedy is an imitation of an action that is ludicrous and imperfect,
of sufficient length, [in embellished language,] the several kinds
[of embellishment being] separately [found] in the [several] parts
[of the play]; [directly presented] by persons acting, and not
[given] through narrative; through pleasure and laughter effecting
the purgation of the like emotions. It has laughter for its mother.

Laughter arises (I) from the diction [= expression] (II) from the
things [= content].

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THE TRACTATE TRANSLATED 225

(I) From the diction, through the use of —

(A) Homonyms

(B) Synon5mis

(C) GarruHty

(D) Paronyms, formed by (?i) addition and

(? 2) dipping

(E) Diminutives

(F) Perversion

(i) by the voice

(2) by other means of the same sort

(G) Grammar and syntax

(II) Laughter is caused by the things —

(A) From assimilation, employed

(i) toward the worse (2) toward the better

(B) From deception

(C) From the impossible

(D) From the possible and inconsequent

(E) From the unexpected

(F) From debasing the personages

(G) From the use of clownish (pantomimic)

dancing

(H) When one of those having power, neglecting the greatest things,
takes the most worthless

(I) When the story is disjointed, and has no sequence

Comedy differs from abuse, since abuse openly censures the bad
quahties attaching [to men], whereas comedy requires the so-called
emphasis [? or 'innuendo '].

The joker will make game of faults in the soul and in the body.

P

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226 THE TRACTATE TRANSLATED

As in tragedies there should be a due proportion of fear, so in
comedies there should be a due proportion of laughter.

The substance of comedy consists of (i) plot, (2) ethos, (3) dianoia,
(4) diction, (5) melody, (6) spectacle.

The comic plot is the structure binding together the ludicrous
incidents.

The characters [ethe] of comedy are (i) the buffoon-ish, (2) the
ironical, and (3) those of the impostors.

The parts of dianoia are two : (A) opinion and (B) proof. [Proofs (or
\* persuasions ') are of] five [sorts]: (i) oaths, (2) compacts, (3)
testimonies, (4) tortures [' tests ' or ' ordeals '], (5) laws.

The diction of comedy is the common, popular language. The comic poet
must endow his personages with his own native idiom, but must endow
an alien with the alien idiom.

Melody is the province of the art of music, and hence one must take
its fundamental rules from that art.

Spectacle is of great advantage to dramas in supplying what is in
concord with them.

Plot, diction, and melody are foimd in all comedies, dianoia, ethos,
and spectacle in few.

The [quantitative] parts of comedy are fom*: (i) prologue, (2) the
choral part, (3) episode, (4) exode. The prologue is that portion of
a comedy extending as far as the entrance of the chorus. The choral
part [chori-con] is a song by the chorus when it [the song] is of
adequate length. An episode is what lies between two choral songs.
The exode is the utterance of the chorus at the end.

The kinds of comedy are : (i) Old, with a superabundance of the
laughable; (2) New, which disregards laughter, and tends toward the
serious; (3) Middle, which is a mixture of the two.

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THE TRACTATUS COISLINIANUS AMPLIFIED AND ILLUSTRATED

[For the sake of clearness it has seemed better first (above, pp.
224-6) to give a rendering of the succinct Tractate by itself, and
then to repeat that rendering, as follows, with interlarded comment
and illustration.]

Poetry is either (I) non-mimetic or (II) mimetic. Kinds of [In the
*Poetics* such a thing as \* non-mimetic ' poetry is not recognized;
there poetry is regarded as in its nature mimetic, and versified
history, or medicine, or the hke, is excluded from the realm of
poetry; yet see above, p. 12.]

(I) Non-mimetic poetry is divided into (A) histor- Non-mimetic

ical, (B) instructive. [(A) Historical poetry finds illustration in
the poem of Choerilus on the Persian war (see Aristotle, Rhetoric
3.14, and compare above, p. 141) ; in the Pharsalia of Lucan ; and in
Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars between the two Houses of Lancaster
and York.']

(B) Instructive [TuaiBsuTrwi^] poetry is divided into (i) didactic
[OcpYJYviTixY)], (2) theoretical. [In a comprehensive scheme of Greek
poetry room would be found for Hesiod ; the Theogony is perhaps \*
theoretical,' and the Works and Days ' didactic' Other examples of
didactic poetry would be the lines from Scion quoted in Aristotle's
Constitution of Athens and Aristotle's own scolion on virtue (compare
above, pp. 12—13), and Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. Other examples of
theoretical poetry would be Parmenides' On Nature, and similar
cosmological poems of the pre-Socratic philosophers ; also the poem
of Lucretius, and Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden. In *Poetics* i.
1447^ 16—20 Empedocles is said to be a ' physicist rather than a poet
'; in 21. 1457^24, and elsewhere, he is cited in illustration of
details in the theory of poetry!]

p2

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THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Mimetic

Tragedy

Comedy. A definition

(II) Mimetic poetry is divided into (A) narrative [as the Odyssey],
(B) dramatic and [directly] presenting action. (B) Dramatic poetry,
or that [directly] presenting action, is divided into (i) comedy [as
the Birds of Aristophanes], (2) tragedy [as Sophocles' Oedipus the
King], (3) mimes [as the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus (see above,
pp. 168—70)], (4) satyr-dramas [as the lost Phorcides of Aeschylus
(see *Poetics* 18), the partly-preserved Ichneutae (Trackers) of
Sophocles, and the Cyclops of Euripides (translated by Shelley)].

Tragedy removes the fearful emotions [(poj3epa xaGY)[j.aira] of the
soul through compassion and terror [Bl oi>tTou xai Bsou^]. And [some
one (? Aristotle) says] that it [tragedy] aims at having a due
proportion of fear [cp6pou]. It has grief [luizri] for its mother.

[Does the \* proportion' ((7U|X[j.£Tpia) mean a due measure of fear,
not an excess of it, as compared with pity ? Or are we to understand
that the latent fear of the spectators is to be aroused by tragedy,
and so reduced to moderation ?]

Comedy is an imitation of an action that is ludicrous and imperfect,1
of sufficient [or ' perfect'] length, [in embellished language,] the
several kinds of embellishment being separately found in the several
parts of the play ;2 directly presented by persons acting, and not in
the form of narrative ;^ through pleasure and laughter effecting the
purgation of the like [or ' of the said '] emotions [ty]v twv
toioutcov 7uaOY][xaTcav xaOapaiv]. It has laughter for its mother.
[For a discussion of comic purgation, see above, pp. 60—98. On
laughter as the ' mother' of comedy, see above, p. 12.]

^ Reading yeXoias, as Kayser conjectures, for yeXoiov, and taking
d/uoifjov as of feminine gender.

\* Following Vahlen. Compare also above, p. 179.

^ Literally : ' an action ... of persons doing, and not through
narrative' (or 'through report').

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DICTION: HOMONYMS

229

Laughter from

(I) diction

(II) thinos

(A) liomonyms

Laughter arises (I) from the diction, (11) from the things done. [\*
Things ' or \* things done ' would include mental acts as well as
physical. There is necessarily some overlapping between the two main
categories of words (= expression) and things (= content), as there
is overlapping between the sub-heads under each. For a tripartite
division by Aristotle of the sources of laughter, see above, pp. 62,
138.]

(I) Laughter arises from the diction [Xe^i?] through Pi^^*'°^"^ the
use of —

(A) Homonyms. [That is, equivoca, or ambiguities.

Things having the same name, but in themselves distinct, are
homonymous. Thus, in the comedy of Aristophanes the changes are rung
upon IIXouto?, the god, and tuXouto?, wealth. So ' Iris' (\* iris')
may refer to (i) the messenger of the gods, (2) the rainbow, (3) a
halo (round the moon or round a candle), (4) the flower. \* Spring '
has more than one meaning in English, as in the remark of the tramp
to the tourist:

\* Speaking of bathing in famous springs, I bathed in the spring of
'86.' Compare the following: ' Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being
old ' {Richard II 2. i. 74).

\* I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream ; it shall
be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom ' {MND. 4. i.
215-7). Falstaff: ' Their points being broken — ' Poins : ' Down fell
their hose ' (j Henry IV 2. 4. 216—7). — ' Points ' here has the two
meanings of sword-points and the tagged lace for attaching the hose
to the doublet. The use of equivoca is, of course, very frequent in
the comedy of every age. Thus the envoys from Persia, in Acharnians
91—2, ' come, bringing Pseudartabas, \*' the King's Eye " '; and
Dicaeopolis on hearing the title rejoins:

\* Would that a crow might peck it out, and yours, too, the
ambassador's' (92—3). See also the various turns on the word %61oc,
in Birds 179—84, and again on opvi? in Birds 719—21 (Rogers'
translation) :

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230 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

And whene'er you of omen or augury speak, 't is a bird you

are always repeating; A rumor's a bird, and a sneeze is a bird, and
so is a word

or a meeting, A servant 's a bird, and an ass is a bird.

The number of meanings a given word (e. g., how) may have is,
therefore, not necessarily restricted to two, especially if, as in
Enghsh, we include all the meanings indicated by the same sound {how,
hough). ' Equivocal terms,' says Aristotle, in Rhetoric 3. 2 (see
above, p. 144), \* are the class of words most useful to the sophist,
for it is with the help of these that he juggles/ The comic poet also
juggles with them.] PJction: (B) Synonvms. [The interpretation is
obvious. In

(B) synonyms \\ / j ^ u r

the passage last quoted Aristotle continues: ' Synonyms are most
useful to the poet. By synonyms in ordinary use I mean, for instance,
"to go " and " to walk " ; these are at once accepted and synonymous
terms.' Different terms applied to the same thing, then, are
synonymous — as go, fare, proceed. So one may call the same act \*
stealing' or \* conve3dng.' ' " Convey " the wise it call. " Steal "
! foh ! a fico for the phrase!' {Merry Wives i. 3. 30). The comic
poet has the option of calling the worse thing by the better name, or
the better thing by the worse name. By the use of metaphor, the
number of names applied to the same thing may be indefinitely
extended. As Aristotle points out {Rhetoric 3. 2), Dionysius ' the
Brazen ' in his elegies called poetry ' Calliope's screech ' — poetry
and screeching being both of them \* voices '; and Simonides {ihid.;
see above, p. 155), when asked to compose an ode in honor of a
victory in the mule-race, at first refused to write about \*
half-asses,' and then, when a larger fee was offered, wrote:

Hail, daughters of storm-footed mares —

' yet they were equally daughters of the asses.' Similarly, hands may
be called ' pickers and stealers' {Hamlet 3. 2. 340). Or take the
following expressions for late and early : ' One that converses more
with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning '
{Coriolanus 2.1. 53-5). Or take the case when Euelpides

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wishes to kiss the Nightingale, and Peisthetaerus warns him (Birds
672): \* O wretched fool, her beak has two little spits' (mandibles).
Starkie (Hermathena 42. 30—1) gives examples from Shakespeare and
Moliere, and notes the fertility of Rabelais in strings of
depreciatory synonyms — for example, the epithets addressed to monks
in the inscription over the entrance to the convent of Thelema.]

(C) Garrulity. [This is d:Zo'kz(j'/i<x, a staple device Diction: of
comic writers, to which Socrates makes allusion in the A pology and
Phaedo (see above, pp. 104-5) • Aristotle refers to 6!^okzGyioL, but
not in connection with comedy (see above, p. 144; and compare
Rhetoric 2. 13. 1390^9, 2. 22. 1395^26, Nicomachean Ethics 3. 13.
iii7t>35, De Sophisticis Elenchis 3. 165bi5, Problems 18. 8.917^4,
Historia Animalium 11. 492^2). The simplest case is the repetition of
the same word over and over again (see Tzetzes, below, p. 288), but
the term embraces verbosity of every sort — bombast, triviality,
learned nonsense (in the philosophical discussions of the Clouds, in
Swift's Voyage to Laputa, in Les Femmes Savantes of Moliere), the
garrulity of age, of children and the childish, of the idle, of
clowns, domestics, and the like. Dogberry is ' garrulous ' in the
pompous style. The pettifoggers and quacks of Moliere are \*
garrulous '; in Le Malade Imaginaire the first speech of the
Hypochondriac is an instance, the harangue of Monsieur Diafoirus in
2. 6 is another, and the address of his son Thomas to Angelique
(quoted below, pp. 242-3, under ' assimilation ') yet another. Thomas
is twice foiled [ibid. 2. 6,7) in a long-winded memorized address
intended for her step-mother. The choruses in the Acharnians and the
Wasps indulge in garrulity; for example [Wasps 233—9) \* ' O
Strymodore of Conthyle, best of our crew of dicasts, has Euergides
appeared, or Chabes of Phlya ? Ah, here you are, alas and alack! all
that yet remains of that youth so flourishing then when we kept the
watch together, you and I, in Byzantium. Remember how, as we paced
our round by night, we found and filched the baker's tray, and
chopped it up

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232 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

to cook our pimpernel withaL' It would be easy to multiply examples,
as from Shakespeare {Measure for Measure 2. i. 89—105): Pompey: '
Sir, she came in, great with child, and longing — saving your honor's
reverence — for stewed prunes. Sir, we had but two in the house,
which at that very distant time stood, as it were, in a fruit-dish, a
dish of some three-pence ; your honors have seen such dishes; they
are not China dishes, but very good dishes.' Escalus: \* Go to, go
to; no matter for the dish, sir.' Pompey : \* No indeed, sir, not of
a pin. You are therein in the right. But to the point: as I say, this
Mistress Elbow, being, as I say, with child, and being great-belhed,
and longing, as I said, for prunes, and having but two in the dish,
as I said, Master Froth here, this very man, having eaten the rest,
as I said, and, as I say, paying for them very honestly; for, as you
know, Master Froth, I could not give you three-pence again.' Another
good case is that of Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona 2. 3. 21—33.
The chorus in Aristophanes' Birds is likewise talkative; see their'
anapaests ' (684 ff.) — above all, their account of the creation and
of their own importance in the affairs of men [Birds 693—722).
Parodies and travesties are likely to be of the same windy nature;
thus, the monody uttered by Aeschylus in the Frogs in imitation of
Euripides (Frogs 1331—63), beginning (Rogers' translation) :

O darkly-light mysterious Night,

What may this Vision mean,

Sent from the world unseen

With baleful omens rife;

A thing of lifeless life,

A child of sable night,

A ghastly curdling sight.

In black funereal veils.

With murder, murder in its eyes,

And great enormous nails ?

Many passages of garrulity, as the last-quoted, betray a lack of
sequence, which in itself may be a source of laughter, and is so
listed in the Tractate (see below, p. 257). But long-winded speeches
afford opportunity^ for various sorts of comic effect, and hence
contain

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illustrations of other categories. The long anapaestic chorus of the
Birds has already been cited for an example of homonyms : ' A rumor's
a bird, and a sneeze is a bird, and so is a word or a meeting '
(Birds 720).]

(D) Paronyms. They are formed (i) by adding to Diction: a word, and
(2) by taking something away from it. [Or the sense may be that they
are formed by first dropping some part of a word and then adding
something to what remains. A paronjmi is, so to speak, a name lying
at the side of another. In each case, two words are concerned, one of
them being derived from the other, generally by a change of
termination. The relation may be a true one according to scientific
principles. Or it may be a fancied one according to popular notions
of etymology — as in the time of Aristophanes, before the advent of
strict linguistic science. Or it may be a pretended one based upon an
assumed principle. Thus Hermippus (frg. 4, Kock i. 225—6) derives the
rolling ' year' (sviauiro?), which contains all within itself, from
sv a6Ta). Similar derivatives are common in everyday speech while a
language is in the making. In comedy they are extempore formations,
or else formations otherwise rare in the language. In a given
instance it may be difficult to say whether the word is a coinage of
the poet, or a term, not previously recorded, from common usage. If
the reading ' great oneyers ' is authentic, a paronym formed by
addition is found in Gadshill's \*I am joined with no
foot-land-rakers, no long-staff sixpenny strikers, none of these mad
musta-chio-purple-hued malt-worms, but with nobility and
tranquillity, burgomasters and great oneyers ' (j Henry IV 2. I.
76—9). So also (from auiro?, by dropping <; and adding -xaTo?)
vMo^oitqc, in Plutus 83 : \* Are you really he} ' \* I am.' ' Himself
? ' \* His own self's self.' Here too, perhaps, belongs xuvToxaTo? —
' the most shameless (most doglike) of all' (see above, pp. 29, 150).
In a comic compound epithet, if we take the first element as a base,
the whole may be regarded as a paronym derived from it. Those of
Gadshill (as \* long-staff sixpenny strikers ' and ' mad mustachio-

paronyms

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234 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

purple-hued malt-worms '), formed by addition, may be compared with
Aristophanes' (7C(,\Kiyyoloyyjj'Kr\\f6Lba,i^
(7apxa(7[jL07utTL>oxa{i7UTat {Frogs 966) : \* Great
long-beard-lance-and-trum pet-men, flesh-tearers with the pine' (cf.
Starkie, Hermathena 42.33; and compare above, p. 212). Starkie
(Acharnians, pp. xhx—hv) gives nine subdivisions under the head of
Paronymy : (i) compounds ; (2) coinages to suit special occasions;
(3) jocular feminine forms; (4) comic comparatives and superlatives
(as aozozoczoq) ; (5) character-names with diverse terminations (as
xdcvGwv in Peace 82) ; (6) verbal formations (as >.uBi^eiv in Knights
523) ; (7) comic adverbs (as [xaystpixw^ in Acharnians 1015) ; (8)
imitative words and phrases (as the mimic notes of birds, frogs, and
musical instruments) ; (9) certain comic exclamations, mostly
imitative. But the device, strictly considered, seems to involve a
stem of some word in regular usage; the customary termination of the
word may be dropped, and then something may be added. Or again, it
would seem, something may be clipped from the end (? or beginning, or
middle) of a word, so that the resultant coinage is shorter than the
ordinary word. This last case apparently is hard to find in comedy,
save as comedy makes use of ordinary colloquial contractions ;
compare also Gib (for Gilbert) and Daw (for David) in the Towneley
Secunda Pastorum. It would simplify matters could we reverse the
order of the Tractate under this category, and say, ' paronymy by
subtraction and addition,' since commonly the familiar ending of a
word is dropped, and an unusual ending then supplied — as in the
proverbial jocular derivation oi Middleton from Moses : you take away
the termination -OSes, and add the termination -iddleton. So the
Hostess in Henry V 2. 3. 10 shortens Abraham to Arthur, saying of the
dead Falstaff: ' Na}^ sure, he 's not in hell; he 's in Arthur's
bosom, if ever any man went to Arthur's bosom.' Middleton from Moses,
and Arthur from Abraham, recall the example of paronymy preserved by
Tzetzes (see below, p. 288), ' I Momax am called Midas ' (which has
disturbed textual critics) ; they will perhaps illustrate the case of
proper names derived

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one from another by clipping or addition or both, though they trench
upon the field of comic perversions (see below, under F). The
categories of paronyms and perversion overlap, since a perversion
often contains some considerable part of the word it travesties.]

(E) Diminutives. [These, of course, are usually deriv- Diction:
atives. Aristotle has defined and illustrated them in minutives
Rhetoric 3. 2 (see above, pp. 29, 156): ' Again, without abandoning a
given epithet, one may turn it mto a diminutive. By a diminutive I
mean a form that lessens either the good or the bad in a description;
for example, the banter of Aristophanes in the Babylonians, where he
uses " coinlet " for coin, " cloaklet " for cloak, " gibelet " for
gihe, and " plaguelet." ' Greek is rich in diminutives, as is also
Italian — much more so than English, which in this point lags behind
German ; Starkie (Acharnians, pp. Iv—Ivi) lists thirteen such endings
in Aristophanes, with many examples (mostly under -tov, -iB-tov,
-aptov, and -ictxo?, -ictxy]). Diminutives may be endearing,
caressing, ludicrous, or contemptuous, two or more of these qualities
often being strangely mingled in the same epithet. Examples are :
EuptmBiov {Acharnians 404 — ' Euripides, Euripi-darling ! hearken
!'); the same form [Acharnians 475 —

\* Euripidarling, my best and sweetest! ') ; ScoxpaxiBiov [Clouds 223
— ' Dear little Socrates ! '); the same form [ibid. 237 — \* Come
down, dear little Socrates ! '); again [ibid. 746 — ' O dearest
little Socrates! '); opviGtov [Birds 223 — Euelpides exclaims, at the
sound of the flute imitating the Nightingale : \* OZeus the king,
hark to the little birdie's voice! '). Similar effects are attained
in English, partly by the use of such diminutives as we possess (as
-ie in birdie), partly by means of additional words, as adjectives;
thus: ' Come, sweet Audry, We must be married, or we must live in
bawdry ' [AYL. 3. 3. 93—4); ' What sayst thou, bully Bottom? ' [MND.
3. I. 8.) Other examples are: ' Most brisky Juvenal, and eke most
lovely Jew ' [MND. 3. i. 92) ;

\* I '11 meet thee, Pyramus, at Ninny's tomb ' [ibid. 3. I. 94); '
Why, that's my dainty Ariel! ' [Tempest

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236 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

5. I. 95). The same effect is gained by the use of the rhymes in the
song by Titania (herself a diminutive!) in MND. 3. I. 162—71: eyes,
dewberries, mulberries, humble-bees, thighs, eyes, arise,
butterflies, eyes, courtesies; consider, too, the names of the
attendant elves, particularly Mustard-seed. Flute's perversion, \*
Ninny's tomb ' (' " Ninus' tomb," man! ' interrupts Quince) belongs
equally well under the next head.] Diction: (F) Perversion (i) by the
voice, (2) by other means

(F) perversion \\ / J > \\ / J

of the same sort. [\* This ' — l^oCkXaxh, — says Rutherford (p. 444),
' is not identical with the zioCKkoLjf]' of the *Poetics*, \* and
wholly different from the i\oChXoL'^r\\ ' of the Rhetoric. \* It is
further so particularized that there can be no doubt that it is any
ludicrous perversion of a word's intention by means of
mispronunciation or of intonation ' (that is, by the voice), \* or by
gesture, grimace, wink, twinkle in the eye ' (that is, by other means
in the same class with the voice), ' or, of course, by both
combined.' An ancient example (see below, p. 288) is that of w Zsu
BscTTcoira (' O Lord Zeus! ') twisted by pronunciation into w jBBsQ
(Lat. peditum) BsCTuoTa. Bent ley would identify the passage with the
end of line 940 in the Lysistrata ; but the joke would be more pat in
one or another of the passages containing w Zsu ^olgiKzu — as Clouds
2, or Birds 223 — and we need not stickle for the accuracy of the
tradition that gives the relatively unimportant word Bs^TuoTa. We
find a rather good English parallel in Henry V 4. 4. 4—8, where
Pistol captures the French soldier. Pistol: \* Art thou a gentleman ?
What is thy name? Discuss.' French Soldier: 'O Seigneur Dieu! '
Pistol: \* O Signieur Dew should be a gentleman. Perpend my words, O
Signieur Dew, and mark.' The laughable through perversion by the
voice and similar means would therefore include many puns — though
not those arising from the confusion of things having names exactly
alike. Thus Falstaff in I Henry IV 2. 4. 241—2 : ' If reasons (\*
raisins ') were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a
reason upon compulsion, I.' Or take the unconscious pun

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DICTION: PERVERSION, GRAMMAR 237

uttered by the illiterate maid-servant Martine to the purist Belise
in Les Femmes Savantes 2. 6. 64—5. Belise : ' Veux-tu toute ta vie
offenser la grammaire ? ' Mar-tine : \* Qui parle d'offenser
grand'mere ni grand-pere ? ' But the category embraces all sorts of
perversions in diction, from Fluellen's Welsh pronunciation of \*
Alexander the Pig ' (Henry V 4. 7. 12—18 — \* The pig, or the great,
or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one
reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations') to Alcibiades'
lisp (TFas/)s 42—6, esp. 45 — \* Theolus ' for Theorus). Add the
Hostess' \* variation ' on the death of Falstaff: \* A' made a finer
end and went away an it had been any christom child ' (Henry F 2. 3.
11—12 — a perversion of Christian and chrism together). There is a
succession of instances during the preparations for their pla^/ by
the artisans in A Midsummer-Night's Dream : ' Phibbus' ' for Phoebus'
(MND. 1. 2. 3); ' Thisne ' for Thisby (i. 2. 51—3 — but the case is
also one of diminutives: ' I'll speak in a monstrous little voice,
\*\* Thisne, Thisne! " '); ' Saying thus, or to the same defect ' (3.
I. 38 — \* defect ' = effect) ; \* He comes to disfigure, or to
present, the person of Moonshine ' (3. i. 57—8);

\* I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gently as any
sucking dove' (2.1.80—1). Again, Bottom :

\* Thisby, the flowers have odious savors sweet' — Quince: ' Odorous,
odorous.' Bottom: — ' odors savors sweet' (3. i. 79—81). Finally,
Quince: \* And he is a very paramour for a sweet voice.' Flute:

\* You must say " paragon "; a paramour is, God bless us! a thing of
naught ' (4. 2. 11—14).]

(G) Grammar and syntax. [So I paraphrase (TX^[xa Diction: ^.s^scoc,
which covers not only the grammatical and syn- and syntax tactical
relations of discourse, but also the rhythm and cadence of a sentence
— the arrangement of the diction in a general sense. Laughter arises
from inflections and syntax formed on a spurious analogy with correct
usage. In ordinary speech such forms are barbarisms ; and taken from
the usage of illiterates they may serve a comic purpose. The luckless
Martine has offended

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238 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Belise by the \* solecisme horrible ' : ' Mon Dieu! je n'avons pas
^tugue (= ' etudie') comme vous, Et je parlons tout droit comme on
parle cheux (= ' chez ') nous.' Belise: ' Ton esprit, je I'avoue, est
bien materiel : Je n'est qu'un singulier, avons est pluriel. Veux-tu
toute ta vie offenser la grammaire? ' (Femmes Savantes 2. 6. 58—9,
62—4). Similarly Lucas uses the ilhterate form j'avons in Le Medecin
Malgre Lui i. 6. However, the comic poet outdoes ordinary ilhterate
usage (though often through the speech of rustics, servants, and the
like) in producing spurious grammatical forms and false congruities.
Compare Toinette (disguised as a physician) in Le Malade Imaginaire
3. 14: \* Ignoranius, ignoranta, ignorantum/ Or compare the Latin in
Calverley's The Cock and the Bull (below, p. 258) with that of
Sganarelle in Le Medecin Malgre Lui 26:\* Quia substantivo, et
adjectivum, concordat in generi, numerum, et casus.' Calverley's
skit, in burlesque imitation of The Ring and the Book, makes use of
Browning's d/^jj-a T^s^ew^ (even in the cadence of the title) for
comic effect. In Two Gentlemen of Verona 2. 5. 25—33 Shakespeare
gives the following. Speed: ' What an ass art thou! I understand thee
not.' Launce: ' What a block art thou, that thou canst not. My staff
understands me.' Speed :' What thou sayest ?' Launce: \* Ay, and what
I do, too. Look thee, I '11 but lean, and my staff understands me.'
Speed : \* It stands under thee, indeed.' Launce: \* Why, stand-under
and under-stand is all one.' Of this order is the youthful Person's
answer to the question, whether Brutus did right in assassinating
Caesar: ' Non bene fecit, nee male fecit; sed inter-fecit.' It is
often difficult, sometimes impossible, to translate pleasantries of
this type ; perhaps one may partly succeed with the dialogue between
Euripides and his stupid kinsman in Thesmophoriazusae 26—8.
Euripides: ' See this wicket ? ' Mnesilochus: ' By Heck! should think
I did.' Euripides : ' Now silence, you ! ' Mnesilochus : ' I silence
the wicket ? ' Euripides : ' Hark ! ' Mnesilochus : ' I
hark-and-silence the wicket ? ' In the Clouds, as Starkie notes, the
old peasant learns from

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things: assimilation

239

Socrates not to confuse dc>^sxTrpuwv (' rooster') and a>.£xi:p(5atva
{' roostress '), and discovers that the correct form ^ xapBoTco? is
not correct at all — it should be •?) xapBoTUY) (Clouds 850—2,
669—75, 1251 — compare Starkie's rendering, ' kneading-jack ' and '
kneading-jill '). The category of false grammar overlaps with that of
perversion; see \* paramour ' and \* paragon ' at the end of the
preceding paragraph, and perhaps Mistress Quickly's \* thou bastardly
rogue ' (2 Henry IV 2. I. 51, — ?' bastardly ' = dastardly). In
parodies (see below, pp. 258—9), the individual style of the author
parodied — his pet forms and constructions — will become the standard
which the comic writer travesties; so it is in The Cock and the Bull,
and in the samples offered by Euripides and Aeschylus of their own
and each other's wares in the Frogs. For the expression (7)^Y)[xa
>.s^£(o^ in Aristotle's Rhetoric see above,

p. 145.]

(II) Laughter arises from the things. F\* Things' Lauohter

(TupayfiLaTa) mcJude acts and objects m themselves (as distinct from
their names, which belong under \* diction ' = Xe'^t?), and persons
in themselves (again as distinct from their names), regarded
objectively. \* Things' are, above all, things done, that is, deeds
and activities, including the acts and experiences of the mind. But
it is hard to dissociate a thing from its name, and hence, as we have
observed, a particular example of the ludicrous may sometimes be
classified under more than one head and sub-head. If a garrulous
person, for instance, uses the same word over and over, he will keep
talking about the same object — as prunes. In general, however, we
have this distinction : if the humor disappears when the joke is
translated (as in Porson's joke on Brutus and Caesar), we have to do
with ' laughter from the diction '; if not, then with \* laughter
from the things.' Yet a shrewd translator will often be surprisingly
close to the foreign language in his rendering of ' laughter from the
diction.']

(A) From assimilation. The assimilation may be ^limiiation^

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(i) of what is better (superior) to what is worse (inferior), or (2)
vice versa.-Assimilation (i) Assimilation or equation of what is
better to

tc the worse ^ ' ^

what is worse. [Tzetzes (below, p. 289) gives as an instance of (i)
the transformation of the master Dionysus into the slave Xanthias
(Frogs 494—502); and we may add the assimilation of Xanthias himself
to a beast of burden (ibid. 9—20, 32). Since comedy in general tends
to represent things as worse than they commonly are, the principle of
assimilation can be freely illustrated from the basic ideas of many
plays. Thus men (superior) are assimilated to birds (inferior), to
frogs, and to wasps, in the respective comedies of Aristophanes, and
to the denizens of the farmyard in Rostand's Chantecler. In like
manner Swift assimilates men to pygmies, to heavy giants, to horses,
to apes. The method also reaches to detail; so that, as Starkie
remarks (Acharnians, p. Ixii), so long as they represent :upaY^aTa,
and not merely 'kziic,, comparisons, metaphors, and even epithets,
come under' this head or that of (2) assimilation to the better. The
Platonic Socrates' comparison of the State to a sluggish horse, and
of himself to a gadfly sent to arouse it (Apology 30, 31), is a case
in point; of the same order are Alcibiades' comparisons of Socrates
to the busts of Silenus, to Marsyas the satyr, and to a brent-goose
(the last taken from Aristophanes — see above, p. 113), in Symposium
215, 216, 221. So the following from Shakespeare. Boy (speaking of
Falstaff) : ' He is very sick, and would to bed. Good Bardolph, put
thy face between his sheets, and do the office of a warming-pan '
(Henry F 2. i. 83—5). Prince: ' How now, wool-sack! What mutter you ?
' Falstaff : \* A king's son. If I do not beat thee out of thy
kingdom with a dagger of lath, and drive all thy subjects afore thee
like a flock of wild geese. I '11 never wear hair on my face m.ore '
(i Hen/y IV 2. 4. 136—40). Falstaff: \* 'Sblood, you starveling, you
elf-skin, you dried neat's-tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish!
O! for breath to utter what is like thee; you tailor's yard, you
sheath, you bow case, you vile standing tuck '

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(ibid. 2. 4. 246—50). Other examples from Aristophanes are the
following. In the ' thinking-house ' of Socrates dwell the men who '
teach and persuade us that heaven is a muffle enveloping us, and that
we are the charcoal within ' {Clouds 94—7 — comparison with an oven);
Brasidas and Cleon are the ' pestle ' and \* mortar ' of Sparta and
Athens (Peace 259 ff.); Euelpides looks like a gander done by a
penny-artist (Birds 803-6). Euelpides: \* What are you laughing at ?
' Peisthe-taerus: ' At your long wing-feathers. Do you know what you
are like, your wings and you ? Just like a gander in a cheap sketch.'
Euelpides: ' And you hke a bald-headed blackbird.' Here, too, may be
noticed the \* Dionysus, son of — Wine-jar,' in Frogs 22, where the
epithet we anticipate is son of Zeus or the like; the assimilation to
\* wine-jar ' may therefore be classified also under ' the unexpected
' (see below, p. 250). The hint from Tzetzes (above) suggests that
many comic transformations and disguises fall under the present head
of assimilation to the better or the worse. The \* translated '
Bottom, ' with an ass's head ' (MND. 3. i), belongs in this category
as well as in that of ' the impossible ' (below, p. 244). The
interchange of master and servant, the disguise of lovers as menials
so as to obtain entrance into the house of the beloved, and similar
devices of the New Greek Comedy and its successors, hardly need to be
mentioned; we immediately think of Valere finding employment in the
household of Harpagon in L'Avare, Leandre as an apothecary assisting
Sganarelle in Le Medecin Malgre Lui, etc.]

(2) Assimilation or equation of what is worse to what Assimilation

to the better

is better. [Tzetzes (below, p. 289) gives as the other side

of his instance the transformation of the slave Xan-thias into his
master Dionysus (Frogs 494 ff.). This amounts to an assimilation of
Xanthias to Heracles (see ihid. 499), and brings to mind the similar
equation of the unheroic Dionysus to Heracles earlier in the play
(ihid. 40 ff., 108 ff.). The principle involved has a general value
for comedy. It may serve to bring out a ludicrous contrast in which '
the worse ' gains nothing

q

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242 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

from its ostensible approximation to \* the better '; so in the
examples just given, and in the case of Bottom, who, after his
metamorphosis, is called ' angel' and \* gentleman ' by Titania (MND.
3. i. 126, 161). Or it may serve to elevate or soften what is too low
or painful for comedy, to the right comic degree of inferiority that
gives no pain. In the Birds, some of the qualities taken on by men
are those in which winged creatures excel all human beings, as Ariel,
in The Tempest, excels them; the approximation in plumage, color,
song, and flight, helps in the embellishment of the play. And
particular comparisons may be, not odious, but complimentary. Yet in
the main the equation of the worse to the better in comedy is
ludicrous, and the compliments are ironical. ' Thou art as wise as
thou art beautiful,' says the enchanted Titania to the transformed
Bottom with his decoration (MND. 3. i. 145). The assimilation of
Sganarelle to a great physician in Le Medecin Malgre Lui lends but a
mock-dignity to that jocular rustic. The elevation of Sly in The
Taming of the Shrew does not ennoble him. And servants disguised as
masters become only the more ridiculous. In the way of detail,
Starkie [Acharnians, p. Ixii) adds the following examples.
Strepsiades compares the loss of his shoes with the squandering of
State funds by Pericles — on \* the service ' [Clouds 858—9); the
huge dung-beetle on which Trygaeus will fly up to Zeus is identified
with the winged Pegasus of Beller-ophon (Peace 73—89); the wall built
by the birds for Cloudcuckootown is twice as high as the famous wall
of Babylon, and on its top chariots could drive and pass with horses
as big as the Wooden Horse that caused the fall of Troy (Birds 552,
1124—9). Compare also the garrulous Euphuistic elaborations of the
Pbysiologus noted by Starkie (Hermathena 42. 36—7) in Shakespeare and
Moliere. Falstaff: ' For, though the camomile, the more it is trodden
on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner
it wears' (i Henry IV 2. 4. 408—10). Thomas Diafoirus (to Angelique)
: ' Mademoiselle, ne plus ne moins que le statue de Memnon rendait un
son harmonieux lorsqu'elle venait a ^tre

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eclairee des rayons du soleil, tout de mtoe me sens-je anime d'un
doux transport a Tapparition du soleil de vos beautes; et, comme les
naturalistes remarquent que la fleur nommee heliotrope tourne sans
cesse vers cet astre du jour, aussi mon coeur dores-en-avant
toumera-t-il toujours vers les astres resplendissants de vos yeux
adorables, ainsi que vers son pole unique \* (Malade Imaginaire 2.
6).]

(B) From deception. [This category overlaps with Things:

that of (E) \* the unexpected,' since every ludicrous accident to
which an author carefully leads up with a view to surprising us into
laughter has the nature of a deception ; and similarly the outcome of
deception is unexpected. Deception may be said to govern the plot of
the Birds, which is an elaborate lie (Men are birds); the poet cheats
us into accepting the falsehood through a gradual, yet swift,
transition from what is mere credible to what is less, and through an
accumulation of circumstances that would result if the primary
assumption were true. Similarly in the Frogs the poet cheats us into
expecting that Dionysus will bring back Euripides, and by a sudden
turn at the end makes him bring back Aeschylus instead. Still, we
must differentiate between surprise and deception, as also between
laughter arising from deception in regard to things and the deception
illustrated by jests on words. Aristotle speaks of the deceptive
element in verbal jests such as are produced by an unexpected change
of a letter (see above, p. 146); but this appertains to Xihq. In the
same connection, however, he gives an example of a jocular deception
involving TrpayixaTa: ' " Statelily stept he along, and under his
feet were his — chilblains."—The anticipated word was \*\* sandals."
' But the category of laughter arising from deceit may preferably
include things of greater moment — deeds, schemes, disguises. It was
Homer who taught those who came after how a lie should be represented
(see above, p. 217); the crafty Odysseus, with his many wiles, became
very useful to the comic poets. And impostors, pretenders, quacks,
disguised lovers — any sort of person in

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disguise, any one affecting to be other than himself — are similarly
useful; hkewise the scheming slaves and servants of Menander,
Plautus, Terence, and all modern comedy. Instances are the following:
Falstaff disguised as Mother Prat {Merry Wives 4. 2); Sir Hugh Evans,
disguised, and others disguised as Fairies, and Falstaff disguised as
Heme, with a buck's head on (ibid. 5. 5); Feste disguised as Sir
Topas the curate (Twelfth Night 4. 2); Toinette disguised as
physician (Malade Imaginaire 3. 14); Covielle disguised as
interpreter, and Cleonte ' en Turc ' (Bourgeois Gentilhomme 4. 6).
The entire plot of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac illustrates laughter
through deceit, with Sbrigani as main agent and the Limousin as chief
victim. Starkie (Acharnians, pp. Ixiii-lxiv) notes the following in
Aristophanes : Pseudartabas (' Shamartabas ') and his companions
{Acharnians 65 ff.); the Megarian bringing his two little girls to
market as pigs, and for sale (ihid. 764 ff.); the ' baby girl ' tiiat
turns out to be a leathern bottle (Thesmophoriazusae y;^^ ff.). To
this last Starkie finds a parallel in i Henry IV 5.3. 48—55. Prince:
' I prithee, lend me thy sword.' Falstaff : ' Nay, before God, Hal,
if Percy be alive, thou gett'st not my sword ; but take my pistol, if
thou wilt.' Prince : \* Give it me. What! is it in the case ? '
Falstaff: ' Ay, Hal; 't is hot, 'tis hot: there's that will sack a
city.' (The prince draws out a bottle of sack.) Prince: ' What [ is
't a time to jest and dally now ? ' (Throws it at him, and exit.) The
example of laughter through deceit preserved by Tzetzes (below, p.
289) is the case of Strep-siades, who was taken in by the account of
the disciple regarding Socrates' method of estimating the leap of the
flea; the method itself, as described, is an instance under another
head (see below, pp. 247-8).]

Thinos: (C) From the impossible. [The impossible (irra-

possibie tional, unintelhgible, violating the laws of natural se-

quence, especially that of cause and effect) may be used for comic
purposes, and it is then to be distinguished from the unintentional
lapses to which any author, comic or not, is exposed. There is, for
example, a real

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inconsistency in the Clouds as we have the play; for in line 142
Socrates is represented as within, measuring the distance skipped by
a flea, while in lines 217 ff. he is seen to have been outside, and
above, engaged in \* treading the air and contemplating the sun.' It
has been suggested (cf. Starkie, Clouds, p. 45, note on line 152)
that the inconsistency may be due, not to carelessness on the part of
Aristophanes, but to later imperfect ' contamination ' of the two
editions of the play. On the other hand, Socrates'' I tread the air,
and look down on the sun ' (Starkie's rendering) is a case of true
comic impossibility. So also the building of Cloudcuckoo-town with
its massive walls, midway between heaven and earth [Birds 1124 ff.);
and the resulting blockade of the gods, what they suffer from it, and
the embassy they send to Peisthetaerus in order to make terms [ihid.
1565 ff.), are equally irrational (= ' impossible '). ' Impossible,'
too, are the encounter of Dionysus and Xan-thias with the dead man,
and their attempt to strike a bargain with him as carrier [Frogs
170—8); the ascent of Trygaeus to heaven on his Pegasus, the beetle
[Peace 154—81). Lucian's True History abounds in comic
impossibilities, giving rise to many imitations in subsequent writers
— as in Swift's Voyage to Laputa. With the category in the Tractate
compare also the following. ' It is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God' (Matt. 19. 24). ' Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, . . .
blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel' [ihid. 23.
23—4). In Moliere, when the Constable asks Harpagon, \* Whom do you
suspect of this robbery ? ' the Miser replies: ' Every one; and I
wish you to arrest the city and the suburbs ' [L'Avare 5. i).
Unreason and unintelligi-bility for the sake of laughter are often
employed by Shakespeare. Second Servingman: ' Nay, I knew by his face
that there was something in him; he had, sir, a kind of face,
methought — I cannot tell how to term it.' First Servingman: \* He
had so, looking as it were — would I were hanged but I thought there
was more in him than I could think ' [Coriolanus 4. 5. 161—6).

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246 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

With this compare the reply of Sganarelle to the imposing argument of
the hero in Mohere's Don Jtcan 1. 2. : ' Ma foi, j 'ai a dire — Je ne
sais que dire. . . . Laissez faire; une autre fois je mettrai mes
raisonnements par ecrit, pour disputer avec vous.' Again, Dogberry: '
To be a we]l-favored man is the gift of fortune; but to \\vrite and
read comes by nature ' {Much Ado 3. 3. 14—6). ' For your writing and
reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity. You
are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the
constable of the watch ' {ibid. 3.3. 20—3). Dogberry : \* You are to
bid any man stand, in the prmce's name.' ' How if a ' will not stand
? ' Dogberry: \* Why then, take no note of him, but let him go; and
presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are
rid of a knave ' {ibid. 3. 3. 25—30). ' Garrulity,' of course, may
evince \* impossibility ' (unreason). Bottom (after returning to his
normal shape, and awaking) : \* I have had a most rare vision. I have
had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was; man is but
an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was — there
is no man can tell what. Methought I was — and methought I had — but
man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I
had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his
heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write
a ballad of this dream ; it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because
it hath no bottom ' {MND. 4. i. 206-17). The speeches of the
Servingmen, Dogberry, and Bottom illustrate also the category of \*
disjointed utterance,' when the story \* has no sequence ' (see
below, p. 257). Among the cases of ' impossibility ' (unreason) noted
by Starkie {Acharnians, p. Ixv) are the following. Socrates: \* I
should never have solved the riddle if I gazed upon the sky from the
nether earth ; for, soothly, perforce the earth draws the moist
element in thought. — Such, too, is the law with water-cresses.'
Strepsiades : \* What! does " thought " " draw " " the moist element
" into " the water-cresses " ? ' {Clouds 231—6.) In the Birds

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THINGS :THE POSSIBLE AND INCONSEQUENT 247

999—1005, Meton the geometer shows his rods for air-surveying, and
explains how to square the circle. Later, Iris is threatened with
death, although she is immortal {ibid. 1221—4). Aristotle furnishes
an example of this type of humor in Physica Auscultatio 2. 6 (see
above, p. 143) :' If any one should say he had washed himself in vain
because the sun was not eclipsed, he would be laughed at, since there
is no causal connection between this and that.']

(D) From the possible and inconsequent. [The pos- Things:

sible, but not' probable ' or relevant (see above, p. 191), sibie and
used for comic effect. The category may be termed that "'^°"^®''"®"\*
of ' the irrelevant.' A good case is Dionysus' attempt to measure the
literary value of lines from Aeschylus and Euripides by weighing them
in scales {Frogs 1365— 1410); compare the similar device employed by
Irving in his Knickerbocker's History of New York, Book 3, chap. I,
where Governor Van Twiller pronounced that, ' having carefully
counted over the leaves and weighed the books, it was found that one
was just as thick and as heavy as the other ; therefore it was the
final opinion of the court that the accounts were equally balanced;
therefore Wandle should give Barent a receipt, and Barent should give
Wandle a receipt — and the constable should pay the costs.' So
Rabelais (3. 39, 43) represents Bridoye, that excellent judge, as
deciding cases (after hearing the arguments on both sides) by means
of dice ; for forty years and more Bridoye judged successfully, and
then, his eyesight failing, he mistook a throw of four for a five. It
is \* possible ' to measure and judge by such standards, but the
process is irrelevant (\* inconsequent '). Futile measurements are
the staple in the illustration given by Tzetzes of laughter through '
deceit' (see above, p. 244, below, p. 289). As Tzetzes mentions but
two of the nine heads under Tipay^xaTa listed in the Tractate, his
second illustration may be one that had become misplaced in the
tradition. Strepsiades is deceived; but the story that deceives him
belongs here. Disciple: ' A while ago Socrates asked Chaeremon how
many of its own feet a flea had

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jumped; for after biting Chaeremon's eyebrow it bounded off to
Socrates' head.' Strepsiades: 'How, then, did he measure the leap ? '
Disciple : \* With the utmost dexterity. He melted some wax, caught
the flea, and dipped its feet in the melted wax; when this was cold,
the feet were encased in Persian slippers! These he took off, and so
he found the distance ' (Clouds 144—52). The deception lies in
Strepsiades' belief that a system of measurement has been described,
when the disciple's account is irrelevant. Irrelevance, whether in
garrulity or in brief answers, is frequent in comic dialogue. Second
Watch: ' If we know him to be a thief, shall we not lay hands on him?
' Dogberry: ' Truly, by your office you may; but I think that they
that touch pitch will be defiled ' (Much Ado 3. 3. 53—6). Verges: 'If
you hear a child cry in the night, you must call to the nurse and bid
her still it.' Second Watch : ' How if the nurse be asleep and will
not hear us ? ' Dogberry : \* Why, then, depart in peace, and let the
child wake her with crying ; for the ewe that will not hear her lamb
when it baes will never answer a calf when he bleats ' (ibid. 3. 3.
64—71). Touchstone: ' As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his
curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires' (AYL. 3. 3.
77—9). Polonius : ' This above all: to thine own self be true. And it
must follow as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any
man ' (Hamlet i. 3. 77—80). The day does not produce the night; the
sequence of cause and effect is really lacking. In the Clouds, when
Amynias justly demands payment of a debt, the now sophisticated
Strepsiades thus puts him off: ' Tell me, do you think that Zeus
sends fresh rain each time, or that the sun draws up the same water
again from below ? ' (Clouds 1277—81.) The inconsequent reply is a
favorite ruse of shifty debtors. Irrelevance, however, is perhaps
most frequently to be looked for in extended comic debate, as in the
agon of the Aristophanic play. So Aeschylus argues that the terms of
the proposed contest are unfair ; his own poetry, having survived its
author, can not be brought forward in Hades, while that of Euripides

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died with him — ' he's got it here to recite \* (Frogs 866—9). During
the argument between the two poets Dionysus interjects irrelevant
remarks (ibid. 1036—8, 1067—8, 1074—5, 1158—9). EarUer in the play,
the explanations of Xanthias and Dionysus, in accounting for their
cries under the lash of Aeacus, are irrelevant. Dionysus (receiving a
blow): ' Oh, Oh! ' Aeacus: ' What is it ? ' Dionysus : \* I see
horsemen.' Aeacus : ' Why do you cry ? ' Dionysus: \* I smell onions
' (Frogs 653—4, cf. 644—52). As a last example, take the following.
Falstaff: \* By the Lord, thou say est true, lad. And is not my
hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench ? ' Prince: ' As the honey
of Hybla, my old lad of the castle. And is not a buff jerkin a most
sweet robe of durance ? ' Falstaff: ' How now, how now, mad wag!
What, in thy quips and thy quiddities ? what a plague have I to do
with a buff jerkin ? ' Prince: \* Why, what a pox have I to do with
my hostess of the tavern?' (j Henry IV i. 2.

40-9.)]

(E) From the unexpected. [Deception and surprise Things: are,
strictly considered, the sources of laughter par expected excellence,
and underlie all others. Thus the irrelevant is unexpected, and
similarly the impossible, since things normally follow one another in
a ' probable ' or ' necessary ' sequence. Still, we may have a
category of the unexpected proper, including simpler forms, and also
the strange, the marvelous, the astounding. The marvelous clearly is
a distinctive feature of the Birds, the Frogs, A Midsummer-Night's
Dream, The Tempest, and other comedies having the scene laid outside
the world of our everyday experience. But to illustrate in detail,
laughter is caused at the end of the Frogs by the unexpected choice
of Dionysus in taking Aeschylus instead of Euripides ; by the
appearance of Lucas between Sganarelle and Jacqueline as Sganarelle
is about to embrace her (Medecin Malgre Lui 3. 3) ; by that of Bottom
(just transformed) and Puck amongst the artisans rehearsing (MND. 3.
i.); by the speech and song of Ariel, unseen, in The Tempest.
Aristotle's

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250 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

quotation (see above, pp. 146, 243), ' Statelily stept he along, and
under his feet were his — chilblains' (where we anticipated sandals),
illustrates either \* deception ' or 'the unexpected.' Other examples
of the latter are: ' I, Dionysus, son of—Wine-jar ' (Frogs 22);' By
Apollo! there is plenty of spirit in women, if — the wine-shop is
handy ' [Lysistrata 465—6) ; ' Many bold allies will join, good
honest men without — barley' (Plutus 218—9 — the expected word was
fear). Starkie (Achar-nians, p. Ixviii) says that \* the most
successful surprise in Aristophanes ' is the refusal of the dead man
to act as carrier for less than two drachmas (in Frogs 177): ' Strike
me alive if I do! ']

Things: (F) From debasing the personages. [That is, more

(F) debssino

the personages literally, \* fashionmg the personages in the
direction of the worthless.' There is a difference, says Aristotle in
*Poetics* 3 (above, p. 171), between tragedy and comedy, in that \*
tragedy tends to represent men as better, and comedy tends to
represent them as worse, than the men of the present day.' So
Aristophanes makes the Socrates of the Clouds worse than the Socrates
of reality, and doubtless Ameipsias did likewise with the same
character in the Connus ; but (anticipating the dictum of *Poetics* 5)
not worse in any and every way — only ridiculous. The character is
distorted, and to some extent lowered, from the truth, yet not
painfully so. The present category obviously overlaps with that (A I,
above, p. 240) of \* assimilation to the worse'; but it is more
general, since there are other means of lowering a character besides
assimilation, and' is at the same time more specific, since it is
confined to persons. To call Dionysus \* son of Wine-jar ' (when we
expected son of Zeus) is to make him worse than reality. Aristophanes
makes the gods he employs as personages worse than they were in
tradition; compare his treatment of Heracles, Prometheus, and Iris,
in the Birds. And he proceeds similarly with men. So Demus, standing
for the Athenian people, in the Knights (1340 ff.), is old, deaf, and
witless; his ears open and close like a sunshade at flattering and
unflattering reference to him

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THINGS: DEBASING THE PERSONAGES 251

by speakers in the Assembly. So not only Socrates and the
philosophers and Sophists generally, but statesmen, even Pericles,
and Cleon of course, are made ridiculous; and similarly the generals,
other comic poets such as Cratinus and Eupolis; likewise tragic
poets, Euripides in particular, but also Aeschylus — on occasion even
Sophocles, who has been metamorphosed into a sordid old Simonides,
and would put to sea on a hurdle if the voyage promised gain (Peace
695—9). In the main, however, Aristophanes does not lower what is
really exalted, or distort what is in good proportion. In the Birds,
not Zeus, but minor deities or demigods, as Prometheus, chiefly evoke
laughter; the most ridiculous of the deities there presented is the
outlandish Triballian. Poseidon appears in the Birds, and there and
elsewhere we find passing, yet only passing, allusion to Zeus in
uncomplimentary terms. Poseidon is not a main figure in the embassy.
Nor does Sophocles come forward as a main character in the Frogs;
Aristophanes significantly lets him alone as unsuited to the comic
purpose. The old and traditionally best is unsuited to his ends. In
the Acharnians, Pericles, still near in point of time, is casually
debased, and his statesmanship ridiculed; later, the age of Pericles
has become ideal, and it is the next generation of leaders that is
mocked. The \* conservatism ' of Aristophanes is not that of a
detached thinker, but that of a comic poet engaged in a dramatic
competition, for whom the present is out of joint, distorted, and
hence capable of exaggerated distortion. The ideal past is less
useful to him — though not useless directly, and indirectly
serviceable by providing him with a standard of comparison with the
present which he ridicules. In the New Comedy, nearly all the
personages are made somewhat worse than the average. Old men have the
vices of age, avarice, apprehension, and garrulity, in excess; as the
young men are prodigal, lustful, and so on, and the courtesans are
worse than the average of their class. But now and then the
courtesans, since the class is already below the average, are endowed
with certain virtues so that they may be less odious,

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THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Things: (G) the "use of clownish dancing

and that the comedy may not fail to give pleasure ; just as the
intriguing slave, chief agent in the plot, has intelligence, good
humor, a measure of fidelity to his master, and the like. The
principle of making the agents worse is easily illustrated from comic
poets ancient and modern. Moliere's treatment of the medical
fraternity will supply numerous examples, and so will Shakespeare's
clowns and petty officers. Dogberry and Verges are more worthless
than are constables and head-boroughs as a rule. Falstaff, descended
on one side from the braggart soldier of classical tradition, is
worse than the average blusterer; and, so far as he had an original
in history, he has been distorted. The dramatist has lowered him, yet
not too far; Falstaff remains comic. The principle being of wide
application, the reader can furnish other illustrations.]

(G) From the use of clownish (pantomimic) dancing. \* Vulgar ' —
perhaps even ' clownish ' — more than translates cpopTLXY], which is
opposed to the dignified motions of the chorus in tragedy, and hence
is about equivalent to ' comic' Some of the dancing in comedy is
beautiful, some ludicrous; there is much of both sorts (cf. above,
pp. 71—4). The present category must include not only the traditional
dance of the Old Comedy, the cordax, or any dance introduced by the
poet for comic effect, but ridiculous dumb-show of every kind,
especially that of a rhythmical sort. The Tractate does not specify
the indecent cordax, coarse and lascivious, that was suggestive of
the phallic song and dance from which comedy took its origin. The
Athenian would not allow the cordax in the Platonic commonwealth (see
above, p. 125). Aristophanes prides himself on its absence from the
Clouds (cf. line 540), but elsewhere employs it, probably in a less
offensive way than did his contemporaries; Dicaeopolis seems to have
danced it in his phallic monody [Acharnians 263 ff.; cf. 261—2, and
Starkie, p. Ixxi). The poet makes use of other dances also, such as
the travesty of the Persian military dance in Thesmophoriazusae 1175
ff., where the dancing-girl skips (according to the Scythian)

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' like a flea on a blanket ' {ibid. 1180). Again, as Haigh (p. 318)
notes, \* the chorus, at the end of the Wasfs, when encouraging the
sons of Carcinus to fresh exertions, bid them " whirl round like
tops, and fling their legs up into the sky." ' Rogers thus translates
the passage {Wasps 1516-37) :

Come draw we aside, and leave them wide, a roomy and peaceable
exercise-ground,

That before us therein like tops they may spin, revolving and
whirling and twirling around. O lofty-titled sons of the ocean-roving
sire. Ye brethern of the shrimps, come and leap

On the sand and on the strand of the salt and barren deep.

Whisk nimble feet around you ; kick out, till all admire, The
Phrynichean kick to the sky;

That the audience may applaud, as they view your leg on high.

On, on in mazy circles; hit your stomach with your heel;

Fling legs aloft to heaven, as like spinning-tops you wheel.

Your Sire is creeping onward, the Ruler of the Sea ;

He gazes with delight at his hobby-dancers three.

Come, dancing as you are, if you like it, lead away.

For never yet, I warrant, has an actor till to-day

Led out a chorus, dancing, at the ending of the Play.

See also Rogers' admirable rendering of the Plutus for the vehement
dancing of the chorus in the orchestra, while Cario dances on the
stage — a fine instance of 'pleasure' and 'laughter' combined (Plutus
288-321), In pantomimic dancing and rhythmical dumb-show, the
mechanical regularity imposed upon what is by nature irregular — as
the motions of the drunken, or of men engaged in fisticuffs, or the
like — is incongruous, and is a source of laughter. The punishment
(fillips in cadence) meted out to Polichinelle in Le Malade
Imaginaire, Premier Intermede, sc. 8, is an instance: ' Les archers
danseurs lui donnent des croquignoles en cadence.' And again (ibid.):
'Les archers danseurs lui donnent des coups de baton en cadence.'
Compare Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 4. 13 (Troisieme Entree de Ballet) :
' Les Turcs dansants mettent le turban sur le tete de M. Jourdain au
son des instruments'; (Quat-rieme Entree de Ballet) : \* Les Turcs
dansants donnent en cadence plusieurs coups de sabre a M. Jourdain ';
(Cinquieme Entree de Ballet) : \* Les Turcs dansants

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donnent aM. Jourdain des coups de baton en cadence.' The scene ends
with the stage-direction (I translate) : \* The Mufti begins a third
invocation. The Dervishes respectfully hold him up beneath the arms;
after which the Turks, singing and dancing, leap about the Mufti,
withdraw with him, and lead away M. Jourdain/ But in modern comedy
perhaps the most striking instance of pantomimic song and dance is
the close (Troisieme Intermede) of Le Malade Imaginaire, introduced
by these stage-directions: \* C'est une cere-monie burlesque d'un
homme qu'on fait medecin en recit, chante, et danse. Plusieurs
tapissiers viennent preparer la salle et placer les bancs en cadence.
Ensuite de quoi toute Tassemblee, composee de huit porte-seringues,
six apothicaires, vingt-deux docteurs, et celui qui se fait recevoir
medecin, huit chirurgiens dan-sants, et deux chantants, entrent, et
prennent place, chacun selon son rang.' The dancing of Shakespearean
comedy is often for \* pleasure ' more than for \* laughter '; the
statement doubtless holds for romantic comedy in general. So Ariel's
Song {Tempest 1.2. 375—85):' Come unto these yellow sands. And then
take hands. . . . Foot it featly here and there,' etc.; yet the song
closes in the other vein:

Hark, hark !

{Burden : Bow, wow, dispersedly. The watch-dogs bark :

{Burden : Bow, wow, dispersedly. Hark, hark ! I hear The strain of
strutting Chanticleer

{Cry : Cock-a-diddle-dow.

A more typical case for the Tractate would be the dance of the \*
fairies,' when Falstaff is trapped in Windsor Park {Merry Wives 5. 5.
93 ff.), and the dancers are incited to their work by Anne Page as
the Fairy Queen :

Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire !

About him, fairies, sing a scornful rime;

And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time.

As commentators on the Tractate at this point have hitherto limited
themselves to discussions of the

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THINGS: TAKING THE WORTHLESS 255

cordax, one may now add that all modern light opera illustrates
Category G; so the \* very loud ' chorus of the Pirates in Gilbert
and Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance, Act 2): \* With cat-like tread
Upon our prey we steal; In silence dread Our cautious way we feel/
There is \* vulgar dancing' in the Walpurgisnacht scene of Goethe's
Faust — ' Faust mit der Jungen tanzend . . . Mephistopheles mit der
Alt en.' The accompanying words of Mephistopheles are unfit for
quotation. The grotesque episode in Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Act 2, at the
Court of the Dovregubbe in the mountains, where we have dancing, and
a hunt of the hero by the Trolls, is familiar through the music of
Grieg, First Peer Gynt Suite, No. 4, In the Hall of the Mountain
King. Burns shows his mastery of this type of comic effect in Tarn
O'Shanter ; I ask the reader to turn to that poem. ' The unlimited
capacities of Greek dancing ' are well estimated by Haigh (p. 313) :
' The purpose . . . was to represent various objects and events by
means of gestures, postures, and attitudes. In this kind of mimicry
the nations of southern Europe are particularly skilful, as may be
seen at the present day. The art was carried by the Greeks to the
highest perfection, and a good dancer was able to accompany a song
with such expressive pantomime as to create a visible picture of the
things described. Aristotle defines dancing as an imitation of "
actions, characters, and passions by means of postures and rhythmical
movements {*Poetics* I — see above, p. 168).]

(H) When one of those having power, neglecting the Things: greatest
things, takes the most worthless. [The point the choice

... and taking

IS illustrated by Dionysus' intention to bring back the worthless
Euripides, when he might, as Heracles reminds him (Frogs 76—7), have
Sophocles if he chose. Thieves become ludicrous when they pass by
things of value, and fasten upon what is trivial. In the Wasps 233—9
^^^ aged dicasts lament their prime, \* when we kept the watch
together, and stole . . . the baker's tray, and chopped it up to cook
our pimpernel withal.' Again (ibid. 354—5) : \* Don't you remember
when, in the cam-

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256 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

paign, you stole the spits, and slid down by the wall, when we
captured Naxos ? ' Cherished memories of trifling adventures, then,
come under this head. Justice Shallow: ' The same Sir John, the very
same. I saw him break Skogan's head at the court-gate, when a' was a
crack not thus high; and the very same day did I fight with one
Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu! Jesu! the
mad days that I have spent ' [2 Henry IV 3. 2. 31—6). The Boy in
Henry V 3. 2. 42—5 says of Falstaff's friends : ' They will steal
anything and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it
twelve leagues, and sold it for three halfpence. Nym and Bardolph are
sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel.'
In The Taming of the Shrew, Induction 2. 5—9, Sly, as \* your
lordship ' and ' your honor,' may have a cup of sack, conserves, rich
raiment. He replies : ' I am Christophero Sly; call not me honor, nor
lordship. I ne'er drank sack in my life ; and if you give me any
conserves, give me conserves of beef. Ne'er ask me what\* raiment
I'll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings
than legs.' Titania gives orders to feed Bottom ' with apricocks and
dewberries, with purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries,' and asks
if he will hear fairy music. Bottom : ' I have a reasonable good ear
in music : let us have the tongs and the bones.' And what will he eat
? ' Truly, a peck of provender ; I could munch your good dry oats.
Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet
hay, hath no fellow ' [MND. 3. i. 161 ff.; 4. i. i ff.). In Moliere,
Philaminte prefers the vapid Trissotin for son-in-law rather than the
worthy Clitandre {Femmes Savantes) ; M. Jourdain desires \* le fils
du Grand Turc ' in the same relation rather than Cleonte (Bourgeois
Gentilhomme) ; and Argan chooses Thomas Diafoirus rather than Cleante
for his daughter Angelique [Malade Imaginaire). ' Under this head,'
says Starkie (Acharnians, p. Ixxii), \* comes bathos, even when
confined to a single thought. As the sudden drop causes surprise,
many of these instances may be classified under ::apa 7:po(7Boxtav '
(' the unexpected'). Among his examples are the

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following. As a disciple of Socrates, Strepsiades would not even \*
talk to the other gods ' — those of Olympus, — in comparison with the
new divinities of Chaos, Clouds, Tongue (Clouds 424—5). When his son
was a child, Strepsiades yielded to his lisping prayer, and \* spent
the very first obol I earned for court-service on a go-cart for you
at the fair ' (ibid. 861—4). In the Knights 642—5, the finest piece
of news the Sausage-seller can give to the Council is: \* Never since
the war broke out have I seen sprats cheaper than now.' In the Birds
1683 ff., Heracles gives up his right to the Lady Sovereignty for a
dish of thrushes.]

(I) When the story [or ' discourse'] is disjointed, and Things: has
no sequence. [I have translated Xoyo? by \* story' or storfOT*""***\*
' discourse '; one can not be certain what the term here means (see a
discussion of it, above, pp. 49-51,62n., 211). It means, at least, a
single speech in a play. If it covers also the plot of a comedy,
there must be limits to the want of sequence in that, since the whole
must not be utterly devoid of organic structure. If the law of
causality, or of probability, may be violated, while yet suggested,
for comic effect, still the poet should rather aim at a seeming than
at a real lack of plan. Even that is dangerous in a work of any
length. Yet the Frogs has struck more than one critic of Aristophanes
as not well-jointed, though not less amusing on that account; on its
essential unity and coherence, see above pp. 47, 206—7. Rabelais
through his actual formlessness gains some advantage perhaps, to
offset a part of what he thereby loses. The comic effect of a
disjointed story is safer to aim at in shorter pieces like Chaucer's
Tale of Sir Thopas and Calverley's The Cock and the Bull, above all
when the author pretends that his work is a fragment. A lack of
sequence may be tolerable, and ludicrous, in a farce. When the word
"Xoyo? refers, not to a whole comedy regarded as one continuous'
utterance, but to some part of the work, as a single speech or song
of the chorus, or of a character, it is easy to illustrate the point
of disjointed discourse. Don Pedro : \* Officers, what offence have
these men

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258 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

done ? ' Dogberry: \* Marry, sir, they have committed false report;
moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders;
sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have
verified unjust things; and to conclude, they are lying knaves/ Don
Pedro : \* First, I ask thee what they have done ; thirdly, I ask
thee what's their offence; sixth and lastly, why they are committed;
and, to conclude, what you lay to their charge ? ' (Much Ado 5. i.
212—222.) Many examples of garrulity would fall under this head, as
well as parodies; and the present category overlaps with those of \*
the impossible ' and ' the possible and inconsequent.' Bottom's
account of his \* vision' (MND. 4. i) is disjointed, as is the talk
of the Serving-men in Coriolanus 4. 5 ; Calverley's The Cock and the
Bull partly so, especially near the close:

Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far,

So good, tarn bene. Bene, satis, male —

Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag ?

I did once hitch the syntax into verse :

Verbum personale, a verb personal,

Concordat — Ay, 'agrees,' old Fatchaps — cum

Nominativo, with its nominative,

Geneve, V point o' gender, numero,

O\* number, et persona, and person. Ut,

Instance : Sol ruit, down flops sun; et, and

Monies umbrantur, out flounce mountains. Pah !

Excuse me, sir, I think I'm going mad.

You see the trick on 't though, and can yourself

Continue the discourse ad libitum.

Compare the following. Sganarelle [se levant brus-quement) : ' Vous
n'entendez point le latin ? ' Geronte : ' Non.' Sganarelle [avec
enthousiasme) : \* Cahricias, arci thuram, catalamus, singulariter,
nominativo, haec musa, la muse, bonus, bona, bonum. Deus sanctus,
esi-ne oratio latinas? Etiam, oui. Quare ? pourquoi ? Quia
substantivo, et adjectivum, concordat in generi, numerum, et casus '
(Midecin Malgre Lui 2. 6). The first four words are forged jargon;
thereafter Moliere travesties the Grammar (' rudiment ') of
Despautere. (See also 'grammar and syntax,' above, pp. 237-9.)

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Parodies of the tragic and lyric poets are common in Aristophanes, as
the lyrical imitation, without se-. quence, in the Birds 948—53
(Rogers' translation). Poet: \* Yes I '11 depart, and make to the
city pretty songs like this:

0 thou of the golden throne, Sing Her, the quivering, shivering;

1 came to the plains many-sown, I came to the snowy, the blowy.

Alalae !'

Disjointed composition may be seen in the verses proffered to the
ladies by Trissotin in Les Femmes Savantes 3. 2.]

Comedy differs from abuse [>.oi^opia], since abuse comedy dif-

. fers from

openly censures the bad qualities attachmg to men, scurrility whereas
comedy employs what is called ' emphasis ' [? 'innuendo']. [This
'emphasis' (£[j.(pa(7L?) is commonly taken to mean the same thing as
Aristotle's ' innuendo ' (67u6voicc) in the Nicomachean Ethics (see
Kaibel, p. 52, and compare above, pp. 19, 25,120). The term '
emphasis ' is found also in late Greek, and hence in Latin, theories
of rhetoric (see Volkmann, Rhetorik der Griechen und Romer, 1885, pp.
445—6); the orator employs ' emphasis ' when he has a deeper meaning
than his words, taken literally, suggest. But the term may not have
just the same sense for comedy. According to the usual
interpretation, ' abuse ' would refer to a characteristic of the Old
Comedy, and ' emphasis ' to a characteristic of the New. But the
epitomator has just given an analysis of laughter with a special
application to Aristophanes (see the examples in Tzetzes, below, pp.
288—9). Perhaps it would be safer to connect ' abuse ' with the
earlier stages of the Old Comedy (but still more with the iambic
invective of Archilochus and Hipponax), and ' emphasis ' with the
later plays of Aristophanes, and with those of his successors who
leaned toward the New Comedy. In Aristophanes a good deal of what now
counts for ' abuse ' — at least

r 2

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. . 26o THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

with many critics — was not so regarded by the poet and his audience.
According to tradition, Socrates left his seat during the performance
of the Clouds, and stood near enough to the \* Socrates ' of the play
to let the spectators judge the success of the imitation.
Aristophanes does not directly abuse Socrates, or the gods, or
Aeschylus and Euripides. In his hands the peculiarities of Socrates
are heightened so as to produce laughter; the traditional Heracles
becomes a buffoon through a process of selection and accentuation of
the comic possibilities in the myth; and a similar method of
selection and over-stress is employed in order to arouse laughter
with Aeschylus and Euripides. Might not the result be a form of \*
emphasis ' ? It is not certain that the sjicpaci^ of the Tractate and
the uTuovoia of the Nicomachean Ethics are identical. On the other
hand, that the indirect method is not foreign to Aristophanes may be
seen in the Knights, where Demus and Paphlagon respectively stand for
the people of Athens and the demagogues ; not until line 976, and
only there, is Cleon mentioned by name. That the same method was
employed by Cratinus may be inferred from the usual interpretation of
the fragments of his Nemesis, in which Zeus and Nemesis are thought
to have represented Pericles and Aspasia (cf. Kock i. 47). The titles
of many plays of the Old Comedy.betray the same tendency to avoid
open abuse, and to render ludicrous by indirection — as the Wasps,
Frogs, and Clouds of Aristophanes. In the Birds, the poet does not
openly censure the bad habit of speculation attaching to the
Athenians; he employs an indirect form of good-humored ridicule.]

The ludicrous The joker [6 (jy.wTUTwvl will make game of faults in

In mental and ■; -, • , , , ^'^^ ■,

bodily defects the soul and m the body. [The word Gy^oiTZTO))/ may be

applied to a comic poet; Aristotle uses the verb with reference to
Aristophanes, Strattis, and Anaxandrides (see above, pp. 156,158,31).
For Cicero's statement that both bodily and mental qualities lie
within the province of the truly ludicrous, see above, p. 88. The
sentiment is doubtless ancient, possibly belonging to early Greek

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rhetorical theory as well as to the theory of comedy. With regard to
comedy it is a mere truism in view of the actual practice of writers
great and small. Aristophanes makes use of the bodily features and
also the philosophy and method of teaching of \* Socrates ' for
laughter in the Clouds. In the Birds the ridiculous bulk of Heracles
as well as his simplicity and gross appetite is represented.
Shakespeare makes game of the unwieldy frame not less than the
buffoonery of Falstaff. Bottom with an ass's head is as wise as he is
beautiful. One might go on to mention Bardolph, MalvoHo, and others,
if there were any point in extending the list. In Monsieur de
Pourceaugnac Moliere prepares the audience in advance for the
ridiculous face and bearing of the hero, and for his qualities as a
bombastic dupe, and utilizes both aspects of the character for
laughter throughout the play. Similarly the outward form and the
dress of Argan, as well as his hypochondria, are employed in Le
Malade Imaginaire, and the appearance and ethos of the miserly
Harpagon in L'Avare. Perhaps the propriety of laughter at bodily
defects was questioned in Greek treatises on poetry, as it has been
since. Certain blemishes, however, such as baldness, knock-knees,
bandy-legs, lack of an eye, strabismus, do not strike humanity at
large as painful; they are like the comic mask, mentioned in the
*Poetics* (see above, p. 176) as an example of something ugly,
distorted, and ludicrous, without suggesting pain. No doubt there is
a limit beyond which the comic poet may not go in representing bodily
defects, as there are forms of vice that are excluded from comedy.
The obvious results of severe illness would not be suitable for comic
treatment, nor would mortal emaciation or frightful scars. But it is
hard to draw the line. Extreme emaciation coupled with activity, like
extreme corpulence, or any unusual departure from the norm, may be
rendered ludicrous. Hunchbacks have often served their turn in comic
writers ; yet Dickens' Quilp and Hugo's Quasimodo are not strictly
comic, but saturnine, with a hint of pain. So long as the suggestion
of pain is absent, even the dead man of tlieFrogs may create
amusement.]

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THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Proportionate laughter

Constituent parts of comedy

Plot

Ethos In comedy: three types

(I) the buf-foonish

As in tragedies there should be a due proportion of fear, so in
comedies there should be a due proportion of laughter. [Kayser (pp.
30—1) thinks the statement to be Aristotelian. Bernays (p. 151)
interprets thus: As in tragedy a due proportion of fear to pity is
demanded, so in comedy a due proportion of laughter to pleasure; in
other words, the laughter must be neither that of scurrility nor that
of bitter invective. But if we are to extract anything from the
passage, perhaps the meaning is that the element of laughter must not
be in excess — there must be a sufficient admixture of the pleasing
accessories of comedy, such as beautiful language, music, etc. (See
above, pp. 71—6.) \* Due proportion ' represents the (7U[j.[j.£Tpia
of the original.]

The substance \\pkr\\\ of comedy consists of (i) plot, (2) ethos, (3)
dianoia, (4) diction, (5) melody, (6) spectacle. [See above, pp.
47—53, 182—6.]

The comic plot [p8o?] is the structure binding together the ludicrous
incidents. [Literally, \* is that having the ada^oLGK concerning
laughable acts.' For pGo^ see above, pp. 49—51.]

The characters [y]Oy)] of comedy are (i) the buffoonish, (2) the
ironical, and (3) those of the impostors. [The three are
distinguished by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics 4. 13—4, but other
types that might serve for comedy are likewise there described.
Examples of the ' buffoon ' in Aristophanes are Dionysus in the
Frogs, Euelpides in the Birds, Strepsiades in the Clouds, Philocleon
in the Wasps, Demus in the Knights. In Shakespeare, Polonius,
Dogberry, and Bottom are \* buffoons ' of several sorts; in Moliere,
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Sganarelle in Le Festin de Pierre, and
doubtless Sganarelle in Le Midecin Malgre Lui — though the last-named
is forced into the role of \* impostor '; Monsieur Jourdain in Le
Bourgeois Gentil-homme is fundamentally a \* buffoon,' with leanings
toward the type of \* impostor.' Falstaff is an \* impostor ' with
frequent indulgence in the language of

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BUFFOON, EIRON, AND IMPOSTORS 263

the ' buffoon/ The latter term, like the other two, is used in a
technical sense (see above, pp. 117—9); it must not mislead a
defender of Falstaff or the Sganarelle of Le Midecin Malgre Lui
because of their shrewd wit. Sancho Panza in Don Quixote is
technically a \* buffoon.' The great example of the \* ironical man '
is the Socrates of Plato, with his customary affectation of
ignorance. No modern language has an exact equivalent of the Greek
sipwvsta, though the character is found in modern society; Bishop
Stubbs, the historian, was an example; cf. the description in Hutton,
Letters of William Stubbs, p. 407 : ' I think that sometimes he came
near displaying what was not real for fear of being tempted into
displaying what was.' Comic \* irony ' resembles one of the traits of
old age ; according to Aristotle (Rhetoric 2. 13), the old ' are
never positive about anything, and always err on the side of too
little excess ; they " suppose," but never " know " anything ; and in
discussion they always add " perhaps" or " possibly," expressing
themselves invariably in this guarded manner, and never positively.'
Says Cornford (pp. 137—8): ' The Buffoon and the Eiron are more
closely allied in Aristotle's view than a modem reader might expect.
... It will be remembered that in the Ethics the Ironical Man and the
Impostor or swaggerer (2) The confront one another in the two vicious
extremes which '""'"' flank the virtuous mean of Truthfulness. While
the Impostor claims to possess higher qualities than he has, the
Ironical Man is given to making himself out worse than he is. This is
a generalized description, meant to cover all types of
self-depreciation, many forms of which are not comic. In comedy the
special kind of irony practised by the Impostor's opponent is feigned
stupidity. . . . The Eiron who victimizes the Impostors masks his
cleverness under a show of clownish dullness.... His attitude is
precisely expressed by Demus in a passage of cynical and even
sinister self-revelation to the Knights, at a moment when the stage
is clear of the two impostors who are competing for his favor. In the
previous scene Demus has feigned sim-pHcity almost to the point of
idiocy, and when the two

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impostors

264 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

rogues are gone, the chorus reproach him for being so easily deceived
by flattery.... Demus replies that his wits are safer than those
sheltered by the young Knights' curled locks. He is letting the
rascals feed fat before he gobbles them up: "I play the simpleton
like this on purpose." Thus in the concrete character-type as it
exists in the Old Comedy, " buffoonery " ([3o)[xo-lox^a) is only the
outer wear of " irony " ; and the Ironical Buffoon is in exact
antithesis to the Impostor, who covers inward cowardice and folly
under a vain pretence of bravery and wisdom.' The ironical jester,
says Aristotle (above, p. 123), makes fun for his own amusement, the
buffoon for the amusement of others. (3) The_^ The unmixed Ironical
type is not so common as the Buffoons and Impostors, the last being
numerous and important in the comedy of all times. In the Birds
Aristophanes has a motley crew of them. As Cornford notes (p. 135), '
The sacrifice, immediately after the parabasis, attracts a Priest,
who is no sooner got rid of than a Poet comes with an ode prepared "
long since " for the city that has only just been founded. . . . The
next comer, the inevitable Oracle-monger, is discomfited by an
oracle, extemporized by Peisthetaerus, which declares in Pythian
hexameters that, if an " impostor " comes unbidden, he is to be
beaten. This divine command is religiously carried out. The
mathematician Meton next appears, armed with an enormous pair of
compasses and the scheme of rational town-planning. . . . But he is
before his time, and yields to a forcible request to measure himself
into the middle of next week. An Inspector, who announces himself as
duly appointed by lot to an office in Cloudcuckootown, is beaten ;
and so is a Hawker of Acts of Parliament, who enters reading aloud
extracts from a brand-new constitution for the city.' Then come a
young man (Sire-striker), ' attracted by the morahty of bird-life,
which, as he understands, allows the young to peck and strangle their
parents '; Cinesias, the dithyrambic poet, applying ' for
nightingale's wings on which to soar in pursuit of inspiration '; and
an Informer, who ' seeks wings to carry him on his less creditable
mission among the

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islands of the Athenian empire.' In a later age, the braggart
soldier, the deceitful slave, the scheming or pretentious rogue of
every description (in the New Greek Comedy, and hence in Plautus and
Terence), all belong to this type. As we have seen, Falstaff, the
many-sided, is likewise related to it. Moliere's Tartuffe,

\* or the Impostor ' (one should put \* the ' in italics) is our
chief modern example. But Moliere's cohort of medical quacks will go
into the same class. Aristotle picks out skill in prophesying or
medicine as the kind of excellence to which ' boasters ' are likely
to pretend (see above, p. 118). Nor may we here forget the chanting
Avocats in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac 2. 13 ; or Toinette as a
nonagenarian doctor in Le Malade Imaginaire 3. 14—16 ; or Sganarelle
in LeMedecin Malgre Lui, after he is clubbed into the art of healing;
or the \* Turks ' in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.]

The parts of dianoia are two : (A) opinion and (B) Diamia in proof.
Proofs [or ' persuasions '] are of five sorts : (A) opmi^on, (i)
oaths, (2) compacts, (3) testimonies, (4) tortures [' tests ' or '
ordeals '], (5) laws. [The division into

\* opinion ' (yvw[j//] = Lat. sententia = maxim) and

\* proof ' {iziG^ic, = means of persuasion) corresponds to the dual
division of dianoia in the *Poetics* (see above, pp. 185, 210) ; there
the intellectual element of tragedy is seen to be composed of general
statements (such as maxims) and particular efforts to prove,
disprove, magnify, minify, and the like. The word Y^wfJ-''] in the
sense of general statement is common to the *Poetics* and Rhetoric.
Again, in *Poetics* 16. 1454^ 28—9 ' a discovery using signs as a means
of assurance' (mo-Ti?) is said to be \* less artistic '; so that
mcTt? also may be reckoned common to both works in connection with
dianoia. But in the subdivisions of the Tractate under 7ii(7Ttc the
language is like that of Rhetoric 1. 2. 1355^ 35—7 and I. 15. 1375 a-
24—5. In the first of these two passages we have the distinction
between ' artistic ' (svTspoi) means of persuasion (maxst?) and \*
un-artistic ' (aT£)(voi) — that is (the latter), not due to inventive
skill in the orator, but supplied to him from

(B) proof

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266 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

without, being already in existence, ' such as witnesses, evidence
from tortures, contracts ' ([xapTups?, pdco-avot, (TUYYpacpai), ' and
the hke.' They may be used by a speaker in support of argument and
assertion. The second passage in the Rhetoric contains the five
subdivisions of the Tractate, but in a different order: sicrt Bs
TusvTs Tov apiOjjLOV v6[xot, [j,apTup£?, cruvOrjxai, pdccavoi, opxo?.
The Tractate puts ' oaths ' (opxoi) first, and \* laws ' (vopi) last;
it offers perhaps a textual correction of the Rhetoric in its use of
the plural opxoi; it holds to the (TuvG^/vai (' compacts ') of the
second passage, rather than the o-uyypacpat (\* contracts') of the
first; and in place of the (xdcpTups? (\* witnesses ') of both
passages in the Rhetoric it gives us [xapT'jptai (' witnessings ') —
a difference that merits attention. Such variations have been taken
as the marks of a clumsy adapter trying to cover up his tracks.
Bernays (p. 156) censures the Tractate for what he deems its inept
draft upon the Rhetoric ; perhaps he thought that a treatise on
comedy should contain hints on the \* artistic ' (svTs/vo?) side of
dianoia. The general animus against the epitomator has been such that
no one, hitherto, has tested this part of his scheme by applying it
to Aristophanes. Yet there is something to be said for the
epitomator, or for his source. Instead of the weighty maxims
(Yvco[j.ai) of tragedy, we find in comedy a more trivial kind of
generalization that still must be termed yvoip^; my equivalent here
is \* opinion ' — Touchstone's \* instance.' May we not, then, expect
to find Aristophanes using the more superficial and adventitious
kinds of support for argument, the more mechanical means of
persuasion and discovery, rather than the well-planned invention
characteristic of true eloquence ? The word yv(o[j-"/] , certainly
not a rare one in the poet, is at times employed by him as if in a
specific sense for comedy. And of the five kinds of 7ut(7Ti? (I refer
to the words), only c-uvGYJxat are rare in his extant plays. But the
thing, the compact, is frequent enough in him (see below, pp.
271—2).] Dianoia: (A) Opinion. [All thought consists of more general,

and less general, operations of the mind; the mind is

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constantly passing from one kind of thought to the other in either
direction; but, logically, we advance in a play from particulars to
conclusions. One might therefore begin a study of comic dianoia by
examining the first few hues of the Birds, where Euelpides and
Peisthetaerus consult a crow and a jackdaw (' witnesses/ perhaps) as
guides in their quest; here is an example of tuio-ti^. But let us
follow the order of the Tractate, and begin with general statements.
In the Frogs 1420 ff. (esp. 1423, 1424, 1430, 1435), Dionysus,
seeking for the poet who can best advise the city, asks Euripides and
Aeschylus each for an \* opinion ' (yvwjjLY)) of Alcibiades ; and
each replies with a kind of maxim. Euripides: ' I hate a citizen who
by nature is slow to help, and swift to hurt, his fatherland.\*
Aeschylus: \* Tis best to rear no lion's whelp in the city.' The
passage continues as far as line 1465 with a string of oracular
utterances elicited from the poets by the god. So in the Clouds 156
ff., Chaeremon is reported to have asked Socrates which \* opinion '
(yvwiiY)) he held regarding gnats — do they sing through the mouth or
through the tail ? The ' opinion ' of Socrates is distinctly set
forth by the Disciple. The answers of the Bachelierus to the
questions propounded by the faculty in Le Malade Imaginaire,
Troisieme Intermide, are examples of the comic y^^jxy] ; thus:

Mihi a docto doctore Domandatur causam et rationem quare Opium facit
dormire. A quoi respondeo: Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva, Cujus est
natura Sensus assoupire.

This is the first of a series of five. Isolated maxims may occur in
comedy as in tragedy; so that of Sgana-relle at the opening of
Moli^re's Don Juan : \* Quoi que puisse dire Aristote et toute la
philosophic, 11 n 'est rien d'egal au tabac' Or that of Arnolphe in
L'Ecole des Femmes 2. 4:

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268 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Un certain Grec disait a 1' empereur Auguste, Comme une instruction
utile autant que juste. Que, lorsqu' une aventure en colere nous met.
Nous devons, avant tout, dire notre alphabet, Afin que dans ce temps
la bile se tempere.

So also the famous line "]"] in the Self-Tormentor of Terence. When
Menedemus asks his neighbor Chrernes why the latter meddles with
concerns that are not his own, Chremes replies: ' Homo sum; humani
nil a me alienum puto.' \* I am a man, and naught that is human deem
I foreign to me,' would be a sentiment grave enough for tragedy, if
we forgot the comic busybody who utters it, and his foolish actions
elsewhere in the play; still, the maxims in Menander and Terence tend
to be more serious than those of the Old Comedy. In comedy as a
whole, however, if isolated ' opinions ' are not more frequent than
are maxims in tragedy, the characteristic series of ' opinions,' such
as we have noted in the Frogs and Le Malade Imaginaire, demand
special attention. Another good case is that of ' Les Maximes du
Marriage,' which Arnolphe puts into the hands of Agnes in L'Ecole des
Femmes 3. 2 to be read aloud ; she reads ten, and begins the
eleventh, when Arnolphe tells her to finish the rest by herself.
Other instances of isolated or accumulated ' opinions ' may be
gleaned from Falstaff, and from the wisdom of Touchstone, Feste, and
the clowns and fools of Shakespeare generally. So Feste's quotation
from the Hermit of Prague: ' That that is, is ' {Twelfth Night 4. 2.
15). And so Dogberry: \* For the ewe that will not hear her lamb when
it baes will never answer a calf when he bleats ' [Much Ado
3.3.69—71). And the following. Corin: ' And how like you this
shepherd's life. Master Touchstone ? ' Touchstone: \* Truly,
shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect
that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is
solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it
is a very vile life. Now, in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth
me well; but in respect it is not in the Court, it is tedious. As it
is a spare life, look you, it fits my humor well; but as there is no
more plenty in it, it

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COMIC 'PERSUASIONS': OATHS

269

^oes much against my stomach. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd ?
' Again, Corin: ' The courtier's hands are perfumed with civet.'
Touchstone:' . . . Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very
uncleanly flux of a cat. Mend the instance, shepherd ' [AYL. 3. 2.
11—22, 62—7). The entire episode between Corin and Touchstone is an
exchange of ' opinions.' Clown (Feste): ' What is the opinion of
P5^hagoras concerning wild-fowl ?' Malvolio : ' That the soul of our
grandam might haply inhabit a bird ' [Twelfth Night 4. 2. 52 55).
Falstaff: 'There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of,
and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch; this pitch,
as ancient writers do report, doth defile ; so doth the company thou
keepest ' (j Henry IV 2. 4. 419—23). Aristotle would term the appeal
to the Hermit of Prague, to Pythagoras, and to ' ancient writers,' a
citation of ' ancient witnesses,' while the ' many in our land '
would in his view be \* recent witnesses ' (see above, p. 158). In
the speech of Falstaff we have a combination of ' witnesses ' with an
'opinion,' as well as the particular inference the Prince is to draw;
it is a capital illustration of dianoia, considered in its elements
and as a whole.]

(B) Proofs [or ' persuasions ']. (i) Oaths. [Proof or Dianoia:

persuasion has a double aspect, and may be considered in relation to
the one who persuades or the one who is persuaded. It may be effected
by word or by deed, mental operations being expressed in both ways.
Thus one person may try to convince another by an oath, or to learn
his identity by an ordeal. ' Oaths ' (p^Y.oi) are chiefly verbal —
yet one may swear by motion of the hand or body. Oaths in a general
sense (swearing by deities, etc.) are often combined with those of a
formal sort. The following examples are varied. Xan-thias : ' Cheer
up ! ... Spectre's vanished.' Dionysus : ' Swear it (xaTopcov) ! '
Xanthias : ' Yes, by Zeus.' Dionysus: 'Swear it again.' Xanthias: 'By
Zeus.' Dionysus: 'Swear' {^6]^qgo'j). Xanthias: 'By Zeus' [Frogs
302—6). Further on, Dionysus persuades the reluctant Xanthias to
reassume the lion-skin : ' But if I

\* persuasions five sorts

' Persuasions': (I) oaths

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take it from you again, perdition seize me, my wife, my children,
and, worst of all, blear-eyed Archidemus.' Xanthias: 'I accept the
oath (opxov), and on those terms I take it ' (ibid. 586—9). Compare
the ' oath ' with which the birds ratify their \* compact'
(BiaGrj/wY)) with Peisthetaerus (Birds 439, 444—7). Chorus: 'I make
the compact ' (BiairtO£p.ai). Peisthetaerus: ' Now swear these things
to me.' Chorus: ' I swear (opujj.') on these terms: so may I win the
prize by the vote of all the judges and all the spectators.'
Peisthetaerus: 'So be it! ' Chorus: \* And if I break the compact, so
may I win by but a single vote.' It is readily seen that several
forms of proof or persuasion may be used conjointly. In Lysistrata
183 ff., the women make a compact to abstain from all relations with
the men imtil the men effect a peace betwen Athens and Sparta, and
they take an oath to carry out this plan of the heroine ; the
question comes up again in the attempt of Cinesias to woo his wife
Myrrhina, which is in the nature of a

\* test ' or \* ordeal'; in repulsing her husband the wife cites the
\* oath ' (ibid. 914) — and her argument is successful. The preceding
are formal oaths. As to the more general sense (swearing by Apollo,
Zeus, Heracles, Poseidon, and the like), it is clear that the mental
processes of speakers in Aristophanic comedy are often displayed in
such forms of expression. Since comedy employs a popular diction, it
contains more of them than does the elevated language of tragedy. It
also contains strange and unexpected oaths; compare Jonson's Bobadil
(Every Man in his Humor 2. 2. 2—3): ' Speak to him ? Away! By the
foot of Pharaoh, you shall not; you shall not do him that grace! ' Or
take the case of Falstaff enforcing his assertion regarding the men
who deprived him of his booty. Falstaff: \* These four came all
a-front, and mainly thrust at me. I made me no more ado but took all
their seven points in my target, thus.' Prince: \* Seven ? Why, there
were but four even now.' Falstaff: ' In buckram.' Poins:

\* Ay, four, in buckram suits.' Falstaff: 'Seven, by these hilts, or
I am a villain else ' (i Henry IV 2. 4. 202—8). Compare also the
oaths of Bob Acres in Sheri-

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COMIC 'PERSUASIONS': COMPACTS 271

dan (Rivals 2. i. 172—3, 190—i, 213—4): ' Odd's whips and wheels ! I
Ve traveled like a comet ' ; ' Odd's blushes and blooms ! She has
been as healthy as the German Spa '; ' Merry! Odd's crickets! She has
been the belle and spirit of the company wherever she has been.' In
the closing ceremony of Le Malade Imaginaire the Bachelierus
undergoes a \* test ' or \* ordeal' which he successfully passes by
giving satisfactory ' opinions '; finally he is called upon to swear,
formally, and thrice, that he will maintain the established
traditions of medicine, no matter what the outcome for the patient.
Grimarest avers that Mo-liere, who acted the part of the Bachelierus,
had the fatal seizure leading to his death, at the very moment of
pronouncing the word 'Juro.' This ' oath' is followed by a \* compact
' ratified by the Praeses.]

(2) Compacts. [The term o-uvOtqxy] (' compact,' ' trea- 'Persuasions'

ty ') occurs but twice in the extant plays of Aristophanes (both
times in the plural), namely, in Lysis-trata 1268 and Peace 1065, in
each case referring to the conclusion of peace between Athens and
Sparta which is the desideratum in these comedies. The word is not
used to indicate those compacts which often exercise the intellect
[dianoia) of some chief personage in a comedy, about which not a
little of the discussion revolves, and to which the Tractate
doubtless alludes. Once (out of three occurrences), BiaOYJxY) is used
in this sense — as we have seen, in Birds 439, where the treaty with
Peisthetaerus is on the point of being ratified by the chorus. The
poet's liking for the notion, however, is shown by his frequent use
of o^ovBy] (' libation ') and (jTzovhcd (\* treaty '). No reader of
the Acharnians, Lysistrata, and Peace needs a reminder of
Aristophanes' preoccupation with treaties of peace. As for the
Tractate, we may suppose that ' compact,' like other technical terms,
has both a more general, and a more special, application. The general
sense is exemplified by the three plays just mentioned. And, to judge
from the illustrations, both general and special, dianoia is shown by
persons of the drama in arguing for, as well

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272 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

as from, ' compacts ' ; we are here dealing, not with Rhetoric and an
oration or legal argument, but with the tissue of life as represented
on the comic stage — not merely with the citation of oaths, compacts,
witnesses, ordeals, and laws from the past, but with the genesis and
growth of such things before our eyes. Peisthe-taerus argues for the
compact with the birds until it is ratified; it is then carried into
action, and thereafter he argues from it. The agreement to found
Cloudcuckootown, accordingly, is an instance of the technical sort.
Such, too, are the compact between the hero and the envoys from the
gods at the climax of the play; the compact between Praxagora and the
other women in the Ecclesiazusae to assume the political activities
of the men; the compact between Lysistrata and her fellows to
withhold themselves from relations with their husbands; the compact
between Chremylus and Wealth in the Plutus; and (not to exhaust the
examples from Aristophanes) the compact of Euripides in the
Thesmophoriazusae never again to abuse women in his plays. Euripides
(in the style of an enemy herald): \* Ladies, if you will make a
truce ((ttuovBoc^) with me, now and for evermore, I promise that
henceforward you shall never hear one evil word from me. Such are my
terms.' Chorus: \* What is the object in proposing this ? '
Euripides: \* This poor old relative of mine, now fastened to the
plank — if you will let me take him safe away, then nevermore will I
traduce you. But if you will not yield to my persuasion, then what
you do at home in secret will be my story to your husbands when they
return from the campaign.' Chorus: \* As touching us, be it known to
you that we are by you persuaded. As for this Scythian, do you
yourself persuade him ' [Thesmophoriazusae 1160—71). From
Aristophanes and the Middle Comedy, the \* compact ' passed into
Menander and the New, later reappearing—for example, in
t]\e.Self-TormentoroiTexence — in agreements between a young man and
a household slave to persuade or deceive a father, or the like; it is
related to the \* stratagems ' that are so frequently employed by the
personages of Moli^re — see, for

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COMIC 'PERSUASIONS': TESTIMONIES 273

example, those of Mascarille in L'Etourdi 1. 2, etc., repeatedly
devised for his master, and as often foiled by the latter's stupidity
and ill luck. Modern examples of the \* compact ' are seen in the
scheme for drawing Beatrice and Benedick from enmity into love {Much
Ado 2. 1 ii.); and in the agreement between the Prince and Falstaff,
Poins, Gadshill, and the others, to rob the travelers, and between
the Prince and Poins to frighten Falstaff and the others from the
booty (j Henry IV 1. 2). The language at one point {ibid. 1.2.
149—54) clearly evinces dianoia. Poins: \* Sir John, I prithee, leave
the prince and me alone ; I will lay him down such reasons for this
adventure that he shall go.' Falstaff : ' Well, God give thee the
spirit of persuasion and him the ears of profiting, that what thou
speakest may move, and what he hears may be believed.' See also the
compact between Sganarelle as doctor and Leandre as apothecary, in Le
Medecin Malgre Lui 2. 9; that between Beralde, Ange-lique, Cleante,
and Toinette, in Le Malade Imaginaire 3^. 23; and the elaborate
scheme entered into by Julie, Eraste, Nerine, and Sbrigani, for the
undoing of the hero, in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac i. 3, 4. I will end
this list of examples with a reference to Dekker's Satiro-mastix 5.
2. 297—393, in which Horace (= Ben Jonson) is forced to make a
compact with his enemies something like the one Euripides makes with
the women in the Thesmophoriazusae. It begins with a speech of
Cris-pinus: \* Sir Vaughan, will you minister their oath ? ' Next we
have the terms of the agreement. Sir Vaughan : ' You shall sweare not
to bumbast out a new play with the olde Ijmings of jestes, stolne
from the Temples Revels,' etc. \* Sweare all this, by Apollo and the
eight or nine Muses.' Horace: \* By Apollo, Helicon, the Muses (who
march three and three in a rancke), and by all that belongs to
Pernassus, I swear all this.' Tucca : ' Beare witnes.' Under the
present head we regard these schemes and compacts, not in relation to
\* plot,' but in the light of dianoia — as exercising the reason of
the agents, and as displayed in their uttered arguments.]

(3) Testimonies. [In both lists of \*unartistic proofs'
•persuasions': as given by Aristotle in the Rhetoric (see above, p.
265-6)

(3) testimonies

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274 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

we have the word [xapTupe^ ('witnesses'). In the Tractate we have the
abstract word [xapTupiat (' testimonies ' or ' witnessings '), which
would include not only ' ancient ' and \* recent ' witnesses cited in
an argument, but also the spontaneous offer of testimony by a
character in a play as a means of persuasion, or even the clamor for
it. Conrade : ' Away! you are an ass; you are an ass.' Dogberry: '
Dost thou not suspect my place ? Dost thou not suspect my years ?

0 that he (Sexton) were here to write me down an ass ! But, masters,
remember that I am an ass. . .. No, thou villain, thou art full of
piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. . . . Bring him
away. O that

1 had been writ down an ass! ' {Much Ado 4. 2. 74—88.) The personages
of Aristophanes are much given to ' witnessing ' and \* calling to
witness.' When Peisthetaerus maltreats the Inspector, the latter
cries : ' I call to witness that I, an Inspector, am struck ! '
(Birds 1029—31.) In like manner, when Dionysus strips Xanthias of the
lion-skin, the slave bawls out: \* I call to witness, and appeal to
the gods! ' {Frogs 526—9) ; but the ' persuasion ' is unavailing. Of
the formal summons there is a good comic instance in Wasps 935 ff.
(esp. 936—7), where Bdelycleon for the defence calls the
kitchen-utensils that were present on the occasion of the alleged
theft by Labes of the cheese. Bdelycleon: ' I summon the witnesses.
Witnesses for Labes stand forth ! Bowl, Pestle, Cheese-grater,
Brazier, Pipkin, and the other well-scorched vessels ! ' In Clouds
1221—5, Pasias, desiring a repayment justly due him, summons
Strepsiades, who, vAth a quibble, exclaims : ' I call to witness that
he named two days ! ' The use of evidence by witness for purposes of
discovery, persuasion, and the like, is illustrated in Moliere as
follows. In Tartuffe 4. 4, 5, Orgon is placed in hiding so that he
may observe the attempt of the dissembler upon Orgon's wife Elmire.
In Le Malade Imaginaire 2.11, Argan forces his little daughter
Louison to bear witness as to the endearments that have passed
between her sister and Cleante, the evidence being given after '
torture '; and Toinette, having induced Argan

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to counterfeit death, makes him a witness of the heart-lessness of
his wife and the fidehty of his daughter Angehque {ibid. 3. 16—21).
In Le Medecin Malgre Lui 3. 3, Lucas is a witness of the knavery of
Sganarelle. In Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (2. 2.) the doctor testifies
to the ill health of the hero, convincing Oronte; (2. 3) Sbrigani,
disguised as a Flemish merchant, testifies to the hero's debts and
his design to rehabilitate himself by a rich marriage; and (2. 8—10)
Nerine and Lu-cette in disguise, with the children, give evidence of
his alleged bigamy. The speeches exemplify this division of dianoia.
In Twelfth Night 4. 2, Shakespeare makes the Clown, in the guise of
Sir Topas, a witness of Malvolio's alleged insanity. The song of
Ariel (\* Full fathom five ') in The Tempest i. 2. 394—400 bears
witness to Ferdinand concerning the supposed death of his father. The
Prince and Poins are witnesses to the flight of Falstaff from the
booty he has taken (j Henry IV 2.4.255—67). Prince: 'We two saw you
four set on four, and you bound them, and were masters of their
wealth. Mark, now, how a plain tale shall put you down. Then did we
two set on you fom:, and, with a word, out-faced you from your prize,
and have it; yea, and can show it you here in the house. And,
Falstaff, you carried your guts away as nimbly, with as quick
dexterity, and roared for mercy, and still ran and roared, as ever I
heard bull-calf. What a slave art thou, to hack thy sword as thou
hast done, and then say it was in fight! What trick, what device,
what starting-hole, canst thou now find out to hide thee from this
open and apparent shame ? ' He asks Falstaff for an exhibition of
dianoia ; Falstaff gives it with an ' oath,' adding an ' opinion '
{ihid. 2. 4. 270—5) : ' By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that
made ye. . . . The lion will not touch the true prince.']

(4) Tests. [The usual translation of Sdccavoi is 'Persuasions':

' (4) tests OP

\* tortures '; but for comedy the term embraces ordeals ordeals
(mental as well as physical), forcible inquisitions, systematic tests
of every sort, yet particularly those of a mechanical nature, as may
be inferred from the

S 2

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276 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

primary meaning of pdcaavo?, that is, touchstone. A satisfactory
rendering of the word (3a(7avot in the Tractate would combine the
notions of ' torture ' (such as mock-floggings), decisions by
mock-combat, tests (as of poetry by weight and measure), and, on the
mental side, persistent inquiries and mock-examinations (as that of
the Bachelierus in Le Malade Imaginaire). Sharp mental inquisitions
naturally form a part of the literary technique in the Platonic
dialogue; Plato systematically introduces them for comic effect, as
in the Protagoras and the Phaedrus, and even in the Apology.
Excellent examples are found in Book i of the Republic and in the
Ion. But in general, perhaps, the \* ordeal' tends rather to be of a
physical sort, or at least to involve the use of material objects and
instruments, such as the scales of Wouter Van Twiller and the dice of
Bridoye (see above, p. 247), or the cart-wheel described at the end
of the Summoner's Tale in Chaucer. The noun pacravoi in the Tractate
corresponds to the frequently occurring verb j3a(7ccvi^£iv in
Aristophanes, who uses the noun but twice (Thesmophoriazusae 800,
801). The nine occurrences of the verb in the Frogs (616, 618, 625,
629, 642, 802, 1121, 1123, 1367 — cf. also pao-avLG-Tpia, 826) tend
to show the range of meaning. Take the first five. Xanthias (in the
disguise of Dionysus = ' Heracles,' beginning with an ' oath,' and
offering a ' compact '): \* By Zeus, now! If ever I was here before,
or stole a hair's worth of your goods, let me perish. And I '11 make
you a right noble offer. Take this lad of mine, and torture
(pao-avi^e) him; and if you find me guilty, then lead him off to
death.' Aeacus : ' And how shall I torture (j3a(7avi<7a)) him ? '
Xanthias: \* In every way. Bind him to the rack; hang, flog, and flay
him; and then pour vinegar in his nostrils and pile bricks on his
chest. And do all else this side of whipping the wretch with an onion
or a tender leek.' Aeacus: ' A fair proposal. And if I maim the lad
in striking him, I'll pay you what he's worth.' Xanthias : ' I don't
ask that; just take him off and torture (pacravt^') him.' Aeacus : \*
I '11 do it here, that you may be eye-witness to his confession.'

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To Dionysus in the garb of Xanthias: \* Now then, my boy, put down
the traps, and mind you tell no falsehood ! ' Dionysus: \* I charge
you not to torture (pacravi^siv) me, a god immortal!' All this, and
more, is introductory to the \* ordeal ' proper, in which Aeacus with
alternate blows seeks to draw an unambiguous cry from the one who is
not divine {Frogs 641—66), and which begins with Aeacus ' command, \*
Now strip! ' and Xanthias' question, ' How can you test (Pcca-avtsT?)
us fairly ? ' The ' ordeal' ends with the inquisitor's confession of
failure: 'No, by Demeter! I can't find out which one of you is god.'
The other four occurrences of the verb have to do with the contest
between the tragic poets, of which we begin to learn in the middle of
the play. Aeacus has heard that poetry will be measured in a balance.
Xanthias: \* What! Will they weigh out tragedy like mutton ? ' Aeacus
: ' They are going to bring levels, and foot-rules for words, and
oblong forms ' — Xanthias : \* To make bricks ? ' Aeacus : \* — and
compasses and wedges; for Euripides declares he'll test (pacavisTv)
the tragedies word by word ' {ibid. 797—802). At length we come to
the great examination. Euripides (addressing Aeschylus) : ' Now then,
I '11 turn to your very prologues, so that first of all I may test
(Pafjaviw) the opening part of the worthy poet's tragic play; for he
is obscure in his statement of the facts.' Dionysus: ' And which of
his plays will you test (pao-avisTc) ? ' Euripides : \* Full many.
But first of all read me the prologue from the Oresteia.' Dionysus:
\* Come, let every one keep silence. Read, Aeschylus ! ' Aeschylus :
' " O Hermes of the nether world," ' etc. {ibid. 1119—26). Lastly
{ibid. 1364—1419), we have the actual weighing in the scales.
Dionysus : ' That's enough for the odes.' Aeschylus : ' Content; for
now I wish to bring him to the scales, and that alone will show the
choice between us two in the poetic art. 'Twill test (j3a(7avi£T) the
weight respectively of our words.' Dionysus: ' Come hither both,
since I must needs weigh out like cheese the art of doughty poets '
{ibid. 1364—9). There is a test or inquisition, with a threat of
torture, in Acharnians no ff., when Dicae-

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278 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

opolis cross-questions Pseudartabas. ' You get away ! ' he tells the
Ambassador; \* I '11 test (paaaviw) this man alone.' Another case is
found in the speech of Philo-cleon and the notes which Bdelycleon
makes upon it m writing (Wasps 521 ff., esp. 547), with the chorus as
umpires in the dispute. Yet another is the test proposed by the
Sausage-seller in the Knights 1209 ff. in order to let the audience
think that Demus has discrimination : Demus must pry into the
Sausage-seller's hamper (which turns out to be empty), and then into
Paphlagon's (which is discovered to be full of dainties) ; see
especially line 1212. We have a mental ordeal or inquisition in
Lysistrata 476 ff., when the men examine the women as to the reason
why the latter have seized the Acropolis; and a physical ordeal
[ihid. 872 ff.), in which Myrrhina tantalizes Cinesias. In the
Thes-mophoriazusae there is sharp and prolonged cross-questioning as
to the presence and sex of Mnesilochus, culminating in the discovery
of his manhood ; see particularly lines 626 ff., beginning with the
speech of the First Woman: ' Stand aside, for I will test (paaaviw)
her from the rites of last year. . . . Now tell me what was the first
thing done in the rites. ' Mnesilochus : ' Well then, what came first
? We drank.' Woman : \* And after that, what next ? ' Mnesilochus: \*
We drank again.' Woman: ' You heard that from some one. What was the
third ? ' Mnesilochus betrays ignorance, and is trapped. Any
important ' test ' is well-suited to the comic agon ; less notable
ones may occur almost anywhere in a play. The presence of the verb
pac-avi^siv is not indispensable; there is no occurrence of it in the
Clouds or the Plutus. Yet as an example of a minor \* test' we have
the means accredited to Socrates for estimating the powers of jumping
in a flea (see above, pp. 247—8) ; while the healing of the bhnd god
in the Plutus is the central incident of the play, brought about by
much persuasion. Turning to modern comedy, we may again note the
examination of the Bachelierus in Le Malade Imaginaire. In the same
play we have the ordeal by which Argan extracts information ifrom
Louison, and the test devised by

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Toinette when she prevails on Argan to feign death in order to find
out how much his wife and daughter love him; these examples were
discussed under the head of ' witnesses ' (see above, pp. 274-5),
but, as we have seen, the categories of the Tractate, like those of
the *Poetics*, are not always mutually exclusive — or the devices are
constantly uniting to form a whole. The feigned death of Louison in
the midst of her ordeal is itself a trial of her father, and a means
of persuading him. The flips and strokes administered \* en cadence '
by the guard in Le Malade Imaginaire, Premier Intermede, constitute
an ordeal for Polichinelle, as a result of which he is induced to
give the Archers six pistoles — a \* persuasion ' with a vengeance!
As the entire farce of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is in one way a \*
deception ' of the hero, so in another way it may be regarded as an
\* ordeal' for him, and a ' persuasion ' to drive him from the city;
yet, in order to be specific, we may instance his pursuit (i. 16) by
the medical attendants armed with syringes, while the apothecary
confronts him with another. The patient, however, is not induced to
take the purge! The literary contest in Les Femmes Savantes 3. 2—5,
and the transformation of M. Jourdain into a Turk (see especially Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme 4. 13), are likewise \* tests ' and \*
ordeals.' It is by means of an ' ordeal' that Valere and Lucas
(Medecin Malgre Lui i. 6) compel Sganarelle to admit that he is a
doctor: \* lis prennent chacun un baton, et le frappent.' Sganarelle
: ' Ah ! Ah ! Ah ! messieurs, je suis tout ce qu'il vous plaira.' In
i Henry IV 2. 2 the Prince and Poins subject Falstaff and his
companions to the test: ' As they are sharing, the Prince and Poins
set upon them. They all run away ; and Falstaff, after a blow or two,
runs away too, leaving the booty behind.' As Aristotle says of
dianoia in *Poetics* 19, ' the act must produce its effect without
verbal explanation.']

(5) Laws. [Laws are either human or divine. Di- 'Persuasions' T • 1 1
1 r 1 (5) laws

vine laws include the utterances of oracles; — yet

oracles at times may serve as witnesses. There are

also laws of birds. Human laws include legal codes.

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28o THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

medical dicta, and so on. Almost any general statement proceeding
from a notable authority may fall under this head if it has greater
cogency than a maxim (y^^wjxy]). When the young scapegrace appears in
the Birds 1342—57, having heard that in the aerial city the young may
maltreat the old, and hungering for its \* laws,' Peisthetaerus
begins the task of persuading him to withdraw by citing the \* law '
that when the old stork has reared his young, and they are ready for
flight, the young must maintain their father. Later (ibid. 1660 —6)
he cites ' the law of Solon ' prohibiting bastards from the right of
inheritance; therewith he persuades Heracles, the ' bastard ' son of
Zeus, to renounce all claim to possession of the Lady Sovereignty.
The law of filial obedience is often appealed to by characters in
Aristophanes in their efforts to prove or disprove, to urge or
dissuade; see, for example, the long argument in Clouds 1399—1447,
ending in the query of Pheidip-pides : ' But what if by the Worser
Reason I prove that it is right to beat my mother ? ' There are over
fifty references to 'laws ' (singular and plural) in Dunbar's
Concordance of Aristophanes; consult this work for Yva)|XY) also, and
for opxo?, (jTuovBai, [iapTUpo[j.at, jBacavi^stv, v6[jL0$, and their
cognates.^ The process will throw light on the poet, and will add to
one's confidence in the Tractate. In Moliere the law regarding
polygamy is invoked against Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (2. 13) by the
second Avocat, \* chantant fort vite en hredouillant ' (\* sputtering
') :

Si vous consultez nos auteurs, Legislateurs et glossateurs,

^ Some of these words are common in Greek tragedy, and some are not.
Thus vo^og {-ol) occurs 25, 37, and 65 times in Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides respectively; o^jxog 11, 13, and 36 times; ofiyvfii 2,
6, and 14 times; ovu&fjxai, or avvO-axog (Sophocles), 1,1, and 6
times; anot^drj (-at) 3, 2, and 17; fiaQZVQslv 11, 6, and 5;
^uQTVQSad-aL I, I, and 6; /uaQivg or ^dqiVQ (Euripides) 2, 3, and II.
The frequent occurrence of'laws' and 'oaths' in Euripides is not so
impressive when we reflect that we have eighteen of his plays, and
but eleven of Aristophanes'. It is noteworthy that, while ^daayoi and
cognate words occur but thrice in Sophocles, we have no instances at
all in either Aeschylus or Euripides.

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Justinian, Papinian, Ulpian et Tribonian, Fernand, Rebuffe, Jean
Imole, Paul Castre, Julian, Barthole, Josan, Alciat, et Cujas,

Ce grand homme si capable; La polygamic est un cas.

Est un cas pendable.

Tartuffe appeals to State law in the last scene but one of the comedy
named for him, and apparently with success, only to yield to an order
from the Prince a moment later, and to be led away in disgrace.
Phila-minte discharges Martine (Femmes Savantes 2. 6) because the
unlucky maid-servant has broken the laws of grammar laid down by
Vaugelas, and argues on the strength of those laws against Chrysale,
who would protect the girl [ihid. 2. 7) for her ability as cook.
Chrysale demands :

Qu' importe qu'elle manque aux lois de Vaugelas, Pourvu qu'a la
cuisine elle ne manque pas ?

But his argument is overborne by his wife and grammatical vopi. The
Comedy of Errors turns upon the law that any Syracusan found at
Ephesus must die; the Duke cites it, and Aegeon, admitting its
cogency, is ready to accept his fate. So much for \* proofs ' or \*
persuasions ' as illustrated in comedy. It will be readily understood
that there can be an admixture of a serious kind of dianoia — that
is, of ' artistic ' proofs — in a comic play, and the more so as the
play verges toward a more serious type of comedy; but this is only
saying in another way that the Tractate is right in singling out the
\* unartistic ' proofs as characteristic of speeches in the comic
drama.]

The diction of comedy is the common, popular Ian- PJ^^o']','" guage.
The comic poet must endow his personages with his own native idiom,
but must endow an alien with the alien idiom. [So the language of
Aristophanes is in general pure, limpid, Attic Greek (see above, pp.
36, 92), the language of Terence, however refined,

comedy

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282 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

is natural Latin, and the language of Moliere is straightforward,
perspicuous, idiomatic French. (Some allowance must be made for the
modifications of diction that are introduced for comic purposes — as
in wordplay.) Aristophanes endows Lysistrata with his own tongue, and
her Spartan ally, Lampito, with forms from the dialect of Sparta. The
differences in language mentioned by the Tractate are, for Greek
comedy, differences in the Greek dialects. In the Acharnians, says
Rogers (p. xlvi), \* the speeches of both the Megarian and the
Boeotian are seasoned with the dialects in vogue in their respective
countries; but Aristophanes was far too great an artist and too
shrewd a dramatist to overload their language with the strictest
Doric and Aeolic forms, which would be unfamiliar and might be
unintelligible to his audience, and would spoil the rhythmical
cadence of his verses.' Moliere and Shakespeare observe the same
economy in their use of dialect. In Le Medecin Malgre Lui the nurse
Jacqueline and her husband employ dialectal forms in harmony with
their station in life. In Monsieur de Pourceaugnac 2. 8, 9, Lucette,
pretending to be a Languedocian wife of the hero, and Nerine,
pretending to be a wife of his from Picardy, use dialects which the
situation makes intelligible enough. In Le Malade Imaginaire,
Troisieme Intermede, the bombastic yet simple Latin of the examiners
and the Bachelierus is intermixed with French forms that add both to
the incongruity and to the intelligibility of the initiation into
medicine; moreover, the Intermede is a ballet, with music and
dancing. The amount of Lingua Franca and ' Turkish ' in Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme might be thought excessive, were the speeches
unaccompanied by expressive dumb-show, and were the ' Turks ' not '
chantants et dansants/ The Lingua Franca is, however, not
unintelligible to a cosmopolitan audience speaking one of the Romance
languages. And various dialects of Greece were heard on the streets
of Athens in the time of Aristophanes, above all, during the
celebration of the City Dionysia, when, according to Aeschines
(Haigh, p. 7), the audience in the theatre consisted of the \* whole
Greek nation.'

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DICTION, MELODY, AND SPECTACLE 283

Shakespeare indulges less in dialect, possibly because of the
relative isolation of the English audience from Continental tongues,
and because different languages (as well as different dialects of
English) were spoken in different parts of Great Britain. Caliban
speaks good English, while the Triballian of the Birds and the
Scythian of the Thesmophoriazusae utter a jargon (the Scythian more
intelligible than the Triballian). Flu-ellen {Henry V 4. 7) betrays
his origin, not by speaking Welsh, but by the broken English of a
Welshman. The principle noted in the Tractate may thus by extension
include the comic gibberish of the Triballian, of the Scythian, and
of Pseudartabas in the Acharnians. Compare Rogers' translation [Birds
1627—81). Peisthe-taerus: ' All rests with this Triballian. What say
you ? ' Triballian : ' Me gulna charmi grati Sovranau birdito stori.'
Heracles : \* There! he said " Restore her." ' Or take Acharnians
98—104. Ambassador:

\* Now tell the Athenians, Pseudo-Art abas, what the Great King
commissioned you to say.' Pseudo-Artabas : ' Ijisti boutti furbiss
upde rotti.' Ambassador :

\* Do you understand ? ' Dicaeopolis : ' By Apollo, no not I.'
Ambassador: \* He says the King is going to send you gold.' To
Pseudo-Artabas: \* Be more distinct and clear about the gold.'
Pseudo-Artabas:

\* No getti goldi nincompoop lawny.']

Melody is the province of the art of music; hence it is necessary to
take its fundamental rules from that art. [So Aristotle in the
*Poetics* (see above, p. 209) sends us to the Rhetoric for the
technique of dramatic speeches. The technique of music was of great
importance to the dramatic poet, who in the flourishing days of the
Greek stage was likewise a composer ; in our sense, Sophocles and
Aristophanes were as much \* musicians ' as ' poets '; yet the
*Poetics* virtually neglects the subject of music, and is perfunctory
in its treatment of the chorus. In the Politics (see above, p. 128)
the author disclaims a knowledge of music such as one could find in
technical treatises, to which he refers.]

Spectacle is of great advantage to dramas in supply- comedy'^'"

Music in comedy

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THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Presence or absence of constituent elements

ing what is in concord with them. [The remark would apply to the
Frogs and the Birds (see above, pp. 73—4).] Plot, diction, and
melody, are found in all comedies; dianoia, ethos, and spectacle in
few. [This dubious statement has some relation to a difficult passage
in the *Poetics* (6. 1450^12—5), which is thus rendered in my \*
Amphfied Version ' (p. 23) : \* These constitutive elements,
accordingly, not a few of the tragic poets, so to speak, have duly
employed; for, indeed, every drama must contain certain things that
are meant for the eye, as well as the elements of moral disposition,
plot, diction, melody, and intellect.' Here the \* so to speak '
possibly should be read with the reference to ' spectacle.' In the
same chapter [*Poetics* 6. 1450^23—6) we learn that a tragedy cannot
exist without \* plot,' but can without ' ethos '; that ' ethos' is
rare in the tragic poets after Euripides; and that the defect is not
confined to tragic poets. That is, we may suppose, ideally conceived
personages, fulfilling all artistic demands — personages out of whose
motives the action constantly arises — are rare. Such an opinion
would hold true for comedies. The statement of the Tractate regarding
dianoia and spectacle is hard to understand, and, if ever
intelligible, hard to illustrate in view of our limited acquaintance
with complete Greek comedies outside of Aristophanes. In the Plutus,
spectacle doubtless is not so important as in the Birds. Perhaps
there is less extensive use of ordeals, testimonies, and the like, in
the later comedies; yet surely the Plutus is rich in ' opinions' on
the relative advantages of poverty and wealth. Diction, and some sort
of plot, there must be in all comedies as in all tragedies. But what
of the melody ? According to modern conceptions, this is the one
formative element out of the six that can be totally absent from a
play. For the Greek drama, the question of the presence or absence of
any of the elements would seem to be a matter of more or less, not of
absolute exclusion. After the impoverishment of Athens through her
reverses in war, the entire choral element became less significant on
the stage, and for

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reasons of economy the cost of stage-setting dwindled. Why should not
' melody ' tend to disappear with \* spectacle ' ? Still, in Menander
we have evidence that music, having shght connection or none with the
comedy, continued to be given. The statement of the Tractate is at
best difficult to interpret; perhaps one is wiser not to throw out
too many suggestions concerning it.]

The [quantitative] parts of comedy are four: Quantitative

'-^ -J JT J parts of com-

(i) prologue, (2) the choral part, (3) episode, (4) exode. ^dy The
prologue is that portion of a comedy extending as far as the entrance
of the chorus. The choral part [choricon] is a song by the chorus
when it [the song] is of adequate length. An episode is what lies
between two choral songs. The exode is the utterance of the chorus at
the end. [This passage has been discussed at length above, pp. 53—9,
198—9.]

The kinds of comedy are (i) Old, with a superabun- ^ ^j^:'^iSdr dance
of the laughable; (2) New, which disregards comedy laughter, and
tends toward the serious; (3) Middle, which is a mixture of the two.
[The allusion to the ' New ' comedy may place the source of this part
of the Tractate after Aristotle (see above, pp. 12,26) ; and yet we
know that Aristophanes produced comedies which anticipated the
devices of Menander (see above, p. 23). Is it possible that Aristotle
invented all three terms, or at all events that they were current in
his time ? But this is mere conjecture. The three kinds represent not
only periods of time — in a rough and general way, — but also
tendencies that were present from an early date in Greek comedy: the
Tractate does not say that the \* Middle' is intermediate in point of
time, but that it is ' a mixture ' of the other two. The Frogs,
perhaps, has \* a superabundance of laughter,' and is of the older
type. The tendency of the \* New ' toward a more serious vein may be
observed in the Self-Tormentor of Terence, adapted from Menander. The
Plutus possibly belongs to the type of ' Middle,' as the Aeolosi-con
is said to have done, and the Cocalus foreshadowed

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286 THE TRACTATE ILLUSTRATED

Menander. The two divergent tendencies, and the mean in which they
approximate each other, are not pecuhar to Greek hterature, but are
universal. In Shakespeare, Falstaff belongs to the ' old ' comedy,
the Comedy of Errors to the ' new,' and The Tempest to a region
intermediate. All three types are found in Moliere; for example, the
ceremony at the end of Le Malade Imaginaire (' old '), Amphitryon (\*
middle '), and Tartuffe or Le Misanthrope (' new '). That the ' new,'
while tending toward the serious, nevertheless is amusing, and thus
duly belongs to the realm of comedy, may be learned from a study of
Tartuffe — that is, if not on a first, yet on repeated perusal. For a
discussion of the terms \* old ' and ' new ' as used by Aristotle,
see above, pp. 19—25.]

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JOHN TZETZES ON COMEDY

[Translated from the First Proem to Aristophanes (Kaibel, pp. 17-9);
I have omitted the first chapter.]

Comedy is an imitation of an action [that is ridiculous], . . .
purgative of emotions, constructive of life, moulded by laughter and
pleasure. Tragedy differs from comedy in that tragedy has a story,
and a report of things [or \* deeds '] that are past, although it
represents them as taking place in the present, but comedy embraces
fictions of the affairs of everyday life; and in that the aim of
tragedy is to move the hearers to lamentation, while the aim of
comedy is to move them to laughter.

And again, according to another differentiation of comedy we have on
the one hand the Archaic, on the other the New [, and the Middle^].
The Old Comedy, then, differs from the New in time, dialect, matter,
metre, and equipment. There is a difference in time in that the New
was in the days of Alexander, while the Old had its zenith in the
days of the Peloponnesian war. There is a difference in dialect in
that the New had greater clearness, making use of the new Attic,
while the Old had vigor and loftiness of utterance; and sometimes
they [the poets of the Old Comedy] invented certain expressions.
There is a difference in the matter in that the New . . ., while the
Old . . .2 There is a difference in metre in that the New for the
most part

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1 Meineke deletes, and Kaibel brackets, the phrase.

2 Something has been lost from the text; see Kaibel, p. 18, and
perhaps pp. 63-4, 68.

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employs the iambic measure, and other measures but seldom, while in
the Old a multiplicity of metres was the great desideratum. There is
a difference in equipment in that in the New there is no necessity of
choruses, but in the other they were highly important.

And the Old Comedy itself is not uniform; for they who in Attica
first took up the production of comedy (namely Susarion and his
fellows) brought in their personages in no definite order, and all
they aimed at was to raise a laugh. But when Cratinus came, he first
appointed that there should be as many as three personages [? actors]
in comedy, putting an end to the lack of arrangement; and to the
pleasure of comedy he added profit, attacking evil-doers, and
chastising them with comedy as with a public whip. Yet he, too, was
allied to the older type, and to a slight degree shared in its want
of arrangement. Aristophanes, however, using more art than his
contemporaries, reduced comedy to order, and shone pre-eminent among
all.

The laughter of comedy arises from diction and things. It arises from
diction in seven ways. First, from homonyms, as, for example,
Bta(popoL»|jL£voi$; for this signifies both to he at variance and
gain. Secondly, from synonyms, as tjxco and v.oL^i^yo^oix [' I come '
and ' I arrive ' (see Frogs 1156—7)]; for they are the same thing.
Thirdly, from garrulity, as when any one uses the same word over and
over. Fourthly, from paronyms, as when any one using the proper term
[for a person or thing] applies it where it does not belong, as, for
example, \* I Momax am called Midas.' Fifthly, from diminutives, as '
Dear little Socrates,' ' Dear little Euripides.' Sixthly, from
interchange [hoCk\oi'^'i]\i], as \* O Lord BBsQ! ' [Lat. peditum]
instead of \* O Lord Zstj! ' [Zeus]. Seventhly, from

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grammar and syntax [—literally, as in the Tractate, above, p. 237, \*
from the arrangement of language ']. This occurs through the use of
the voice or through similar means. [The foregoing statement properly
belongs under the treatment of ' interchange ' (=' perversion ') ;
see above, p. 236.] From things done, laughter arises in two ways.
First, from deception, as when Strepsiades is persuaded that the
story about the flea is true [see above," p. 244]. Secondly, from
assimilation; but assimilation is divided in two, either toward the
better, as when Xanthias is assimilated to Heracles, or toward the
worse, as when Dionysus is assimilated to Xanthias [see above, pp.
240—2].

[Where the Tractate has nine sub-heads under ' things,' Tzetzes has
but two. The seeming defect may be due to laziness in an excerptor
before Tzetzes. Or the case may be that Tzetzes, or some one from
whom he copied, at this point used a source lying in the field of
rhetorical theory — that is, not in the direct line of tradition for
the theory of comedy. Arndt (pp. 13—4) somewhat doubtfully equates
Tzetzes' two sub-heads under \* things ' with Cicero's \* fabella vel
narratio ficta ' (= \* deception ') and ' imitatio de-pravata ' (= \*
assimilation to the worse ') in De Orator e 2. 240—3. ' Laughter from
clownish dancing ' would not find a place in rhetorical theory; and
so with the other omitted items. If we do not like the explanation,
we may, as Arndt advises, take refuge in the notion of a lazy
excerptor.]

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APPENDIX

THE FIFTH FORM OF 'DISCOVERY' IN THE

POETICS

[Reprinted, and adapted, from Classical Philology 13. 251-61 (July,
1918) with the kind permission of the Managing-Editor.]

The universal longing for knowledge is the key-note in the philosophy
of Aristotle; doubtless the most familiar sentence in his works is
the opening maxim of the Metaphysics : ' All men by nature desire to
know/ The satisfaction of this desire is to him the basic pleasure,
not only in the pursuit of science and philosophy, but also in the
realm of art, and hence of poetry. When we see a face drawn to the
life, the difference between the medium of the artist and the flesh
and blood of the living original occasions a moment of suspense —
there is a sudden inference as we catch the resemblance, and we
exclaim in recognition: \* Why, that is he! ' — that is the man we
know so well. So, one may add, the hasty reader, snatching at
delight, foregoes the cmnulative satisfaction to be had from the
successive disclosures of a long story, and skips to the end of the
book in order to learn at once the main outcome of the whole. Or
again, to return to Aristotle, the essential mark of genius in a poet
is the ability to discover underlying resemblances in things that are
superficially unlike, a power that is shown in his command of
figurative language — in similes and the like. And, again, the style
that gives the greatest pleasure is the one in which the current
diction,.

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY \* 291

instantly intelligible, is diversified with just the right admixture
of strange or rare terms — archaic words and so on. Thus Lincoln
said, not ' eighty-seven ' years ago, but \* Four score and seven.'
The perfection of style is to be clear without being ordinary; an
infusion of the less familiar, so long as we do not convert our
language into an enigma or a jargon, gives opportunity for a
succession of delights arising from the recognition of meanings.
Aristotle does not precisely say all this, but I trust no injury has
been done to his remarks on diction if we detect in them a latent
resemblance to other parts of his theory.

There can at all events be no question as to the importance he
attaches to that element in the plot of a drama or an epic poem which
he calls \* discovery ' (avayvcopKri?) or, as we sometimes render it,
' recognition.' Like other terms found in the *Poetics*, this may be
taken first in a more general sense, and then in a more special or
technical sense. Discovery in general is simply a transition from
ignorance to knowledge. You may discover the identity of a person, or
of yotir dog Argus, or of inanimate, even casual, things. You may
discover the solution of a riddle propounded by the Sphinx. You may
discover that such and such a thing has or has not occurred, or that
you yourself have or have not done a particular deed. Thus Oedipus
discovers, or thinks he discovers, all sorts of things true or imtrue
— that Creon is plotting against him; that Tiresias is basely
involved in the plot; that he, the hero, could not have slain his
father and married his mother, fulfilling the oracle, since he
discovers that Polybus and Merope have died a natural death; that the
dead Polybus and Merope after all were not his parents; that the man
he slew at the cross-roads was

t2

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his father, and the queen he subsequently married, his mother; that,
as Tiresias had said, he himself, Oedipus, is the accursed defiler of
the land whom he has been seeking. \* Oedipus ' is the real answer to
the riddle of the Sphinx: more than other infants, he with the
pierced feet went on all fours in the morning of life; he above all
went proudly erect at noon; and he it was who in his blindness went
with a staff in the night of age. All the while the unfamiliar, as it
is added on, is converted into the familiar; the unexpected turns out
to be the very thing we were awaiting. The unknown stranger is
revealed as the first-born of the house — who must again become a
stranger, and yet again seek a familiar home and final resting-place,
no longer at outlandish Thebes, but here in the neighborhood of our
own Athens, at the grove beloved of his and our poet. And all the
while we, with Oedipus, desire further knowledge, and our desire,
momentarily baffled, is as constantly satisfied — until the entire
plan of Sophocles is unfolded, and we know all. Even when the
knowledge is painful, the satisfaction is a satisfaction. And for us,
the spectators, the pain is tempered, since we behold it, not in real
life, but in an imitation, with a close resemblance to reality (yet
with a difference) that keeps us inferring, and saying: \* Ah, so it
is — just like human fortune and misfortune as we see them every day!
' The story itself, being traditional, is familiar yet old and far
away; and it now has an admixture of the strange and rare which only
Sophocles could give it. How delightful to learn — to discover
fundamental similarity under superficial difference!

So much for ' discovery ' in general. More specifically, in the
technical sense, a \* discovery ' is the

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY ' 293

recognition, in the drama or in a tale, of the identity of one or
more persons by one or more others. X may know Y, and then Y must
learn the identity of X, or the mutual ignorance of both may pass
into mutual recognition, causing love or hate, and hence pleasure or
pain, to one or both ; but, if the poet or novelist does his work
aright, always with pleasure to the man who sees the play or hears
the story — the pleasure of inferring and learning. In particular,
the poet must let the audience do its own observing and draw its own
inferences without too much obvious assistance. In tragedy at least,
we do not wish formal proofs of identity, the display of birthmarks,
scars, or tokens — necklaces and so on. Nor do we wish a purely
artificial declaration from the unknown individual, with no preceding
incident to make it necessary. In tragedy, tokens and declarations
are the last resort of a feeble or nodding poet, who has forgotten
that all men desire to learn by inference, and must not be cheated of
the universal satisfaction. They like to fancy themselves wholly
responsible for their mental operations ; they do not wish to have
their wits insulted. The various kinds of \* discovery,' in the more
technical sense, are, according to Aristotle, six in number. Of
these, the first is that brought about by signs or tokens; the second
is the formal declaration; the third is the one effected by memory,
when the occasion stirs a man's emotions, and his display of feeling
because of some remembrance reveals who he must be; and the fourth is
that resulting from inference, when one agent in a drama identifies
another by a process of reasoning. It is easy to see that these four
divisions, and indeed all six, are not mutually exclusive, since, for
example, a scar might be subsidiary to a declaration, or serve to

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stir a memory; or a necklace, or a bow, or a garment, might prompt an
inference. The fifth kind is the 'synthetic' (or 'composite,' or
fictitious — otherwise fallacious or false, or perhaps ' concocted ')
' discovery,' and is the form I wish specially to examine. The sixth
is the best form. In it the identity of the hero is revealed, not by
a scar, or by his own declaration, artificially dragged in by the
poet, or by his weeping when he hears the tale of his wanderings
rehearsed by another, or by an inference made by his long-lost
sister; but through the inevitable sequence of incident after
incident in the plot itself. Here the action of the reader's mind
follows the very action of the play, and the pleasure of learning the
particular identity is but one item in an orderly series, in that
passage from ignorance to knowledge which is effected by the work as
a whole.

And pleasure, we must recollect, is not a state of being, but a form
of action. The right functioning of the mind is pleasure. Pleasure
and free activity are convertible terms. Thus the emphasis of the
*Poetics* is always laid upon what is rational and orderly. An overplus
of delight is experienced when a regular advance from antecedent to
consequent finally brings a sudden addition to our knowledge'; when
by a rapid, unlabored, logical inference the desire to know the truth
is satisfied. All learning is essentially rapid; the recognition
dawns, then comes as a flash of pleasure.

Yet the poet has a use for what is not strictly true and logical.
Even the irrational may escape censure if it be made plausible, or
comic when comedy is intended. And the marvelous is sweet. It is
legitimate also to represent a dramatic character as deceiving
himself or another, the poet being aware that it is hard for a man
swayed by anger, or fear, or any other powerful emotion.

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to see and tell the exact truth. People are always magnifying the
things that comfort their self-love, and minifying whatever may
ruffle or hurt it. Then there are characters who like to mystify
their fellows, as well as those who deceive for some obvious
advantage. The poet may on occasion set before us a crafty Odysseus
who delights in all manner of wiles. It requires art also to portray
the slippery Clytaemnestra, not to mention the lying Lady Macbeth.
Superior mental activity as such is ever interesting, and the false
inferences of the deceived are not unpleasing, but the reverse,
unless they exceed the bounds of the credible. Furthermore, as we
have seen, a slight admixture of the strange or rare gives a spice to
the known and obvious. In fact, we all like to add a little something
in the telling of a tale, with a view to pleasing the neighbor who
hears it.

Accordingly, in his remarks on epic poetry Aristotle says (*Poetics*
24. 1460a 17—26) :

' That the marvelous is a source of pleasure may be seen by the way
in which people add to a story [xpod-TtQ'svTE?] ; for they always
embellish the facts in the belief that it will gratify the listeners.
Yet it is Homer above all who has shown the rest how a lie should be
told; [in effect: who has shown how a poet ought to represent
Odysseus or the like deceiving some other personage.] The essence of
the method is the use of a paralogism, as follows. Suppose that
whenever A exists or comes to pass, B must exist or occur. Men think,
if the consequent B exists, the antecedent A must also ; but the
inference is illegitimate. For the poet, then, the right method is
this : if the antecedent A is untrue, and if there is something else,
B, which would necessarily exist or occur if A were true, one must
add [xpoc-Gstvaij the B ; for, knowing the added detail to be true,
we ourselves mentally proceed to the fallacious inference

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that the antecedent A is Hkewise true. We may take an instance from
the Bath Scene in the Odyssey.'^

That is, one must say the least possible about the A, and keep
harping on the B. Turning to the Bath Scene in Odyssey 19, we see the
force of Aristotle's illustration. Here Odysseus, disguised in rags,
wishes to convince Penelope that he, the Beggar, has seen the real
Odysseus alive = A, a falsehood. Accordingly, he adds an elaborate
and accurate description of the hero's clothing = B. Penelope knows B
to be true, since the garments came from her. If A were true, that
is, if the Beggar had seen Odysseus, the natural consequence, B,
would be a true description of the clothing. From the truth of B,
Penelope mistakenly infers the occurrence of A, and believes the
Beggar.2

It is interesting to note in detail how Homer makes Odysseus ' add
the B '; I give the passage (Odyssey 19. 218 ff.) in the translation
of Butcher and Lang :

' " Tell me what manner of raiment he was clothed in about his body,
and what manner of man he was himself, and tell me of his fellows
that went with him." Then Odysseus of many counsels answered her
saying: " Lady, it is hard for one so long parted from him to tell
thee all this, for it is now the twentieth year since he went thither
and left my country. Yet even so I will tell thee as I see him in
spirit. Goodly Odysseus wore a thick, purple mantle, twofold, which
had a brooch fashioned in gold, with a double covering for the pins,
and on the face of it was a curious device: a hound in his fore-paws
held a dappled fawn, and gazed on it as it writhed. And all men
marveled at the workmanship, how, wrought as they were in gold, the
hound was gazing on the fawn and strangling it, and the fawn was
writhing with his feet and striving to flee. Moreover,

^ Here and subsequently I follow, with little deviation, my
'Amplified Version' (p. 82). 2 Ibid., pp. 82-3.

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY ' 297

I marked the shining doublet about his body, as it were the skin of a
dried onion, so smooth it was, and ghster-ing as the sun; truly many
women looked thereon and wondered. Yet another thing will I tell
thee, and do thou ponder it in thy heart. I know not if Odysseus was
thus clothed upon at home, or if one of his fellows gave him the
raiment as he went on board the swift ship, or even it may be some
stranger." ... So he spake, and in her heart he stirred yet more the
desire of weeping, as she knew the certain tokens that Odysseus
showed her. So when she had taken her fill of tearful lament, then
she answered him, and spake saying: \*\* Now verily, stranger, thou
that even before wert held in pity, shalt be dear and honorable in my
halls, for it was I who gave him these garments, even such as thou
namest, and folded them myself, and brought them from the chamber,
and added besides the shining brooch to be his jewel." '

At this point it is well to remember several things. First of all,
there are the words Tcpoo-TiQsvTs^ and xpodGsTvai, used in the sense
of ' adding to,' as if putting together truth and falsehood were
characteristic of deception. Then, there is the logical term
paralogism (iztxpcdo^Kjixo^) employed by Aristotle in the same
connection. Again, the stock example of a liar could hardly be any
other than Odysseus. Finally, we are to recall that Aristotle remarks
in the *Poetics* (24. 1459^14—5) upon the number of ' discoveries ' in
the Odyssey; the poem is, he says, an example of an involved plot,
since there is ' discovery ' throughout, and it is a story of
character. The incident of the false tidings, just quoted, has in
fact the nature of an erroneous recognition effected in the heroine
by the disguised hero, and might suggest the title 'OBuacsug
^zuhd'^^zloc, referred to by Aristotle in another passage which we
are about to examine — save that there it does not fit the case
without a textual change in the *Poetics*.

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And now we have reached our special topic. The fifth form of '
discovery ' described in the *Poetics* has evidently puzzled the
commentators. The meaning of the name applied to it, (tuvGstyj, has
not been made clear. To translate this by \* composite ' does not
help very much unless we know the nature of the thing described — a
better plan would be to transliterate and say ' synthetic \*; and the
example supplied by Aristotle from some poem or lay called Odysseus
the False Messenger, or Odysseus with the False Tidings, leaves us
very uncertain of our facts. The text is doubtful at two points. Were
it not, any translation would still be conjectural, since the
reference is too brief, and of the two parties to the ' discovery \*
we can not be sure who recognizes and who is recognized.

Even so, more light can be thrown on the passage. Bywater, for
example, has not done so well with this difficulty as with others in
the *Poetics*. But since his masterly edition may fairly be thought to
sum up our present knowledge of that work,^ it may be well to begin
with his text and translation of the passage, and to append his note
on the meaning of it. Thereupon I shall give, with a few minor
changes, the rendering and explanation I reached in my ' Amplified
Version'; and I shall then subjoin a few reflections that have
subsequently occurred to me.

Bywater reads thus (16. I455ai2—6):

£(7Ttv Bs Tt? xat (jDvGsTYj sx TuapaXoyio-jJiotj toO OaTspou, oTov £V
T(o 'OBucTcrsT ttw dtsuBayysXw\* to [jlsv yap [to] to^ov scpY]
yv(o(7saGat 6 ou)( scopaxst, to Bs (b? By] sxsivod ava-yvwpioQvTo?
Bia toutou TwOivjo-ai 7:apa>.oyt(7[j.6c.

^ True in July, 1918 ; I have since (1921) had opportunity to consult
Gudeman's article and translation (the Preface to the latter b6ing
dated July, 1920), and shall later refer to the translation; his
article and translation are noted in the Bibliography.

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY ' 299

For the last word of the passage, following Vahlen he accepts the
reading of ms. Riccardianus 46, confirmed, he says, by the Arabic
version of the *Poetics*, rejecting the better authority of ms.
Parisinus 1741, which gives TuapaXoYi^rpv; and he translates :

\* There is, too, a composite Discovery arising from bad reasoning on
the side of the other party. An instance of it is in Ulysses the
False Messenger : he said he should know the bow — which he had not
seen; but to suppose from that that he would know it again (as though
he had once seen it) was bad reasoning.'

Bywater's note on the passage is this : ' sx 7uapa>.oYi(7[xoL>: comp.
^^ It, GuXkoyiG\kou. Vahlen, who connects this directly with
(tuvOsty], supposes the two factors in the Discovery to be a
<juXkoyiG\k6(; on the side of the one, and a 'Kccp(xkoyiG[x6c, on the
side of the other, of the two parties : \*\* quae [scil.
avayvcopKri?] ut ex simplici unius ratiocinatione prodire, ita
composita esse potest alterius ex syllogismo, paralogismo alterius "
(comp. also the discussion in his Zur Kritik Aristotel-ischer
Schriften, p. 16). The illustration, however, from the "OBuo-o-eu^
^zoZay^zkoc, does not seem to imply anything more than an erroneous
inference by one party (TzoLpcckoyiGikbc, 6 GocTspou) from some
statement made by the other. The reasoning in this instance Aristotle
appears to regard as the illogical parallel to that in the Choephoroe
: just as the recognition of Orestes by Electra came about through a
(juHoyi(j[x6c, on her part, so that of A by B, the two personages in
the ""Oti'jfjGziji; cjjsuBayysXo^, is supposed to come about through
a izcc^yJXoyiGiko^ on the part of the latter. The fallacy to be found
there may have arisen from the ambiguity of the word " know." A
having said, " I shall know the bow," B may have taken this to mean
that he would " know it again " (avayvcopioUvTo^) — which was not
true (comp. 0 00/^ scopa/vei). In our ignorance of the play and its
plot it is idle to speculate further as to the way in which the
actual Discovery may have been worked out in it. The present is one
of many passages showing Aristotle's affection for the

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forms of logic even when dealing with matters of poetry (see on i6.
1454^28).'^

Bywater's interpretation here suffers from his neglect

to observe that, as chapter 16 of the *Poetics* deals with

' discovery ' in the technical sense, and as the examples

of the other forms involve the recognition of persons,

with or without the use of tokens, so in the illustration

of the fifth form what is said of the bow must almost

certainly be subsidiary to the recognition of a person.

He seems to have been misled, too, by a probably

accidental word-echo : yvwasfrOat — avaYvwpiouvTO?. But

here yvcocrsdOai is an indirect quotation of something

uttered by a character in some lay or poem, while

avayvopiotivTO? is a part of the technical language

(cf. avayvcopto-i?) of the *Poetics*. Furthermore, the

whole theory of the treatise, and Aristotle's use in it

of the verb tuoisTv, irresistibly lead one to think of

TzovfiGOLi as here referring to the activity of the poet.

My own rendering of the passage in question is, I hope,

clearer, at least to the sort of student I originally had

in mind. I preface it only by saying that it assumes

the accusative TuapaT^oyKipv to be correct, and with

the remark that I translate (tuvGstt^, not by ' composite,'

but by ' synthetic' or ' fictitious,' though perhaps

' concocted ' would convey the idea:

' Related to discovery by inference is a kind of sjm-thetic [or \*
fictitious '] discovery where the poet causes X to be recognized
through the false inference of Y [or ' through a logical deception
practised by X upon Y ']. There is an example of this in Odysseus
with the False Tidings. Here X says : ' I shall know the bow ' (which
he had not seen) ; but that Y should recognize X through this is to
represent a false inference [i. e., 'to poetize a paralogism '].

1 By water, pp. 237-8.

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY ' 301

I now wish to add these reflections. The word <7uvG£T^ is here
associated with a ' discovery ' that is deceptive or false, and with
Odysseus, the stock ex-, ample of success in deceit. The mention of a
paralogism, too, instantly reminds us of what Aristotle says
concerning Homer and his correct method in the telling of a lie, in a
passage where, as we have seen, the example is likewise that of
Odysseus effecting a false discovery, and where the notion of lying
is that of adding something true to something false (cf.
Tupoa-TiGsvTSi;, TupoaOsTvai). ' Composite,' then, may be misleading
as a translation of (juvOeT"^, which rather expresses the result when
the false A and the added B are put together. The Greek adjective, it
is true, can hardly have the same force here as in Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound 686 (o-uvGstou^ loyoui; = ' lying speeches ') ; we
need some term like \* fictitious ' — one with no necessary
connotation of what is morally wrongful.

[Gudeman's German translation of the *Poetics* (1921) is based upon a
fresh study of the Arabic version. Where we have heretofore read '
know the bow,' he, like Margohouth (1911), gives, \* string the bow
'; I have often tried to identify Aristotle's Odysseus with the False
Tidings as one of the \* lays ' in the Odyssey (see my \* Amplified
Version,' p. 56). The Arabic version, then, leads us to connect the
example with Odyssey 21 or some adaptation of it. Gudeman (p. 33)
translates :

' Es gibt aber auch eine zusammengesetzte Art der Erkennung, aus dem
Fehlschluss des einen (der ange-redeten Person), wie zum Beispiel im
Odysseus der Trugbote. Da behauptete der eine (Odysseus), er allein
konne den Bogen spannen und kein anderer. Dies lasst ihn der Dichter
nach der Uberlieferung sagen; wenn er nun hinzufiigt, er werde den
Bogen wieder-

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erkennen, den er doch niemals gesehen, so war die An-nahme, er werde
diesen (wirklich) wiedererkennen, ein Fehlschluss/

The Arabic version evidently warrants an interpretation different
from that of Bywater; at this point there must have been a notable
difference between the Greek text that lay behind that and the Syriac
version, on the one hand, and ms. Parisinus 1741, on the other. To
me, there are great difficulties in Gudeman's rendering of the
passage, but I have no means of removing them. Very likely they will
be explained when Gude-man publishes his critical edition of the
*Poetics*. If not, then I should like to suggest the possibiUty of an
early textual corruption. May it be that Aristotle really spoke, not
of the bow (t6|ov) of Odyssey 21. 11, etc., but of the nuptial bed
(kiypi) of Odyssey 23. 177ff., a description of which enters into
Odysseus' revelation of himself to Penelope ? The hero is still in
the garb of a beggar. He finally identifies himself to her by a
circumstantial account of the bed — which as Beggar he had not seen.
' A great token,' he says, \* is worked into the elaborate bed ; it
was I that laboriously wrought this, and no other ' (to B' h(^ xajxov
o5B£ ti? SXXoc). His minute description, which he could give if he
were her husband, leads her, not to the legitimate inference that he
might be so, but that he must be. He adds the B, and she infers the
A. The \* discovery ' is of the fifth or \* synthetic ' sort. The
author of the lay, which could still be called Odysseus with the
False Tidings, has here ' poetized a paralogism.']

There is nothing morally objectionable in emplojang this kind of '
discovery.' It is not the best kind, for that grows out of the
incidents of the plot; but if the poet wishes to represent a
character producing a false

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY ' 303

recognition, let the device be used in the proper way — &C, BsT. You
must mention the false A, but not dwell upon it. You must put in the
B, and, as Homer makes the Beggar do in describing the garments to
Penelope, you must keep on adding to the description. In spite of By
water's warning that \* it is idle to speculate further as to the way
in which the actual Discovery may have been worked out ' in Odysseus
with the False Tidings, it is tempting to think of this poem or lay
in connection with Book 19 or Book 23 of the Odyssey. If, however,
the story is not Homeric, one could imagine the hero appearing in
disguise, and then proving his identity by a detailed description of
his ancient bow, or perhaps offering to pick out this weapon from a
number of others, and thus imposing on the guileless.

Some of these thoughts were evidently in my mind when my ' Amplified
Version ' was published. But since then the whole question of the \*
synthetic ' or ' concocted discovery' has become more intelligible to
me through the observation of actual instances of the device in
literature. Aristotle was simply dealing with observed facts, so that
when a point in his conception of the drama or of epic poetry is
obscure, the best way of illuminating it is, not to theorize
immoderately on his text, but to compare what he says with the
practice of poets. Every one of his kinds of \* discovery ' can be
illustrated from Homer. How could it be otherwise in view of the
allusion in the *Poetics* to (S^vayvwpKxt^ in the Odyssey ? But I have
hit upon two very apt examples from the Biblical account of Joseph
and his brethren, a tale that might be described in Aristotle's words
as ' a complex story — there is "discovery" throughout, — and one of
character.'

Thus (Gen. 37. 31-3):

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' And they took Joseph's coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and
dipped the coat in the blood; and they sent the coat of many colors,
and they brought it to their father, and said : " This have we found
; know now whether it be thy son's coat or no." And he knew it, and
said : " It is my son's coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph
is without doubt rent in pieces." '

In other words, the sons supply the B, their father infers the A, and
the \* concocted discovery ' is effected by a paralogism. The writer
of the story understood a point in his art — TuoiYJo-at
7uapaXoytG-|jL6v, — and knew how to represent a lie — ^su^yj Xsyeiv
65 BsT. In fact, he is specially given to using this form of
recognition. Potiphar's wife (Gen. 39. 7—20) caused Poti-phar to make
a false \* discovery ' by means of Joseph's garment, which she laid
up by her \* until his lord came home ':

' And she spake unto him according to these words, saying : " The
Hebrew servant which thou hast brought unto us came in unto me to
mock me. And it came to pass, as I lifted up my voice and cried, that
he left his garment with me, and fled out." And it came to pass, when
his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him,
saying, " After this manner did thy servant to me," that his wrath
was kindled. And Joseph's master took him, and put him into the
prison.'

Joseph himself practised upon his brethren in somewhat similar
fashion. After securing grain from him in Egypt, twice they found
every man's money in his sack's mouth, and on the second occasion the
silver cup of the great Egyptian diviner in Benjamin's sack.

If it be objected that the story in Genesis is historical, and that
we should not attribute too much to the originality of the writer,
there is an excellent reply in the *Poetics* itself (9. I45ib29—32) :

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THE FIFTH FORM OF ' DISCOVERY ' 305

\* And even if he happens to take a subject from history, he is not
the less a poet for that; for there is nothing to hinder certain
actual events from possessing the ideal quality of a probable or
necessary sequence; and it is by virtue of representing this quality
in such events that he is their poet.'

It is obvious that false \* discoveries ' are not restricted to a
single type. Odysseus describing the garments Penelope had given him
is a deceiver. Odysseus describing the nuptial couch to Penelope, who
has just tried to deceive him, is in earnest. A mistaken recognition
might occur when no deceit was intended by either party. Nevertheless
the poet would need to know how to bring it about, and the principle
would always be the same — a mistaken inference from the known B to
the seemingly necessary antecedent A. The New Comedy of Greece must
have been full of incidents turning upon both innocent mistakes and
guileful deceptions with regard to identity. It is easy enough to
find examples in Plautus and Terence; Chremes' delusion that the
courtesan Bacchis is the true love of young Clinia, in the
Self-Tormentor, will serve as an instance. As for the modern drama,
need one mention Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors ? I take it that
Aristotle's fifth form of discovery is peculiarly well-suited to
comedy.

All men by nature desire to know; all like to see good
representations of the human mind in action; and nearly all delight
to see false inferences well portrayed — if the mystery is finally
cleared, and every mistake resolved.

u

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[Names and titles included in the Bibliography (above pp. xiv -xxi)
are here omitted; for two other cases of omission, see below under '
Aristotle' and ' *Poetics*.']

Abraham 234

A bstract of a Comparison between

Aristophanes and Menander,

Plutarchian 35, 90 Acharnians, Aristophanes' 92,

149 n., 157, 203, 209, 213,

229, 231, 234, 244, 251, 252,

271, 277, 282, 283. Acharnians, Rogers' edition

39 n., 282, 283 Acharnians, Starkie's edition

6n., 15 n.. 29 n., 234, 235,

240, 242, 244, 246, 250, 252,

256 Achilles 92, 143 ' Acidus ' 95 Acres, Bob 270 Acropolis 278 Ad
Atticum, Cicero's 92 n. Ad Quintum Fratrem, Cicero's

91 n. Adrastus 33 n. Aeacus 197, 207, 210, 249, 276,

277 Aegeon 281

Aegisthus 61, 150, 201 Aegyptus 160 n. Aeneid, Virgil's 187
Aeolosicon, Aristophanes' 22 n.,

23, 24, i57n., 285 Aeolus 175 Aeschines 282 Aeschylus 15, 21, 23, 24,
27, 30,

48, 103, 106, i25n., 139,

193-196, 198, 204, 207, 210,

219, 220, 228, 232, 239, 243,

247, 248, 251, 260, 267, 277,

28on., 301 Aesthetic, Croce's 78-80, 80n.

Agathon 222

Agnes 268

Ainslie 80 n.

Ajax 143

Alcaeus 157

Alcestis, Euripides' 86

Alciat 281

Alcibiades 107, 112, 113, 123, 126, 192, 237, 240, 267

Alcidamas 91, 132

Alcinous 204

Alcmaeon 33

Aldus Manutius 39 n., 40

Alexamenus loi

Alexander 237, 287

Alexandria 51, 139

Alexis 31, 150, 151, 160, 192

A lope, Carcinus' 165

Ambassador 278, 283

Ameipsias 28, 105, 106, 151, 157, 160, 250

American Journal of Philology 36n., i47n., i6on.

Amour Mededn, L', Moliere's 81, 82n.

Amphitryon, Moliere's 209, 286

Amphitryon, Plautus' 50, 209

'Amplified Version' of the *Poetics*, Cooper's 9n., i2n., 4on., 42n.,
63n., 166, 284, 296n., 298, 301-303

Amynias 248

Anacharsis 134

Anaxandrides 26, 30, 31, 34, 34n., 55, 147, I47n., I48n., 151, 159,
160, i6on., 260

Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable, Grant's 98, 99, 99 n.

u 2

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INDEX

Andria 149 Andria, Terence's 35 AnecdotaGraeca, Bekker's 15011,
Ang61ique 231, 242, 256, 273.

275 Anima, De, Aristotle's 31, 32,

I33> 134. 13411.. 159, I59n.

Anne Page 254

Anonymus 27 n., 51 n.

Antecedents of Hellenistic Comedy, The, Frescott's 71 n.

A nthologium, Stobaeus' 116 n.

Anthology, Greek 39

Anti-Atticist 5, 7n., 29, 150, i5on., 233

Antipater 149

Antiphanes 31*33. 33 n., 34. 50, I49n., 151. 160

Antipholus of Ephesus 197, 205

Antipholus of Syracuse 197, 205

Antiphon 161

Aphrodite 159

Apollo 250, 270, 273

Apology, Plato's 38, 99n., 103, 104, i04n., 105, 106, 113, 124, 157,
231, 240, 276

Arabic version of the *Poetics* 299, 301

Archers 253, 279

Archibius 105, 158

Archidemus 270

Archilochus 21, 97, 193, 259

Archippus 28, 151, I57n., 159

Argan 256, 274, 278, 279

Argas 170

Argus 291

Ariel 235, 242. 249. 254, 275

Ariphrades 126

Aristides 142

Aristodemus 114

Aristophanes (see also Acharni-ans, Aeolosicon, Babylonians, Birds,
Clouds, Cocalus, Daedalus, Ecclesiazusae, Frogs, Knights, Lysistrata,
Peace, Plutus, Poiesis, Storks, Thes-mophoriazusae, Wasps) i, 6,
15-20, 2on., 21-25, 27-32,

33n., 34-39. 39n., 40. 41. 44. 48, 49, 49n., 50, 58, 59, 68, 71-75,
80, 90-92, 98, 102, 103,

I03n., 104-107, III, 113,

ii6n., 121-124, i25n., 126,

132, I4in., 143, I49n., 150-

152, 155, 156, I56n., 157,

I57n., 158. 159, i59n., 160,

161, 169, 171-173, 178, 182,

185, 187, 189, 191-199, 201-

203, 205-211, 213, 214, 217,

219, 221, 223, 228, 229, 232-

235. 240, 241, 243-245, 248,

250-252, 257, 259-262, 264,

266, 270-272, 274, 276, 280, 28on., 281-285. 287, 288

Aristophon 142

Aristotelische Aufsatze, Vahlen's

5

Aristotle. References to the philosopher, as also to his *Poetics*, are
omitted ; but see Carmina, Constitution of Athens, De Anima, De
Caelo, De Divinatione, De Genera-tione Animalium, De
Inter-pretatione, De Partibus Animalium, De Sensu, De Soph-isticis
Elenchis, Didascaliae, Eudemian Ethics, Fragmenta, Historia
Animalium, Metaphysics, Meteorologica, Nico-machean Ethics, On Poets,
Problems, Politics, Physica AuscuUatio, Rhetoric, Scolion, Topica,
Tractate.

Aristotle, not the Stagirite, a writer on the Iliad 127

Aristotle, not the Stagirite, a writer On Pleonasm 127

Aristotle of Cyrene 127

Aristotles, eight 127

Arndt 138 n., 289

Arnolphe 267, 268

Art of Poetry, On the, Aristotle's, not the Stagirite 127

Art of Poetry, Theophrastus' 127

Arthur 234

Artium Scriptores, Spengel's i6on.

Asclepius 196

Aspasia 260

Ass's Shadow, Archippus' 28, 159

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309

As You Like It, Shakespeare's

235, 248, 269 Atellan Comedy 95 Athenaeus 2611., loi, loin. Athenian,
The, in the Laws 108,

109, 127, 252 Athenians 250 Athens 25, 35, 39, 75. 9i. 105.

152, 158, 162, 172. 173, 177,

195, 212, 221, 241, 260, 265, 270, 271, 282, 284, 292

Attica 37, 172, 288 Audry 235 Augustus Caesar 268 Aulularia, Plautus'
196, 198 Autobiographie, Geschichte der,

Misch's I Autobiography, The, Burr's i,

42 n. Avare, L', Moliere's 171, 177,

196, 198, 241, 245, 261 Avocat, Second 280 Avocats 265

Babylon 242

Babylonians, Aristophanes' 29,

156, 157, 235 Bacchis 305 Bachelierus 267, 271, 276, 278,

282 Bacon 43 Bain 77 'Ballet,' in L'Amour Medecin

81 Bardolph 240, 256, 261 Barent 237 Bar thole 281 Bath Scene 217,
296 Bdelycleon 274, 278 Beare i58n. Beatrice 273 Beggar, in the
Odyssey 296,

302, 303 Bekker 3on., i5on. B61ise 237, 238 Bellerophon 242 Benedick
273 Benjamin 205, 304 Bentley 153 n., 236 B6ralde 273 Bergk I57n

Bernays 10, ion., 12, 12 n., 15-19, 42, 262, 266

Bible 204, 303

Biottus 33

Birds, Aristophanes' 27, 38, 40, 41, 50, 52, 61, 71-73, 121, 157,
187. 191, 195, 196, 199, 201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211, 217, 228, 229,
231-233, 235, 236, 240-243, 245-247, 249, 251, 257, 259-262, 264,
267, 270, 271, 274, 280, 283, 284

Birds, chorus of 73, 199, 232, 233. 270

Birds, Rogers' edition 73 n., 229, 259. 283

Blass 103 n.

Bob Acres 270

Bobadil 270

Boeotia 282

Boileau 3

Bonitz 34, 35, 61 n.

Book of Homage to Shakespeare, Gollancz's 15 n.

Boor, Theophrastian 121

Boston 75

Botanic Garden, Darwin's 227

Bottom 229, 235, 237, 241, 242, 246, 249, 256, 258, 261, 262

Bottom's Dream 246

Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le, Moliere's 171, 244, 253, 256, 262, 265,
279, 282

Boy, in Henry V 240, 256

Bradley 2

Brasidas 241

Brentano 20 n.

Bridoye 247, 276

Brill 77 n.

Bruns i

Brutus 238, 239

Burns 255

Burr I, 42n.

Butcher 19, I9n., 31,39,41,296

Byron 189, 215

Bywater 5, 6n., ion., 12, 12n., 19, i9n., 2in., 22, 22n.,. 23n., 27,
28, 41, 4in., 64,^ 64n., I3in., 133, I33n.,. I39n., I43n.,
169,192,298-300^ 30on., 302, 303

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10

INDEX

Byzantinische Zeitschrift 4011. Byzantium 231

Caelo, De, Aristotle's 51

Caesar, Augustus 268

Caesar, Julius 89, 238, 239

Calais 256

Caliban 283

Callias 158, 161

Callimachus 156

Calliope 230

Calonice 72

Calverley 238, 257, 258

Capps 22, 22 n.

Captives, Plautus' 212

Carlo 253

Carmen Physicum, Epicharmus'

151 Carmina, Aristotle's 13, 13 n.,

227 Castre, Paul 281 Cercyon 165 Chabes 231

Chaeremon 247, 248, 267 Chantecler. Rostand's 208, 240 Chaos 257
Characters, Theophrastus' 121,

127 Chares 105, 158 Chaucer 217, 257, 276 Chionides 28, 150, 151,
160, 172 Chirones, Cratinus' 157n. Choephoroe, Aeschylus' 299
Choerilus 141 n., 227 Choral Dancer,On the, Antiphon's

161 Chorus in Thesmophoriazusae

272 Chremes 33, 268, 305 Chremylus 197, 200, 205, 210,

272 Chrysale 281 Chrysippus 98 Chrysostom 39, 39 n., 40 Chrysostomos
. . . sein Verhdltnis

zum Hellenismus, Naegele's

4on. Cicero, M. T. 39, 39n., 41, 63,

64, 87, 88n., 89-91, 91 n.,

92, 92n., 93-98, 100, loon.,

102, 132, 200, 260, 289

Cicero, Q. T. 91, 91 n.

Cinesias 157, 158

Cinesias, in Lysistrafa 270, 278

Cinesias, the poet 264

City Dionysia 194, 282

Civic Justice (see also Dicae-

opolis) 193 Civil Wars, Daniel's 227 Clansmen, Leucon's 28, 157 Clark
35 n.

Classical Library 88 n. Classical Philology 35 n,, 48 n.,

71 n., 290 Classical Review 22 n. Classical Studies in Honor of

C. F. Smith 89 n. Cleante 256, 273, 274 Cleon 241, 251, 260 Cleonte
244, 256 Cleophon 143, 143 n., 170 Clinia 305 Clitandre 256
Cloudcuckootown 242, 245, 264,

272 Clouds, Aristophanes' 28, 38,

39. 50> 73. 75. 104. io5. 105n.,

113, ii3n., 124, I4in., 156,

212, 223, 231, 235, 236, 238,

239, 241. 242, 245, 246, 248,

250, 252, 257, 260-262, 267,

274, 278, 280 Clouds, chorus of 73, 75 Clouds, new divinities 257
Clouds, Rogers' edition 38 n.,

5on., i05n., Clouds, Starkie's edition 105 n.,

ii3n., 238, 239, 245 Clytaemnestra 295 Cocalus, Aristophanes' 22 n.,

23, 24, 47, 285 Cock and the Bull, The, Calver-

ley's 238, 239. 257, 258 Coislin, De 10 Coislinianus, Tractatus, see
Trac

tate. ' Comedy,' in L'Amour Mide-

cin 81, 82 Comedy, On, Theophrastus' 127 Comedy of Errors,
Shakespeare'

190,197, 205,208, 281, 286, 305 Comicorum Graecorum Frag-

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311

menta, Kaibel's (see also

Kaibel) 11, iin. Commentaries, Favorinus' loi Commonwealth, English
25 Comoedia, De, Donatus' 91 n.,132 Comparison of Aristophanes and

Menander, Plutarchian 35, 90 Concordance of Aristophanes,

Dunbar's 280 Congreve 25 Connus, Ameipsias' 28, 105, 157,

350 Conrade 274

Constable, in L'Avare 245 Constitution of Athens, Aristotle's

9, 12, i2n., 161, i6in., 227 Conthyle 231 Cook 71 n., loon. Cope 141
n., I52n., i6on. Corin 268, 269 Coriolanus, Shakespeare's 230,

245. 258 Cornford 22 n,, 44, 45 n., 48,

48n., 49, 49n., I22n., 263-

265 Corpse, in the Frogs 173, 245,

250, 261 Covielle 244 Cramer 6n., 10, ion. Crates, comic poet 21, 28,
29,

48, 49, 71, 112, 150, 151, 160,

177' 178, Crates, critic 157, I57n. Cratinus 28, 34, 37, 92, 102,
151,

I52n., 157, i57n., 160, 251,

260, 288 Creon 291 Crispinus 273 Critique de VEcole des Femmes,

La, Moliere's 81, 81 n. Crito 126, I26n. Croce 78-80, 8on. Croiset,
A. 3, 4n., 24, 24n.,

i05n. Croiset, M. 4n., i7n., 31, 31 n.,

36, 36n., 39n., 4911., i2on., Cujas 281

Cyclops 131, 170, 171 Cyclops, Euripides' 171, 228 Cynics 97, 98
Daedalus 32, 159

Daedalus, Aristophanes' 28, 32,

I57n., 159 Daedalus, Eubulus' I59n. Daedalus, Philippus' I59n. Daniel
227 Dante 76 Darwin 227 Daw 234 De Anima, Aristotle's 31, 32,

133, I34n., 159, I59n. De Caelo, Aristotle's 51 De Coislin 10

De Comoedia, Donatus' 91 n. De Divinatione, Aristotle's 149,

i49n. De Elocutione, Demetrius' 71 n.,

102, 103. io3n., 138, 149,

I49n., 150, i5on. Defence of Poetry, Shelley's

loon. Defense of Poesy, Sidney's 71 n.,

72 n. De Generatione Animalium,

Aristotle's 112, 145, 145 n.,

153. I53I1-. 162, i62n. De Interpretatione, Aristotle's

141, i4in. De Legibus, Cicero's 3911., 9111., De Mysteriis, (?)
lamblichus'

82, 83n. De Officiis, Cicero's 39 n., 91 n. De Oratore, Cicero's 88
n., 89n.,

289 De Partibus Animalium, Aristotle's 163, 163 n. De Sensu,
Aristotle's 29, 158,

i58n. De Sophisticis Elenchis, Aristotle's 35, 146, 231 Dead man, in
the Frogs 173, 245,

250, 261 Dekker 273 Delphi 114 Demeter 277 Demetrius 26, 71, 102,
103,

I03n., 138, I38n., 149, 14911.,

150, i5on. Democritus, predecessor of

Aristotle 126 Democritus, philosopher 87, 89,

99, 159

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INDEX

Demosthenes 141 n., 213 Demus 198, 250, 260, 262-264,

278 Dervishes 254 Despautere 258 Dew, Signieur 236 Diafoirus,
Monsieur 231 Diafoirus, Thomas 231, 242,

256 Dialog, Der, Hirzel's i, loi n.,

i02n., io3n., ii2n. Dialogues, Alexamenus' loi Dialogues, Plato's 20,
21, 38,

99-102, 102 n., 103, 104, 107,

112, 116, 123, 125, 127, 276 Dicaeopolis 193, 200, 203, 229,

252, 277, 278, 283 Dickens 261 Didascaliae, Aristotle's 16, 28,

30, 151, 156, 157, 159, 161 Diliad, Nicochares' 170 Dindorf 156, 157
Diogenes, the Cynic 98 Diogenes Laertius 89n., 100,

loon., loi, loin., 126, I26n.,

127, i27n. Diomede 175 Diomedes 51, 85 Dionysius ' the Brazen ' 230
Dionysius, painter 169 Dionysius, tyrant 39 Dionysius Thrax 51, 85
Dionysus I7n., 141 n., 185, 189,

195-197, 202, 204, 206, 207,

210, 221, 240, 241, 243, 245,

247, 249, 250, 255, 262, 267, 269, 274, 276, 277, 289

Diphilus 48

Disciple, in the Clouds 244, 247,

248, 267

Divinatione, De, Aristotle's 149,

14911. Dogberry 231, 246, 248, 252,

258, 262, 268, 274 Donatus 91 n., 132 Don Juan, Byron's 189, 215 Don
Juan, Moliere's 209, 246,

262, 267 Don Quixote, Cervantes' 216,

263 Dorante 81 n.

Dorians 172, 173

Dovregubbe 255

Diibner 23 n.

Dugas 65 n., 77, 78 n.

Duke, Solinus 205, 281

Dunbar 280

Dutch painters 169

Duty, Ode to, Wordsworth's 227

Ecclesiazusae, Aristophanes' 24,

,38, 58, 272 Ecole des Femmes, L', Moliere's

81, 267. 268 Ecphantides 29, 128, 151, 152,

I52n., 162 Egger35, 35n., 45n., 100. loin.,

i25n., i26n., i27n. Egypt 304 Elbow 232 Electra 299 Electra,
Sophocles' 86 Elizabethan comedy 25 Elmire 274 Elocutione, De,
Demetrius' 26,

71, 7in., 102., 103, io3n.,

138, i38n., 149, i49n., 150,

i5on. Elyot 39, 39 n. Empedocles 227 Encyclopedia Americana 48n.
England 25 English 283 Ephesus 281 Epicharmus 28-30, 48, 49, 55,

102, i02n., 103, III, 112,

150-152, I52n., 153, I53n.,

154, i54n., 155, i55n., 172,

177 Epicrates 26 Eraste 273

Eratosthenes 156, 157 Ergdnzung zu Aristoteles' Poetik,

Bernays' 10, 15 Escalus 232 Essay on Comedy, Meredith's

8on. Ethics, Aristotle's, see Eudemian

Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics. Etottvdi, L', Moliere's 273 Eubulus,
comic poet 31, 32,

151, 159, 15911.

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313

Eubulus, orator 105, 158

Euclides 126

Euclio 196

Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle's 7, 121, i2in.

Euelpides 193, 230, 235, 241, 262, 267

Euergides 231

Euphues 242

Eupolis 28, 37, 92, 105, 10511., 151, 156, 157, 161, 251

Euripides 15, 21, 23-25, 27, 30, 31, 40, 48, 71, 86, 103, i37n., 141,
158, 171, 185, 193-196, 198, 204, 207, 210, 219-221, 228, 232, 235,
238,

239, 243, 247-249, 251, 255. 260, 267, 272, 273, 277, 280 n., 284,
288

Europe, southern 255 Euthydemus, Plato's i58n. Evans, Sir Hugh 244
Evenus I35n.

Every Man in his Humor, Jon-son's 270

Facheux, Les, Moliere's 81 n., 209 Faerie Queene, Spenser's 170
Falstaff 25, 229, 234, 236, 237,

240, 242, 244, 249, 252, 254, 256, 261-263, 268-270, 273, 275. 279,
286

Faust 255

Faust, Goethe's 255

Favorinus loi

Femmes Savantes, Les, Moliere's

231, 237, 238, 256, 259, 279,

281 Ferdinand 275 Fernand 281 Feste 244, 268, 269, 275 Festin de
Pierre, Le, see Don

Juan, Moliere's. Fielding 207, 215 First Alcibiades, Plato's 112,

ii2n. First Proem, Tzetzes' 287-289 Fiske 89n., 9on., 96-97, 97n.,

98, 98n. Flagon, Cratinus' 28, 157 Flatterer, Eupolis' 28, 157

Flemish painters 170 Flickinger 22 n. Fluellen 237, 283 Flute 236,
237 Fragmenta, Aristotle's 13 n., loon., loi, loin., 150, i5on.,

156, I56n., 157, 15711., 158, I58n., 159, 15911., 161, i6in.

French 282

French Soldier 236

French theorists 190

Frere 73, 170

Freud 76, 77, 77 n., 78, 78 n.

Frogs, Aristophanes' 28, 40, 47. 48, 50. 52, 58, 61, 73, 74, ii6n.,
I25n., I4in., 143.

157, 158, 161, 173 185, 189 194-198, 202, 204, 206, 207, 210, 212,
213, 220, 221, 232, 234. 239-241, 243. 245, 247, 249-251, 255, 257,
260-262, 267-270, 274, 276, 277, 284, 285, 288

Frogs, chorus of 73, 74, 207,

221 Frogs, Rogers' edition 232 Froth 232 Function of Suspense, Mori-

arty's 68 n.

Gadshill 233, 273

Gaunt 229

Generatione Animalium, De,

Aristotle's 112, 145, I45n.,

153. i53n., 162, i62n. Genesis, Book of 303, 304 G^ronte 258
Gerontomania, Anaxandrides'

160, i6on. Geschichte der Autobiographic,

Misch's I Gib (Gilbert) 234 Gilbert, W. S. 255 Glaucon 126, 221
Glaucus 175 Gliederung der Altattischen Ko-

moedie, Zielinski's 44 Grammar, Despautere's 258 Grant 98, 99, 99n.
Gray's Inn 256 Goethe 255

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INDEX

Gollancz 1511.

Good Men, The, (?) Anaxandri-

des' 160, 160 n. Gorgias 26, 123, 144, 15211. Gorgias, Plato's 112,
11211.,

15211. Governour, The, Elyot's 3911. Greece 1711. Greek Anthology 39
Greek Culture, Cooper's 4811. Greek Theatre, Flickinger's 22 n.
Greeks, the 255 Greg I

Griechische Roman, £)ey,Rohde*s i Grieg 255 Grimarest 271 Guard, in
Le Malade Imaginaire

279 Gudeman 10711., 12611., 179,

20911., 29811., 301, 302

Hades 189, 195, 196, 248

Haigh 22n., 7311., 12511., 15811., 253. 255, 282

Hal, see Prince Hal

Hall of the Mountain King, In the, Grieg's 255

Hamlet, Shakespeare's 230, 248

Harpagon 171, 177, 196, 241, 245, 261

Harpocration i6i

Hawker 264

Hegemon 28, 150, 161, 170

Heitz I58n., I59n.

Helicon 273

Hellenistic Comedy, The Antecedents of, Prescott's 71 n.

Hendrickson 90 n.

1 Henry IV, Shakespeare's 229,

233. 236, 240-242, 244, 249, 269, 270, 275, 279

2 Henry IV, Shakespeare's 239,

256 Henry V, Shakespeare's 234,

236, 237, 240, 256, 283 Hense ii6n. Heracleid 189 Heracles 189, 196,
204, 207,

209, 221, 241, 250, 255. 257,

260, 261, 270, 276, 280, 283,

289

Heraclides 126, i26n.

Heraclitus 83

Herald of King Aegyptus 160 n.

Hermathena I5n., 231, 234, 242

Hermes 145, 277

Hermippus 233

Hermit of Prague 268, 269

Heme 244

Herodotus 191

Hesiod 227

Hicks I34n.

Hippias 126

Hippocrates 82

Hipponax 97, 259

Hirzel i, 3, loin., 102 n., 103 n., 112, ii2n.

Histoire de la Litteraiure Grecque (see also Croiset) 4n., i7n., 24n.

Historia Animalium, Aristotle's 163, i63n., 231

History of New York, Knickerbocker's (Irving's) 247

Hobbes 79, 80

Hogarth 169

Homer (see also Iliad, Margites, and Odyssey) i, 15, 21, 28, 37,
39-4i> 92, loi, 106, 107, III, 127, 132, 136, 150, 170-172, 174, 175,
190, 191, 217, 218, 243, 295. 296, 301, 303

Hoopoe 196, 211

Hopeful (see also Euelpides) 193

Horace 86, 86n., 87, 97, 99n.

' Horace ' (Ben Jonson) 273

Hostess, see Quickly

Hugo 261

Hutton 263

Hybla 249

lamblichus 82, 83, 83 n. 'lau^ol tej^vLXoi, Tzetzes' 51Q. Ibsen 255

Ichneutae, Sophocles' 288 Idylls of the King, Tennyson's

170 Idyls, Theocritus' 171 Iliad I36n.. i4in., 171, 175\*

191 Ilium 190 Imole, Jean 281

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;i5

Index Arisfotelicus, Bonitz's 34,

35. 6in. Informer 264 Inspector 264, 274 l7istitntio Oratoria,
Quintilian's

36n., 39n., 92, 92n., gGn. Interpretatione, De, Aristotle's

141, I4in. locasta 33

Ion, Plato's 103, 276 Iphicrates 142 Iphigenia 294 Iphigenia among
the Tauvians,

Euripides' 27, 40, 71 Iris 73, 204, 229, 247, 250 Irus 175 Irving
247, 276 Isarchus 157 Italy 190

Jacobean comedy 25

Jacqueline 249, 282

Japanese, the 74

Jean Imole 281

Jean Paul 80

Jebb 62n., i23n., i24n., i25n.,

i35n., i38n., i42n., 143 n.,

i44n., i45n., I47n., I53n.,

I56n., I58n. Jonson 270, 273 Josan 281

Joseph 204, 303, 304 Jourdain 253, 254, 256, 262, 279 Jowett 104,
i04n., io5n., I07n., • io8n., io9n., iion., iiin.,

ii2n., ii3n., ii4n., ii6n.,

i25n., i28n., I29n., i3in.,

i62n. Juan, Don, Byron's 189, 215 Juan, Don iLe Festin de Pierre),

Moliere's 209, 246, 262, 267 Julian 281 Julie 273

Just Reason, in the Clouds 50 Justinian 281

Kaibel 11, iin., 23n., 27n., 37n., 5in., 85, 86n., gin., I5in.,
I52n., I53n., I55n., 224, 259, 287, 287n.

Kant 79, 80

Kayser 11, iin., 14, I4n., 64n.,

76n., 224, 22811., 262 Kent 22, 22 n. Kenyon 161n. King Arthur,
Frere's 170 King, the Great 229, 283 King's Eye 229 Knickerbocker
247, 276 Knights 263, 264 Knights, Aristophanes' 14111.,

178, 198, 213, 234, 250, 257,

260, 262, 278 Kock 26n., 3in., 32, 32n.,

33n., 34, 34n., io5n., ii3n..

i47n., i48n., I49n., i5on.,

I56n., I57n., I58n., I59n.,

i6on., 233, 260 Kritik Aristotelischer Schriften,

Zur, Vahlen's 299 KroU 85 n.

Labes 274

Lacedaemon 162

Lacedaemonians 119

Lady Macbeth 295

Lady Sovereignty 73, 257, 280,

283 Laertius, Diogenes 89n., 100,

lOon., loi, loin., 126, I26n.,

127, i27n. La Fleche 196 Laius 33, 157 Lampito 282 Lang 296 Languedoc
282 Laputa, Voyage to, Swift's 231,

245 Laughable, On the, Greek and

Latin books 89, 93, 94 Laughable, On the, Theophras-

tus\* 127 Launce 232, 238 Laws, Plato's 99, 108, 109, no,

lion., Ill, inn., 121, 125,

i25n., 127, I29n. Leandre 241, 273 Leeuwen, Van 72 Legibus, De,
Cicero's 39 n.,

91 n. Legrand i, 26, 26n,, 36n., 59,

59 n.

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INDEX

Lentulus 95

Letters of William Stubbs, Hut-ton's 263

Leucon 28, 151, 157

Lexicon, Harpocration's 161

Lexicon, Photius' 159

Library of the World's Best Literature, Warner's 49 n.

Lincoln 291

Lingua Franca 282

Literarische Portrdt der Griechen, Das, Bruns' i

Lorenz 152 n.

Louison 274, 278, 279

Lucan 227

Lucas 238, 249, 275, 279, 282

Lucette 275, 282

Lucian 39, 245

Lucretius 227

Lycambes 21

Lycophron 144

Lyrik und Lyriker, Werner's i

Lysias 103

Lysistrata 72, 270, 272, 282

Lysistrata, Aristophanes' 40, 4on., 72, 202, 209, 212, 230, 250, 270,
271, 278

Lysistrata, Rogers' edition 40 n., 72 n.

Macbeth, Lady 295

McMahon 4, 4n., 6, 6n., 7, 7n., 8n., II, iin., I4n., 16, i6n., 63, 63
n.

Magnes 28, 150, 161, 172

Mahaffy 3

Malade Imaginaire, Le, Mo-li^re's 177, 194, 209, 231, 238, 243, 244,
253, 254, 256, 261, 265, 267, 268, 271, 273, 274. 276, 278, 279, 282,
286

Malvolio 261, 269, 275

Manutius, Aldus 39n., 40

Margites, Homeric 132, 172,

i74» 175 Margoliouth 301 Maricas, Eupolis' 28, 156 Marsyas 240
Martine 237, 281 Mascarille 273 Maslow 103 n.

Matthew, Book of 245 Maximes du Marriage, Les 268 Mazon 56, 56n.,
57-59. 59n. Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's 232 Midecin MalgrS
Lui, Le, Mo-

lifere's 238, 241, 242, 249, 258,.

262, 263, 265, 273, 275, 279,

282 Megara 162, 172, 282 Megarian, the 244 Meineke 18, 30, 3on., 31,
32n.,

39, I45n., 150, I52n.. i58n.,

I59n., i6on., 287n. Melampus 51, 85 Meletus 157 Memnon 242 Menaechmi,
Plautus' 190 Menander 23, 24, 27, 35, 36,

41, 44, 48, 59, 71. 90, 192,

193. 198, 209, 244, 268, 272

285, 286 Menander, Comparison between

Aristophanes and, Plutarchian

35. 90 Menedemus 268 Meno 101

Mephistopheles 255 Meredith 80, 80n., 81 Merope 291 Merry Wives of
Windsor, The,

Shakespeare's 230, 244, 254 Metaphysics, Aristotle's 7, 112,

153.154. I54n., 155. i55n., 290-Meteor ologica, Aristotle's 150, ,

i5on. Meton 247, 264 Midas 234, 288 Middle Ages 3 Middle Comedy 12,
19, 23, 25-

27, 27n., 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, •41, 48, 71, 122, 124, 14911.,

193, 212, 272, 285-287 Middleton 234 Midsummer-Night's Dream, A,

Shakespeare's 229, 235-237,

241, 242, 246, 249, 256, 258 Miller 91 n. Mimes 20, 38, 101-102, 102
n.,

103, io8n., 112, 132, 168,

169, 228

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317

Mimus, Der, Reich's i, 10211., io8n.

Misanthrope, Le, Moliere's 286

Misch I

Mnesilochus 238, 272, 278

Moliere (see also Amour M6de-cin, Amphitryon, Avare, Bourgeois
Gentilhomme, Critique de I'Ecole des Femmes, Don Juan, licole des
Femmes, J^tourdi, Facheux, Femmes Savantes, Malade Imaginaire,
Medecin Malgre Lui, Misanthrope, Monsieur de Pour-ceaugnac, Tartuffe)
15, 1511., 44, 80-82, 171, 177, 189, 191, 195, 196, 198, 205, 206,
208, 209, 220, 231, 242, 245, 246, 252, 256, 258, 261, 262, 265, 267,
271, 274, 280, 282, 286

Momax 234, 288

Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Moliere's 244, 261, 262, 265, 273, 275.
279, 280, 282

Moonshine 237

Moriarty 68

Moses 234

Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare's 246, 248, 258, 268,

273' 274 Mufti, the 254 Muses, the 273 \* Music,' in L'Amour Medecin

81 Mustard-seed 236 Myrrhina 270, 278 Mysians, Philoxenus' 131
Mysteriis, De, (?) lamblichus'

82, 83n.

Naegele 40 n.

Nature, On, Parmenides' 227

Nauck i37n.

Naxos 256

Nemesis 260

Nemesis, Cratinus' 260

Nerine 273, 275, 282

New Comedy 12, 16, 19, 23, 26-28, 34, 36, 37. 89-91, 187, 192, 193,
212, 226, 241, 251, 259, 265, 272, 285-288, 305

New Greek Comedy, The (see also Legrand) i

Nicochares 33, 150, 161, 170

Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's 7, 9, 13, 16, 19, 20, 23, 25, 30. 31.
65, 69. 70, io2n., 117, ii7n., 118-120, i2on., 122, 133, 134, I34n.,
139, 154. i54n., 160, i6on., 162, i62n., 165, i65n., 176. 231, 259,
260, 262, 263

Nicon 146

Nightingale 73, 231, 235

' Ninny ' 235, 236

Ninus 236

Nym 256

Odysseus 143, 175, 190, 191,

204, 243, 294-297, 301-303.

305 Odysseus with the False Tidings

297-303 Odyssey 61, 91, 132, I4in., 171, 175, 189-191, 197, 201, 211,
216, 217, 223, 228, 296, 302,

303 Oedipodia, Meletus' 157 Oedipus 33, 291, 292 Oedipus the King,
Sophocles' 27,

40, 54, 71, i4in., 172, 187,

191, 228

Officiis, De, Cicero's 39n., gin..

Ogle 163 n.

Old Comedy 12, 16, 2on., 21, 23, 24, 26-28, 34, 35-37. 39-41. 47. 49.
55. 72. 74. 75. 90-92, 97, 102, 122, 124, 125, 143, i48n., i49n.,
152, i52n.,

192, 226, 252, 259, 260, 264, 268, 285-288

Olympiodorus 38, 112 Olympus 257

On Comedy, Theophrastus' 127 On Nature, Parmenides' 267 On Pleonasm,
Aristotle's, not

the Stagirite 127 On Poetry, Democritus' 126 On Poets, Aristotle's
dialogue 8,

14, 15, loi, 204 On Rhythms and Harmony, Democritus' 126

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INDEX

On Style, Demetrius,' see De

Elocutione. On Style, Theophrastus' 127 On the A rt of Poetry,
Aristotle's,

not the Stagirite 127 On the Art of Poetry, Theophrastus' 127 On the
Choral Dancer, Antiphon's

161 On the Laughable, Greek and

Latin books 89, 93, 94 On the Laughable, Theophrastus'

127 Oracle-monger 264 Orator, Cicero's 88 n., 92 n.,

loon. Oraiore, De, Cicero's 88 n., 89 n.,

289 Oresteia, Aeschylus' 277 Orestes 61, 150, 201, 294, 299 Orestes,
Alexis\* 31, 150, 192 Orestes, Euripides' 86 Orgon 205, 274 Origin of
Attic Comedy, The,

Cornford's 44 Oronte 275 Oxford translation of Aristotle

I2in., i3in., I45n., i6in.,

162 n.

Page, Anne 254 Palamedes 160 Pan 145

Panaetius 89, 98 Pancratiastes, Philemon's 34,

35

Pantacles 161

Panza, Sancho 263

Paphlagon 260, 278

Papinian 281

Paris 75

Parmenides 227

Parnassus 190, 273

Parthey 83 n.

Partibus Animalium, De, Aristotle's 163, 163 n.

Pasias 274

Pastoral Drama, Greg's i

Paul Castre 281

Pauson 129, 169, 221

Peace, Aristophanes' 28, 58,

157. 173. 213, 234, 241. 242,

245. 251, 271 Pedro, Don 257, 258 Peer Gynt, Ibsen's 255 Peer Gynt
Suite, Grieg's 255 Pegasus 242, 245 Peisthetaerus 193, 196, 200,

203, 231, 241, 245, 264, 267,

270-272, 274, 280, 283 Peleus 33 Peloponnese 172 Peloponnesian war
24, 287 Penelope 61, 296, 297, 302, 303,

305 Peparethia, (?) Antiphanes' 34,

149, i49n. Percy 244

Pericles 129, 159, 242, 251, 260 Perinthia 149 n.

Peripatetics 13, 14, 16, 48, 64 Persia 229 Persian war 227 Phaedo,
Plato's 103, 105, 105 n.,

106, 113, 231 Phaedrus, Plato's 42 n., 99 n.,

103, 113, ii3n., 276 Pharaoh 270 Pharsalia, Lucan's 227 Pheidippides
280 Pherecrates 120 ' Phibbus ' 237 Phido 33

Philaminte 256, 281 Philammon 148, 149 Philebus, Plato's 11, 66, 79,

100, 114-116, ii6n., 127, 134 Philemon, actor 160 Philemon, comic
poet 23, 24, 34,

35. 41. 48 Philippus 31, 32, 151, 159,

I59n. Philocleon 262, 278 Philoctetes 165 Philologus lojn., 209n.
Philomela 26 Philosophical Review 42 n. Philoxenus 131, 151, 170, 171
Phlya 231 Phoebus 237 Phoenicides 33 Phoenissae, Strattis' 158 n.

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319

Phormis 28, 49, 112, 150, 161, 177

Phorcides, Aeschylus' 139, 228

Photius 159

Phrynichus 253

Physica Auscultatio, Aristotle's 51, 143, 14311., 149, i49n., 15811.,
247

Physiologus 242

Picardy 282

Pindar 145

Pirates, chorus of 255

Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan's 255

Pistol 236

Placidus 95

Plain Style in the Scipionic Circle, Fiske's 89 n.

Plato, comic poet 29, 33, 105, 112, ii3n., 151, 158, i58n.

Plato, philosopher (see also Dialogues, and Apology, First
Alcibiades, Euthydemus, Gorgias, Ion, Laws, Phaedo, Phaedrus,
Philebus, Protagoras, Republic, Symposium, Theaetetus) 5, 7, 11, 20,
21, 26, 29, 38, 39, 42, 66, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 90-92, 97-99, 99n.,
100-102, io2n., 104, I04n., 105. io5n., 107-109, 111-114, ii6n.,
121-123, 125-127, i29n., 131, 134, 151, I52n., I55n-, 157. i58n.,
169, 187, 240, 263, 276

Platonis Rem Publicam, In, Proclus Diadochus' 85 n.

Platonius 23, 37, 37 n.

Piatt 145 n.

Plautus 27 n., 44, 50, 91, 97, 187, 189, 193, 196, 198, 206,

209, 212, 244, 265, 305 Pleonasm, On, Aristotle's, not

the Stagirite 127

Plutarch 35, 90

Plutus 196, 205, 207, 229, 272

Plutus, Aristophanes' 22, 24,

40, 47, 50, 58, 68, 171, 189,

193, 196-198, 205, 207, 208,

210, 229, 233, 250, 253, 272, 278, 284, 285

Plutus, Rogers' edition 23 n.,

24n., 253 Poet, in the Birds 259, 264 *Poetics*, Aristotle's.
References to the work are omitted ; but see ' Amplified Version,'
An-ti-Atticist, Arabic version. Butcher, Bywater, Gudeman,
lamblichus, McMahon, Mar-goliouth, Proclus, Rutherford, Starkie,
Vahlen. Poetry, On, Democritus' 126 Poets, On, Aristotle's dialogue

8, 14, 15, loi, 204 Poiesis, Antiphanes' 32 Poiesis, Aristophanes'
32, 40 Poietai, Alexis' 32 Poietai, Plato's, the comic poet

33

Poietes, Biottus' 33

Poietes, Nicochares' 33

Poietes, Phoenicides' 33

Poi^^^s,Plato's, the comic poet 33

Poietria, Alexis' 32

Poins 229, 270, 273, 275, 279

Polichinelle 194, 253, 279

Politics, Aristotle's 5, 9, 12, I3n., 19, 20, 29, 30, 34, 43, 63, 64,
70, 104, III, 123, 125, i25n., 128, I28n., 129, i29n., 130, 131,
I3in., 152, i52n., I57n., 162, i62n., 180, 283

Polonius 248, 262

Polybus 141, 291

Polygnotus 129, 169

Polyidus 42 n.

PoljT'machaeroplagides 212

Polyphemus 131, 171, 175

Pompey 232

Porson 238, 239

Poseidon 251, 270

Potamii, Strattis' I58n.

Potiphar 304

Potiphar's wife 304

Pourceaugnac, Monsieur de, Moliere's, see Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.

Pourceaugnac, Monsieur de (the hero) 244, 261, 262, 273, 275, 279,
280, 282

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INDEX

Poverty 210 Praeses 271 Prat, Mother 244 Praxagora 272 Prescott 48,
4811., 71 n. Pre-Socratics 98, 277 Priest, in the Birds 264 Prince
Hal 240, 244, 249, 269,

270, 273, 275, 279, 281 Problems, Aristotle's 69, 155,

I55n., 163, i63n., 164, i64n.,

165, i65n., 231 Proclus Diadochus 64, 83-85,

8511., 90 Prometheus 250, 251 Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus'

301 Protagoras 126 Protagoras, Plato's 103, 276 Protarchus 114

Proverbs, Zenobius\* 157 n., 159 Pseudartabas 213, 229, 244,

278, 283 Pseudolus, Plautus' 212 Psychologic du Rire, Dugas'

65n., 78n. Puck 249 Pun in the Rhetoric of Aristotle,

A, Cooper's 36n., 147n. Pyramus 235 Pythagoras 269

Quasimodo 261

Quickly (Hostess) 234, 237,239,

249 Quilp 261

Quince 229, 236, 237, 246 Quintilian 36, 36n., 39, 39 n.,

41, 92, 92n., 93-96. 96n. Quixote, Don 216, 263

Rabelais 15 n., 231, 247, 257

Radermacher 96 n.

Raphael 170

Rebuffe 281

Reich I, io2n., io8n.

Renaissance 3, 7, 30n., 190, 198

Republic, Plato's 5. 7, 38, 83-85. 85n., loi, 104,106, 107, i07n.,
108, io8n., 109, io9n.. iii, 113, 121, 122, 127, 131, i3in., 187, 276

Restoration comedy 25

Rhadamanthus 160

Rhetoric, Aristotle's 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, i3n., 14, 16, 17, 21
n., 26n., 29, 30, 3on., 34, 36, 40, 49, 54, 62, 66, 66n., 69, 87, 91
n., 96, 105, io5n., ii6n., 123, I23n., 124, 12411., 125, i25n., 127,
I32n., 133-135. I35n., 136-138, i38n., 139, 140, 141, 141 n., 142,
I42n., 143, I43n., 144, I44n., 145, I45n., 146, 147, i47n., 148, 149,
I49n., 152, I52n., 153, i53n., 155, 156. i56n., 158, I58n., 160,
i6on., 209, 227, 230, 231, 235. 236, 239, 263, 265, 266, 273, 283

Rhetorik derGriechen und Romer, Volkmann's 259

Rhythms and Harmony, On, Democritus' 126

Richard II, Shakespeare's 229

Richter 80

Ring and the Book, The, Browning's 238

Rivals, The, Sheridan's 271

Roberts 103, 103 n., 149 n.

Rogers 23n., 24, 24n., 28n., 39n., 40, 4on., 50, 5on., 72, 72n., 73,
73n., 229, 232, 253, 259, 282, 283

Rohde I, 3

Roman Comedy, The Interpretation of, Prescott's 48 n.

Roman satirists 97

Romans, the 96

Rome 89

Rose I3n., icon., loin., i5on., i56n., i57n., I58n., I59n., 161 n.

Ross I2in., I3in., i6in., 162n., 163 n.

Rostand 208, 240

Rutherford 6, 6n., 11, iin., 15. 16, 30, 36. 50, 5on., 147n., 236

Sampson Stockfish 256

Sancho Panza 263

Sandys I2n., 141 n., 152n., i6on.

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321

Satiromastix, Dekker's 273

Satires, Horace's 86 n., 97, 9911.

Sausage-seller 213, 257, 278

Savages (AyoLoi), Pherecrates' 120

Sbrigani 244, 273, 275

Scaliger 3

Scipio 95

Scolion, Aristotle's 13, 227

Scythian 252, 253, 272, 283

Secunda Pastorum 234

Self-Tormentor, Terence's 268, 272, 285, 305

Sensu, De, Aristotle's 29, 158, I58n.

' Serapion ' 95

Servingman, First 245, 246, 258

Servingman, Second 245, 246, 258

Sexton 274

Sganarelle, in Moliere's Don Juan 246, 262, 267

Sganarelle, in Le Midecin Mal-gr6 Lui 238, 241, 242, 249,
258,262,263,265,273,275,279

Shakespeare (see also As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus,
Hamlet, i Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Measure for Measure, Merry
Wives of Windsor, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing,
Richard II, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth-Night, Two Gentlemen of
Verona, Tempest) 15, 15 n., 25, 40, 44, 75, 80, 168, 190, 197, 205,
206, 208, 231, 232, 238, 240, 242, 245, 252, 254, 261, 262, 268, 275,
282, 283, 286,

305

Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley's 2

Shallow 256

Shamartabas (see also Pseud-artabas) 244

Shelley 100, loon., 228

Sheridan 270, 271

Shorey 49 n.

Shute 7

Sicily 48, 49, 71, 112, 172, 177

Sicyonians 172

Signieur Dew 236

Sidney 71 n., 72 n.

Silenus 240

Simmias 126, i26n.

Simon 126, I26n.

Simonides 152 n., 155, 230, 251

Sir Thopas, Chaucer's Tale of

257

Sir Topas 244, 275 '

Sir Vaughan 273

Sire-striker 264, 280

Skogan 256

Sly 242, 256

Smith, J. A. I45n., i63n.

Socrates 21, 38, 42, 75,91, 96, 97, 100-102, 104, 105, 107-109,
111-114, ii6n., 119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 151, 193, 231, 235.
239, 240, 241, 244-248, 250, 251, 257, 260, 261, 263, 267, 278, 288

' Socratic conversations ' 100, loi, 102, 168, 169

Socratics, the 89

Solinus, Duke 205, 281

Solomon, J, 121 n.

Solon 12, 227, 280

Sophisticis Elenchis, De, Aristotle's 35, 46, 231

Sophists 251

Sophocles I, 15, 23, 24, 27, 28,

30. 37. 39-41. 48, 71. 86, 103, 141, 142, 172, 187, 191, 228, 251,
255, 28on., 283, 292

Sophron38,100, loi, 102, io2n., 103, io8n., 138, 151, 168, 228

Sovereignty, Lady 73, 257, 280, 283

Sparta 212, 241, 270, 271, 282

Speed 238

Spencer 77

Spengel 158n., i6on.

Spenser 170

Speusippus 26, 126, i26n.

Sphinx 291, 292

' Spinther ' 95

Starkie 6, 6n., 15, I5n., 16 29n., 30, 36, 44, io5n., ii3n. 231, 234,
235, 238-240, 242 244-246, 250, 252, 256 • -

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INDEX

Stobaeus ii6n.

Stockfish 256

Stoics 97, 98

Storks, Aristophanes' 28, 157

Strabo ii6n.

Strattis 28, 29, 34, 151, 158,

15811., 260 Strepsiades 14111., 242, 244,

246-248, 257, 262, 274, 289 Strobilus 196 Strymodore 231 Stubbs 263
Style, On, Demetrius,' see De

Elocutione. Style, On, Theophrastus' 127 Sullivan 255

Summoner's Tale, Chaucer's 276 Suppliant Maidens i6on. Susarion 37,
288 Swift 206, 231, 240, 245 Symposium, Plato's 29, 38,

99n., 103, 107, 108, III, 113,

ii3n., 114, ii4n., 123, 126,

169, 240 Syracuse 39, 281 Syriac version of the *Poetics* 302

Talkover (see also Peisthetaerus)

193 Taming of the Shrew, The,

Shakespeare's 242, 256 Tarn O' Shanter, Burns' 255 Tartuffe 171, 177,
205, 220,

265, 281 Tartuffe, Moli^re's 191, 195,

208, 220, 274, 281, 286 Taylor, Jeremy 39 Tempest, The, Shakespeare's
27,

168, 235, 236, 242, 249, 254,

275, 286 Temples Revels 273 Tennyson 170 Terence 27n., 35, 44, 50,
71.

91. 187, 189, 193. 244, 265,

268, 281, 285, 305 Terpander 157 n. Teucer 33

Teucer, Sophocles' 142 Theaetetus, Plato's iii, ii2n.,

151. i55n. Thebes 292

Thelema 231

Theocritus 171

Theodectes 165

Theodorus 146, i46n., 147

Theogony, Hesiod's 227

' Theolus ' 237

Theophrastus 13, 14, 48, 89, 121, 122, 127

Theorus 237

Thersites 171

Thesaurochrysonicochrysides 212

Theseid 189

Theseus 189

Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes' 238, 244, 252, 272, 273, 276, 278,
283

Thisby 237

' Thisne ' 237

Thopas, Sir, Chaucer's Tale of

257

Thrasippus 152, 162

Timotheus 131, 170

Tiresias 291, 292

Titania 236, 242, 256

Toinette 238. 244, 265, 273, 274, 279

Tom Jones, Fielding's 207, 215, 216

Tongue 257

Topas, Sir 244, 275

Topica, Aristotle's 143, 143 n.

Touchstone 248, 266, 268, 269

Towneley Secunda Pastorum 234

Trackers, Sophocles' 228

Tractate ( Tractatus Coislini-anus) 6, 8, 10-18, 23, 30, 36, 42, 44,
50, 55, 64, 69-71, 75, 82, 87, 89, 91, 92 96, 118, 122, 138-140, 151,
177, 202, 211, 224-286, 289

Triballian 121, 251, 281, 283

Trinummus, Plautus' 190, 198

Trissotin 256, 259

Trolls 255

Troy 242

True History, Lucian's 245

Trygaeus 242, 245

Tucca 273

Turc, le Grand 256

Turkish 282

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323

Turks 253, 254, 265, 282

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's 244, 268, 269, 275

Twiller, Van 247, 276

Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare's 232, 238

Tzetzes 36, 37, 3711.. 51, 5111., 86, 90. 91, 231, 234, 240, 241,
244. 247, 259, 287-289

Ulpian 281

Ulysses the False Messenger, see Odysseus with the False Tidings.

Unjust Reason (Worser Reason) 50, 280

Uranie 81

Urkunden Dramatischer Auf-fiihrungen, Wilhelm's 22 n.

Usener 26 n.

Vahlen 5, 11, 11 n., 133, 228n.,

299 Val^re, in L'Avare 241 Val6re, in Le MMecin Malgri

Lui 279 Van Leeuwen 72 Van Twiller 247, 276 Varro 198 Vaugelas 281
Vaughan, Sir 273 Verges 248, 252 Veterum Arte Poetica Quaesti-

ones Selectae, De, Kayser's

II, iin. Victorius 141 n. Virgil 30, 187 Vita Aristophanis 23n.
Volkmann 259 Vortrage und Aufsatze, Usener's

27 Voyage to Laputa, Swift's 231,

245

Wachsmuth ii6n.

Walpurgisnacht 255

Wandle 247

Warner 49 n.

Wasps, Aristophanes' 173, 231,

237, 240. 253, 255, 260, 262,

274, 278 Wasps, Roger's edition 253 Wasps, chorus of 253 Watch,
Second, in Much Ado

248 Watson 92 n. Welldon 62n., ii7n., i2on.,

i34n., i44n., i6on., i62n.,

i65n. Welch 73 Welsh 283 Werner i When did Aristophanes Die?

Kent's 22 n. White 199 Wilamowitz 22 n. Wilhelm 22 n. Windsor Paik
254 Wine-jar 241, 250 Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious,
Freud's 77, 77n. Woman, First, in Thesmophoria-

zusae 278 Wooden Horse 204, 242 Wordsworth, C. 39 Wordsworth, W. 30,
227 Works and Days, Hesiod's 227 Wycherley 25

Xanthias 196, 197, 207, 210, 240, 241, 245, 249, 269, 270, 274, 276,
277, 289

Xenarchus 32, 100, 102, 151, 168, 228

Xenocrates 126, 12611.

Xenophanes 155, 219

Xenophantus 165, i65n.

Xerxes 144

Zeno, of Elea loi Zeno, the Stoic 98 Zenobius i57n., 159 Zeus 235,
236, 241, 242, 250, 251, 260, 269, 270, 280, 288 Zielinski 44, 45,
49, 49 n., 55,

Zwei Abhandlungen, Bernays' ion.

V 2

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