The Interpretation of Poetics IX

Abstract

I N his article on the genesis of Aristotle's text in the last issue of Phronesis Dr. Felix Grayeff put forward the view that 'the additions, critical remarks, etc. which we generally find within short chapters and paragraphs of the Corpus Aristotelicum are of such a nature that they can hardly be assumed to have come from one man. On the contrary, they are often so radically at variance with statements made immediately before or after, and so heterogeneous in purpose and standpoint, that perhaps we must conclude that many peripatetic lecturers contributed to almost every part of what is known as Aristotle's works.' As an example he took the well known passage Poctics IX, I-9 (I41a37-b432), in which he distinguished four 'phases of the text' drawn from four different sources: the original lecturer, the 'systematising philosopher', 'a school discussion on a more popular level', and the 'editor'. it is strange to reflect, he added, that the doctrine which later centuries have found in this chapter, and which has proved so stimulating and so productive of poetry, 'was arrived at by a slow and tortuous process and almost inadvertently.' To the present writer such a conclusion seems strange indeed. The first object of this short article is to reconsider this familiar, but admittedly difficult, section of Poetics IX with a view to clarifying the sequence of ideas. I shall maintain that here, at any rate, there is no good ground for Mr. Grayeff's views; on the contrary, the passage in question pursues a single line of thought closely linked with the rest of the Poctics, and presumably the product of a single mind which we may, I think, safely regard as that of Aristotle himself. Secondly, I shall discuss briefly the background, mainly Platonic, from which Aristotle drew some of the ideas involved.