Tragic History and Aristotle's School

Abstract

The term ‘tragic history’ was coined in the 1890's by Eduard Schwartz. It was supposed to denote a certain Hellenistic type of historical writing with a twofold inspiration—tragic drama, for its scale, arrangement, and emotion, and literary criticism of the Peripatetic persuasion, for certain theoretical assumptions. The term was vague in the extreme, and being applied to works of writers no longer extant—from Duris to Posidonius—could not well be otherwise. Nor was it possible to prove, or else disprove, the alleged relevance of the critical works of the Peripatetic school, for there is no information on Theophrastus'De historia, and very little on Praxiphanes' work with the same title; and the master himself, Aristotle, seems to deprecate the course of action which his school is said to have commended. Vagueness and unfounded assertions remained awkward features of most subsequent discussions, whether they accepted Schwartz's original submission or not. In two recent papers F. W. Walbank has sought to break the spell. His result is radical: discard the term ‘tragic history’ altogether. This is not yet proven; but he has done much to rid the argument of mis-leading assumptions. In that process, however, he has perhaps discarded too much and, I think, has slightly mis-stated the most important piece of evidence we have—if tragic history is supposed to have a peripatetic nuance. Aristotle'sPoeticsis the only piece of evidence of which the context is known. But the context is notoriously difficult and the following remarks are concerned with these difficulties.