The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics) (242 page)

BOOK: The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics)
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18
     Next as to Interrogation.
[1419a]
The best moment to employ this is when your opponent has so answered one question that the putting of just one more lands him in absurdity. Thus Pericles questioned Lampon about the way of celebrating the rites of the Saviour Goddess.
39
Lampon declared that no uninitiated person could be told of them. Pericles then asked, ‘Do you know them yourself?’ ‘Yes’, answered Lampon. ‘Why,’ said Pericles, ‘how can that be,
(5)
when you are uninitiated?’

Another good moment is when one premiss of an argument is obviously true, and you can see that your opponent must say ‘yes’ if you ask him whether the other is true. Having first got this answer about the other, do not go on to ask him about the obviously true one, but just state the conclusion yourself. Thus, when Meletus denied that Socrates believed in the existence of gods but admitted that he talked about a supernatural power,
(10)
Socrates proceeded to
ask whether ‘supernatural beings were not either children of the gods or in some way divine?’ ‘Yes’, said Meletus. ‘Then’, replied Socrates, ‘is there any one who believes in the existence of children of the gods and yet not in the existence of the gods themselves?’
40
Another good occasion is when you expect to show that your opponent is contradicting either his own words or what every one believes. A fourth is when it is impossible for him to meet your question except by an evasive answer. If he answers ‘True, and yet not true’,
(15)
or ‘Partly true and partly not true’, or ‘True in one sense but not in another’, the audience thinks he is in difficulties, and applauds his discomfiture. In other cases do not attempt interrogation; for if your opponent gets in an objection, you are felt to have been worsted. You cannot ask a series of questions owing to the incapacity of the audience to follow them; and for this reason you should also make your enthymemes as compact as possible.

In replying, you must meet ambiguous questions by drawing reasonable distinctions,
(20)
not by a curt answer. In meeting questions that seem to involve you in a contradiction, offer the explanation at the outset of your answer, before your opponent asks the next question or draws his conclusion. For it is not difficult to see the drift of his argument in advance. This point, however, as well as the various means of refutation, may be regarded as known to us from the
Topics.
41

When your opponent in drawing his conclusions puts it in the form of a question,
(25)
you must justify your answer. Thus when Sophocles was asked by Peisander whether he had, like the other members of the Board of Safety, voted for setting up the Four Hundred, he said ‘Yes.’ ‘Why, did you not think it wicked?’—‘Yes.’—‘So
you
committed this wickedness?’—‘Yes’, said Sophocles, ‘for there was nothing better to do.’
(30)
Again, the Lacedaemonian, when he was being examined on his conduct as ephor, was asked whether he thought that the other ephors had been justly put to death. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘Well then’, asked his opponent, ‘did not
you
propose the same measures as they?’—‘Yes.’—‘Well then, would not
you
too be justly put to death?’—‘Not at all’, said he; ‘
they
were bribed to do it, and I did it from conviction’.
(35)
Hence you should not ask any further questions after drawing the conclusion, nor put the conclusion itself in the form of a further question, unless there is a large balance of truth on your side.
[1419b]

As to jests. These are supposed to be of some service in controversy. Gorgias said that you should kill your opponents’ earnestness with jesting and their jesting with earnestness; in which he was right.
(5)
Jests have been classified in the
Poetics.
42
Some are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose such as become
you.
Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people.

19
      The Epilogue has four parts.
(10)
You must (1) make the audience well-disposed towards yourself and ill-disposed towards your opponent, (2) magnify or minimize the leading facts, (3) excite the required state of emotion in your hearers, and (4) refresh their memories.

(1) Having shown your own truthfulness and the untruthfulness of your opponent, the natural thing is to commend yourself,
(15)
censure him, and hammer in your points. You must aim at one of two objects—you must make yourself out a good man and him a bad one either in yourselves or in relation to your hearers. How this is to be managed—by what lines of argument you are to represent people as good or bad—this has been already explained.
43

(2) The facts having been proved,
(20)
the natural thing to do next is to magnify or minimize their importance. The facts must be admitted before you can discuss how important they are; just as the body cannot grow except from something already present. The proper lines of argument to be used for this purpose of amplification and depreciation have already been set forth.
44

(3) Next, when the facts and their importance are clearly understood,
(25)
you must excite your hearers’ emotions. These emotions are pity, indignation, anger, hatred, envy, emulation, pugnacity. The lines of argument to be used for these purposes also have been previously mentioned.
45

(4) Finally you have to review what you have already said. Here you may properly do what some wrongly recommended doing in the introduction—repeat your points frequently so as to make them easily understood.
(30)
What you
should
do in your introduction is to state your subject, in order that the point to be judged may be quite plain; in the epilogue you should summarize the arguments by which your case has been proved. The first step in this reviewing process is to observe that you have done what you undertook to do. You must, then, state what you have said and why you have said it. Your method may be a comparison of your own case with that of your
opponent; and you may compare either the ways you have both handled the same point or make your comparison less direct: ‘My opponent said so-and-so on this point; I said so-and-so,
(35)
and this is why I said it’. Or with modest irony, e. g. ‘He certainly said so-and-so, but I said so-and-so’.
[1420a]
Or ‘How vain he would have been if he had proved all this instead of
that!
’ Or put it in the form of a question, ‘What has
not
been proved by me?’ or ‘What
has
my opponent proved?’ You may proceed, then, either in this way by setting point against point, or by following the natural order of the arguments as spoken, first giving your own, and then separately, if you wish, those of your opponent.
[1420b]

For the conclusion, the disconnected style of language is appropriate, and will mark the difference between the oration and the peroration. ‘I have done. You have heard me. The facts are before you. I ask for your judgement.’
46

1
i, c. 2.

2
i and ii.

3
Poetics
, cc. 20–2.

4
sc
. in rhetoric.

5
sc
. in dialectic.

6
A good effect where a speech may seem too long; bad, where it may seem too short already.

7
Isocrates,
Helena
, 1–13.

8
i. e. the disputatious dialecticians to whom Isocrates refers in the introduction to his
Helena
, 3, 4: Protagoras, Gorgias, &c.

9
Isocrates,
Paneg.
1, 2.

10
Iliad
, i. 1.

11
Odyssey
, i. 1.

12
Choerilus?

13
Sophocles,
Oedipus Tyrannus
, 774.

14
Sophocles,
Antigone
, 223.

15
Cp. Euripides,
Iph. Taur.
, 1162.

16
ii, cc. i ff.

17
Odyssey
, vi. 327.

18
Cp. Plato,
Menexenus
, 235
D
.

19
sc.
but he
was.

20
Euripides,
Hippolytus
, 612.

21
Sophocles.

22
Cp.
Iliad
, x. 242–7.

23
Cp. Herodotus, ii. 30.

24
Odyssey
, ix–xii.

25
Odyssey
, xxiii. 264–84 and 310–43.

26
Euripides.

27
Sophocles,
Antigone
, 911, 912.

28
Odyssey
, xix. 361.

29
Cp. Sophocles,
Antigone
, 635–8, 701–4.

30
Odyssey
, iv. 204.

31
Isocrates,
Paneg.
, 110–14.

32
Cp. Isocrates,
De Pace
, 27.

33
Isocrates has episodic passages on Theseus (
Helena
23–38), on Paris (
Helena
41–8), on Pythagoras and the Egyptian priests (
Busiris
21–9), on the poets (
Busiris
38–40), and on Agamemnon (
Panathenaicus
, 72–84).

34
Euripides,
Troades
, 969 and 971.

35
Isocrates,
Philippus
, 4–7.

36
Ib.,
Antidosis
, 132–9, 141–9.

37
Sophocles,
Antigone
, 688–700.

38
Cp. Isocrates,
Archidamus
, 50.

39
sc.
Demeter.

40
Cp. Plato,
Apology
, 27 c.

41
Topics
, viii.

42
Not in the existing
Poetics.
Cp. 1372
a
1.

43
i, c. 9.

44
ii, c. 19.

45
ii, cc. 1–11.

46
Cp. Lysias,
Eratosthenes
, fin.

De Poetica
Translated by Ingram Bywater

 

CONTENTS

(A)    Preliminary discourse on tragedy, epic poetry, and comedy, as the chief forms of imitative poetry.

       
CHAPTER

       
1.
   The poetic arts distinguished (1) by the means they use.

       
2.
                       “         “                    (2) by their objects.

       
3.
                       “         “                    (3) by the manner of their imitations.

       
4.
   Origin and development of poetry and its kinds.

       
5.
   Comedy and epic poetry.

(B)    Definition of a tragedy, and the rules for its construction.

       
6.
   Definition, and analysis into qualitative parts.

7–11. The plot.

       
7.
   Arrangement and length of the play.

       
8.
   Unity of action.

       
9.
   The poet must depict the probable and the universal.

    
10.
   Simple and complex plots.

    
11.
   Peripety, Discovery, and Suffering.

    
12.
   The quantitative parts of a tragedy.

13–14. How the plot can best produce the emotional effect of tragedy.

    
13.
   The tragic hero.

    
14.
   The tragic deed.

    
15.
   Rules for the character of the tragic personages; note on the use of stage-artifice.

16–18. Appendix to discussion of plot.

    
16.
   The various forms of discovery.

    
17

18.
   Additional rules for the construction of a play.

    
19.
   The thought of the tragic personages.

20–22. The diction of tragedy.

    
20.
   The ultimate constituents of language.

    
21.
   The different kinds of terms.

    
22.
   The characteristics of the language of poetry.

(C)    Rules for the construction of an epic.

    
23.
   It must preserve unity of action.

    
24.
   Points of resemblance and of difference between epic poetry and tragedy.

(D)    
25.
   Possible criticisms of an epic or tragedy, and the answers to them.

(E)     
26.
   Tragedy artistically superior to epic poetry.

DE POETICA

(
Poetics
)

1
     
[1447a]
Our subject being Poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in general but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters in the same line of inquiry.
(10)
Let us follow the natural order and begin with the primary facts.

Epic poetry and Tragedy, as also Comedy, Dithyrambic poetry, and most flute-playing and lyre-playing, are all, viewed as a whole,
(15)
modes of imitation. But at the same time they differ from one another in three ways, either by a difference of kind in their means, or by differences in the objects, or in the manner of their imitations.

I. Just as colour and form are used as means by some, who (whether by art or constant practice) imitate and portray many things by their aid, and the voice is used by others; so also in the above-mentioned group of arts,
(20)
the means with them as a whole are rhythm, language, and harmony—used, however, either singly or in certain combinations. A combination of harmony and rhythm alone is the means in flute-playing and lyre-playing, and any other arts there may be of the same description, e. g. imitative piping. Rhythm alone,
(25)
without harmony, is the means in the dancer’s imitations; for even he, by the rhythms of his attitudes, may represent men’s characters, as well as what they do and suffer. There is further an art which imitates by language alone, without harmony, in prose or in verse, and if in verse, either in some one or in a plurality of metres.
[1447b]
This form of imitation is to this day without a name. We have no common name for a mime of Sophron or Xenarchus and a Socratic Conversation; and we should still be without one even if the imitation in the two instances were in trimeters or elegiacs or some other kind of verse—though it is the way with people to tack on ‘poet’ to the name of a metre,
(10)
and talk of elegiac-poets and epic-poets, thinking that they call them poets not by reason of the imitative nature of their work,
(15)
but indiscriminately by reason of the metre they write in. Even if a theory of medicine or physical philosophy be put forth in a metrical form, it is usual to describe the writer in this way; Homer
and Empedocles, however, have really nothing in common apart from their metre; so that, if the one is to be called a poet,
(20)
the other should be termed a physicist rather than a poet. We should be in the same position also, if the imitation in these instances were in all the metres, like the
Centaur
(a rhapsody in a medley of all metres) of Chaeremon; and Chaeremon one has to recognize as a poet. So much, then, as to these arts. There are, lastly, certain other arts,
(25)
which combine all the means enumerated, rhythm, melody, and verse, e. g. Dithyrambic and Nomic poetry, Tragedy and Comedy; with this difference, however, that the three kinds of means are in some of them all employed together, and in others brought in separately, one after the other. These elements of difference in the above arts I term the means of their imitation.

BOOK: The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics)
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