Athens and the tragic stage — thinkers and poets Aristotle reads.
The Poetics has no cast in the dramatic sense — it is a philosophical treatise. But it is built around a small number of authorities: poets whose work Aristotle analyzes, philosophers whose arguments he answers, and one ideal tragic protagonist who appears as an example on almost every page.
Born 384 BCE in Stagira. Studied at Plato's Academy for twenty years, then founded the Lyceum in Athens in 335 BCE. The Poetics belongs to the group of treatises assembled from his lectures. Almost nothing else from the classical world on tragedy, comedy, or epic of comparable analytical density has survived; the Poetics has had to do the work of an entire missing tradition.
Aristotle's teacher and the philosopher whose attack on poetry the Poetics answers. The Republic had excluded poets from the ideal city on the grounds that imitation is a third-order copy and poetry inflames the irrational soul. Aristotle's rehabilitation of mimesis, his claim that poetry is more philosophical than history, and his doctrine of catharsis are all responses to this charge — delivered without naming Plato, but unmistakable to any reader who knew the Republic.
The Athenian tragedian (c. 497–406 BCE) whose Oedipus Tyrannus serves as Aristotle's touchstone throughout. He also receives praise in chapter 25 for drawing men as they ought to be (versus Euripides, who draws them as they are). The Poetics has done as much to canonise Sophocles as Sophocles has done to validate the Poetics.
Author of the Iliad and Odyssey, treated throughout as the ancestor of tragedy and the model for structural unity in epic. Aristotle praises him in chapter 24 as the only poet who rightly appreciates the part the author should take — speaking as little as possible in his own person and letting characters speak. The Iliad's unity of action is the standard against which all epic structure is measured.
The Athenian tragedian (c. 480–406 BCE) who appears throughout the Poetics as both an example and a counterexample. Aristotle calls him "the most tragic of poets" because his endings are often catastrophic — but also criticises him for irrational plot elements (Aegeus in Medea), poor use of the Chorus, and unnecessary episodes. He is cited most often in chapter 25 when Aristotle defends difficult passages in earlier poets.
The earliest of the three great Athenian tragedians (c. 525–456 BCE). Aristotle credits him in chapter 4 with two innovations: introducing a second actor (increasing dramatic dialogue at the expense of the Chorus) and assigning the leading part to dialogue rather than choral song. Without these two changes, the dialogue-driven tragedy that Aristotle analyses would not exist.
The king of Thebes who, in ignorance of his own birth, killed his father and married his mother — and who in the course of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus discovers what he has done and blinds himself in horror. For Aristotle, Oedipus is the ideal case study: the reversal and recognition coincide in the same scene, the catastrophe arises from the protagonist's own actions, and the hamartia is precisely what the theory requires — not vice, not innocence, but the error of a good and intelligent person under conditions that made the error unavoidable.