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II ARISTOTLE, CALLIMACHUS AND THE ANCIENT CRITICAL TRADITION T HE incomplete state of Aristotle's Poetics has never hampered dogmatic interpretation of the master's teaching.) Sharing the fate of the rest of his work, it has become over the centuries a repository of authoritarian doctrine which has been more often used to bludgeon originality than encourage it. It seems consistent with this tradition that modern scholars too should advance the notion that the new poetry of Alexandria could not have drawn, in the first instance, any inspiration from the Peripatos.2 It is important here to ask what purpose Aristotle intended the Poetics to serve. We know that many of his other works bear the stamp of a practical intelligence well adapted to tutor Alexander the Great. His series of Constitutions, of which we now possess that on Athenian government, gave substance to his Politics, and this latter treatise has had wide repercussions throughout European and American history. In turn, the Politics found its essential basis in the personal problems of the Ethics. His books on Metaphysics react to and seek to progress beyond the theories of his teachers, especially Plato. It has been the achievement of our age to recognize in Aristotle a mind by I The subtle interpretations of the "Chicago Aristotelians;' based on the premise that the Poetics is a complete and rigorously logical text (cf. the introduction by E. Olson to Aristotle's Poetics and English Literature [Chicago 1965]. and the concluding essay by R. McKeon) may be contrasted with La Poetique d'Aristote: Texte primitif et additions ulterieures. by D. de Montmollin (Neuchatel 1951). The perennial novelty of the Poetics is illustrated by the renewed attraction which it has for the most modern criticism: cf. Aristote, La Poetique. edd. R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot (Paris 1980); Die Poetik des Aristoteles. I. Interpretationen: II. Analysen. by Ada B. Neschke (Frankfurt am Main 1980). 2 So, for example. R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (1968), p. 137. But this view is rightly repudiated by S. Koster. Antike Epostheorien. pp. 120-22. It looks as if Pfeiffer is influenced by K. O. Brink's article "Callimachus and Aristotle," Class. Quarterly XL (1946). 11 ff.• though he makes no mention of it. 37 38 Aristotle, Callimachus no means static, but continually growing and reaching out to fresh problems-problems that were those of his society and time.3 Those who interpret the doctrines of the Poetics as purely conservative and backward-looking are therefore in danger of making the work an anomaly. They are aided to some degree by the fragmentary nature of the text, from which the promised discussion of comedy, presumably occurring in a second book, is missing.4 Aristotle did express his views on poetry and poets in at least one other work, but this too is lost. His Rhetoric is perhaps the nearest surviving parallel, and yet this was certainly intended to guide the student and remind him of the most effective oratorical techniques.5 It seems right therefore to assume that the Poetics too had some practical significance, hard though it may be now to recover. Can we in fact read it as a key at least to some kinds of later literature? I It begins with a very unconservative notion, by admitting the possibility of imaginative ("mimetic") writing in prose, and so looking ahead to the modern novel. Aristotle had adopted the theory of mimesis, itself quite old in Greek thought, from his teacher Plato. It creates difficulties for him at the outset with the poetry of those who, like Empedocles, appeared to be using verse as the medium for scientific and metaphysical communication. Yet we should note that Aristotle, after raising this problem, left the question of Empedocles' exact place in critical theory unresolved, since later in the Poetics he clarifies an obscurity in Empedocles' poetry without suggesting that he is going outside his proper sphere, and in his On Poets (fr. 70) he both called Empedocles "Homeric" and attributed to him that ability with metaphor which he regarded as the poet's chief and unteachable gift. Another fragment tells us that Aristotle thought of Empedocles as the "founder of rhetoric."6 Like all good teachers, Aristotle evidently threw off queries to 3 "[T)he Rhetoric and Poetics . .. both have a practical slant" (Aristotle's Poetics, by Humphry House [London 1967), p. 36). Modern interpretation of Aristotle as no Aristotelian is particularly indebted to W. Jaeger: cr. A. Lesky, A...

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