If we date
the _Poetics_ about the year 330 B.C., as seems probable, that is more
than two hundred years after the first tragedy of Thespis was produced
in Athens, and more than seventy after the death of the last great
masters of the tragic stage. When we remember that a training in music
and poetry formed a prominent part of the education of every wellborn
Athenian, we cannot be surprised at finding in Aristotle, and to a
less extent in Plato, considerable traces of a tradition of technical
language and even of aesthetic theory.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so
clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a
history. But no writer, certainly no ancient writer, is always
vigilant. Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he
takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is
sometimes deceived by them. Thus there seem to be cases where he has
been affected in his conceptions of fifth-century tragedy by the
practice of his own day, when the only living form of drama was the
New Comedy.
For example, as we have noticed above, true Tragedy had always taken
its material from the sacred myths, or heroic sagas, which to the
classical Greek constituted history.
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