The Peripatetics as Literary Critics

Bibliographic Data

ID5009804
AuthorsAnthony J Podlecki (corresponding author)
Year1969
Volume23
Issue1
Pages114
Publication date1969-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhoenix (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8299 • E-ISSN: 1929-4883
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1086572
OpenAlexW2320945780
LanguageEN
Citations received35

STUDIES OF AN INTERPRETATIVE KIND in which the Greeks tried to understand and evaluate their heritage can be traced at least as far back as the fifth century B.C. Sophocles said to have written a work the Chorus;' Hippias of Elis seems to have studied Homer in some detail;2 and, as the scholar whom this collection intended to honour has maintained, Aristophanes' Frogs is the most important critical document we possess from the fifth century.3 But it was the fourth century which witnessed a conscious and intensive attempt by the Greeks to approach their own literature critically. Whether Plato could have written a dialogue like Aristotle's On Poets one cannot tell (for all we know, Aristotle's dialogue may have been written while he was under the influence of Plato); the fact that he did not, and it to his great successor that we must look for the true beginning of systematic interest in poetry by the Greeks. I propose here to pass over the founder of the Peripatetic school and his immediate successor4 in favour of a closer look at other members of the School who shared the master's interest in a formal approach to poetry. From the outset, the Peripatetics' interest seems to have been largely biographical. But, as a discussion of a poet's life invariably involved s?me consideration of his works and often, too, a comparison with other poets, something genuinely involving literary criticism could hardly have been avoided. A glance at the fragments of what has generally been considered the forerunner of the later treatises, Aristotle's dialogue Ilepl ro7riwv, shows this to have been the case.5 In it Empedocles was described as 'O1.pPLK6S and powerful in diction, being great in metaphors and in the use of all other poetical devices.6 Some little space seems to have been devoted to the origin of the dialogue-form and the artistic, or mimetic quality of Plato's dialogues in particular., Euripides was criticized for an inaccurate detail in his Meleager and Homer's birth was discussed at length, if somewhat fancifully.8

Art · Literary criticism · Literature · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy

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