Plato, Aristotle and Homer
This focus on strong emotion is key to Homer as a tragedian: Aristotle believed that a poet's aim was κάθαρσις, a step above Plato's ideas about emotion evoked by poetry. Regardless of the varying translations of this particular term, it is doubtless that, for Aristotle, Homer's work, like that of the tragic poets, incorporates it: it can be interpreted as a purgation of negative emotion by seeing such events depicted in epic or on stage, or a change from 'ignorance to knowledge', an illumination of fate that occurs when we relate the particular events of the play to the human condition, drawing on the depiction of pity and fear through mimesis. 23 In this way, poetry distils reality into something comprehensible, and is therefore able to provide real wisdom, since it represents the actions of good men – a possibility that Plato firmly rejected. It is for that reason that Aristotle considered tragedy not more therapeutic or morally edifying than history, but by far more philosophical, as he believed it dealt with the universal, rather than the particular. Helpfully, Aristotle breaks down tragedy and epic into their congruent elements, namely plot, character, reasoning, diction, spectacle, and song, 24 of which only the last two are unique to tragedy; ‘consequently anyone who understands what is good and bad in tra gedy also understands about epic’. 25 Aristotle praises Homer as a tragedian for the concentration of his plot; as opposed to other epic poets (whose work is lost to us), he adheres to the doctrine of structuring his narrative around one complete, whole action, as tragedy should be, rather than around a single time period or specific person. Homer understood that the entire war, though it had a beginning and an end, would be too cumbersome to relate in a single epic; instead, ‘he has taken one part and us ed many others as episodes (e.g. the catalogue of ships, and other episodes . . . )’. 26 This completeness means that ‘only one tragedy can be made out of the Iliad and Odyssey , or at most two’, because they are quasi- tragedies in themselves, ‘ . . . but many out of the Cypria and the Little Iliad ’ 27 (though they are lost to us today). Homer’s work contains other elements of tragedy, including περιπέτεια (reversal) and ἀ ναγνώρισις (recognition). According to Aristotle, epic plots, like tragic ones, can be cl assified as simple, complex, ethical, or ‘pathetic’. The Iliad is simple and ‘pathetic’, as suffering figures prominently in it; the Odyssey is complex (it has numerous recognition
23 Golden, 1976. 24 Poet. 1450a. 25 Ibid. 1449b. 26 Ibid. 1459a. 27 Ibid. 1459b.
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