Aristotle's lost book on comedy left only his thoughts on tragedy
Around 335 BCE Aristotle wrote the first surviving treatise devoted purely to literary theory, and half of it vanished. The part on comedy was lost in antiquity, and the remaining half reached medieval Europe via an Arabic version by Averroes. Its ideas about pity, fear and the fatal mistake still frame how stories are judged.
The Poetics treats poetry broadly, taking in epic, lyric and drama, and argues that all of these arts share mimesis, the imitation of life. They differ in their materials, their subjects and their manner. Language, rhythm and melody are the raw ingredients: epic relies on words alone, while Greek tragedy blended speech with a singing chorus. Some recent scholars argue that the word usually rendered as rhythm really meant ordered movement, or dance, which would make drama a union of music, dance and language.
Aristotle's central definition presents tragedy as the enactment of a serious, complete action of some size, performed by actors rather than narrated, which works through pity and terror to bring about a catharsis of those feelings. Tragedy shows people better than ourselves; comedy deals with lesser people and their foibles. Plot comes first. The most moving plot sends a good person into undeserved misfortune because of an error, hamartia, and complex plots turn on reversals and recognitions. Characters should be good, appropriate, realistic and consistent, and even a surprise should seem inevitable in hindsight.
One claim became famous well beyond the theatre. History records what did happen, a string of particulars tied by chance, whereas poetry shows what could happen, bound together by probability and necessity. That makes poetry, Aristotle concluded, more philosophical than history, because it reaches towards universals. He also ranked tragedy above epic, since it can do everything epic does in a tighter, more concentrated form.
The text's survival is a story in itself. At some point in antiquity it was split across two papyrus rolls, and only the first, on tragedy and epic, lasted; some think the Tractatus coislinianus summarises the missing book on comedy. William of Moerbeke produced a faithful Greek-to-Latin translation in 1278, but it was largely ignored. Disagreement persists over almost every detail, especially what catharsis and hamartia mean, the so-called Classical unities, and whether chapters 13 and 14 contradict each other on which plot is best.
Source: Poetics (Aristotle)
