SHOULD THERE HAVE BEEN A POLIS IN ARISTOTLE’S POETICS?

摘要

In her contribution to the collection Tragedy and the Tragic, Edith Hall asks ‘is there anpolis in Aristotle’s Poetics?’n1 She concludes that there is not, and sees the absence as innneed of explanation. It is certainly strikingly at variance with a prominent emphasis innmuch recent scholarship on tragedy;n2 but Hall also notes that awareness of anrelationship between tragedy and its social context is in evidence in other fifth- andnfourth-century sources, including other works by Aristotle. Hall’s explanation ofnAristotle’s approach in the Poetics looks to his personal status, as an outsider innAthens, and historical moment, at a time when tragedy was ‘about’ to be internation-nalized; Aristotle’s deliberate divorce of poetry and the polis, she suggests, caught annemergent tendency (304–5).