As both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato wanted to ban tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that they dabbled in the philosopher’s business but had no “idea” what they were doing. Aristotle set out to answer Plato’s objections by arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. This book argues that Aristotle’s definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on the lat ... More

As both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato wanted to ban tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that they dabbled in the philosopher’s business but had no “idea” what they were doing. Aristotle set out to answer Plato’s objections by arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. This book argues that Aristotle’s definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on the later history of the idea of tragedy, beginning with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 bc–ad 65), whose Latin plays were known and read in the Renaissance for centuries before the now more famous Greek tragedies were rediscovered. When Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) composed An Apology for Poetry, he borrowed from Seneca the word idea to designate what we would now label as a “theory” of tragedy. Through Sidney, Seneca’s plays came to exemplify an idea of tragedy that was at its core Aristotelian. Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle’s conception of the genre as a vivid image of the truth and treats tragedy as a natural venue in which to explore the human soul.