11
Since tragedy is a representation of men better than ourselves we must copy the good portrait-painters who, while rendering the distinctive form and making a likeness, yet paint people better than they are. It is the same with the poet. When representing people who are hot-tempered or lazy, or have other such traits of character, he should make them such, yet men of worth [an example of hardness]Apparently a note on Achilles which has been copied by mistake into the text.; take the way in which Agathon and Homer portray Achilles.
12
Keep, then, a careful eye on these rules and also on the appeal to the eyei.e., stage-craft rather than staging. which is necessarily bound up with the poet’s business; for that offers many opportunities of going wrong. But this subject has been adequately discussed in the published treatises.As distinct from the body of esoteric doctrine circulated by oral teaching among Aristotle’s pupils.
1
What a Discovery is has been already stated.In chapter 11.As for kinds of Discovery, first comes the least artistic kind, which is largely used owing to incompetence—discovery by tokens.
2
These may be congenital, like the spear the Earth-born bear or stars, like those which CarcinusA prolific tragedian of the early fourth century. The family are agreeably ridiculed in Aristophanes’ Wasps. uses in his ThyestesThese were birth-marks. The spear-head distinguished the descendants of the Spartoi at Thebes; the star or bright spot on the descendants of Pelops commemorated his ivory shoulder, and in Carcinus’s play it seems to have survived cooking.;
3
or they may be acquired and these may be on the body, for instance, wounds, or external things like necklaces, and in the TyroA play by Sophocles. Tyro’s twins by Poseidon, who appeared to her in the guise of the river Enipeus, were exposed in a little boat or ark, like Moses in the bulrushes, and this led to their identification. the discovery by means of the boat.
