6
Rhythm alone without tune is employed by dancers in their representations, for by means of rhythmical gestures they represent both character and experiences and actions.πάθη καὶ πράξεις cover the whole field of life, what men do (πράξεις) and what men experience (πάθη). Since πάθη means also emotions and that sense may be present here, but as a technical term in this treatise πάθος is a calamity or tragic incident, something that happens to the hero.
7
But the art which employs words either in bare prose or in metres, either in one kind of metre or combining several, happens up to the present day to have no name.
8
For we can find no common term to apply to the mimes of Sophron and XenarchusSophron and Xenarchus, said to he father and son, lived in Syracuse, the elder a contemporary of Euripides. They wrote mimes, i.e., simple and usually farcical sketches of familiar incidents, similar to the mimes of Herondas and the fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, but in prose. There was a tradition that their mimes suggested to Plato the use of dialogue. and to the Socratic dialogues:
9
nor again supposing a poet were to make his representation in iambics or elegiacs or any other such metre—except that people attach the word poet(maker)to the name of the metre and speak of elegiac poets and of others as epic poets.
10
Thus they do not call them poets in virtue of their representation but apply the name indiscriminately in virtue of the metre.
11
For if people publish medical or scientific treatises in metre the custom is to call them poets. But Homer and EmpedoclesEmpedocles (floruit 445 B.C.) expressed his philosophical and religious teaching in hexameter verse, to which Aristotle elsewhere attributes genuine value as poetry, but it is here excluded from the ranks of poetry because the object is definitely. have nothing in common except the metre, so that it would be proper to call the one a poet and the other not a poet but a scientist.
