3
Clearly each of the above mentioned arts will admit of these distinctions, and they will differ in representing objects which differ from each other in the way here described.
4
In painting too, and flute-playing and harp-playing, these diversities may certainly be found, and it is the same in prose and in unaccompanied verse.
5
For instance Homer’s people are better, Cleophon’s are like, while in Hegemon of Thasos, the first writer of parodies, and in Nicochares, the author of the Poltrooniad, they are worse.Cleophon wrote epics (i.e., hexameter poems), describing scenes of daily life in commonplace diction (cf. Aristot. Poet. 22.2): Hegemon wrote mock epics in the style of the surviving Battle of Frog and Mice: of Nicochares nothing is known, but his forte was evidently satire.
6
It is the same in dithyrambic and nomic poetry, for instance . . . a writer might draw characters like the Cyclops as drawn by Timotheus and Philoxenus.Both famous dithyramhic poets. There is evidence that Philoxenus treated Polyphemus in the vein of satire: Timotheus may have drawn a more dignified picture.
7
It is just in this respect that tragedy differs from comedy. The latter sets out to represent people as worse than they are to-day, the former as better.
1
A third difference in these arts is the manner in which one may represent each of these objects.
2
For in representing the same objects by the same means it is possible to proceed either partly by narrative and partly by assuming a character other than your own—this is Homer’s method—or by remaining yourself without any such change, or else to represent the characters as carrying out the whole action themselves.
3
These, as we said above, are the three differences which form the several species of the art of representation, the means, the objects, and the manner.
