The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

lyre-playing. So
again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music.
Homer, for example, makes men better than they are; Cleophon as
they are; Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and
Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse than they are. The
same thing holds good of Dithyrambs and Nomes; here too one may
portray different types, as Timotheus and Philoxenus differed in
representing their Cyclopes. The same distinction marks off Tragedy
from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy
as better than in actual life.
III
    There is still a third difference—the manner in which each of
these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and
the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which
case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak
in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters
as living and moving before us.
    These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three
differences which distinguish artistic imitation—the medium, the
objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles
is an imitator of the same kind as Homer—for both imitate higher
types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as
Aristophanes—for both imitate persons acting and doing. Hence, some
say, the name of ‘drama’ is given to such poems, as representing
action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of
Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the
Megarians—not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it
originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of
Sicily, for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides
and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by
certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. In each case they appeal to the
evidence of language. The outlying villages, they say, are by them
called komai, by the Athenians demoi: and they assume that
comedians were so named not from komazein, ‘to revel,’ but because
they wandered from village to village (kata komas), being excluded
contemptuously from the city. They add also that the Dorian word
for ‘doing’ is dran, and the Athenian, prattein.
    This may suffice as to the number and nature of the various
modes of imitation.
IV
    Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of
them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is
implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and
other animals being that he is the most imitative of living
creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and
no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have
evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in
themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when
reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most
ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is,
that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to
philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of
learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a
likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning
or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you
happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not
to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or
some such other cause.
    Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is
the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly
sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural
gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude
improvisations gave birth to Poetry.
    Poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the
individual character of the writers. The graver spirits imitated
noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort
imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires,
as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men.
A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any
author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there
were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited—his own
Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The
appropriate meter was also here introduced; hence the measure is
still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which
people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets