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ON THEATRE AND CINEMA— UNIVERSAL things well, yet appears the most tragic of poets. The fable, however, ranks in the second place, though by some it is said to be the Brst composition, which has a twofold construction, such as the Odyssey and which terminates in a contrary fortune, both to the better and worse characters. It appears, however, to rank in the first place, through the imbecility of the spectators. For the poets, in composing their plots, accommodate themselves to the wish of the spectators.' The great tragic sense of the classic Athenian drama was already decaying when Aristotle wrote his treatise on poetry. The post-classic Greek audiences appear to have preferred, as do our modern cinema audiences, the 'happy ending', only we have no Aristotle to remind us of the true meaning of tragic art.
A modern reader of Aristotle's writings should, moreover, bear in mind that the Poetics was not just another book by Aristotle on an incidentally selected subject. The Poetics is an indispensable and organic part of a fundamental attempt to interpret the Greek world as a whole. As the origin of dramatic art leads us to the Greek state-religion, so does ethical reflection naturally turn to the example of the theatre or dramatic art. Ethical norms, analysis of social reality and art, are in Aristotle's mind a synthetic unity.1
The process of the decay of the Greek City-State produces the degeneration of dramatic art. This phenomenon is difficult to explain. Economic, political, religious and, generally speaking, cultural causes — all seem to speed up this process. It is not easy to say which cause was the dominant one. Nietzsche, in his Geburt der Tragoedie aus dem Geiste der Musik, has shown that it was mainly the Socratian rationalism which led to the decline of the Athenian world.
Burckhardt, in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte — writing under the impact of Napoleon Ill's plebiscitarian dictatorship (as I have shown elsewhere) — is inclined to explain the decline of the citystate as the result of the atomised mass (or, as he prefers to say, 'majority') democracy. I am inclined to believe that Nietzsche and Burckhardt gave only partial explanations. Professor Thomson, in his book on Aeschylus and Athens2 (previously referred to), has examined the problem in a wider perspective. 'The citizens of Athens became a class of rentiers, living parasitically on the labour of others.' The tension within the Athenian democracy
1 Cf. e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book i, Chapter XI, or Book 4, Chapter VIII.
2 Cf. particularly Chapter XVIII.
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