1 Selection and design are necessary for aay work of "representation."
2 Cf. chapter 6.
3 Or "in the style of ordinary people," without obvious rhetorical artifice.
4 προαίρεσις is a technical term in Aristotle's ethics, corresponding to our use of the term "Will," the deliberate adoption of any course of conduct or line of action. It is a man's will or choice in the sense that determines the goodness or badness of his character. If character is to be revealed in drama, a man must be shown in the exercise of his will, choosing between one line of conduct and another, and he must be placed in circumstances in wbich the choice is not obvious, i.e., circumstances in which everybody's choice would not be the same. The choice of death rather than disbonourable wealth reveals character; the choice of a nectarine rather than a turnip does not.
5 This seems to be a mistaken reference to 6 above where "diction" is defined as "the metrical arrangement of the words." In poetry they come to the same thing.
6 See Aristot. Poet. 6.2.
7 With a very small object the duration of our vision is, as it were, so rapid that the parts are invisible; we, therefore, cannot appreciate their proportion and arrangement, in which beauty consists.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.