The ‘Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception’ series is already well established, and the present volume is a welcome addition to it. Indeed, it is hard to think of a series in which it would be more at home, given that the reception of the Poetics across the millennia since Aristotle’s time – in an array of disciplines beyond Classics – is such an integral aspect of its impact and appeal. At 658 pages, weighing almost three pounds, the book is both massive and – by the very nature of the topic – not the final word on its subject matter; Janus-like, it looks both back over centuries of reception and forward to discoveries and applications yet to come.
The volume had its inception in the papers delivered at a conference held in 2022, which brought together an international (and interdisciplinary) assemblage of scholars at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. All told, the published volume presents 23 essays, along with an introduction and epilogue. These are all composed in English, with instructions for locating earlier French-language versions for some of them.
The book is divided into three major parts: ‘Reception Areas’; ‘The Poem, Its Parts and Effects’; and ‘Literary Theory: Generic Perspectives’. Part 2 is further divided into four sections, on ‘Story (Muthos)’; ‘Poetic Language (Lexis)’; ‘Visual and Performing Arts’; and ‘Catharsis’. The three parts represent three major areas of concern in Poetics scholarship. The entire collection thus offers a capacious map of Poetics scholarship up to 2022 and signposts to foci of future research. Readers might profit by using it in concert with two earlier Brill publications: O. Schrier’s The Poetics of Aristotle and the Tractatus Coislinianus: A Bibliography from about 900 till 1996 (1998) and the editio maior of the Poetics by L. Tarán and D. Gudas, Aristotle Poetics: Editio Maior of the Greek Text with Historical Introductions and Philological Commentaries (2012).
Part 1 of this new Companion, ‘Reception Areas’ (chapters 1–8), is a collection of detailed studies of how the Poetics has been received in a number of cultural areas, from the Hellenistic period to nineteenth-century Germany, by way of Rome, Byzantium, the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, and the Italian Renaissance (p. 4). Other considerations that might well have appeared in this portion of the book (French Neoclassicism, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) are treated in Parts 2 and 3.
Part 2, ‘The Poem, Its Parts and Effects’ (chapters 9–19), sets out to study ‘key terms of the Aristotelian taxonomy regarding the parts and effects of the artwork, mostly from a comparative and/or diachronic perspective’ (p. 4). These terms, which Raymond Williams might have called ‘keywords’ for Aristotle, include eikos (translated here as ‘verisimilitude’), lusis (‘tragic ending’), hamartia (‘tragic error’, two essays), anagnôrisis (‘recognition’), lexis (‘poetic language’), opsis (as pertains to the ‘visual and performing arts’) and catharsis (aptly called ‘enigmatic’, p. 5). It is worth noting that two sections of Part 2, ‘Muthos’ and ‘Lexis’, are named after two of Aristotle’s qualitative parts of tragedy in the Poetics.
Part 3, ‘Literary Theory: Generic Perspectives’ (chapters 20–3), examines, first, ‘the impact of the Poetics on the elaboration of a theory of literary genres other than tragedy’ (scil. comedy, epic and the novel) and, second, ‘contemporary narrative theory’ (p. 5). The epilogue proffers both a furtherance of Part 3 and a coda to the entire volume, examining as it does ‘the scholarly and critical metanarratives produced about the Poetics’ and ‘another type of reception: the “emplotment” of the Poetics in fictional (literary and pictorial) narratives’ (ibid.).
A less ambitious project might have limited itself to just one of the three parts included here. In practical terms, this means that readers interested solely in historical reception, in a close reading of the text of the Poetics or in the treatise as it relates to subsequent works of literary theory might content themselves with just one of the three parts of the volume. But the plan of the book is so ingeniously devised that a reading of any one of the parts enriches one’s reading of the others; and, in particular, the second part serves as a kind of hinge linking the other two conceptually.
Part 1 details the fortunes of the text and translations of the Poetics to the nineteenth century. Such detailing is as thorough as it can be, but is perforce still only partial, since so much is unknown about some crucial periods in the history of the text: notably, during Aristotle’s lifetime; during post-Aristotelian antiquity; and during the Middle Ages, up to the tenth century or so. For these periods we still lack definitive answers to some of the most basic questions: what use did Aristotle make of this material in his curriculum in the Lyceum? What did the Alexandrian scholars know of the Poetics? How and when did the Greek text come to Rome? Who made the first translations of the Greek text of the Poetics into other languages, and how were these disseminated? Such questions are likely to remain unanswered, unless some stupendous discoveries are made at a site such as Herculaneum.
In the meantime, we must piece together the clues we do have, beginning with the existence (or lack) of manuscripts of the Poetics in antiquity, along with evidence of textual citations from the Poetics (fragments, testimonia or references more oblique) in authors of later antiquity, such as Strabo or Diogenes Laertius. This is the task undertaken in chapters 1–3.
Chapter 3 also glances at William of Moerbeke and the Byzantine tradition, providing a segue to what follows in Part 1. Chapters 4–10 open up the medieval vista to an even broader gaze, also expanding the notion of ‘reception’ beyond manuscript stemmatics. These chapters explore the philosophical reception of the Poetics in Arabic, Neo-Latin poetics in relation to the Poetics, literary theory and criticism in the Italian Renaissance, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy.
Part 2 is necessarily the most densely philological portion of the book: first, because the gist of the Poetics is so strongly tied to specificities of meaning in its terminology, and second, related to that, because Aristotle is working to establish a technical vocabulary in the Poetics (as he does in other treatises) that will facilitate deeper and more precise discussion of the topic at hand. To some extent, naturally enough, he starts from received terminology (e.g. mimêsis from Plato); but the word ‘received’ should remind us that the Poetics itself is a work of reception: the great tragedians had already been dead for several decades by the time Aristotle taught poetics in the Lyceum, and Homer was already several centuries in the past. In addition to building an aesthetic theory that will encompass (inter alia) psychology and rhetoric, Aristotle is engaging in literary criticism and cultural anthropology: partly along lines laid down by Plato, the Sophists and the rhapsodic tradition, and partly in directions largely unthought of, except by Aristotle in other relevant areas of study.
As for Aristotelian ‘keywords’, readers may be surprised to discover that the word muthos, although it appears in the title for Section 1 of Part 2, does not have a dedicated essay of its own in this portion of the book. In response, the editors might point, first, to the two chapters in this section, on eikos (Chapter 9) and on ‘Early Modern Theory of the Tragic Ending’ (Chapter 10), that both explore the concept of muthos, and, second, to the fact that many of the ‘keywords’ under analysis in this section are themselves dimensions of muthos. (Exceptions would include opsis, which is a quantitative part of Aristotelian tragedy, and possibly catharsis, unless the theorist considers the site of catharsis to be found onstage rather than in the audience.) A third possible point might be that Part 3, in particular Chapter 23, has much to say about narrative theory – and ‘narrative’ might be taken as one possible translation of muthos. All that said, there is no single essay that theorises Aristotelian muthos as such (the groundwork for which might begin with E. Downing’s 1984 article in Classical Antiquity, ‘Οἷον Ψυχή: An Essay on Aristotle’s Muthos’). Similarly, if space in this already huge volume had permitted, one might make the case for a chapter each on êthos, dianoia and melopoiïa.
Part 3 showcases several essays in what the editors call ‘meta-reception studies’ (p. 3). At just over 100 pages in total, it is much the shortest of the three parts. It includes essays on comedy (Chapter 20), epic (Chapter 21), the novel (Chapter 22) and narratology (Chapter 23) – each examining how the Poetics could be applied in ways (or in genres) not fully explored or not even imagined by Aristotle. This kind of scholarship is re ipsa more imaginative than, say, a close study of the word dithurambos; but this is an important way in which it expands its relevance. As compared with other disciplines in the humanities, Classics is relatively late in coming to literary theory; the latter is now tantamount to a field of study in itself and can shed valuable light on texts ancient as well as modern, as all the essays in Part 3 of this Companion demonstrate. Indeed, were one to expand each of the parts of the volume, this one might grow the fastest. In view of that, one would do well to recall that the most eminent literary theorists of the twentieth century did not flower without a thorough knowledge of classical thought (see e.g. R. Barthes’s lengthy essay ‘L’ancienne rhétorique: aide-mémoire’, Communications 16 [1970]) – and that the Poetics itself is a work of narratology.
No encyclopaedia is ever truly complete. But the encyclopaedic nature of this collection means that it is already large; paradoxically, the captivating and elusive nature of its subject matter also means that one wants it to be larger still.
The volume includes two indexes, one of names and one of passages cited from Aristotle, and is richly furnished with figures (many in colour) and tables. Individual bibliographies are listed at the end of each essay and are keyed to the footnotes. The physical book is produced with Brill’s customary elegance and care.
