In this volume Z. has set herself the ambitious task of accounting for Aristotle's views on tragedy, music and the plastic arts by setting them in their historical, philosophical and cultural contexts. The historical context is mostly provided by Plato whose critique of poetry in the Ion and the Republic Aristotle countered in the Poetics and Book 8 of the Politics. The philosophical context, in Z.'s opinion, is made up of a variety of well-known points of theory defended in the Physics, the Metaphysics, the De anima and the Nicomachean Ethics. These points include the view that art imitates nature (Physics 2), the distinction between form and matter and dunamis and energeia (Metaphysics Z and T), the endoxic definition of ‘art’ (technē) as an intellectual virtue (Eth. Nic. 6), the link between character, choice, action and virtue (Eth. Nic. 3) and the distinction between what is non-voluntary and what is involuntary (Eth. Nic. 3). Aristotle having been generally parsimonious in his use of katharsis, Z. had to look elsewhere for its antecedents and found them in Pythagorean and Orphic sources. On the issue as to whether Aristotle de-politicised tragedy, Z. sets herself against common scholarly opinion. She argues that Aristotle, by expressing confidence in the judgement of the demos (Pol. 3) and claiming that music contributes to the education of the citizens (Pol. 8), did allot poetry a role in the realisation of the telos of the city-state, the good life for all the citizens. In her final chapter, Z. confronts the Poetics with the theatre and the plastic arts of fifth- and fourth-century Athens. She contends that while the Poetics owes less than might have been expected to the reality of Attic drama of the classical period, it does appear to have been directly influential on writers of New Comedy, Menander in particular. Having then established to her satisfaction that Aristotle's taste in theatrical matters ran to the conservative, Z. comes to the uncontroversial conclusion that the Poetics is best regarded as providing norms for playwrights, as opposed to a description of their practice. In the plastic arts, by contrast, she goes on to claim, Aristotle was much more in line with his time; not only was his valorisation of emotion consonant with the growing expressivity of sculpture, as evident in the art of Scopas, but his concept of ‘right reason’ found an aesthetic pendant in Lysippus' canon.

Perhaps as a result of attempting to deal with so many diverse issues in such a relatively short space, there are almost inevitably a number of points where Z. does not show the depth of treatment and the perspicacity that one might have expected of the author of such a work. Hardly ever does she concern herself with the detail of the text and the several cruces that it contains, preferring instead to rely on the admittedly excellent 1980 translation of R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot. Occasionally she contents herself with over-simplifications: her account of Plato's critique of poetry and tragedy, for instance, goes no deeper than what would be required of an undergraduate-level course. She sidesteps a number of difficult issues raised by such fundamental notions as hamartia and refrains from engaging in the controversies they have given rise to on the ground either that constraints of space would not permit a full treatment of the issue or that scholarly debates having so far proved ineffectual in settling the question, there would be little point in her going over the same ground once again (see, e.g., pp. 41, 45, 47, 73 and 149). What she does instead in those cases is to refer – or defer – to the views of other scholars, amongst whom figure prominently Ricoeur, Romeyer Dherbey, Else, Janko and, most of all, Halliwell. Her book then turns into a compendium of recent interpretations of Aristotle's poetics, a compendium which might conceivably be of use to philosophers whose interest in the Poetics had so far been marginal.

When she ventures to strike on her own, however, and to explain Aristotle by Aristotle, the book appears, at any rate to begin with, to address a student audience. Her chapter on Technē, production, plaisir esthétique et beauté is typical of that second approach. To ground Aristotle's concept of technē in the context of his metaphysics and epistemology, she turns, justifiably enough, to the famous claim in Ph. 2.2, 194a21–2 that ‘art imitates nature’. Having interpreted literally Aristotle's technē mimeitai tēn physin, she embarks on a breathless tour of Aristotle's views on nature, substance, matter and form, dunamis, and the four causes, before informing her reader that while natural objects have an inbuilt telos, the products of art depend on their maker's technē for reaching theirs. The definition of technē as an intellectual virtue in Eth. Nic. 6.3, to which she turns next, provides an opportunity for distinguishing different technai, by which point her strategy becomes clearer and her argument more interesting. Having pointed out the risk of anachronism involved in projecting post eighteenth-century notions onto a philosopher whose terminology did not permit the distinction between art in the modern sense and practices such as medicine or ship-building, Z. proceeds to show that a distinct category of the ‘aesthetic’ is emerging in the Poetics. She argues that the products of the mimetic ‘arts’ (technai), as Aristotle conceives them, are not to be assessed by moral or political criteria, as they were in Plato, but by their ability to elicit in their audience the specifically ‘aesthetic’ pleasures of increased understanding and emotional release. She might have further strengthened her argument by noting that Aristotle's belief that ‘after going through many changes tragedy ceased to evolve, since it had achieved its own nature’ (1449a14–15, tr. Halliwell) shows him to have considered tragedy to have a telos of its own, independently of its ethically charged effects on spectators.

Z.'s final chapter, in which she attempts to relate Aristotle's conception of tragedy to the masterpieces of fifth-century Attic theatre, is less convincing. Having first praised Aristotle for his ‘admirable’ grasp of the ‘essence’ of Attic tragedy (p. 211), she concludes by noting that the normative character of the Poetics causes it to be ‘at odds’ in a number of respects with the masterpieces of fifth-century Attic drama, whose essence it therefore fails to encapsulate ‘in an ideal and wholly satisfactory manner’ (pp. 238–9). So much, she claims, is clear from the way in which Aristotle projects some of his own key concepts onto the plays. After canvassing various scholarly views on the nature of Antigone's hamartia, Z. delivers herself of the opinion that it consisted ‘more probably, in obeying a law of her own making’ (p. 218). How, one wonders, could Z. reconcile her view with the famous lines 450–7, in which Antigone describes the principles of her action as ‘unwritten and unalterable’ (agrapta kasphalē)? Could Z. possibly have misconstrued ‘unwritten’ as non-existent? As for her view, borrowed from Saïd (1978), that the problem of responsibility and guilt is not raised in Oedipus Tyrannus, it might profitably have been confronted with the more sophisticated arguments of J.-P. Vernant, whose absence from her bibliography is as surprising as it is regrettable. In his seminal 1972 article, ‘Ebauches de la volonté dans la tragédie grecque’, Vernant argues that the tension between individual intention and external constraint that is characteristic of Attic tragedy was systematised in Aristotle's ethical writings and, through them, became a crucial stage in the development of the Western concept of the will. (Vernant's article has been ably translated by J. Lloyd as ‘Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy’, in J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece [1990].)

Despite the above-mentioned shortcomings, it should be emphasised that this volume is written with admirable clarity and should therefore be accessible to English speakers with a reasonable command of French. Paradoxically, it is this very quality which makes it possible to isolate such points in Z.'s treatment of her subject which require deeper analysis and more detailed argument.