SOURCE: "Outside the Drama: The Limits of Tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics," in Essays on Aristotle's 'Poetics ', edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 133-49.

[In the following essay, Roberts contends that in discussing the natural limit of plot length, Aristotle conceived of some action as taking place "outside" of the drama's plot. Roberts analyzes what types of action might fall into this category and the methods by which events taking place outside of the play's action could be conveyed to the audience.]

In Chapter 7 of the Poetics (1450b26-31). Aristotle notes that the action of which a play is an imitation must be whole, that is, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end; a beginning, he goes on to say, is that which does not follow naturally or necessarily from anything else, and an end is that from which nothing else follows. This claim often strikes readers at first as obvious and then as untrue. What Aristotle says seems obvious in the sense that a play's action has in fact a duration limited in time; it starts and it stops. It seems untrue in the sense that there appears to be a great deal that precedes the actual beginning of many Greek tragedies, and that tragedies often end with some indication that there is more to come; furthermore, what precedes is often causally connected with the events of the play itself, and what follows often constitutes the later ramifications of an outcome only partially revealed on stage.

It is, of course, precisely the fact that the plot of any literary work implies continuing action which takes place before and after the events narrated that makes Aristotle's claim subtler than at first appears. Recall Henry James's often-quoted remarks in the Preface to Roderick Hudson: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so."¹ Recent work on closure has complicated our ideas about this geometry, that is, about how literature achieves what Frank Kermode calls "the sense of an ending."² The problem of creating beginnings and endings that seem genuinely to begin and to end is particularly prominent in the case of Greek tragedy, which like much of ancient literature took its plots primarily from a body of stories that were continuous with each other and to some extent known to audience or reader.³

Aristotle's account in the Poetics recognizes that any given work is selective and therefore limited in relation to the larger myth—indeed, insists that it must be so. An action (epic or tragic) with a proper beginning, middle, and end will in Aristotle's terms be a whole. But Aristotle makes clear that an action that is itself a whole may also be selected from a larger whole, in keeping with requirements of unity and of size. An epic or tragic plot must have unity, and cannot therefore include (for example) all the events of an individual's life (8.1451al6-30); the natural limit of a plot's length (for both tragedy and epic) is one that allows that plot to be clearly grasped (7.1451a3-6, 23.1459a32-34, 24.1459bl8-20). Where even epic is limited in what it can actually include, tragedy—both shorter and more compact—is more radically so.⁴

Aristotle further recognizes the limits of tragedy by several times noting that there are events that occur outside: outside the drama, outside the tragedy, outside the story or plot. In these passages, Aristotle is not speaking of the world outside the drama, that is, the world of the audience, the nonfictive world, but rather of some part of the larger story from which the play draws its plot.⁵

For some scholars, the limits Aristotle puts on the tragic plot by relegating certain events to "outside" point to other limits Aristotle imposes on the subject matter of tragedy and ultimately to the limits—or limitations—of Aristotle's imagination as a critic tragedy, limits based in his profound rationalism.⁶ But Aristotle's rationalism, properly appreciated, is itself at times as revelatory as any leap of the imagination, and it may be rewarding to consider the implications even of some of his less fully developed ideas. His concept of what is outside the drama has implications for our understanding of the nature of dramatic limits and of audience response.

I

Aristotle refers to what is in some sense "outside" in six passages in the Poetics. Of these, three are concerned with the action of the play, one with the audience's knowledge, and two with the presence in the play of the irrational or inexplicable.

A. Action

(1) In a discussion of actions that arouse pity and fear (14.1453b29-34), Aristotle gives as an example the Sophoclean Oedipus' unknowing murder of his father, but notes that this is in fact outside the drama (exō tou dramatos).

(2) In his discussion of the way to set out a plot in general terms before the addition of names and episodes (17.1455b2-15), Aristotle gives as his first example an outline of an Iphigenia which is in all essentials Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris; the divine command and the purpose that lie behind the arrival of the central character's brother (Orestes) are said to be outside the plot or story (exō tou muthou) (1455b6-9).⁷

(3) In his account of plot-complication (desis) and denouement (lusis), Aristotle notes that the plot-complication of a tragedy includes the things outside (exō then) and some of the things within (18.1455b23-26). It seems safe here to take "outside" as the equivalent of "outside the tragedy," since tragedy has just been mentioned. The example given is a lost play (the Lynceus of Theodectes) and Aristotle specifies no events in that play as outside, merely alluding to the things that have occurred beforehand (ta propepragmena).

B. Knowledge

(4) After commenting that the denouement should come from the plot itself, Aristotle notes (15.1454a37-1454b6) that the deus ex machina (apo mēchanēs) should not be used, as in Euripides' Medea, to bring about a play's resolution, but only for "the things outside the drama" (ta exō tou dramatos), that is, for things which happened either before or after the play, are inaccessible to human knowledge, and must therefore be revealed by a god.⁸

C. The irrational

(5) Aristotle adds to his remarks on the deus ex machina that there should be nothing irrational (alogon) in the play's events, or if there is, it should be outside the tragedy (exō tes̄ tragoidias), as in Sophocles' Oedipus (15.1454b6-9). This allusion will be explained only later, in Chapter 24. That "outside the tragedy" is here equivalent to "outside the drama" is made clear both by the identification elsewhere of the two terms and by the wording in Chapter 14, which contrasts a play in which something happens outside the drama with two in which the same thing happens in the tragedy itself.

(6) In stressing the importance of plausibility (24.1460a27-32), Aristotle again (as in Chapter 15) consigns what is irrational (alogon) to outside, here exō tou mutheumatos.⁹ What mutheuma seems to mean is the plot as enacted or represented—essentially the equivalent of the drama. This interpretation is supported by the opposition in this passage between what is outside the mutheuma and what is in the drama; mutheuma is used here in place of drama because Aristotle is speaking of epic as well as of drama.¹⁰ He here clarifies his earlier reference to something alogon in the Oedipus: it is Oedipus' ignorance of how his predecessor died that is both outside and hard to account for.

Of these references to what is outside some poetic boundary, all but one (the example of Orestes from Chapter 17) are stated in terms that seem in this context to be equivalent: something is outside the drama, the tragedy, or the story as represented. All Aristotle's examples of things outside are things that have actually been mentioned inside the drama; he does not cite any events that might have been known to the audience from other sources but are not mentioned in the play.¹¹ None of Aristotle's instances of what is outside the drama involves a report of something that is supposed to have occurred in the course of the play, rather than before or after. Nor does he include in his category allusions to stories that are parallel to the play's story, the sort of mythic exempla usually found in choral odes. What is outside the drama, then, appears to be anything continuous with the action of the play that occurs before or after the play as staged and is mentioned in it.

But the example from Chapter 17 complicates matters. If muthos here (like mutheuma in Chapter 24) refers to the plot as represented and is thus also essentially the equivalent of "drama," then not all reported events that precede the play's beginning count for Aristotle as outside the drama. For here he appears to include in the plot Iphigenia's past history but not Orestes'; yet neither is enacted within the play, and both must presumably be recounted.¹² Unless there is some other reason for the different treatment of the two, muthos must then be distinct from (and more inclusive than) drama.¹³ The past history of Iphigenia is part of the muthos, that is, of the plot in a larger sense (and thus included in the general outline), but not part of the drama. The background of Orestes' arrival is less essential to the muthos in this sense, since he could presumably have been made to arrive for some other reason; it is therefore outside both drama and plot.

It is hard to be confident of a reading based on a particular understanding of muthos, given the great variety of ways in which Aristotle uses the word.¹⁴ But such a distinction is consistent with our other passages. What is outside the drama may count as among the play's events in some sense (en tois pragmasin, 15.145b6-7), and may in fact be a crucial antecedent to the play, as is Oedipus' killing of his father (14.1453b30-32). The claim in Chapter 18 that a play's actual plot-complication will normally include things outside the drama makes it explicit that something may be essential to the plot's construction and development and still be considered outside the tragedy. The beginning of the plot and the beginning of the play are not necessarily the same.

What is outside the drama, then, precedes or follows the play's action and is reported in the play, but something outside the drama may be (though it need not be) a part of the plot or story. This view has an intuitive appeal; most readers think of Oedipus' killing of his father (for example) as in some sense a part of the plot of the Oedipus Tyrannus. It is also in keeping with the dominant approach in current narrative theory, for which everything connected with the story line that is actually mentioned is part of a play's story (its events, what it tells) and is simply given in a different order in the discourse or narrative that is the play itself.¹⁵

II

But if what is outside the drama may be part of the plot, which is after all the soul of tragedy, why does Aristotle continue to invoke an apparently secondary distinction between what is inside and what is outside the drama?¹⁶

Taken together, the passages that refer to this distinction reflect the general importance of boundedness and selection for Aristotle, in the Poetics as elsewhere in his writings.¹⁷ The unity of the plot is his central concern, but the drama as staged has its own limits, and these are marked in part by what is excluded.

The passages in which the issue is action outside the drama suggest, as it were, the limitations of the drama's limits and the subordination of staged drama to plot. That is, it is by noting that an action central to the plot may be outside the drama (14.1453b29-34), and that the plot-complication will normally include events outside the drama (18.1455b23-26) that Aristotle makes the point (albeit in passing) that the staged drama and the plot are not the same thing and that the latter crosses the bounds of the former.

Since some events crucial to the plot (as well as much ancillary information) will be outside the drama, these must be made known to the audience in some way other than by enactment; the passage in which the issue is knowledge of what is outside the drama points to one such way. Aristotle's comment (in his critique of the deus ex machina, 15.1454a37-1454b6) that the gods provide knowledge of earlier or later events inaccessible to humans suggests that divine prologues and epilogues serve the function which in an epic (or a novel) is often served by a narrator, the function of providing knowledge that the audience must have in order to understand the story, and that only a god (or a narrator) could have.

Such knowledge of what is outside the drama itself helps constitute the limits of the drama, since it tells where both plot and play begin and end and thus helps the audience grasp the work as a whole.¹⁸ Aristotle makes a related point in the Rhetoric (3.14.1415al7-33), noting that as in speeches and epics the exordium lets the hearers know something of the subject in advance, so tragic poets make clear what a play is about—either immediately, like Euripides, or at some point in the prologue, like Sophocles.¹⁹ Such knowledge is critical because "what is unbounded/undefined (aoristos) leads one astray" (3.14.1415al4).²⁰

III

So far I have been considering what is "outside the drama" from the perspective of the boundary it defines. But what is outside the drama may also be said to constitute a region or area, and that there is something distinctive about this region is suggested by the passages (15.1454b6-9, 24.1460a27-32) in which Aristotle relegates to outside the drama an otherwise undesirable element he calls the alogon, variously rendered as the inexplicable, the improbable, or (most often) the irrational.

Even when, in the later chapters of the Poetics, Aristotle's initial exclusion of the alogon (15.1454b6-7). is qualified, the presumption remains that the irrational is best done without. Epic is more likely than tragedy to accept the irrational, which is the chief element in the amazing, because in epic we do not actually see the events in question (24.1460al1-17; Aristotle's example here is the surprising restraint of the other Greeks during Achilles' pursuit of Hector at Iliad XXII.205-7). But even in epic the irrational is undesirable; as a general rule, a story (logos) should not be made up of irrational (aloga) parts. It should contain nothing irrational, but if it does, the place for it is outside the represented story (24.1460a27-37). Again, one may defend the irrational against critics (25.1461bl4-25) either by appealing to "what people say" or by arguing that it is likely that unlikely things should sometimes happen; nonetheless, one should not unnecessarily introduce something irrational for no purpose.²¹ Why does Aristotle tell us that there should as a rule be nothing irrational in the story or events, and that if there is, it should be outside the drama or story as represented?

IV

Does this exclusion of the irrational, as some have thought, spring primarily from a more basic wish to exclude the divine or supernatural?²² On such a view, the critique of the use of the deus ex machina in Chapter 15 is a rejection of any significant involvement of the gods in the dramatic action itself,²³ and the description of the god's (Apollo's) sending of Orestes in the Iphigenia in Tauris as "outside the plot" (Chapter 17) similarly reflects a rejection of divine agency.²⁴

In fact, Aristotle has little to say about the role of the gods in tragedy, and this omission has often disturbed readers.²⁵ But it is not to the use of the gods per se that Aristotle objects in Chapter 15. Medea's appearance in her divine chariot at the end of Euripides' play is a surprise, and most modern readers would see it as a typical and successful instance of Euripides' playing with the audience's expectations. But it is a surprise for which the drama hardly prepares us, and it is for this reason that Aristotle disapproves of it. There are other instances of divine intervention in tragedy whose abruptness would be likely to meet with Aristotle's disapproval, most notably the sudden arrival of Apollo in Euripides' Orestes to solve what appears on the human level to be a hopeless conflict. But there seems to be no reason in Aristotelian terms why the gods may not be used in the action when their arrival is called for by a plot in which they have previously had some involvement (Hermes in Aeschylus' Prometheus or Artemis in Euripides' Hippolytus) or when they are fully involved in the action throughout (Apollo and Athena in Aeschylus' Eumenides or Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchae). Nor does the fact that Aristotle cites "a standard mode of involvement of a deity in the action of the Iliad"²⁶ necessarily suggest that he is critical of all divine involvement; Athena's intervention in Iliad II, like the intervention of some gods ex machina, is a case of divine interference in something that would otherwise have gone in an entirely different direction; without her, the Greeks would have returned home "contary to fate."²⁷ What Aristotle objects to, in tragedy or in epic, is divine action that is inadequately prepared for and inadequately connected with the rest of the action.²⁸

Nor is the exclusion from the plot of Orestes' reason for coming to the land of the Taurians (Chapter 17) a rejection of the divine. It is difficult to be certain of Aristotle's grounds for this exclusion, but it can be plausibly argued that he sees Orestes' arrival but not the reason for it as integral to what is essentially Iphigenia's story. Halliwell rejects the view that what lies behind Orestes' arrival is excluded simply as inessential to the plot, arguing that if that were so, his arrival would appear to constitute just the sort of "unintelligible coincidence" to which Aristotle objects elsewhere.²⁹ But the omission of Orestes' motive at this stage does not mean that the play in its final form would lack such a motive (any more than the omission of names means the characters would lack names); it means simply that the particular motive given in Euripides' version is not essential to the plot as outlined. The mention of Polyidus' version of the recognition makes it plain that although this general outline is based on Euripides' play, it is not identical with it, and one can easily conceive of a play in which Orestes comes for quite other reasons.³⁰

Furthermore, although there is no mention of the god's playing an active role in the story of Iphigenia as given here,³¹ the comment that she disappeared in a manner mysterious (adēlōs) to those who had sacrificed her suggests an action that cannot be explained in human terms and that is nonetheless counted as part of the story or plot as outlined. It is therefore difficult to make the presence or absence of the supernatural the feature that distinguishes Iphigenia's arrival (inside the plot) from Orestes' arrival (outside the plot). Finally, in the outline of the Odyssey that follows Aristotle seems to have no problem with the role of Poseidon.

Under certain conditions Aristotle even welcomes the presence in tragedy of action inexplicable in human terms. At 9.1452al-12 he singles out for praise events which cause amazement because they occur contrary to expectation but in a causal sequence (para tēn doxan di' allēla). As an example (taken not from tragedy but from life) he cites the statue of Mitys, which killed Mitys' killer by falling on him. Such events, says Aristotle, do not seem to come about by chance. Note, then, that here is something which is praiseworthy in part because it follows in likely sequence (or at least in the semblance of likely sequence) even though it cannot be explained in purely human terms.³² Unexpected but fitting events in tragedy may well involve the divine, for example in the form of the unexpectedly fulfilled oracle. Compare Aristotle's acceptance of such events—magical but nonetheless logical—with his rejection of Medea's magical but unmotivated departure in a chariot or of Oedipus' ordinary but unlikely ignorance about his predecessor's death; such a comparison serves to support the view that Aristotle really objects not to the supernatural per se but to the unmotivated or unlikely, whether divine or human in origin.³³

In tragedy itself the more magical aspects of divine activity are usually located outside the central action and offstage; such aspects of the divine seem to play a secondary role in tragedy for the tragedians themselves. If, then, Aristotle has some special difficulty with irrational divine action (as opposed to the irrational in general), he may simply be reflecting an exclusion already dominant in tragedy, rather than excluding out of an obstinate secularism what is really central to the genre, that is, the mysterious but somehow ordered role of the gods in the way things are.

But Aristotle does not even seem to have any such special difficulty with the irrational involvement of the gods. Indeed, with the possible exception of Medea's departure ex machina, all the examples Aristotle actually gives of the objectionable alogon have to do with instances of human rather than divine behavior. It is alogon that Oedipus does not know how his predecessor died (Chapters 15, 24), and that Aegeus suddenly appears in Corinth'in Euripides' Medea (Chapter 25),³⁴ but in neither case does Aristotle suggest the involvement of the gods. Aristotle's two remaining examples of dramatic aloga (Chapter 24) are harder to interpret, but no one has suggested that there is anything supernatural about either of them. The reporting of the Pythian games in the Electra is variously read as constituting an anachronism or as entailing an unlikely delay in the news. The case of the man who comes without speaking from Tegea to Mysia seems irrational because of the unlikelihood of someone making such a journey in silence. Nor do the two examples from epic (24.1460all-16, 35-36) have any clear connection with divine activity: the gods are not involved either in Achilles' unassisted pursuit of Hector or in the putting ashore of Odysseus on Ithaca in Odyssey XIII, presumably an alogon because he fails to wake up when the Phaeacians leave him there.³⁵

That Aristotle's own views of the divine are quite different from those of epic and tragedy is no problem; he evidently considers it appropriate to speak of the gods in various ways to suit various contexts. The Rhetoric, for example, reflects traditional views of the gods where other works call them into question.³⁶ And surely poetry can use tradition as rhetoric does; in Chapter 25, Aristotle offers the response "that's what people say" as a defense against those who object to stories about the gods in epic. Indeed, Aristotle uses a traditional view of the gods to justify his explicit approval of one form of divine involvement: the deus ex machina should be used to provide knowledge of past and future, "for we attribute to the gods the capacity to see all things" (15.1454b3-6).³⁷

Chapter 25 provides further evidence for Aristotle's willingness to retain the traditional divine framework in the world of poetry. He twice mentions a way of rationalizing divine activity, but in neither case does the rationalization entail an explanation in human terms: although the gods drink no wine, Ganymede may be said to pour wine for Zeus if we understand this metaphorically (1461a29-31); if we change the accent of a verb, it was the dream of Zeus sent to Agamemnon in Iliad II that lied, not Zeus himself (1461a22).³⁸ These corrections demand not that the gods be explained away but that the world of the gods make sense in itself; as we know, the gods drink nectar, and what Zeus says should be valid.³⁹ The fragmentary evidence for the lost Homeric Problems presents a similar picture.⁴⁰ Aristotle is here concerned with apparent contradictions, factual difficulties, and implausible behavior in the Homeric poems; those problems that have to do with the gods are almost all problems of consistency or probability within the poem or the tradition, not problems with the divine presence per se. Most striking is Aristotle's treatment of one of the relatively rare instances in Greek literature in which a portent involves not merely a significant natural event (two eagles chase a pregnant hare, an eagle carries off and drops a snake) but an event which is supernatural; at Iliad II.308-319 Odysseus recalls an omen in which a snake eats eight nestlings and their mother and then is turned to stone by Zeus. What troubles Aristotle about this passage is not any implausibility in the magical transformation itself, but rather Calchas' failure to interpret that transformation, apparently the most portentous feature of the omen.⁴¹

Aristotle, then, does not actually treat the role of the gods as central to tragedy (or epic) in his own account, but neither does his account require a rejection of their role. Discourse about the gods is for Greek tragedy and Greek culture generally the language in which human experience and human action are expressed; Aristotle can allow tragedy to continue speaking that language while himself analyzing experience and action in his own terms.

V

What then is the significance of the irrational or alogon? Aristotle's examples suggest for the most part either a kind of commonsense implausibility (the unlikely ignorance of Oedipus, the surprising behavior of the other Greeks during the pursuit of Hector) or a lack of dramatic connectedness (the coincidental arrival of Aegeus, the unprepared for departure of Medea).⁴²

Whatever we make of the alogon, however, we must ask the further question: why does it make sense in Aristotle's view for the poet to locate what is irrational outside the drama? Part of the explanation is suggested by the contrast between epic and drama at Poetics 24.1460a1-17, where epic is said to admit the irrational more readily than drama because in epic we do not actually see the action; the restraint of the other Greeks as Achilles chases Hector would be ridiculous if the action were actually performed on stage, but its absurdity escapes notice in epic. Compare the importance given to the visual in tragedy at 17.1455a2-29, where it is said that in constructing plots the playwright must be careful to place what is happening before his eyes; otherwise he may find himself introducing into the action contradictions that would escape the notice of someone who did not see them but will bother an audience when actually staged.

In both passages, some problem goes undetected (the verb is lanthanein) by one who does not actually see the action staged. Aristotle is here stressing not our diminished emotional response to the merely heard, but our weakened apprehension of it. We are not only less bothered by oddities in action we do not see; since such action is less striking, we actually fail to notice what is odd about it.

Something irrational or inexplicable may then affect us more strongly when we actually see it, and will therefore be more acceptable if it is ouside the drama and thus (as in epic) only heard.⁴³ But this explanation does not work equally well for all cases of the alogon. The pursuit of Hector and the landing of Odysseus might well be more implausible on a stage. It is harder to see how Aegeus' arrival in the Medea (whether it is understood as coincidental and thus unmotivated by the plot, or as absurdly off-course and thus offensive to common sense) would be less implausible if not seen. And consider Aristotle's main example of something irrational outside the drama, that is, Oedipus' ignorance of how Laius died. Why would the general implausibility of this ignorance—is it likely that a man would accept a recently vacated throne without asking how his predecessor died?—be more or less striking depending on whether or not the audience saw presented the failure to seek information? And what exactly would it mean to see such a failure?

What is important in this case is not so much the difference between what is seen and what is merely heard per se as the related difference (one Aristotle stresses in Chapter 3) between what is enacted and what is merely narrated. The crucial feature of that difference for our purposes is this: what is narrated can be more selective than what is enacted, and therefore omissions in narrative may be less noticeable. This comment may at first seem surprising, since in some sense tragedy is more selective than epic, constrained by limitations of size and staging. Once one has chosen to enact an event, however, that enactment cannot be elliptical in the way that narrative can.⁴⁴ If Oedipus tells us he never knew how Laius died, he need say nothing about the context that reveals this surprising lack. But if Sophocles had actually portrayed a Theban delegation offering the throne to Oedipus and explaining that their own king had recently died, the absence of an important question between the offer and the acceptance would be more apparent.

Indeed, since throughout the Poetics Aristotle stresses the fact that it is the structure of events in likely or necessary sequence that is chiefly productive of audience response, the difference between the fully enacted and the merely narrated should be as important for audience response as the difference between what is seen and what is heard. If what is seen is more striking than what is heard, and therefore commands our powers of attention more fully, what is enacted is less selective than what is narrated, and therefore makes a greater demand on our powers of connection.

But several times in the Poetics Aristotle seeks to diminish the importance for tragedy of what we see, that is of staging or enactment. He tells us in Chapter 6 that the effect (dunamis) of tragedy may be achieved without staging (1450b 18-20); later he comments that in the work of the best poets, pity and fear result from the plot and not from the spectacle (14.1453bl-7), and that if the plot is well constructed we should be able to experience pity and fear, even without seeing the play, by hearing of its events. Finally, although spectacle may make our pleasures especially vivid, that very vividness can be achieved by a reading as well as by enactment (26.1460al5-18). What is important, then, for audience response is not the difference between what is enacted and what is narrated, but the difference between what is written to be enacted and what is narrated or written to be narrated. Such an account receives support especially from the passage in Chapter 26, in which the spectacle seems to create an effect that is somehow present even when the play is only read.

Even this distinction, however, is not without difficulties in the context of the Poetics as a whole. Epic is a narrative genre, yet Aristotle makes it clear that epic has almost as strong an effect on the audience as tragedy, and that its events too must be connected; in epic too the irrational is undesirable, even if it is more acceptable there than in tragedy.

What is implicit here is that the more closely narrative approximates to drama (a desideratum suggested by Aristotle's praise of Homer in Chapter 24 for being more mimetic in the dramatic sense than other epic poets), that is, the more vivid and more detailed its narration, the more it will evoke the same response as drama, and the less freely it will admit of the marvellous and the irrational or absurd. If the audience heard Oedipus (or a narrator) telling the story of his taking the throne as fully as he tells the story of his encounter with Laius, it might well have as much difficulty with the narration as with an enacted version. Perhaps, then, the crucial limitation on what is outside, the limitation that makes it an appropriate home for the irrational, is not that it is narrated so much as how it is narrated.

The view that an audience is similarly affected by what is actually seen, what is made vivid, and what is narrated in a complete way gains support from Aristotle's Rhetoric.⁴⁵ In Rhetoric 11.8.1386a34 Aristotle describes speakers who arouse pity by using gesture, voice, and dress to place events before the hearers' eyes either as just having happened or as about to happen. Here, clearly, the greater effect is due to a kind of dramatic enactment, and the events described are placed before the eyes in a sense only once removed from the literal.

Elsewhere in the treatise, however, Aristotle suggests that a certain kind of verbal presentation alone may have the same effect; in III. 11.141 1b24, he explains that things may be placed before the eyes by expressions that signify actuality—in particular by metaphors that animate what they describe. Here, the bringing before the eyes, itself metaphorical, results from vivid narration rather than from dramatic mimesis. That what is important is not 'so much that something is narrated as how it is narrated is further supported by a third passage from the Rhetoric. In III. 16.1417al2-16, in the course of a discussion of narrative in oratory, Aristotle recommends that one should relate past events as having happened (pepragmena) unless their being described as happening (prattomena) will effect either pity or fear.⁴⁶ As an example, he cites the long story Odysseus tells to Alcinous in Odyssey IX-XII, which as told to Penelope in Odyssey XXIII takes only sixty lines; the point is the contrast between the first version, told at length as happening, and the second, told in summary form as having happened. Aristotle supplies two more examples which are instances of the summary ("having happened") form; one of these is the unknown Phayllus' treatment of the epic cycle (presumably an epitome), the other, tellingly for our purposes, the prologue to an Oeneus plausibly identified as Euripides'.⁴⁷ A story told as happening has a considerably different effect from one told as completed, and it is the former that elicits the traditional tragic response.

Aristotle's location of the alogon outside the drama, then, has to do not with his supposed discomfort with traditional beliefs but with the much more fundamental issue of audience response, and suggests that an audience will understand and react differently to what is outside the drama for reasons that have to do with its mode of narration.

Let me sum up what has been argued so far: (1) By "things outside the drama" Aristotle means events that precede or follow the drama and are reported in it. He does not count all such events as outside the plot; indeed, he makes it explicit that although what is outside the drama may be merely background, it may also be a part of the plot. It seems likely that something with a strong causal connection to the staged action (such as the murder of Laius by Oedipus) is outside the drama but inside the plot, whereas something that Aristotle takes to be incidental to the central praxis (the command that brings Orestes to the land of the Taurians) is outside the plot as well. (2) The identification of certain things as outside derives partly from a general concern in the Poetics with boundedness and selection. (3) This identification also reflects an interest in the different effect on the audience of what is outside the drama. Partly because it is reported and not seen, and partly because it is less fully represented than events that are enacted, what is outside the drama not only affects the audience less strongly⁴⁸ but (we may conclude from Aristotle's treatment of the alogon) elicits its critical attention less fully than the drama itself. Since, however, vivid and detailed narration (a story told "as happening") may approximate the effect of dramatic enactment, it seems possible that Aristotle would not identify as outside the drama something so recounted.

VI

Tragedy must frequently refer to earlier or later events without staging them, and some of these events are crucial to the plot. The tragedians exploit this generic constraints as they do others, developing the relationship of staged drama to larger myth in a variety of ways. Aristotle's scattered remarks on what is outside the drama reflect the basic fact of tragedy's reference to past and future events but do not constitute anything like a theory of this rich feature of tragic narrative; they are neither comprehensive nor analytic. Nevertheless, his outside/inside distinction both takes account of a central problem for the tragedians and reflects a significant variation in the way they deal with events not staged, a variation which has implications for audience response.

Consider the range of references in extant tragedy to action before or after the events staged. In the parados of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the chorus recount events from ten years before the play with a declared confidence in the nearly magical efficacy of their own singing. They are selective in the manner characteristic of Greek lyric, but can surely be said to bring what they tell before our eyes. Here is how they tell the sacrifice of Iphigenia:

Her supplications and her cries of father
were nothing, nor the child's lamentation
to kings passioned for battle.
The father prayed, called to his men to lift her
with strength of hand swept in her robes aloft
and prone above the altar, as you might lift
a goat for sacrifice, with guards
against the lips' sweet edge, to check
the curse cried on the house of Atreus
by force of bit and speech drowned in
  strength.

Pouring then to the ground her saffron mantle
she struck the sacrificers with
the eyes' arrows of pity,
lovely as in a painted scene, and striving
to speak—as many times
at the kind festive table of her father
she had sung, and in the clear voice of a
  stainless maiden
with love had graced the song
of worship when the third cup was poured
(227-247).⁴⁹

Such vivid and detailed treatment of past events may be found in Sophocles and Euripides as well, but is less common. More typical of Euripides are the explanatory prologue and the parting speech by a deus ex machina, where what is told tends to take the form not of detailed descriptive narrative but of summary. Such summary rarely has the rhetorical effect of placing something before our eyes, confining itself to giving us the facts as facts, though not necessarily without emotion. Here again is the sacrifice of Iphigenia, this time from the Iphigenia in Tauris, narrated in the opening speech by Iphigenia herself:

I came to Aulis, wretched 1. I was caught and
  held
above the death-pyre, and the sword was ready
  to kill.
But Artemis stole me away, and gave to the
  Achaians
a fawn in my place, and carried me through
  the bright air
to this land of the Taurians, and settled me
  here
(26-30).⁵⁰

Such prologue speeches seem clear instances of what Aristotle calls in the Rhetoric presenting things as having happened (pepragmena) rather than as happening (prattomena); recall that one of the examples given there was in fact a prologue, probably from a Euripidean play. The flatness and sameness of such speeches was an object of mockery already in antiquity; witness Aristophanes' parody in the Frogs (1198-1247).

A third mode of reference to past and future is particularly characteristic of Sophocles. What preceded the action of the play is introduced gradually and piecemeal, in the form of references to the past by various characters rather than full-scale accounts; the future too is more often alluded to that narrated in full. References to past and future are often so conditioned by a given character's perspective and by the particular discursive context that our sense of past and future is incomplete. In Sophocles' Electra the story of Iphigenia's sacrifice is told in typically Sophoclean fashion, introduced by characters as a briefly told part of their versions of events. Thus, Clytemnestra, defending her killing of Agamemnon as just, says:

This father of yours, your constant
  lamentation,
Alone of all the Greeks was bold enough
To sacrifice your sister to the gods.
The pain he suffered over her was not the
  same
As mine—he only sowed, while I gave birth
(530 ff.).⁵¹

Electra's response tells more of the background to the sacrifice (558-574), but still as part of an argument, and the sacrifice itself is mentioned as briefly as possible (573); again, as with the Euripidean example above, the events are clearly related as having happened, not as happening.

In contrast with Aeschylus, then, both Euripides and Sophocles—although in different ways, indeed almost opposite ways—frame what is beyond the play as being distinctively outside. So it is not surprising that Aristotle's examples of what is outside include the Euripidean and the Sophoclean modes but not the Aeschylean. This may be because in general Aristotle pays less attention to Aeschylus than to the other two tragedians, but it may also have to do with the way in which Aeschylus presents the material in question. His more visually detailed accounts of preceding events seem likely to evoke the sort of audience response evoked by dramatic action; they bear as well some resemblance to messenger speeches, which Aristotle nowhere treats as instances, of what is outside. Where Aristotle does count as outside the drama an event told with some detail and vividness, namely Oedipus' killing of his father,⁵² he excludes this event from the drama almost as an afterthought (14.1454a29-32); his treatment displays ambivalence about the place of this deed in the tragedy, an ambivalence that has to do not only with its centrality in the plot but also with the dramatic force with which it is narrated.

Varied modes of narration make events seem to varying degrees a part of the drama, and evoke varying responses from the audience. A tragedian may exploit the possibility of variation in order to evoke different responses from the audience; Aeschylus' treatment of Iphigenia's sacrifice will again serve as an example.

In the Agamemnon, the sacrifice of Iphigenia is recounted in detailed and vivid terms up until the moment when the chorus can no longer bear to describe what happened; there are a number of further references to Iphigenia in the text (1415-1418, 1432, 1525-1529, 1555-1559) and she is kept carefully on our mind by Clytemnestra's words. In the next play of the trilogy, however, the Choephori, Iphigenia is never mentioned by name; the clearest reference to her and to her story occurs in line 242, when Electra, explaining to Orestes that she feels for him all the love she might have given the rest of her family speaks of her "sister who was pitilessly sacrificed." The story is here, in epitome, and so is a judgment on the story. But there is no effort to concentrate the audience's attention on that story, to make the audience understand it as part of a sequence of events, or to bring it vividly before their eyes. The sacrifice which was in all but staging a part of the drama of the Agamemnon is here clearly outside the drama.

Iphigenia's presence is still further diminished in the last play of the trilogy; her sacrifice is not mentioned at all, and seems to be quite outside the plot. Of course, given that the three plays form a trilogy, to be seen together, the audience will recall the events (seen and narrated) of the earlier plays while watching the later. But each of the plays has a unity of its own, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the fact that we obviously retain knowledge from the earlier plays only makes more interesting the fact that the shift in treatment of the Iphigenia story changes the degree to which we respond to it as part of the play we are currently watching. What is important is not so much what we know or even how recently we thought of it as the way that knowledge is structured and called to mind. The play itself shows us what we are to treat, by a selective act of attention, as truly part of the play.

A final question: to what extent do the extant tragedies follow Aristotle's rule that the alogon should if possible be kept outside the drama?⁵³ Are there many examples of irrational or absurd events in what is merely narrated? In fact, and perhaps this is Aristotle's point, I have not noticed many—except the ones that Euripides shows us. For although it is true that Euripides does to some extent seem to locate the irrational or unlikely outside the drama (in prologue, in epilogue, or in choral reminiscence) he seems positively to call our attention to it, deliberately arousing the skepticism, discomfort or laughter that Aristotle implies would naturally be weakest in us at such times. "Seems" is too mild; sometimes Euripides explicitly draws our attention to implausibilities in the background story: could a woman be born from an egg, or the sun go backwards in response to human wrong?⁵⁴ Nor is it only in what is outside the drama that Euripides reveals and questions the alogon; the case that most seems to fit Aristotle's description of the irrational is virtually flung in our face by Euripides in his famous parody of the Aeschylean scene in which Electra becomes aware of Orestes' presence by a series of unlikely signs.⁵⁵ But this may only be to say that Euripides is the most important pre-Aristotelian critic of tragedy.⁵⁶

VII

I conclude by setting these comments about the limits or boundaries of drama in a larger context—outside the drama in quite another sense. It is a commonplace of contemporary narratology that we seek to give narrative structures to our lives as well as to our fictions, and that our desire for bounded narratives is in part a way of dealing with our inability to be fully aware of either our own beginning or our own end, let alone what precedes and follows.⁵⁷ Greek culture generally, and tragedy in particular, show a concern both with escaping the boundedness of the human perspective (consider the role of oracles) and with establishing boundaries (consider the role of oracles). And the wisdom of Herodotus' Solon, that we may call no one happy until death, suggests that we require to know the boundaries within which we are to judge the worth of human life.⁵⁸

In Nicomachean Ethics I.11, in the context of his discussion of happiness, Aristotle turns to a discussion of Solon's view, and asks whether happiness can be affected by things that happen after death. After noting that we are in any case variously affected by different things that happen to us, he concludes that the happiness of the dead may be affected by the experiences of their descendants, but not very much, and makes the following comparison: it makes more difference whether suffering happens to the living or the dead than whether terrible events are presupposed by the drama or presented onstage (1101a32 ff.).

This analogy suggests the way in which we give varying qualities of attention and significance to what is within and without boundaries, and points not only to Aristotle's own concern with boundaries but to our human preoccupation with boundaries in literature and in life. I am not suggesting that these connections are explicit either here or in the Poetics, but that here as elsewhere Aristotle's eye for similitude—the eye not only of the philosopher, but of the dream interpreter and the maker of metaphors⁵⁹—points us beyond the connection he sees to connections that perhaps for him remain outside the range of vision.⁶⁰

Notes

¹ Preface to Roderick Hudson, rpt. in The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (1907; New York, 1962), 6. D. W. Lucas (comm., Aristotle's Poetics, Oxford, 1968) cites James ad 1450b24. The text of the Poetics used here is R. Kassel's Oxford Classical Text (Oxford, 1965).

² F. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford, 1966). See also B. H. Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago, 1968), D. P. Fowler, "First Thoughts on Closure: Problems and Prospects," Materiali e discussioni per I'analisi dei testi classici 22 (1989) 75-122, and bibliography cited in Fowler.

³ Cf. Lucas, Aristotle's Poetics (ad 1451b26). It is unclear exactly how well known the stories were. Aristotle himself suggests that the main lines of the narrative must be respected (14.1453b22-26) but notes also that one need not base tragedies only on traditional stories, since "even what is familiar is familiar only to a few but pleases everyone" (9.1451b25-26). Audience knowledge probably varied considerably, with the basic facts of certain central stories known to most though not all.

⁴ Cf. also 9.145lb37-39 on playwrights who stretch the plot by adding episodes. In the course of the Poetics Aristotle discusses size from three different perspectives: the length of time a work takes in performance (7.1451a6-9), the length of the play or epic itself on what might now be called the level of discourse (passages cited here and 7.1451a9-15), and the length of the story the play or epic tells (5.1449b l2-16, 7.1451al l-15). Epic is said in Chapter 5 to be, like early tragedy, unlimited in time; given the comparison with tragedy and what is said later, this clearly refers only. to the duration of the story, that is, of the events narrated. On the relation of these different levels see esp. R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot, trans. and comm., Aristote, La Poétique (Paris, 1980) ad. loc.

⁵ Recent developments in narrative theory have led to heightened interest in the narratological aspects of the Poetics. See for example E. Downing, "Hoion Psyche: An Essay on Aristotle's Muthos," Classical Antiquity 3 (1984) 164-178; Dupont-Roc and Lallot, Aristote, La Poétique; S. Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics (London and Chapel Hill, 1986); S. Halliwell, trans. and comm., The Poetics of Aristotle (London and Chapel Hill, 1987); P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago and London, 1984), trans. of Temps et Récit, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1983). Halliwell's treatment of Aristotle's "outside the drama" is the most thorough to date.

⁶ See esp. Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics, and The Poetics of Aristotle.

⁷ The variation in terminology is rendered doubly problematic by textual debate. Kassel's text gives the manuscript reading, and brackets (following W. von Christ) the words most frequently left out (dia tina aitian exō tou katholou). If we accept this emendation, we read that the fact that the god commanded the brother to come, and the purpose of his doing so, are outside the plot or story (exō tou muthou); if we leave the text unemended (so most recently R. Janko, Aristotle, Poetics I with the Tractatus Coislinianus); (Indianapolis, 1987) and Dupont-Roc and Lallot, Aristote, La Poétique), we learn in addition that the god gave his command for some reason outside the general sketch (exō tou katholou). Depending on our choice, either the general background of Orestes' arrival is outside the muthos, or that general background is outside the muthos and contains an element which is outside the general outline as well. Those who try to distinguish the katholou from the muthos run into difficulties not so much because of theoretical problems as because it is difficult to see the cause of the oracle as having a different status from the oracle itself and the purpose of the god in sending Orestes. The duplication of "outside" in one speech is awkward, even for the Poetics; stranger still is that the "outside" apparently more relevant to the subject here under discussion—"outside the general outline"—is the one introduced parenthetically. See Dupont-Roc and Lallot and Janko ad loc. for the most interesting attempts at interpreting the ms. text.

⁸ This section of Chapter 15 appears to deal with some concerns of plot that intrude briefly on a larger discussion of character; on the problem of the passage's relation to what proceeds see the various commentators ad loc. Aristotle is here using the term apo mechanes (literally, "from the crane") in an extended sense, to cover other sorts of (sudden) divine intervention as well (see Lucas, Aristotle's Poetics ad loc., and cf. Else, Aristotle's Poetics (Ann Arbor, MI, 1967), 470-473 for a different view).

⁹ The topic here is ostensibly epic, but the constraint seems to apply to either genre, and Aristotle's examples are mostly drawn from tragedy, in which he thinks the presence of the alogon is more problematic.

¹⁰ See on this point esp. Janko, Aristotle Poetics I and Dupont-Roc and Lallot, Aristote, La Poetique. The term mutheuma occurs nowhere else in the Poétics, and all the other examples of its use seem to be considerably later. The word is sometimes taken (by Lucas, Aristotle's Poetics, for example, ad loc.) as the equivalent of muthos (see E. Downing), "Hoion Psyche: An Essay on Aristotle's Muthos," Classical Antiquity 3 (1984) 164-178).

¹¹ E.g. Laius' rape of Pelops' son Chrysippus, long before the events of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, or Heracles' fatal second marriage, to Deianeira, after the events of Euripides' Heracles.

¹² See Euripides' play, 1-66, 77-93; even if we envision a somewhat different play, the way Aristotle speaks of Iphigenia's past suggests that it is not actually enacted.

¹³ O. B. Hardison (Aristotle's Poetics, trans. L. Golden, 2nd edn (Tallahassee, FL 1981), ad loc.), takes logos (1455a34, rendered as "argument") as the larger, more inclusive term, and muthos as the less inclusive; his discussion is interesting but not altogether convincing. For a different reason for Aristotle's exclusion of Orestes' past, see below on Else, Aristotle: Poetics and Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics.

¹⁴ Again, see Downing, "Hoion Psychê."

¹⁵ See (for example) G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1980), trans. of "Discours du récit," Figures III (Paris, 1972), and T. Todorov, "Les catégories du recit litteraire," Communications 8 (1966) 125-151. For a helpful general account of issues and terminology in narrative theory, see S. Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978).

¹⁶ Cf. Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle, ad Ch. 18; he sees Aristotle's distinction as even more problematic than I have suggested here. On his response to this question, see below.

¹⁷ Dupont-Roc and Lallot, Aristote, La Poetique (ad 1450b37) cite Politics VII, 1326a33 ff. and its limitations on the best city-state, Metaphysics 1078a36 on the beauty of mathematical entities in virtue of order, symmetry and limitation (to horismenon). Cf. also Aristotle on exō tou pragmatos in the Rhetoric and his complex and interesting discussion of what is exo tou ouranou in De Caelo I, 9.

¹⁸ Cf. 24.1459bl8-20. When Iphigenia speaks the prologue to Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, she tells us, among other things, both where the plot begins (with her sacrifice, according to Aristotle's outline in Ch. 17) and where the play begins (many years later, the morning after her dream about Orestes).

¹⁹ What is made known may be the general topic (as in the epic examples given), but it may also be information from the past, as in Sophocles' "my father was Polybus" (Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus 774, not the prologue in any usual sense).

²⁰ Cf. also Poetics 23.1459al7-21 on the importance of wholeness and unity for the production of the proper pleasure (oikeia hedone) of a work.

²¹ There is one further reference to the alogon at 25.1461a35-1461b9, a description of critics who unreasonably make assumptions about what an author means and then criticize him for it; this passage may serve as a caution to Aristotle's own critics.

²² See esp. Else (Aristotle: Poetics, ad Chs. 15, 17; cf. also 306), Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics (231-234 and Ch. 7 passim), and Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle (11-15 and passim); cf. also Dupont-Roc and Lallot, Aristote, La Poétique (ad 15.1454b8). Halliwell gives a particular prominence to the association between the inside/outside distinction and the alogon; in fact, for him this association points to the orientation that explains Aristotle's insistence on a separation between outside and inside. Aristotle's emphasis on tragedy's connectedness in terms of purely human action means that he cannot accept the irrational elements that are a part of the role of the divine in tragedy. Halliwell's wording is telling: Aristotle "deliberately reinterprets the possibilities of tragic drama so as to make the religious ideas of myth marginal [my italics] to its purpose" (The Poetics of Aristotle, 12).

²³ For Halliwell it is the inclusion of an example from epic that "indicates what we might anyway infer from the repeated insistence on the principles of coherent plot-construction: that Aristotle's ideal of dramatic action does not readily permit the intervention of divine agency in any form, except "outside the plot"—which is where, we note, the "irrational" in general belongs" (Aristotle's Poetics 231, and cf. The Poetics of Aristotle, ad loc.). Else, Aristotle: Poetics (463-475) reads Aulidi for Iliadi, thus replacing a reference to epic with another to Euripides, but he too reads the passage as "a warning that the gods are not to be tolerated in the tragic action in any organic capacity" (475).

²⁴ Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, 232 and cf. his comm., The Poetics of Aristotle ad loc.; Else, Aristotle: Poetics ad loc., 507-508.

²⁵ See Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics, p. 233 n. 42 for bibliography on this issue.

²⁶ Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics, p. 231.

²⁷Iliad II.155. Athena wrenches the story back to its required and traditional sequence much as Apollo does in Euripides' Orestes or Heracles in Sophocles' Philoctetes. Aristotle seems to have commented on this intervention in his Homeric Problems (see V. Rose, Aristotelis Qui Ferebantur Librorum Fragmenta (Leipzig, 1886), fr. 142) but it is not altogether clear how much of the discussion in this fragment and its larger context is Aristotle's own; see n. 41 below.

²⁸ Cf. Hardison, Aristotle's Poetics, ad loc.

²⁹ That is, it would be an alogon like the arrival of Aegeus in the Medea (25.1461b21); Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics 232.

³⁰ Cf. Janko. Aristotle, Poetics I., ad loc.; cf. also Else, Aristotle: Poetics, ad loc. (508) on the significance of understanding "the priestess's brother" here rather than "Orestes."

³¹ Aristotle mentions the custom of sacrificing strangers to the (unnamed) goddess. Halliwell notes the absence from this outline of Athena's concluding intervention (Aristotle's Poetics, 232).

³² Halliwell (The Poetics of Aristotle, ad Ch. 9, 111) sees the sort of thing described here as still falling short of the "deep and final inscrutability" tragedy in fact involves. But although Aristotle shows no particular interest in the deep and inscrutable action of the gods we also have no clear evidence that he objects to such action.

³³ Cf. Hardison, Aristotle's Poetics, ad Ch. 15, 209-210.

³⁴ This is apparently what Aristotle has in mind when he says "as Euripides uses Aegeus."

³⁵ Some scholars (cf. Hardison, Aristotle's Poetics; Else, Aristotle: Poetics; and Lucas, Aristotle's Poetics, ad loc.) suggest that the irrational elements in the casting ashore include the Phaeacian's magical boat and Poseidon's turning that boat to stone. But the former is not at all stressed in the actual putting ashore (the Phaeacians row in), and the latter is a separate matter.

³⁶ Compare (for example) Rhetoric II.22.7-8 and NE 1.12.3 on praising the gods; cf. also Rhetoric II.5.21 and IL. 17.6.

³⁷ For Halliwell's view of the necessary limitations on Aristotle's acceptance of traditional religion in poetry, see Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics, 233.

³⁸ See Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics, ad loc. on this interpretation of Aristotle's highly elliptical remark.

³⁹ The gods are not of course consistent truth-tellers in Greek tradition but there is at least as strong a stress on the force of Zeus' word as on divine deception.

⁴⁰ See Rose, Aristotelis qui Ferebantur Librorum Fragmenta (Leipzig, 1886), frs. 142-179.

⁴¹ Fr. 145; cf. frs. 142, 149, 153, 163, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178. Fr. 175 is the sole example of allegorical treatment; the rationalization Janko (Aristotle: Poetics I, ad 1454b2) cites as part of fr. 142 (not actually included in Rose's fragment, but drawn from its context) may or may not be Aristotle's; see W. Dindorf, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 1877), 91-92, and H. Schrader, Porphyrii Quaestionum Homericarum ad Iliadem Pertinentium Reliquias (Leipzig, 1880), 24-25.

⁴² It is sometimes hard to tell into which category a particular example falls: some commentators think that Aegeus' arrival is an alogon because it is not motivated within the plot, others that it is simply unlikely that a man should return from Delphi to Athens by way of Corinth.

⁴³ Cf. (somewhat differently) Dupont-Roc and Lallot, Aristote, La Poetique, ad 15.1454b8.

⁴⁴ Cf. S. Chatman on the difference between novel and film narrative (Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978)).

⁴⁵ In the relevant passages from the Rhetoric Aristotle stresses the emotional response, but it is clear that he is also talking about the degree to which (and the way in which) the audience really takes in what is heard.

⁴⁶ See the Cope and Sandys edition for this interpretation. The proper translation of this passage is much debated; I have seen no version that makes better sense than Cópe's (E. M. Cope and J. E. Sandys, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1877)).

⁴⁷ On these examples see Cope and Sandys, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, and M. Dufour and A. Wartelle, Aristote, Rhetorique, Vol. 3, (Paris, 1973) ad loc.

⁴⁸ See Lucas, Aristotle's Poetics, ad 1454b7.

⁴⁹ Trans. R. Lattimore, The Complete Greek Tragedies, eds. D. Grene and R. Lattimore, Vol. I (Chicago, 1953).

⁵⁰ Trans. R. Lattimore, Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (London, 1974).

⁵¹ Trans. W. Sale, Electra by Sophocles (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973).

⁵² Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus 800-813; the terrifying restraint of the narration gives this factual account its own vividness.

⁵³ Modern scholars share Aristotle's concern with the inexplicable or irrational as a problem in the drama itself—witness the endless articles on the double burial in the Antigone, and other such matters—but often suggest (the opposite of Aristotle's view) that it is precisely when such irrational actions are staged that an audience is least likely to notice such problems; what is peculiar will go unnoticed as the drama holds our attention.

⁵⁴ See Helen 257-259, 17-21, Electra 737-745; cf. also Bacchae 286-297.

⁵⁵Electra 518-544.

⁵⁶ Euripides allows his characters to be more critical of unlikely divine action than Aristotle is; he often problematizes these criticisms at the same time, as for example in the Heracles, where the hero expresses at 1340-1346 disbelief in the sort of divine misbehavior which is part of this very play's background, calling the tales of such misbehavior "wretched stories of the poets."

⁵⁷ See for example P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York, 1984), esp. his discussion (in Chs. 1, 4) of W. Benjamin's "The Storyteller [Der Erzahler]," Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York, 1969). Cf. also Kermode, The Sense of an Ending.

⁵⁸ Herodotus, Histories 1.32.

⁵⁹ See Poetics 22.1459a5-8, On Divination in Sleep 464b6-7.

⁶⁰ This paper is based on one presented at the Princeton Colloquium on Classical Philosophy in December 1989; earlier versions of small parts of it were presented at the Comparative Drama Conference at the University of Florida at Gainesville and at an NEH Summer Institute on Language in the Greek Enlightenment. I am grateful to Mark Griffith, my commentator at Princeton, and to the other participants in these occasions for their comments and questions.