SOURCE: "The Tragic Action and Character," in Aristotle's Poetics, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964, pp. 82-99.

[In the following essay, written in 1956, House analyzes the features of dramatic characters which Aristotle discusses in Poetics. In particular, House focuses on the tragic hero and on the concept of hamartia, noting that the understanding ofhamartia as the hero's "tragic flaw" is misleading.]

In the definition of Tragedy in ch. vi, Bywater's version makes Aristotle say that Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is "serious"; this is also Butcher's translation at that point. But in fact the Greek word here in the definition [spoudaīos] is the same as that used at the beginning of ch. ii (p. 25) in the sentence:

The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men [spoudaīos] or bad.

The word for the good men in ch. ii is the same as the word translated "serious" in ch. vi. Is this difference justified?

Many people have argued for and defended the translation "serious" in ch. vi; and I have been among them in the past, and must now recant. The reason for wanting to defend it is obvious. If it can be made out that "serious" is right (as meaning "having importance", "being of import", "having weight", and so on), Aristotle's general theory is rescued from some of its heavier moralistic implications.

But there is no doubt that the whole range of parallel and contrasting words as they occur both in the Poetics and in the Ethics makes it unjustifiable to isolate this use of the term [spoudaīos] in ch. vi: it does mean "good", ethically good: and in the Poetics itself the clearest passage to bring in support of this view is that at the beginning of ch. xv (p. 55):

In the Characters there are four points to aim at.First and foremost, that they shall be good.

The word here is not [spoudaīos] but a word which has an unequivocal sense of "ethically good" [khrēstos]. Aristotle is here speaking of "character" in the sense I explained it in the last lecture, as an ethical nature revealed only in act, in the desiring of an end and in the choosing of the means towards it. The goodness he here requires in the moral purpose is inseparably linked to the goodness of the whole action.

The word [spoudaīos] in ch. ii must be taken as synonymous with this word [khrēstos] in ch. xv; and it would be too glaring an inconsistency for [spoudaīos] in ch. vi to be used differently.

In ch. xv (pp. 55-8) Aristotle says that in treating dramatic "characters" (the word does not mean "personages" but characters in the sense I spoke of in the last lecture) there are four points to aim at; and every one of them raises important questions. They are:

1. that the characters should be "good".…
2. that they should be "appropriate".…
3. that they should be "like reality".…
4. that they should be "consistent".…

I shall take these four points in tum, as applying to the characters in general, referring, as necessary, to the special case of the tragic hero as I go along, and shall then discuss at the end what Aristotle says about the hero alone.

1. "Goodness" of Character

This predominant and main requirement of "goodness", which seems at first sight rather strange, is essential to Aristotle's whole theory because it is the foundation of that initial sympathy in spectator or reader without which the tragic emotions cannot be roused or the tragic pleasure ultimately conveyed. Aristotle assumes in his spectators a normally balanced moral attitude, by which they cannot give their sympathies to one who is "depraved" or "odious"; and sympathy is the very basis of the whole tragic pleasure. In particular, the special kind of sympathy which is pity. The bad man, Aristotle says in ch. xiii (p. 50), falling from happiness to misery arouses some kind of human feeling in us, but not pity.

Also, when he comes to details of plot, he says (ch. xiv, p. 53) that the most tragic situations arise between friends or between blood-relations, that is between those in whom are found the affections and loyalties which characterise the good. In such situations there is the maximum possibility of pity.

But does Aristotle mean that all characters in Tragedy should be equally good, and that interplay of character as between good and bad is ruled out? He has no explicit statement about this, but his answer is by implication absolutely plain.

It is plain, both from ch. xv (p. 56) when he speaks of the badness of character of Menelaus in the Orestes as being "not required", and also from ch. xxv (p. 92) when, again using the example of Menelaus, he says there is "no possible apology" for "depravity of character" when it is not necessary and no use is made of it, that he admits that badness may be necessary in certain tragedies. In both chapters the words for badness are extreme words … meaning out-and-out badness, real baseness, depravity, wickedness: they are not intermediate words meaning absence of perfection or anything like that.

The action of the play as a whole should be a "good" one (i.e., it should portray efforts to bring about a "good" result), and the personages setting on foot the main action necessarily therefore are "good": but in so far as this main action requires it, bad characters, even depraved and wicked characters, may occur. The Creon of Oedipus at Colonus is not ruled out; nor is Iago.¹

Nothing is further from Aristotle's mind than the recommendation of a negative or fugitive or cloistered virtue. Not only is his whole ethical theory a theory of activity, but the very word [spoudaīos] implies a zealous and energetic goodness. [This is doubtful, even if the adjective is derived from [spoudē], zeal.]

Some forms of Hebraic and Christian morality have emphasised negative virtue, especially in the avoidance of "sin"; but Aristotle's good man is not good unless he is desiring specific, positive, good ends and working towards their attainment.

This suggests another reason why, for Aristotle, the tragic hero was to be "not pre-eminently virtuous and just", but something less than that. The only explicit reason he gives in the Poetics for this decision (ch. xiii, p. 50) is that the entirely good man passing from happiness to misery "is not fear-inspiring or piteous, but simply odious to us"; he rejects such a character, in effect, because his suffering offends our sense of justice. But taking his theory as a whole it necessarily involves another reason. The perfect or nearly perfect man would be one whose desires were so trained and controlled, whose intellect also was so habituated to the right calculation of means and the making of the right practical inferences, that he would formulate to himself ends more immediately in his power. The gap between the desired end and what is in his power here and now would tend to close; right action would tend to become more and more immediate and spontaneous; the sphere of deliberation would be more and more limited; and in the ideal situation the opportunity for the dramatic display of action would disappear.

The insistence on "goodness" has no objectionably moralistic implications; it is quite free from the taint of direct didacticism. And though the word [spoudaīos] in ch. vi should not be translated "serious", it certainly involves the conception of seriousness. A tragedy is for Aristotle essentially a play in which great moral issues are involved—matters of the greatest possible importance to human life: and these cannot be made plain except in characters who are basically and mainly good. An evil man has already a bent or habit of evil; and if this kind of action altogether controls a play, it is either, if seriously treated, merely horrible, or, if not seriously treated, the play is a comedy, and we are made to laugh at his evil and not be shocked by it.

Aristotle would certainly rule out, as not being tragedies, plays of policy in which the leading character is a calculating and unscrupulous person of a Machiavellian type, plays like The Jew of Malta or The Massacre at Paris, in which there is not even any suggestion of ultimate benefit to the state to justify villainy.² He would scarcely have understood the phrases "the Hero as Villain" and "the Villain as Hero". The required initial sympathy would be absent.

2. Appropriateness of Character

The second point is that the characters should be "appropriate" … Bywater in his edition glosses this word by saying that there should in the individual character be "nothing at variance with that of the class to which the individual belongs". F. L. Lucas takes this even further by his rendering of the word "true to type", and he then goes on to say that "a modern dramatist would be very moderately flattered by being told that his characters were absolutely typical" (Tragedy, p. 111). This is making a point by overstatement, by a gradual edging further and further away from what Aristotle actually says.

There is no doubt that Lucas is edging in the direction of what many later writers took Aristotle to mean: and he himself quotes an extreme example of its application in Thomas Rymer's saying

that lago is a badly drawn character because soldiers are notoriously an honest class of men.

This is a very sensitive point in the whole interpretation of the Poetics; one about which it is easy to be intellectually dishonest. I hope that, at least, I have left no doubt in your minds about my own bias: for I argued at very considerable length in the last chapter that Aristotle's insistence on the importance of plot is to be understood as an attempt to guarantee the individuality of character. My interest in the word "appropriate" is to clear Aristotle of the charge that he ultimately reduces all characterisation to the mere presentation of types.

There is no word in the Greek at all corresponding to "type". The word translated "appropriate" … is quite fairly so translated; it is an intransitive participle meaning "fitting"; it is used first absolutely with no indication of what the character is to be fitting or appropriate to; and that is where the scope for various interpretation begins. The first example of applying the principle is the broad and very obvious one of the difference between the sexes. I must avoid going off into a digression about the Greek view of women. But it is important to realise that what Aristotle is here talking about (where Bywater translates "a female character") is "a womanly ēthos",³ not just a female personage in a play. However recent analytic psychology may have demonstrated that each sex possesses qualities of the other, which may be found more or less developed, nobody even now pretends that the psychological make-up of the sexes is identical. It may well be possible to create a woman (say like Lady Macbeth) with certain masculine characteristics; but even now it still makes sense to say that if you want to create a womanly woman it is inappropriate to make her a manly woman. We may well think that Aristotle was wrong in calling some specific things unwomanly (such as being cleverly sceptical about the popular idea of monsters, which is the point at issue in the speech that Euripides gave to Melanippe), but it does not therefore follow that there is no sense or meaning in the conception of "womanliness". Classification of human characters is, in some sense, not only justifiable but necessary. Rostagni agrees with Bywater that classification of characters is what Aristotle is talking about, so that we can rule out the idea that he means that characters should be "appropriate" to the traditional accounts of them. The question is, what kind of classification, and how far does he mean it to be carried? The only other example that he gives of something "inappropriate" is a rather obscure one about the "lamentation of Ulysses in the Scylla", a work of the dithyrambic poet Timotheus. The context is not known; but I confess it looks rather like an example which opens up the possibility that Aristotle may have been moving somewhere towards the ground I want to keep him clear of. But even there you can see that there may be some sense in the judgment. If Ulysses was made to speak some desperately sentimental drivel, it might well have been "inappropriate": but, in default of detailed knowledge, the case, I admit, seems to lie on the borderline between EITHER being inappropriate to the traditional accounts of Ulysses, as that he was "wily" or tough, OR being inappropriate to sorme other preconceived conception of the sort of person he ought to be, OR being inconsistent with what Timotheus had shown him to be elsewhere. This third possibility is ruled out by Aristotle's later discussion of "consistency", which is evidently something different from "appropriateness": and I think the reference to the traditional stories as a criterion should be ruled out here also. We are therefore left with the problem of trying to define what preconception of a "class" may have been in Aristotle's mind, such as would govern the dramatic characterisation of women and of Ulysses.

If we consider not merely the narrower context of what Aristotle says about "appropriateness", but also the wider context of the whole chapter in which it occurs, it appears that women, slaves and Ulysses are being used as examples of something of a different sort from what Iphigenia is meant to exemplify. She is being considered at a different level of dramatic individualisation.

Very tentatively indeed I wish to suggest that the controlling conception in Aristotle's mind, in what is plainly a kind of classification, may have been that of "status"—of political and social status, as that was defined by law, by custom, and by function. In Athens, of course, neither women nor slaves had the citizenship, and their position was defined and restricted in countless other ways by law. Ulysses would have a peculiar and clearly defined status in that he was a king.

In all ancient and medieval societies this concept of "status" has been fundamental. Athenian democracy itself was a democracy of adult male citizens only; the right to citizenship was jealously guarded and contested; the lesser rights of those who had not the citizenship were graded and defined by law. Aristotle himself, as a foreigner in Athens, could not be the owner of real property. In medieval Europe the feudal system, much as it varied from time to time and in different countries, was characteristically a system which perpetuated an elaborate hierarchy of status, from king to serf, each status in the hierarchy being related to a social and political function. Medieval political thought hinges on the concept of status. The first polity to be based upon the theoretical rejection of status was the Republic of the United States of America; and France followed. In England, even at the present day, you find surviving relics of status in the monarchy and the House of Lords; in certain legal privileges of hereditary peers; in the fact that a married woman living with her husband does not make an independent income tax return.

In all societies based upon status the positions of slaves, of women and of kings provide marked and extreme examples of the definition of status by law and custom.

The relation of character to status needs consideration in two aspects. Aristotle, with his insistence on practice as the source of character, would certainly have maintained that one brought up in slavery, doing the acts of a slave, would become slavelike if not, in the more pejorative sense, slavish. His theory of the genesis of character would have tended to stabilise a type of character appropriate to the status. One brought up, as he had seen Alexander brought up, as heir to a monarchy would stabilise a habit of command and authority; and so on. In this sense his feeling for "appropriateness" corresponds to the modern belief in the importance of environment. Environment would have a greater formative influence when it was clearly defined by law and daily imposed legal and social restrictions, and would tend more to the production of "types".

Secondly, when the conception of legal status was fundamental to the whole organisation of society, and there was no conception of a society in which it did not play a great part, breaches of what was "appropriate" to any status would have been breaches of the political and social order in the play. There might, of course, be a play about such breaches (and then the violation of appropriateness would, in Aristotle's terminology, be "necessary"), or involving a critique of the social order: but a typical Tragedy does not necessarily, for Aristotle, involve anything of that kind, but does take place within a social order which is familiar and intelligible; and the behaviour of the characters is referred to it.

If I am right in this connection of appropriateness with legal and customary status, it does tend in one way towards the typical; but in another way it tends to clarify the uniqueness and particularity of moral situations: our moral judgments "have more of the stamp of truth on them" when the circumstances are known; and the legal status of a character (e.g., bond or free) is one of the circumstances which have to be known. Also, within each status, there still remains the greatest freedom for individuality of characterisation; all women are not the same, any more than all slaves. In fact we can much better understand from this viewpoint the emphasis which should be given to that remark of Aristotle's (also in this ch. xv, pp. 55-6) which is so startlingly offensive to modern opinion:

Such goodness is possible in every type of personage, even in a woman or a slave, though the one is perhaps an inferior, and the other a wholly worthless being.

In spite of all the accepted legal restrictions of rights, scope and power, in spite of the limitations of status which the whole of society takes for granted, the individual may rise above the inevitable tendency to run true to type. And this involves dramatic treatment too.

3. "Likeness" of Character

The third is to make them like … which is not the same as their being good and appropriate, in our sense of the term.

This is a very difficult criterion to assess and involves large questions of general theory; especially it is difficult in this context because Aristotle gives no example to illustrate what he means. Bywater in his edition takes up the word as it is used farther on, towards the end of ch. xv, in the comparison with portrait-painters. There is no doubt that in that context the word does mean "likeness to the original". But here what Aristotle actually says, in his telegraphic style, is "Third is the being like".… He is masterfully silent in answer to the question "like what?" Bywater prejudices the matter by his addition "like THE reality". The reality: What reality, is the point! His note in his edition makes it plain when he says: "the literary portrait produced by the poet should be 'like the original', i.e., like what the personage in question is in history or legend". This deprives the poet of all his creative freedom and ties him to a quite indefinable examplar, because history and legend are themselves largely the creation of other writers. Butcher here also feels the necessity of answering in his translation the essential question "Like what?" which Aristotle does not answer in his text; but Butcher answers the question in what is to my mind the much saner and more likely way by translating: "Thirdly character must be true to life." Rostagni here in his note goes along with Butcher in saying that he understands Aristotle to mean that the characters should be "natural".

This requirement, of likeness, must also be taken in conjunction with the whole of ch. ii (pp. 25-7) in which Aristotle is differentiating Tragedy from Comedy by the consideration of the types of character shown acting in each. The analogy with portrait-painters comes in here too. He says that characters are either better or worse than ourselves, or just like ourselves: and at the very end of the chapter he says that Comedy makes its personages "worse" and Tragedy makes its personages "better than the men of the present day".

It is clear that "ourselves" and "the men of the present day" are here to be equated. Taken together they represent what is now often summed up in the phrase "the man in the street".

As I tried to show at length in the last lecture, it is impossible to treat character and action, on Aristotle's theory, as separable: they are inextricably interdependent. The action of a tragedy has, as we have also seen, a greater coherence, a greater unity, a more clearly defined end than a slice of real life or a slice of history. To be necessarily fitting to such an action, character also must be modified from the commonplace norm of real life.

The question is how much and in what way is it to be modified, and how is the modification reconcilable with this requirement of "likeness"?

I want for the present to leave that in the form of a question and to return to it in the final lecture, when I shall discuss the general theory of poetry as "imitation".

4. Consistency

Very little need be said about the fourth of these requirements for character; for nobody could seriously dispute that consistency is a basic need. The character must be seen as a whole; development must take place according to intelligible principles. I have already discussed those principles when dealing with probability and necessity—what such-and-such a character will probably or necessarily say or do. And Aristotle properly provides for waywardness of all degrees in the formula "consistently inconsistent" (… homalously anomalous). This, as Twining says, note III, p. 332 (1789); II, 145; (1812), is not concerned with momentary conflicting passions (what we should call emotions), but with "the basis or foundation of a character", which is what I have been calling its habit, bent or tendency. Aristotle is not recommending a dead level, not a flat uniformity, but a living coherence.

5. Hamartia

I have already mentioned two reasons why the tragic hero cannot be perfect:

1. As Aristotle explicitly says, his misfortunes would be odious to us—i.e. offend our sense of justice.
2. By implication his whole theory requires a hero less than perfect in order to allow scope for action at all.

He does not say what kind of moral imperfections he is thinking of: he states the matter negatively only: the hero should be an intermediate kind of personage not pre-eminently virtuous or just.

This brings us to the famous and vexed question of "hamartia" … it is wise to use the word transliterated into English, as "hamartia".

The first thing to grasp about this famous word is that it is not a general inclusive descriptive phrase for those moral shortcomings in which the hero, as already described, is said to fall short of being "pre-eminently virtuous and just". It should be quite plain from the two uses of the word in ch. xiii (p. 50) that Aristotle is quite clearly and deliberately distinguishing the hamartia from these general moral failings:

(a) misfortune … is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment (hamartia)

and again (pp. 50-1):

(b) and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error (hamartia) on his part; the man himself being either such as we have described, or better, not worse, than that.

This second passage shows the emphasis very clearly: if anything the hero is to be better than "the intermediate kind of personage", but still he commits this "hamartia". So little does the word concern his general moral character, that Aristotle attaches it, if anything, to the better man rather than to the worse. A further point, which Butcher feels bound to give weight to, even though it goes rather against the general drift of his argument, is that "great" or "big" … "is not a natural adjective to apply to a mental quality or a flaw in conduct."⁴

A clear warning is needed against the tendency of critics to use Aristotle's phrase "hamartia" as a general inclusive phrase to cover moral faults and failings. "Hamartia" is not a moral state; but a specific error which a man makes or commits.

The phrase "tragic flaw" should be treated with suspicion. I do not know when it was first used, or by whom. It is not an Aristotelian metaphor at all, and though it might be adopted as an accepted technical translation of "hamartia" in the strict and properly limited sense, the fact is that it has not been so adopted, and it is far more commonly used for a characteristic moral failing in an otherwise predominantly good man. Thus, it may be said by some writers to be the "tragic flaw" of Oedipus that he was hasty in temper; of Samson that he was sensually uxorious; of Macbeth that he was ambitious; of Othello that he was proud or jealous—and so on. These things may be true of those characters, and it may be important that they are so; but these things do not constitute the "hamartiai" of those characters in Aristotle's sense.

Bywater and Rostagni agree on this point, and I think I can safely say that all serious modern Aristotelian scholarship agrees with them, that "hamartia" means an error which is derived from "ignorance of some material fact or circumstance."⁵

The main evidence upon which this interpretation is based is to be found in two passages in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, ch. viii, and Book III, ch. i. Talking of the kinds of injury in transactions between man and man, Aristotle says (V, viii) that "those done in ignorance are mistakes when the person acted on, the act, the instrument, or the end that will be attained, is other than the agent supposed".

Aristotle calls "acts done by reason of ignorance of fact" non-voluntary (III, i); a special class lying between acts which are "voluntary" and those which are "involuntary". Such acts share some characteristics of voluntary action because they are derived from a wish for an end and proceed by the processes of deliberation; but they share some characteristics of involuntary action because the ignorance of some particular fact or circumstance produces a result other than that which was expected. Such acts are regretted by the doer, and are proper objects of our pity and pardon.

It is important to realise that the ignorance involved is not ignorance of the end, or a mistake in the kind of end to be aimed at; for that means a voluntary action and a bad one.

It is also most important to realise that Aristotle does not assert or deny anything about the connection of hamartia with moral failings in the hero. He assumes as a matter of course that the hamartia is accompanied by moral imperfections; but it is not itself a moral imperfection, and in the purest tragic situation the suffering hero is not morally to blame.

Now, it is plain, when this theory is understood as involved in the "error" of the tragic hero, that it fits the play King Oedipus like a glove. Oedipus sets in motion voluntarily, with a good end in view, the whole train of action which aims to discover the polluted person and so release Thebes from the plague. But he is ignorant of the circumstance that he has killed his own father; and the discovery of that fact produces a result other than what he expected.

It also fits many more tragedies than its rather dry and technical statement by Aristotle might make it appear: but that does not become quite so plain till we take it in relation to Peripety and Discovery.

6. Peripety

The "hamartia" of the hero so understood is closely and inseparably connected with the "peripety" or reversal and the "discovery", which are the characteristic features of what Aristotle calls a "complex" as distinct from a "simple" plot (chs. x and xi, p. 46).

The action … I call simple, when the change in the hero's fortunes takes place without Peripety or Discovery; and complex, when it involves one or the other, or both.

This makes it quite plain that the peripety is not just the general change in the hero's fortunes which is essential for all tragedy. Even the simple plot involves a radical change from good to bad fortune. "Peripeteia" must not be translated or paraphrased "Reversal of Fortune"; for a reversal of fortune may well happen without it. If it is to be paraphrased at all, the phrase which fits best is "reversal of intention". For that is what it is, from the point of view of the character involved. From the point of view of the spectator or reader it is, in the plot of the play as a whole, a reversal of the direction of the action. As Aristotle himself says at the beginning of ch. xi (p. 46):

A Peripety is the change from one state of things within the play to its opposite of the kind described… in the probable or necessary sequence of events.

Aristotle nowhere says that a peripety can happen only in relation to the hero. No doubt he was thinking that in some of the best tragic plots this was so, and that the hero and others were involved in the sudden swift reversal. But it is worth noting that even in King Oedipus one character was not involved in the reversal. Teiresias all along knew that Oedipus was the guilty man.

Within any tragic plot a minor peripety may occur within the main course of the action, involving primarily some other character than the hero. For instance there is such a subordinate peripety in the Oedipus at Colonus, when Polynices comes to his father in hope of a blessing and gets a curse. The very means that he chooses produce this unexpected result. Aristotle himself gives the example of the messenger in King Oedipus, at the beginning of ch. xi.

In the word peripety is contained the idea of the boomerang or recoil effect of one's own actions, of being hoist with one's own petard, falling into the pit that one has dug for someone else. The action is complex because it moves on two levels, as it appears to the doer and as it really is, and because the cause of the disaster is woven in with the good intentions and right means to achieve them. Aristotle makes a technical term of what had often before been felt from Homer onwards.…

The whole of Rhetoric II, 5, should be read: the idea, though not the word "peripety", underlies much of it.

7. Discovery

The "discovery" is in its essence, as Aristotle quite clearly says (ch. xi, p. 47), "a change from ignorance to knowledge". The recognition of a person, or the discovery of the identity of a person, like the recognition of Orestes by Iphigenia and of Iphigenia by Orestes (mentioned by Aristotle at the end of ch. xi, p. 48), is merely one special kind of this "change from ignorance to knowledge" which is what is meant in general by "discovery". It is rather a pity that in ch. xvi (pp. 58-60), which is entirely given up to discussing the various methods and processes of argument by which "discoveries" may be brought about, nearly all the examples should be examples of the discovery of the identity of persons. For this is merely one vivid and easily intelligible kind. The statement of the general principle in the middle of ch. xi (p. 47)—that it is a "change from ignorance to knowledge"—is of far wider significance, and Aristotle shows this, though in a rather loose way, when he says that it

may happen in a way in reference to inanimate things, even things of a very causal kind; and it is also possible to discover whether someone has done or not done something.

Thus it is intended to include the discovery of whole areas of circumstance, whole states of affairs, about which there was previous ignorance or mistake. Such discoveries may come about, technically, through the recognition of some object or person or some trivial or minor thing; but the total implications of the discovery are not trivial or minor at all; they may include, as Aristotle in his quiet way says in passing, such terrific changes as the change from love to hate or from hate to love.

You will see at once how closely this is linked to the "hamartia" when that is properly understood. The discovery of the truth of the matter is the ghastly wakening from that state of ignorance which is the very essence of "hamartia".

Hamartia, peripety and discovery all hang together in this ideal schematisation of tragic plot.

The common old phrase "getting hold of the wrong end of the stick" may help as an illustration. The hamartia, or error of ignorance, is not to know that you have got hold of the wrong end, or not to know which is the right end or the wrong, or not to know that it is the sort of stick that has a right end and a wrong, and to hit yourself very hard with it as a result.

The "peripety" is a real reversal, a turning of the stick round the opposite way, brought about by force of circumstances or by the action of other characters.

The "discovery" is the realisation of which really is the right end, and of the fact that you had got hold of the wrong one, and also, perhaps, of a whole train of consequences.

Of course such little illustrative analogies must not be pressed into details.

F. L. Lucas in one of the very best parts of his book, Tragedy, discusses the question (pp. 91-105) and I refer you to him in excuse of my rather summary discussion.

Notes

¹ [Later moral ideas, e.g., that goodness consists in trying to do one's duty, must not be read into Aristotle. By "good" he means the habitual possession of one or more of the separate virtues, … such as courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, gentleness, truthfulness, friendliness and even wittiness.… See the list in Sir David Ross, Aristotle, p. 203, and his discussion of goodness of character and the moral virtues, pp. 192-208.]

² Cf U. Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe (London, 1927), p. 90 and notes ad loc.

³ Accepting Bywater's conjecture [gunaikeiō] at 54 a 23.

⁴ Butcher op. cit., p. 319, n. 3.

⁵ Bywater, edn. p. 215. Rostagni writes: "cioè errore proveniente da inconsapevolezza, da ignoranza di qualche fatto o di qualche circostanza: colpa involuntaria". 1st edn., 1927, p. 48; 2nd edn., 1945, p. 71.