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This book is primarily for students and is designed to be used in tandem with the ancient Greek text or with any of the dozens of available translations generally titled The Poetics that cost a few dollars each or that are free on the Internet. The Primer provides the basic findings of Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition: The Real Role of Literature, Catharsis, Music and Dance in the POETICS(hereafter ADMC) in less than 1/3 the number of words of ADMC.
The book has additional scholarship that goes beyond ADMC, in two appendices. The first gives the conditions for properly understanding how catharsis (and pity and fear) might have been used by Aristotle in some sub-type of tragedy (as listed in Chapter 18) or in comedy. The second examines the ancient evidence for how Aristotle’s books were damaged because they were hidden in a trench (in Scepsis, Northwest Turkey) for decades in fear of the book-acquiring kings of Pergamon and why the catharsis-clause was wrongly interpolated by an editor after Apellicon bought the whole, damaged library and poorly restored the texts to more quickly sell the books back in Athens or in Rome. Also, Appendix 2 shows, e.g., that there is not one reference to catharsis and the so-called Poetics (which has not poem) for over 1300 years, until Avicenna, in Persia, but he could not make sense of the word and ignores it in his commentary. Yet before Avicenna, al-Farabi (872-950) in Baghdad for the first time ever speaks of tragedy in our treatise and says its goal (correctly) is pleasure, not catharsis!
Being directed to the specialists in the field, ADMC is necessarily rigorous and lengthy and is therefore unsuitable for undergraduates or anyone else wishing a mere introduction to Aristotle’s Dramatics. Scott argues that this is a better title than Poetics, not only because there is not one poem in the treatise but because Aristotle only focusses primarily on the two major dramatic musical arts of his day, tragedy and comedy, with the only other art examined, epic, being said to be a subset of tragedy. According to Chapter 6, tragedy necessarily has plot, character, reasoning, language, music-dance, and spectacle. (Plot could be accomplished with mere acting or dancing for Aristotle and is not the same as language.)
By including comments on the 26 chapters of Aristotle’s treatise, with the emphasis on correcting both the standard mis-interpretation of seven core Greek terms and the ten chapters that have been badly misunderstood, the Primer allows the student, or even a classicist wanting an easy introduction to these issues, to grasp the basics of Aristotle’s treatise in the way that he intended. For example, the core term poiesis has been universally translated in this context until now as poetry, which was only coined by the sophist Gorgias when Aristotle’s mentor Plato was a boy. For the first time ever, Scott hypothesizes that Aristotle actually employs the term as Plato himself explains via Diotima in the The Symposium as ‘music’ [in the Greek sense] and verse. Aristotle adds plot as another necessary condition of the term, making it a technical word in his Lyceum, and seeing this allows us to resolve easily many heretofore perennial dilemmas in the treatise. By understanding this change of meaning, readers can simply and usually treat poiesis/ poetry as musical verse or dramatic musical composition anytime they read the word in typical translations and arrive at the better interpretation.
