1. La Rue Van Hook, ‘The Encomium on Helen by Gorgias,’ Classical Weekly (February 15, 1913) 123. Compare Gorgias’ Helen, ch. 10, with Plato, Republic 598d: ‘When anyone reports to us of someone, that he has met a man who knows all the crafts and everything else that men severally know, and that there is nothing that he does not know more exactly () than anybody else, our tacit rejoinder must be that he is a simple fellow, who apparently has met a magician or sleight-of-hand man and imitator and has been deceived by him (γó ) into belief that he is all-wise, because of his own inability to put to the proof and distinguish knowledge, ignorance, and imitation ().’
2. See Else , 437. For the diametrically opposed conclusion based on some very similar presuppositions see Alexandre Niçev, L'Enigme de la catharsis tragique dans Aristote (Sofia 1970) 57–58 and 69.
3. Gerald Else in Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge 1957) emphasizes the relationship in Aristotelian thought between the prudential and the productive activities (73): ‘Again and again we shall find it useful, in interpreting other passages, to remember that poetry imitates only men of action and has nothing to do with the life of thought as such; that if it is “philosophical” it must be so in another sense; and that because poetry is a portrayal of the life of action the closest affinities with the Poetics will turn up in the other works that deal with the “practical” sphere: the Rhetoric, the Politics, and especially the Ethics.’ See also Crane R. S. , The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto 1953), ch. 2, ‘Poetic Structure in the Language of Aristotle,’ 39–79.
4. Rhetoric 2.5.15: ‘So that whenever it is preferable that the audience should feel afraid, it is necessary to make them think they are likely to suffer, by reminding them that others greater than they have suffered, and showing that their equals are suffering or have suffered, and that at the hands of those from whom they did not expect it, in such a manner and at times when they did not think it likely.’ Compare this with Poetics 9.11, where tragedy is described as a complete action causing fear and pity particularly when the incidents are unexpected ( δóξaν).
5. Poetics 9.6: ‘In tragedy, on the other hand, they keep to real names. The reason is that what is possible carries conviction. If a thing has not happened, we do not yet believe in its possibility, but what has happened is obviously possible. Had it been impossible, it would not have happened.’