Plato
It is widely accepted that Plato, the Athenian philosopher,
was born in 428-7 B.C.E and died at the age of eighty or eighty-one at 348-7
B.C.E. When Socrates died, Plato left Athens,
staying first in Megara, but then going on to
several other places, including perhaps Cyrene, Italy, Sicily,
and even Egypt.
Plato returned to Athens
and founded a school, known as the Academy.
(This is where we get our word, “academic.” The Academy got its name from its
location, a grove of trees sacred to the hero Academus—or Hecademus [see D.L.
3.7]—a mile or so outside the Athenian walls.
Supposedly possessed of outstanding intellectual and
artistic ability even from his youth, according to Diogenes, Plato began his
career as a writer of tragedies, but hearing Socrates talk, he wholly abandoned
that path, and even burned a tragedy he had hoped to enter in a dramatic
competition (D.L. 3.5). Whether or not any of these stories is true, there can
be no question of Plato’s mastery of dialogue, characterization, and dramatic
context. He may, indeed, have written some epigrams; of the surviving epigrams
attributed to him in antiquity, some may be genuine.
“And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of
the painter, for he is like him in two ways: first, inasmuch as his creations
have an inferior degree of truth — in this, I say, he is like him; and he is
also like him in being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and
therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State,
because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the
reason. As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good
are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative
poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which
has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time
great and at another small — he is a manufacturer of images and is very far
removed from the truth.”(Republic – Ch-X)
Aristotle
Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient
Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics,
mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine,
dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagirus, a now extinct Greek colony and
seaport on the coast of Thrace.
His father Nichomachus was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia.
“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is
serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language
embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several
kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of
action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the
proper purgation of these emotions.” (Ch – VI)
“But most important of all is the structure of the
incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an
action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is
a mode of action, not a quality.” (Ch – VI)
