grammar,
not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.
An instance is provided by Aristotle's famous saying that the typical
tragic hero is one who falls from high state or fame, not through vice
or depravity, but by some great _hamartia_. _Hamartia_ means originally
a 'bad shot' or 'error', but is currently used for 'offence' or 'sin'.
Aristotle clearly means that the typical hero is a great man with
'something wrong' in his life or character; but I think it is a mistake
of method to argue whether he means 'an intellectual error' or 'a moral
flaw'. The word is not so precise.

Similarly, when Aristotle says that a deed of strife or disaster is more
tragic when it occurs 'amid affections' or 'among people who love each
other', no doubt the phrase, as Aristotle's own examples show, would
primarily suggest to a Greek feuds between near relations. Yet some of
the meaning is lost if one translates simply 'within the family'.

There is another series of obscurities or confusions in the _Poetics_
which, unless I am mistaken, arises from the fact that Aristotle was
writing at a time when the great age of Greek tragedy was long past, and
was using language formed in previous generations. The words and phrases
remained in the tradition, but the forms of art and activity which they
denoted had sometimes changed in the interval. If we date the _Poetics_
about the year 330 B.C., as seems probable, that is more than two
hundred years after the first tragedy of Thespis was produced in Athens,
and more than seventy after the death of the last great masters of
the tragic stage. When we remember that a training in music and poetry
formed a prominent part of the education of every wellborn Athenian,
we cannot be surprised at finding in Aristotle, and to a less extent in
Plato, considerable traces of a tradition of technical language and even
of aesthetic theory.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived
so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a
history. But no writer, certainly no ancient writer, is always vigilant.
Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for
granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by
them. Thus there seem to be cases where he has been affected in his
conceptions of fifth-century tragedy by the practice of his own day,
when the only living form of drama was the New Comedy.

For exam