form and colour are used as means by some, who (whether by
art or constant practice) imitate and portray many things by their aid,
and the voice is used by others; so also in the above-mentioned group
of arts, the means with them as a whole are rhythm, language, and
harmony--used, however, either singly or in certain combinations. A
combination of rhythm and harmony alone is the means in flute-playing
and lyre-playing, and any other arts there may be of the same
description, e.g. imitative piping. Rhythm alone, without harmony, is
the means in the dancer's imitations; for even he, by the rhythms of his
attitudes, may represent men's characters, as well as what they do
and suffer. There is further an art which imitates by language alone,
without harmony, in prose or in verse, and if in verse, either in some
one or in a plurality of metres. This form of imitation is to this
day without a name. We have no common name for a mime of Sophron or
Xenarchus and a Socratic Conversation; and we should still be without
one even if the imitation in the two instances were in trimeters or
elegiacs or some other kind of verse--though it is the way with people
to tack on 'poet' to the name of a metre, and talk of elegiac-poets
and epic-poets, thinking that they call them poets not by reason of the
imitative nature of their work, but indiscriminately by reason of the
metre they write in. Even if a theory of medicine or physical philosophy
be put forth in a metrical form, it is usual to describe the writer in
this way; Homer and Empedocles, however, have really nothing in common
apart from their metre; so that, if the one is to be called a poet, the
other should be termed a physicist rather than a poet. We should be in
the same position also, if the imitation in these instances were in all
the metres, like the _Centaur_ (a rhapsody in a medley of all metres) of
Chaeremon; and Chaeremon one has to recognize as a poet. So much, then,
as to these arts. There are, lastly, certain other arts, which combine
all the means enumerated, rhythm, melody, and verse, e.g. Dithyrambic
and Nomic poetry, Tragedy and Comedy; with this difference, however,
that the three kinds of means are in some of them all employed together,
and in others brought in separately, one after the other. These elements
of difference in the above arts I term the means of their imitation.

2

II. The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are
neces