(iii) The third point is expressed in the concluding phrase of Aristotle's definition of tragedy (_Poetics_, vi. 2). 'Tragedy', he says, 'is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude ... through pity and fear effecting the proper καθαρσις {katharsis} or purgation, of these emotions.' (Butcher's translation.) This word καθαρσις {katharsis}--purgation, purification, cleansing, discharge--has been the subject of interminable controversy among scholars, but any one acquainted with Ancient Greek literature who has lived through the war will understand what it means. Certainly the writer found, in the worst moments of the war, that passages from the classics--some line of Aeschylus or Lucretius or Virgil, or the sense of some speech in Thucydides, or the impression of some mood of bitterness or serenity in a dialogue of Plato--would come into his mind and give him relief. These men had travelled along the road on which our feet were set; they had travelled it farther than we, travelled it to the end; and the wisdom of greater experience and the poignancy of greater suffering than ours was expressed in the beauty of their words. In the writer's personal experience that relief was obtained from acquaintance with Greek civilization as expressed in Greek literature. It put one in communication with a different civilization from our own--with people who had experienced all and more than we had experienced, and who were now at peace beyond the world of time and change. Καθαρσις {Katharsis}, then, is the emotional value which is peculiar to the study of a different civilization, and which one cannot get, at any rate with the same intensity, by the study of his own.