It remains for me to say a word to those who ask how far this great poetry of the Greeks was reduced to theory, among a nation who loved to reduce everything to theory. The climax of this tendency is shown in the work of Aristotle, as we shall see in another connection, and Aristotle has either written, or caused to be written, among his multifarious tracts, an essay called the _Poetic_, which is mainly, so far as we have it, an analysis of the meaning of Tragic poetry. There are, no doubt, some very important utterances in this tract, notably the famous definition of tragedy, upon which so many volumes have been written. But, on the whole, I know no poorer and more jejune exposition of a great subject, so much so that I cannot but suspect that it is one of the many outlying researches that he entrusted to his pupils. Here is the kind of criticism to which I take exception as unworthy of Aristotle: In the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ Euripides has given us one distinct type in his wonderful gallery of heroines, all facing death for the real or supposed public good, either freely or under the coercion of cowardly or cruel princes. This Iphigenia is a young fresh creature just blooming into life, and she hears the first news of her fate with an outburst of passionate tears, and of supplication against the cruel sentence. Yet presently, when she finds her doom sealed, she resigns herself with the splendid dignity of an inborn gentlewoman, and so adds greatly to the “pity and the terror” of the tragedy. The author of the _Poetic_ says the character is not consistently drawn, and therefore faulty. What a contemptible judgment! It is only to be matched by the observation of the worthless pedant who tells us in his _scholium_ that the Medea of Euripides had no business to shed tears over her children, as she was a hard and cruel character and about to murder them. So again this Aristotle says that poetry is essentially different from prose, and gives as an example that the work of Herodotus would not cease to be history even were it cast in metrical form. This observation misses the deeper distinction of poetic and prosaic thought, which does not depend on metrical form. There are many passages in Herodotus which despite their prose form are essentially poetry, as we shall see in the next lecture.