ABSTRACT
Aristotle’s treatise on poetry traces the origins of tragedy to the Dionysiac satyr chorus and the associated dithyramb hymns in honour of Dionysos. Tiresias retorts that Dionysos exists as a force of nature, but Pentheus furiously orders that Tiresias’s seat of prophecy be destroyed and that the insidious stranger be sought out and arrested. By pointing to the Dionysiac origin of the tragedy Aristotle puts the emphasis on the pathos of the fragmentation of a primal unit as the defining characteristic of the tragic. The central mutative act in the progression from the mythos of an original unity to the logos of differentiation is a formative violence that, fundamentally, operates in the service of the life instincts. The aim of logos is not to eliminate contradiction but to construct a meaning that embodies it and expresses the fundamental human paradox.
