ABSTRACT
Before Aristotle the Sophist Gorgias had narrowed the gap between poetry and rhetoric; in the dialogue called Gorgias Plato’s Socrates seizes on the notion that both are arts of persuasion to deprecate them both as ignoble appeals to feeling rather than thought. For Aristotle poetry is a thing of the spirit, and some aspects of its techne cannot be learned: but a great many can, and Aristotle discusses them. From Aristotle onwards Greek and Roman critics, writing about literature without Aristotle’s genius, perhaps without much reference to Aristotle’s texts, have little to contribute to theory other than conventional arguments about the relative importance of nature and art, physis and techne. For the rest, criticism is assessment of the merits of the writers discussed, mostly in terms of the right or wrong use of the figures of speech. The debate about nature and art carries with it no questioning of the principle of mimesis; and since techne can be learned, to the imitation of nature is added the imitation of the ancients. Interesting as the criticism of the four centuries or so after Aristotle may be for the student of classical literature, for the history of phantasia it is the exceptional writers, expressing ideas diverging from the mainstream of Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman critical comment, who begin to signpost the road from mimesis to phantasia.
