ABSTRACT
This book deals with philosophical questions about one type of drama. The appeal of drama is first and foremost aesthetic. Philosophical drama, if it is good drama, is in the first place art, and only in the second place is it philosophy. It is significant that the old dispute in aesthetics about instruction and delight has been pretty well confined to the purpose of literature. There is a reason for rejecting Croce’s absolute distinction between art and philosophy. Socrates is said to have brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth, from astronomy to the life of man. There are more specific reasons why Plato should think of himself as taking the place of Aeschylus. It was once fashionable to call Thucydides a scientific historian as contrasted with the unsystematic and supposedly credulous Herodotus. Tragic drama was the moral philosophy of fifth-century Athens.
