Abstract

In the seventh and eighth chapters of Poetics, Aristotle tries to derive several general requirements for the tragic mythos. Mythos should have the unity and the wholeness. In this paper, the contributor will re-evaluate the concept of the mythos and try to show that it is not the "combination of the incidents" performed before the audience, but that imitated through a work. To use Russian Formalists' terms, Aristotle's mythos is fabular in that it contains actions outside the drama. This interpretation of the tragic mythos sheds new light on the meanings and dramatic functions of two important but cumbersome terms discussed in Chapter 17, namely, logos katholon and epeisodion. Logos katholon is neither a kind of Ur-logos nor it cannot be identified with the itself. Rather, it is a chronological structure of the essential events abstracted from the somewhat concrete mythos for the sake of the determination of the scenes performed before the audience. Epeisodion, then, means the sjuzhetization of the fabula regardless of whether each epeisodion belongs to the mythos or is taken from the other elements of tragedy that concern the 'object of imitation', namely, ethos and dianoia