7
This can be seen also in actual practice. For at first poets accepted any plots, but to-day the best tragedies are written about a few families—Alcmaeon for instance and Oedipus and Orestes and Meleager and Thyestes and Telephus and all the others whom it befell to suffer or inflict terrible disasters.
8
Judged then by the theory of the art, the bestThis is modified by 19 in the following chapter, where he finds an even better formula for the tragic effect. tragedy is of this construction.
9
Those critics are therefore wrong who charge Euripides with doing this in his tragedies, and say that many of his end in misfortune.
10
That is, as we have shown, correct. And there is very good evidence of this, for on the stage and in competitions such plays appear the most tragic of all, if they are successful, and even if Euripides is in other respects a bad manager,Against Euripides Aristotle makes the following criticisms: (1)his choruses are often irrelevant; (2)the character of the heroine in his Iphigeneia in Tauris is inconsistent; (3)in the Medea the deliberate killing of the children is ineffective and the play is inartistically ended by the machina; (4)the character of Menelaus in the Orestes is needlessly depraved; (5)Melanippe is too philosophical for a woman. yet he is certainly the most tragic of the poets.
11
Next in order comes the structure which some put first, that which has a double issue, like the Odyssey, and ends in opposite ways for the good characters and the bad.
