8
For we can find no common term to apply to the mimes of Sophron and XenarchusSophron and Xenarchus, said to he father and son, lived in Syracuse, the elder a contemporary of Euripides. They wrote mimes, i.e., simple and usually farcical sketches of familiar incidents, similar to the mimes of Herondas and the fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, but in prose. There was a tradition that their mimes suggested to Plato the use of dialogue. and to the Socratic dialogues:
9
nor again supposing a poet were to make his representation in iambics or elegiacs or any other such metre—except that people attach the word poet(maker)to the name of the metre and speak of elegiac poets and of others as epic poets.
10
Thus they do not call them poets in virtue of their representation but apply the name indiscriminately in virtue of the metre.
11
For if people publish medical or scientific treatises in metre the custom is to call them poets. But Homer and EmpedoclesEmpedocles (floruit 445 B.C.) expressed his philosophical and religious teaching in hexameter verse, to which Aristotle elsewhere attributes genuine value as poetry, but it is here excluded from the ranks of poetry because the object is definitely. have nothing in common except the metre, so that it would be proper to call the one a poet and the other not a poet but a scientist.
