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.

Similarly if a man makes his representation by combining all the metres, as Chaeremon did when he wrote his rhapsody , a medley of all the metres, he too should be given the name of poet.Chaeremon was a tragedian and rhapsodist. The was apparently an experiment which might be classed as either drama or epic. Cf. Aristot. Poet. 24.11. On this point the distinctions thus made may suffice.

There are certain arts which employ all the means which I have mentioned, such as rhythm and tune and metre—dithyrambic and nomic poetry,The traditional definition is that the Dithyramb was sung to a flute accompaniment by a chorus in honor of Dionysus; and that the Nome was a solo sung to a harp accompaniment in honor of Apollo, but it is not clear that Aristotle regarded the Dithyramb as restricted to the worship of Dionysus. Timotheus’s dithyramb mentioned in Aristot. Poet. 15.8 cannot have been Dionysiac. But there is good evidence to show that the dithyramb was primarily associated with Dionysus. for example, and tragedy too and comedy. The difference here is that some use all these at once, others use now one now another.

These differences then in the various arts I call the means of representation.

Since living personsLiterally men doing or experiencing something. are the objects of representation, these must necessarily be either good men or inferior—thus only are characters normally distinguished, since ethical differences depend upon vice and virtue—that is to say either better than ourselves or worse or much what we are. It is the same with painters.