Poetics (4.9-4.13)

Before Homer we cannot indeed name any such poem, though there were probably many satirical poets,

but starting from Homer, there is, for instance, his Margites[*] and other similar poems. For these the iambic metre was fittingly introduced and that is why it is still called iambic, because it was the metre in which they lampooned each other.[*]

Of the ancients some wrote heroic verse and some iambic.

And just as Homer was a supreme poet in the serious style, since he alone made his representations not only good but also dramatic, so, too, he was the first to mark out the main lines of comedy, since he made his drama not out of personal satire but out of the laughable as such. His Margites indeed provides an analogy: as are the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies,

When tragedy and comedy came to light, poets were drawn by their natural bent towards one or the other. Some became writers of comedies instead of lampoons, the others produced tragedies instead of epics; the reason being that the former is in each case a higher kind of art and has greater value.

To consider whether tragedy is fully developed by now in all its various species or not, and to criticize it both in itself and in relation to the stage, that is another question.