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This book is primarily for students and is designed to be used in tandem with the ancient Greek text or with any of the dozens of available translations generally titled The Poetics that cost a few dollars each or that are free on the Internet. The Primer provides the basic findings of Aristotle on Dramatic Musical Composition: The Real Role of Literature, Catharsis, Music and Dance in the POETICS (hereafter ADMC) in less than 1/3 the number of words of ADMC.The book has additional scholarship that goes beyond ADMC, in two appendices. The first gives the conditions for properly understanding how catharsis (and pity and fear) might have been used by Aristotle in some sub-type of tragedy (as listed in Chapter 18) or in comedy. The second examines the ancient evidence for how Aristotle's books were damaged because they were hidden in a trench (in Scepsis, Northwest Turkey) for decades in fear of the book-acquiring kings of Pergamon and why the catharsis-clause was wrongly interpolated by an editor after Apellicon bought the whole, damaged library and poorly restored the texts to more quickly sell the books back in Athens or in Rome. Also, Appendix 2 shows, e.g., that there is not one reference to catharsis and the so-called Poetics (which has not poem) for over 1300 years, until Avicenna, in Persia, but he could not make sense of the word and ignores it in his commentary. Yet before Avicenna, al-Fáráb¿ (872-950) in Baghdad for the first time ever speaks of tragedy in our treatise and says its goal (correctly) is pleasure, not catharsis!Being directed to the specialists in the field, ADMC is necessarily rigorous and lengthy and is therefore unsuitable for undergraduates or anyone else wishing a mere introduction to Aristotle's Dramatics. Scott argues that this is a better title than Poetics, not only because there is not one poem in the treatise but because Aristotle only focusses primarily on the two major dramatic musical arts of his day, tragedy and comedy, with the only other art examined, epic, being said to be a subset of tragedy. According to Chapter 6, tragedy necessarily has plot, character, reasoning, language, music-dance, and spectacle. (Plot could be accomplished with mere acting or dancing for Aristotle and is not the same as language.)By including comments on the 26 chapters of Aristotle's treatise, with the emphasis on correcting both the standard mis-interpretation of seven core Greek terms and the ten chapters that have been badly misunderstood, the Primer allows the student, or even a classicist wanting an easy introduction to these issues, to grasp the basics of Aristotle's treatise in the way that he intended. For example, the core term poi¿sis has been universally translated in this context until now as "poetry," which was only coined by the sophist Gorgias when Aristotle's mentor Plato was a boy. For the first time ever, Scott hypothesizes that Aristotle actually employs the term as Plato himself explains via Diotima in the The Symposium as "'music' [in the Greek sense] and verse." Aristotle adds plot as another necessary condition of the term, making it a technical word in his Lyceum, and seeing this allows us to resolve easily many heretofore perennial dilemmas in the treatise. By understanding this change of meaning, readers can simply and usually treat poi¿sis/"poetry" as "musical verse" or "dramatic musical composition" anytime they read the word in typical translations and arrive at the better interpretation.

This book revolutionizes the 1000-year old tradition that stems from the first commentaries on the Poetics by the Arabic scholars. (No commentary exists from antiquity or Byzantine times.) Starting with those scholars, Aristotle's treatise has always been thought to be about poetic-literary theory, with tragedy being its paradigm. Scott demonstrates, however, that Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE) employs poiesis not in the way universally assumed until now, as "poetry," which the sophist Gorgias only coined in 415 BCE. Rather, Aristotle follows Diotima, who in the Symposium of Plato (c. 424-347) explains poiesis as mousike kai metra (typically "'music' and verses" but better "music-dance and verses"). One reason Aristotle employs the Diotiman and not the Gorgian sense of poiesis is that not one poem exists in the so-called "Poetics"; another reason is that the definition of tragedy includes music and dance (rhuthmos).Scott subsequently demonstrates that Aristotle considers tragedy not to be a species of literature but one of dramatic musical theater that also requires dance and spectacle. Chapter 2 includes a revised version of Scott's "The Poetics of Performance" (Cambridge University Press, 1999).The book also supplements his arguments of "Purging the Poetics" (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2003), reprinted here as Chapter 5, providing the additional reasons why Aristotle could not have written the clause with the words catharsis, pity, and fear in the definition of tragedy, as a number of internationally known ancient Greek specialists have already been accepting. As part of his reasons, Scott shows that, despite their recent, very admirable paleography, Leonardo Tarán and Dmitri Gutas too often mangle the philosophical interpretations and even some of the philology regarding the "musical" terms, especially when they try to sweep the problems of catharsis under the rug. Also, Tarán and Gutas never even recognize the Diotiman sense of poiesis that Aristotle uses, nor do they recognize the philosophical contradictions with keeping the katharsis-clause.All of this allows a fresh and better reading of the treatise that even with its fundamental misinterpretations has been a major part of the foundation of Western literary, dramatic and artistic theory.UPDATES & ERRATA: www.epspress.com/ADMCupdates.htmlContentsVolume 1 includes: Plato's meanings of poiesis as "music-dance and verse" and his use of rhuthmos often not as "rhythm" but "dance"; the importance of dance in the state for Plato; Aristotle's agreement with his mentor on the meaning of the musical terms and the requirement of dance not only in the Poetics but in the Politics, along with the proof that Aristotle considers tragedy to be a species of dramatic "musical" art, not literature. 364 pages. List: Hardcover $68; Softcover $48.Volume 1 is available at www.amazon.com/dp/0999704923Volume 2 (this book) includes the issues of catharsis, pity, and fear, and a complete rebuttal of the only attempted rigorous reply (by Stephen Halliwell in Between Ecstasy and Truth, 2011) to "Purging the Poetics." This volume also contains: Aristotle's response to Plato without catharsis; comedy; whether or not the principles of "musical" dramatic theater can be applied to art forms like literature and cinema; the history of the Poetics with regards to the two fundamental misconceptions; Bibliography; and Index for both volumes.