It consists of sublime verse, as opposed to the lighter forms of elegy (used for love poems) ( Amores 3.1.39 –42).Īnother influential grammarian of the fourth century, Aelius Donatus, considers Homer the father of tragedy in the Iliad and the father of comedy in the Odyssey. –17 c.e.), too, has style in mind when he says that tragedy is the gravest form of writing ( Tristia 2.381). The complaints of tragedy should not readily be mixed with the privata carmina (domestic verse) of comedy.

He does not define the forms and deals mainly with questions of style, that is, tone and diction. He explains the meaning of 'tragedy' as 'goat-song,' so called because the winning players were rewarded with a cheap goat. Meanwhile, Horace (65 –8 b.c.e.) had discussed the genres in his Ars poetica. They can be rendered as follows: 'Tragedy deals with the fortunes of heroes in adversity,' and 'Comedy treats of private deeds with no threat to life.' Diomedes adds that tragedies usually move from joy to sadness, comedies the opposite. 287 b.c.e.) also dealt with tragedy and comedy, and his definitions were cited by the Latin grammarian Diomedes (4th century c.e.). Effective tragedies need not end in disaster he gives highest praise to the happily resolved Iphigenia among the Taurians of Sophocles, and, among narrative poems (since staging is not essential to tragedy), he considers the Odyssey to have a tragic story as well as the Iliad, though he notes at one point that the effects of such a double-plotted story (good end for the good, bad for the bad) are more appropriate to comedy.Īristotle's treatment of comedy has not survived, and his analysis of tragedy was not cited in antiquity. Tragedies aimed at arousing and then purging emotions such as pity and fear. Aristotle (384 –322 b.c.e.) said that tragedies dealt with spoudaia (serious matters) and comedies with phaulika (trivial subjects). Tragedies are first heard of, as stage plays, in the Dionysiac celebrations in Athens at the turn of the fifth century b.c.e., and comedies appear as a contrasting type of play a century later. Various ideas have been associated with the term tragedy and the term comedy over the centuries, including tragedy that is not tragic, in the sense of 'sad' or 'disastrous,' and comedy that is not comic, in the modern prevalent meaning of 'amusing.' The modern English meaning of comedy as a synonym for humor is largely a twentieth-century development.

Comedy tragedy pumkin artoon