How Poetics drew on Medea
A documented line of influence: Aristotle demonstrably engaged Euripides’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Medea
Euripides · 431 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Poetics
Aristotle · c. 335 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
6/10
On Poetics’s page
- When Aristotle warns that a plot's unraveling must arise from the plot itself and not from a deus ex machina, his example is Medea's escape by god-sent chariot
- Read Euripides first and the Poetics stops being abstract — you've seen the very ending Aristotle is faulting
- He returns to Medea for the child-murder too, as a deed done knowingly; the play is one of the concrete cases the theory is reasoning from
On Medea’s page
- Aristotle puts Medea on his dissecting table — he names the play by name when he lays down the rules of plot
- Its god-sent chariot ending is his prime example of a resolution wrongly forced by a deus ex machina, a fault he warns every dramatist against
- He cites Medea's child-murder again as a deed done knowingly — Medea is one of the case studies the Poetics is built on