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In Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, emotions must be induced in a safe way (through mimesis rather than through real experience) and, because of this, the cathartic relief might make the spectators into better people. The discussion, then, moves from action, characters and the author to the spectator:

However, since (tragedy is the) mimesis not only of a complete action but also (of incidents arousing) fear and pity, and these have the greatest effect on the mind when they happen without control and in consequence of one other (as an effect); for there is more marvel in them than if they happened by accident or by chance…28

The mimesis of action is responsible for catharsis (whether Aristotle means by this term “purgation” or something else is not clear, but the literature on it does tend to imply a purification of some type). The terms ἐλέος and φόβος

appear in the definition of tragedy as well and they have been translated as pity and, respectively, fear or terror. It is not clear how exactly pity and fear would

bring about catharsis, but it seems that Aristotle knows in detail the workings of the spectators’ minds, although these mechanisms are not linked with the emotions themselves, but, once again, with the plot.

The idea of a pleasurable catharsis is an unlikely one, while catharsis as education through exposure to tragic events that arouse pity and fear in the spectators is also problematic, for what would the audience gain in education by being, for instance, exposed to the sufferings of a man whose disease is

contacted by mischance and who is being manipulated by a cunning politician who is trying to steal his only possession of value, his bow? Jacob Bernays, for example, in his famous nineteenth century work Fundamentals of Aristotle’s Lost Essay on the “Effect of Tragedy” explains catharsis either as a religious purification, resulting in an extatic state, or as medical purgation.29 Martha Naussbaum advances another influential (and cognitivist) interpretation of catharsis, arguing that catharsis, although it involves emotion, is in fact part of a process of “ethical investigation”30. Cynthia Freeland explains this cognitive process that applies to the spectator: “when the audience responds to the depicted events of a play with the emotions of pity and fear, they think and learn, and they come to draw appropriate judgements concerning the moral

29 _{Jacob Bernays, “On Catharsis,” from ‘Fundamentals of Aristotle’s Lost Essay on the} “Effect of Tragedy”,’ in American Images, vol. 61, no. 3 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 319-341.

30 _{Martha C. Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Suficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and} Pity,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Rorthy, (Princeton: Princeton

issues and and problems represented in the play.”31 Jonathan Lear, on the other hand, provides the following alternative of interpretation:

It is this experience of the tragic emotions in an appropriately inappropriate environment which, I think, helps to explain out the experience of relief in the theatre. We imaginatively live life to the full, but we risk nothing. The relief is thus not that of releasing pent-up emotions per se, it is the relief of releasing these emotions in a safe environment.32

It is not certain whether the Greeks thought of tragedy in these terms or if they felt the relief that Lear is writing about. It can be argued that the experience of the religious festivals, Lenaia and Dionysia, during which the plays were

performed, created a certain kind of euphoria and it seems that all actions around the plays and the performances themselves were highly ritualized. Pity and fear by themselves do not seem to constitute the pent-up emotions that need to be released in a controlled environment. Pity is a tame, processed emotion, while fear can be of many kinds and Aristotle does not specify which one he refers to here. What is clear, however, is that Aristotle does not believe in the immediacy of the actions that arouse emotions; for him, emotions are contingent on surprise and sequencing. This is once more problematic when looking at the occurrence of pain. In the excerpt from Philoctetes that I used as

31 _{Cynthia A. Freeland, “Plot Immitates Action: Aesthetic Evaluation and Moral} Realism in Aristotle’s Poetics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Rorthy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 111-132.

32 _{Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis,” in in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Rort}

an example above, pain comes and goes unexpectedly, but in no specific order or sequence. It is also impossible to know what exactly a spectator feels when exposed to an enactment of a crisis such as Philoctetes’. It is reasonable,

therefore, to postulate that explaining the presence of pain in tragedy through catharsis as purgation, relief or education is an attempt to medicate or hide it, which is to do injustice to the author, the play and to the spectator as well.