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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
This article is a survey of familiar ground—those passages of the Poetics of Aristotle which throw light on the treatment of legend by the tragic poets. Although sweeping generalizations are often made on the use of the traditional stories in drama, our evidence on the subject is slight and inconclusive. We have little knowledge of the form in which most of the legends were known to the Attic playwrights, for the few we find in the Iliad and Odyssey appear there in very different versions from those they take on in the plays, and the fragmentary remains of epic and lyric poetry between Homer and the fifth century B.C. present us with a wide field for speculation, but few certain facts; while vase paintings and other works of art supplement only here and there the scanty information gained from literature.The comments of ancient writers on this aspect of tragedy are surprisingly few, and carry us little farther. The Poetics stands out as the one source from which we can draw any substantial account of the matter. Even Aristotle, of course, is not directly concerned with the history of drama, and deals with it only incidentally in isolated passages; and in considering these it must constantly be borne in mind that he is discussing tragedy as he knew it in the late fourth century, for the benefit of fourth-century readers. But even so, his statements are the main foundation on which our view of the dramatists' use of legend must be built.
page 152 note 1 Gesch. d. gr. Lit. I. ii, p. 87, n. 4.Google Scholar
page 153 note 1 I am indebted to Mr. D. W. Lucas for valuable comment on this and some other points.
page 153 note 2 So also Rostagni and Gudeman.
page 154 note 1 So also Gudeman ad loc.
page 154 note 2 Tragic Drama of the Greeks, p. 329.Google Scholar This interpretation is inconsistent with Aristotle's later statement, mentioned below, that τ⋯ 
(1451 b 25–26). Aristotle's view appears to be that the names of the figures of legend were familiar and generally accepted, but the incidents connected with them (except, presumably, those bare essentials which 
) were known only to a few. Hence the playwright was at liberty to invent incidents (outside the fixed essentials) and to attach them to the familiar 
page 154 note 3 Op. cit., p. 87, n. 4.Google Scholar
page 155 note 1 One may perhaps suggest a comparison with Thucydides, who, it might be said, wrote speeches 
and put them into the mouths of historical figures to make them more convincing.
page 156 note 1 As Bywater points out, this contradicts Antiphanes fr. igi. But Antiphanes' description of the audience's familiarity with tragic λόγοι is no evidence for the playwrights' adherence to traditions earlier than the drama. By this time constant repetition of certain themes in the theatre itself had done far more than any knowledge of cyclic epic or choral lyric to make them familiar to the Athenians.
page 157 note 1 Fr. 29 Bergk.