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In Aristotle's Poetics XIII (Butcher), which change of fortune and which kind of person produce pity and fear, and what is the 'error or frailty' behind the fall?

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In Butcher's XIII, Aristotle rules out three plots for tragedy: a virtuous man falling from prosperity to adversity (it 'merely shocks us'), a bad man rising to prosperity (alien to tragedy), and the downfall of an utter villain (satisfies the moral sense, but no pity or fear). The text ties pity to unmerited misfortune and fear to the misfortune of a man like ourselves. What remains is a person between the extremes, not eminently good and just, who is highly renowned and prosperous, and whose misfortune comes not from vice or depravity but from 'some error or frailty'; the change should run from good to bad, in a single issue. XIII gives no definition of 'error or frailty' beyond contrasting it with vice or depravity. Classical theory (Aristotle in S. H. Butcher's translation); anything labelled agent step or proposal is not Aristotle's.

In Butcher's XIII, Aristotle rules out three plots for tragedy: a virtuous man falling from prosperity to adversity (it 'merely shocks us'), a bad man rising to prosperity (alien to tragedy), and the downfall of an utter villain (satisfies the moral sense, but no pity or fear). The text ties pity to unmerited misfortune and fear to the misfortune of a man like ourselves. What remains is a person between the extremes, not eminently good and just, who is highly renowned and prosperous, and whose misfortune comes not from vice or depravity but from 'some error or frailty'; the change should run from good to bad, in a single issue. XIII gives no definition of 'error or frailty' beyond contrasting it with vice or depravity. Classical theory (Aristotle in S. H. Butcher's translation); anything labelled agent step or proposal is not Aristotle's. Curator qualifications: Three excluded arcs and the error-or-frailty figure (Butcher translation). Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.
Structured fields
{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1974/pg1974.txt",
      "note": "XIII"
    }
  ]
}

Evidence claims

  • [sourced_fact] In Butcher's XIII, Aristotle rules out three plots for tragedy: a virtuous man falling from prosperity to adversity (it 'merely shocks us'), a bad man rising to prosperity (alien to tragedy), and the downfall of an utter villain (satisfies the moral sense, but no pity or fear). The text ties pity to unmerited misfortune and fear to the misfortune of a man like ourselves. What remains is a person between the extremes, not eminently good and just, who is highly renowned and prosperous, and whose misfortune comes not from vice or depravity but from 'some error or frailty'; the change should run from good to bad, in a single issue. XIII gives no definition of 'error or frailty' beyond contrasting it with vice or depravity. Classical theory (Aristotle in S. H. Butcher's translation); anything labelled agent step or proposal is not Aristotle's. · locator: XIII source

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