Aristotle's life was intimately connected to the politics of the Greek world. His father Nichomachus served as a physician to Amyntas II, the King of Macedon, who was the father of Philip II; Aristotle later became the tutor of Philip's son, Alexander the Great.

Born in Stageira in the north of Greece, Aristotle moved to Athens at the age of seventeen and became a student of Plato. He lived in Athens for twenty years, leaving in 347, the year of Plato's death. He settled first in Assos, where he joined a group of philosophers. There he married Pythias, the niece of Hermeias, the leader of the nearby city of Atarneus. Hermeias supported the work of the philosphers in Assos, but when he was assassinated in 340, Aristotle fled to the island of Lesbos and taught in Mytilene for a few years.

In 342, Aristotle accepted the invitation of Philip II to tutor the king's young son Alexander. Alexander assumed the throne in 335, and Aristotle returned to Athens and began a career teaching in what became known as the Lyceum. He founded the first major library and research center of the ancient world. Like many important documents in the history of philosophy and literary theory, Aristotle's Poetics, composed around 330 BCE, was most likely preserved in the form of students' lecture notes. This brief text, through its various interpretations and applications from the Renaissance onward, has had a profound impact on Western aesthetic philosophy and artistic production.

The Poetics is in part Aristotle's response to his teacher, Plato, who argues in The Republic that poetry is representation of mere appearances and is thus misleading and morally suspect. Aristotle's approach to the phenomenon of poetry is quite different from Plato's. Fascinated by the intellectual challenge of forming categories and organizing them into coherent systems, Aristotle approaches literary texts as a natural scientist, carefully accounting for the features of each "species" of text.

When Alexander died in 323, anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens made Aristotle's life uncomfortable. He moved to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in the following year.

Although a relatively small portion of Aristotle's body of philosophical work has survived, the influence of his thought on Western philosophy has been enormous.

2) Character
Character is second in importance after plot; tragedies depict characters as they relate to the action which is the main object of representation. Characters represent their moral qualities throught the speeches assigned to them by the dramatist.

3) Thought Thought comprises both the rational processes through which characters come to decisions, as represented in the drama, as well as the values put forward in the form of maxims and proverbs.

4) Diction
Diction is one of the six components of tragedy and has to do with the way the language of the play is delivered by the actors. Aristotle gives little attention to diction, suggesting that experts in the art of oratory and the actors themselves are more responsible for the success of this dimension of tragedy than the poet.

6) Spectacle
Spectacle includes all aspects of the tragedy that contribute to its sensory effects: costumes, scenery, the gestures of the actors, the sound of the music and the resonance of the actors' voices. Aristotle ranks spectacle last in importance among the other components of tragedy, remarking that a tragedy does not need to be performed to have its impact on the audience, as it can be read as a text.

CATHARSIS-Aristotle describes catharsis as the purging of the emotions of pity and fear that are aroused in the viewer of a tragedy.

UNITY-Literary critics and poets following Aristotle took some of the remarks in the Poetics quite literally. Tragedies should generally not represent actions lasting much longer than a single revolution of the sun were institutionalized in Renaissance theories of drama as the doctrine of the unities. Many dramatists of this period believed that a drama could only represent events taking place in a single day and in a single place. The plays of William Shakespeare were for this reason scandalous for some critics of his time.