Key terms from Aristotle's Poetics

Mythos (‘plot’) An ‘ordered sequence of events’ (Aristotle, 1996, p. xviii).

Ethos (‘character’) The kind of person the agent is.

Dianoia (‘reasoning’ – sometimes translated as ‘thought’, or in 17^th-century France as ‘sentiments’) How the agent interprets and reacts to situations, the attitudes they  expresse, and the arguments they use to express them.

Peripeteia (‘reversal’) A change in situation that overturns expectations. Must be astonishing, yet integrated into a coherent plot, ‘out of necessity or in accordance with probability’ (Aristotle, 1996, p. 18).

Anagnorisis (‘recognition’) A change from ignorance to knowledge, which affects a character’s good or bad fortune. This is often a literal matter of recognizing something, e.g. somebody’s true identity or parentage.

Hamartia (‘error’) A mistake made by the agent. (Not a psychological ‘flaw’, contrary to some interpretations and translations) This may be an error of fact, but may also be a bad or imprudent decision. Hamartia was also used in New Testament Greek to denote the Judaeo-Christian concept of ‘sin’: this probably influenced how the term was understood in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Catharsis (‘purification’) A controversial term, most likely to mean purging excessive feelings of pity and fear, i.e. stimulating these feelings so that the audience gets them out of its collective system.