"TODA LA TRAGEDIA Y LA COMEDIA DE LA VIDA": SOBRE LA MEZCLA DE AFECTOS Y GÉNEROS EN EL FILEBO DE PLATÓN

Abstract

In Philebus 50b ff., for the first time, the pleasure that human beings take in the tragic is explicitly noted. Plato refers there to "all the tragedy and comedy of life", an expression that is at the heart of my work. In what follows I will first make some philological observations on the passage in context, then I outline Plato's conception of the tragic, illustrating it with the Phaedo. I will analyse the references to tragedy and comedy in Symposium and Laws VII. And finally I will return to the Philebus to show that in Plato's poetics "mixture" applies not only to the affections but also to the two dramatic genres, whose mixture occurs both on stage and in life.