Three and scene-painting Sophocles

Abstract

I wish to argue, firstly, that the words τρeῖς δὲ καὶ σκηνογραφίαν Σοφοκλῆς at Poetics 1449a18-19 were not written by Aristotle; secondly that Sophocles is unlikely to have used scene-painting in our sense of the term. These two propositions are not interdependent, but do lend support to one another.IThe deletion of τρeῖς δὲ καὶ σκηνογραφίαν Σοφοκλῆς was first proposed by G. F. Else. Few scholars have taken the deletion seriously (it is ignored in Lucas's edition), though it is cautiously revived by O. Taplin, who remarks that Else ‘brackets the words for a mixture of good and bad reasons’. That is my view also, but I believe that the bad reasons can be replaced with better ones.A complicating factor is that Else also brackets the words that follow, from ἔτι δὲ τὸ μέγeθος to ἀπeσeμνύνθη, though he regards this as a largely separate issue. He may be right in this latter deletion; the difficulty of reconciling the development of tragedy ἐκ σατυρικοῦ with what Aristotle says elsewhere is certainly real enough.