Philosophical Fear and Tragic Fear: The Memory of Theatre in Plato’s Images and Aristotle’s Theory

The theme of fear is a recurrent and relevant one in the great Athenian philosophies of the fourth century. In the Platonic corpus, the theme is differently divided between ethics, politics and religion. Aristotle, in Rhetoric and Poetics, extends the theme of fear to discourses and their effects. This study is aimed at exposing the relationship between dramaturgy – the one we still read – and its philosophical rationalisation. Concerning the more specific theme of fear, what do the Platonic dialogues and the Aristotelian treatises of tragic phobos (as we can still perceive it) capture and what do they leave aside? What do they retain and what do they modify? Some tragic contexts seem more significant than others to recall into question the theme of pathe and of phobos, in particular, which philosophy inherits from dramaturgy. Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus King and the late Oedipus at Colonus are extremely revealing case studies.