brill.com/grms Greek and Roman Musical Studies 4 (2016) 231-252 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2�16 | doi 10.1163/22129758-12341277 Aristotle on the Power of Music in Tragedy Pierre Destrée FNRS/Université catholique de Louvain pierre.destree@uclouvain.be Abstract Against the almost undisputed communis opinio among interpreters of the Poetics, I argue that spectacle in general, and music in particular are of crucial importance in Aristotle’s conception of tragedy. In enhancing the spectators’ emotions of pity and fear, music (i.e. aulos music) contributes to obtaining the pleasure ‘proper’ to tragedy which, as Aristotle says, “comes from pity and fear through mimesis”. Keywords aulos – tragedy – Aristotle – the Poetics – musicians – chorus – emotions Interpreters generally take Aristotle to have totally downplayed the role of the spectacle, and since music is part of the spectacle, it is implied (although rarely explicitly stated) that he must also have considered music as a negli- gible detail not really worth considering when writing the Poetics.1 And indeed, it is indisputable—and I won’t dispute it—that muthos plays the major role in Aristotle’s conception of tragedy. But as I want to show in this paper, this should not lead us to conclude, as most interpreters do, that spectacle in gen- eral and music in particular do not have an important, even crucial, role to 1  Articles on spectacle in the Poetics are quite numerous; the two most vigourous defence of such negative readings are perhaps Hall 1996, and Perceau 2013. Notable exceptions to this main stream are Scott 1999 (but his main arguments are not exactly mine), as well as Konstan 2013 and Sifakis 2013. See also the remarkable finding of Andrea Rotstein who has demon- strated that 1447a13-16 must refer to musical contests: even if Aristotle does not name the Great Dionysia or any other festival, he does have those in mind when writing the Poetics (Rotstein 2004).