Dana Munteanu

This essay examines several snapshots of the reception of hamartia in late antiquity, sixteen-century manuscripts, and modern era. The mysterious term hamartia in chapter 13 of the Poetics can be associated with acting because of ignorance of particulars (with agents acting while not knowing, ἀγνοοῦντας Po. 14.1453b30, as in as in Sophocles’ OT; cf. agents acting because of ignorance", δι’ ἄγνοιαν, Po. 14.1453b35) in the best plots.

Hellenistic visual arts and literature have well understood this connection between “error” and ignorance of details and revived it in both art and drama. Three images have been ascribed to a personified Agnoia in late antiquity. In one of these (LIMC, a funerary painting from Hermopolis, Cairo Museum JE63609; Venit 2016, 105-6), a female figure recoils from a scene in which Oedipus is about to slaughter his father, Laius, perhaps embodying the mental anguish at the realization of the enormity of the murder, as in the Aristotelian recognition. In Menander’s Peirikeiromene (cca 314 BC) a personified Agnoia speaks a delayed prologue. Strangely, she informs the audience that one character holds the key to prevent a “tragic” error in the play (incest between brother and sister), that could happen “because of me, Ignorance” (δι’ ἐμὲ […] τὴν Ἄγνοιαν, Prk. 141). As a reflection of Aristotelian theory, Agnoia may have been the prologue in New Comedy, in plays named after her by Diphilus (or Calliades) and Machon, as well as possibly appeared as a character in Agnoon (The not-Knowing Man), produced mid-second century BCE (IRDF 2323.403; Orth 2019).

A second snapshot in shaping the reception of the term occurred with the translation of the term from sixteen-century Latin manuscripts to modern renditions in French, English and German. The infelicitous English translation of hamartia as “tragic flaw,” likely influenced by the earlier rendering of the term in the Latin manuscripts of the Poetics as peccatum, flagitium, or scelus (“sin,” “scourge,” or “crime”) has led some commentators to think that the word refers to a defect in character under the influence of Christianity (Saïd 1978, 11-16; for a more recent reappraisal, Brazeau 2018). Although, generally, such interpretations are no longer supported in current scholarship, there remains a nagging question of the degree of the moral responsibility of the agent implied in hamartia. In conclusion, I shall suggest that the late antiquity reception and dramatized personification of the error due to misapprehension of details takes us much closer to the Aristotelian frame of thought.