Herodotus.[11] The rhetorical element in the speeches of the characters of
drama or epic, Aristotle calls Thought (διάνια). Although
Aristotle includes Thought as an element in drama, he does not discuss it
in the _Poetics_, but refers his reader to the _Rhetoric_. Metrics, which
occupies so large a place in modern treatises on the theory of poetry,
Aristotle likewise mentions several times, but does not discuss. A
metrical structure he accepts as the usual practice in poetical
composition, but he rejects verse as the distinguishing mark of poetic.
Thus he refuses to classify as poetry the scientific writings which
Empedocles had composed in meter as well as the histories of Herodotus,
even if he had written them in verse. On the other hand, the mimes of
Sophron and Xenarchus, although composed in prose, he considers within the
scope of poetic.[12]

If to Aristotle, then, verse is not the characteristic quality of poetic,
the next step in an investigation must be to discover the criterion by
which he classifies some literature as poetry and other as not poetry. The
characteristic quality, according to Aristotle, which is possessed by the
Socratic dialogs, by the Homeric epics, and by the dramas of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, and which classifies them together as poetic, is
not verse but _mimesis_, imitation.[13] Exactly what Aristotle meant by
imitation has furnished subsequent critics with an excuse for writing many
volumes. The usual meaning of the word to the Greek, as to the modern,
seems to be little more than an aping or mimicking. Aristotle himself uses
imitate in this sense when he speaks of the delight children take in
imitation.[14] But in establishing imitation as the criterion of poetic,
Aristotle seems to have injected something of a private, or at least a
special scientific meaning into the word. As the characteristic quality of
poetic, imitation to Aristotle evidently did not mean a literal copy.
Plato had attacked poetry as unreal, a thrice-removed imitation of the