Ancient poetic philosophy

Ancient Poetic Philosophy is the most famous work of Alonso López Pinciano. It is a pedagogical treatise of poetics divided into thirteen dialogued epistles. They are followed by a brief commentary in the form of a letter in which the pretended correspondent of the Pinciano summarizes and comments on the doctrines exposed in the dialogue that precedes it.
The author follows Aristotle in Poetics and Rhetoric and Horace. The letters contain dialogues about happiness, poetry, doctrine about tragedy, comedy, among others. Although the basis of this system is, naturally, the Poetic Art of Aristotle, the rich prodigality of ideas that the Pinciano exposes in his commentaries to the Aristotelian doctrine is structured in an original and complex system.
The doctrine of Pitian comes from deeper sources. It is not a mere annotation of the Horatian precepts or a deficient assimilation of Aristotelian ideas.
It is believed that Pinciano wrote Filosofía antigua poética with the purpose of putting a classicist brake on the dramatic successes of Lope de Vega. He wanted to recover the structure of the theater of classical antiquity. For this reason the author is a preceptist, defender of the Aristotelian principles of the theater, in contrast to the baroque gimmick.
López Pinciano proposes a true philosophy of literature. It takes into account its essence, its purpose but also, and perhaps above all, the nature of the man who creates it, the poet, and the public.

Similar is, says the Philosopher, in his Politicians, the city to the ship, because as in this the navigators, all to one, aspire to the common rescue, so in that the citizens, to one all, must conspire to universal health, so that if the pilot, calafate or rower governs, caulks and rows for the defense and conservation of the vessel in which he sails, The farmer, the soldier and the judge and the others, each in his ministry, are obliged to the preservation and increase of the republic they inhabit. This is the doctrine that the Philosopher teaches, to which I add that, although it is so, each of the citizens must and is obliged to serve and take advantage of his city in his particular office; the citizen can, perhaps, rightly go to other ministries of his own, and, as it happens that in the ship, forced by necessity the calafate row, the calafatee rower and the Pilot, skipper and captain help to set the sail, it also happens in the republic that the minister of a trade, suaded of necessity, Not without justice, let such an hour enter another’s.
Who will accuse the farmer who, in time of war, leaves the plough and takes up arms for the defense of the fatherland? And who to the soldier who, in time of peace and famine, barters the sword into a fence? And who will now accuse me, who undertook to write doctrine outside my chief and first vocation, if I did so out of honest zeal? God knows for many years I want to see a book of this subject brought to light from the hand of another for not putting me as a sign and target of the people, and knows, that by seeing my homeland, flourished in all other disciplines, being in this part so lacking and needy, I determined to arrive for help. Perhaps someone is not the Poetics of so much substance that for its lack the republic is endangered. To which I answer that you read and you will know the great usefulness and much doctrine that is contained in it. But for what reader do I tire you with this apology, if you know that Apollo was a doctor and poet, because these arts are so related than any other? That if the doctor tempers the humors, the Poetics confronts the customs that are born of the humors.

Fragment of the work