(Gk. mimēsis: ‘imitation’, ‘representation’).
A term found in Greek literature from the final years of the 5th century bce referring to an aesthetic ideal underlying music and art (see Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, 156; Frogs, 109). From the beginning it was used primarily in relation to art and dramatic poetry, but it came to be employed also in discussions of music and particularly of musical Ethos, with reference to harmoniai and rhythms.
Damon and Plato show particular interest in such questions. Plato's discussion of mimesis in the Laws (ii, 667e–673d), for example, rejects the virtuosity that forms an inescapable part of solo instrumental music; but his real concern is the absence of text in this type of music. For Plato, text was essential if music was to be capable of mimesis. He makes it clear that when he speaks of musical mimesis, he means music's capacity to affect ethos, not the mere imitation of sounds (Laws, ii, 669e–670a; cf the Aristotelian Problems, xix.15) – a common feature of compositions for solo instruments. The best music is that which has the greatest similarity (homoiotēs) to mimesis of the good and the beautiful (Laws, ii, 668b; cf Republic, iii, 401b–403c). On the other hand, the treatment of the term by Aristotle in the Poetics is more generally encompassing: epic, tragedy, comedy, the dithyramb and most types of music for the aulos or the kithara are mimetic, but they differ in respect to medium, object and manner and in their combinations of rhythm, language and harmonia (1447a–1448b). For Aristotle, the concentration of mimesis must be human life – character, passions, deeds. Later writers, especially Neoplatonists such as Aristides Quintilianus, expanded on the concepts of harmonia, similarity, mimesis and metaphysics to develop an elaborate musical metaphysics in which rhythmic and metric patterns, tonoi, individual musical pitches, scales and so on might draw the human soul into a more concordant relationship with the order of the cosmos.
Varying translations of the term illustrate the difficulties of interpretation associated with it. ‘Imitation’ stresses the concept of copying; the preference for ‘representation’ emphasizes instead that of creative involvement. Neither translation conveys the full sense of the concept of mimesis.
In the Middle Ages, the term imitatio adopted some of the Neoplatonic conceptions of mimesis, and in the theory of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and St Augustine, the proper focus of imitatio became not earthly ‘reality’ but rather the more perfect invisible world or at least traces of eternal beauty in the visible world. Debates about the proper use of imitatio were at the heart of iconoclasm, and they also appear in scholastic theory, in 12th-century humanism, and in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Aesthetic theories of imitation multiplied rapidly from the 15th century onwards, drawing on Greek and Roman sources but fundamentally distinct from the earlier conception of mimesis.
See also Greece, §I.
S.H. Butcher: ‘“Imitation” as an Aesthetic Term’, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a Critical Text and Translation of the ‘Poetics’ (London, 1895, 4/1911/R), 121–62
H. Koller: Die Mimesis in der Antike (Berne, 1954)
P. Moraux: ‘La “mimesis” dans les théories anciennes de la danse, de la musique, et de la poésie’, Etudes classiques, xxiii (1955), 3–13
G.F. Else: ‘“Imitation” in the Fifth Century’, Classical Philology, liii (1958), 73–90
H. Koller: ‘Die orgiastische Musik und die Lehre von der Mimesis’, Musik und Dichtung im alten Griechenland (Berne, 1963), 150–64
M.C. Beardsley: Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (New York, 1966)
W. Tatarkiewicz: ‘Mimesis’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P.P. Wiener, iii (New York, 1973), 225–30
E.S. Belfiore: ‘Imitation’ and Book X of Plato's ‘Republic’ (Ann Arbor, 1982)
B. Gentili: ‘Poetica della mimesi’, Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica: da Omero al V secolo (Rome, 1984, 2/1995), 69–82; (Eng. trans., 1988), 50–60
T.J. Mathiesen: ‘Harmonia and Ethos in Ancient Greek Music’, JM, iii (1984), 264–79
THOMAS J. MATHIESEN