Aristotle's work on aesthetics consists of the Poetics, Politics (Bk VIII), and Rhetoric.[8] The Poetics was lost to the Western world for a long time. The text was restored to the West in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes.[9] The accurate Greek-Latin translation made by William of Moerbeke in 1278 was virtually ignored.[10] At some point during antiquity, the original text of the Poetics was divided in two, each "book" written on a separate roll of papyrus.[3]: xx Only the first part—that which focuses on tragedy and epic (as a quasi-dramatic art, given its definition in Ch. 23)—survives. The lost second part addressed comedy.[3]: xx [11] Some scholars speculate that the Tractatus coislinianus summarises the contents of the lost second book.[3]: xxi
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