Aristotle was as interested in culture as he was in nature. His handbooks on rhetoric and tragic poetry analyze their constituents but have an ethical component and are prescriptive as well as descriptive. They can improve the output of the trainee public speaker or tragedian partly because they do not let him forget the goal at which his art is aiming: persuasion in the case of rhetoric, but in the case of tragic theater, guiding the audience to understand painful matters better.
