Contained in these intricate and hypothetically reconstructed Aris¬totelian arguments are the premises of all later controversies concerning the borderline between poetry and nonpoetry. During the Hellenic period the situation was to become even more complex as a result of greater proximity and mutual influence between poetry and oratorical art. In the Middle Ages they became further and more permanently estranged: poetics became subordinated to rhetoric (Dante defined poetry as “fictio rhetorica in musica posita”); at the same time the border between the area of reality and the area of fiction in literature disappeared. Res fictae and res gestae were considered equally subjects of poetry