High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. The modern use of the term usually involves the notion that such an hero makes an error in his actions that leads to his or her downfall. The idea that this be a balance of crime and punishment is incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle, who is quite clear in his pronouncement that the hero's misfortune is not brought about "by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment." In fact, in Aristotle's Poetics it is imperative that the tragic hero be noble. Later tragedians deviated from this tradition: the more prone the tragic hero was to vice, the less noble and the less tragic, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, the tragic hero happened to be.