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XXIII
As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a
single metre, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to be
constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a
single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an
end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and
produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from
historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action,
but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one
person or to many, little connected together as the events may be. For as
the sea-fight at Salamis and the battle with the Carthaginians in Sicily
took place at the same time, but did not tend to any one result, so in
the sequence of events, one thing sometimes follows another, and yet no
single result is thereby produced. Such is the practice, we may say, of
most poets. Here again, then, as has been already observed, the
transcendent excellence of Homer is manifest. He never attempts to make
the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem, though that war had a
beginning and an end. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily
embraced in a single view. If, again, he had kept it within moderate
limits, it must have been over-complicated by the variety of the
incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion, and admits as episodes
many events from the general story of the war--such as the Catalogue of
the ships and others--thus diversifying the poem. All other poets take a
single hero, a single period, or an action single indeed, but with a
multiplicity of parts. Thus did the author of the Cypria and of the
Little Iliad. For this reason the Iliad and the Odyssey each furnish the
subject of one tragedy, or, at most, of two; while the Cypria supplies
materials for many, and the Little Iliad for eight--the Award of the
Arms, the Philoctetes, the Neoptolemus, the Eurypylus, the Mendicant
Odysseus, the Laconian Women, the Fall of Ilium, the Departure of the
Fleet.
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