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.
POETICS|24
XXIV
Again, Epic poetry must have as many kinds as Tragedy: it must be
simple, or complex, or 'ethical,'or 'pathetic.
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