ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Poetics [aristotle On the Art of Poetry] [Section Three] I. The construction of its stories should clearly be like that in a drama; they should be based on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature. Nor should one suppose that there is anything like them in our usual histories.

A history has to deal not with one action, but with one period and all that happened in that to one or more persons, however disconnected the several events may have been. Just as two events may take place at the same time, e.g. the sea-fight off Salamis and the battle with the Carthaginians in Sicily, without converging to the same end, so too of two consecutive events one may sometimes come after the other with no one end as their common issue.

Nevertheless most of our epic poets, one may say, ignore the distinction. Herein, then, to repeat what we have said before, we have a further proof of Homer's marvellous superiority to the rest. He did not attempt to deal even with the Trojan war in its entirety, though it was a whole with a definite beginning and end--through a feeling apparently that it was too long a story to be taken in in one view, or if not that, too complicated from the variety of incident in it.

As it is, he has singled out one section of the whole; many of the other incidents, however, he brings in as episodes, using the Catalogue of the Ships, for instance, and other episodes to relieve the uniformity of his narrative. As for the other epic poets, they treat of one man, or one period; or else of an action which, although one, has a multiplicity of parts in it. This last is what the authors of the _Cypria_ and _Little_ _Iliad_ have done.

And the result is that, whereas the _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_ supplies materials for only one, or at most two tragedies, the _Cypria_ does that for several, and the _Little_ _Iliad_ for more than eight: for an _Adjudgment of Arms_, a _Philoctetes_, a _Neoptolemus_, a _Eurypylus_, a _Ulysses as Beggar_, a _Laconian Women_, a _Fall of Ilium_, and a _Departure of the Fleet_; as also a _Sinon_, and _Women of Troy_. II.

Besides this, Epic poetry must divide into the same species as Tragedy; it must be either simple or complex, a story of character or one of suffering.