[1451a]
[1]
since being unable to
view it all at once, we lose the effect of a single whole; for instance, suppose a
creature a thousand miles long. As
then creatures and other organic structures must have a certain magnitude and yet be
easily taken in by the eye, so too with plots: they must have length but must be
easily taken in by the memory. The limit of length considered in relation to
competitions and production1 before an audience
does not concern this treatise. Had it been the rule to produce a hundred tragedies,
the performance would have been regulated by the water clock, as it is said they did
once in other days. But as for the
natural limit of the action, the longer the better as far as magnitude goes,
provided it can all be grasped at once. To give a simple definition: the magnitude
which admits of a change from bad fortune to good or from good fortune to bad, in a
sequence of events which follow one another either inevitably or according to
probability, that is the proper limit. A plot does not have unity, as some people
think, simply because it deals with a single hero. Many and indeed innumerable
things happen to an individual, some of which do not go to make up any unity, and
similarly an individual is concerned in many actions which do not combine into a
single piece of action.
[20]
It seems therefore that all those poets are wrong who
have written a Heracleid or Theseid or other such
poems.2 They think that because Heracles was a single individual the plot
must for that reason have unity. But
Homer, supreme also in all other respects, was apparently well aware of this truth
either by instinct or from knowledge of his art. For in writing an
Odyssey he did not put in all that ever happened to Odysseus, his
being wounded on Parnassus, for instance,
or his feigned madness when the host was gathered(these being events
neither of which necessarily or probably led to the other), but he
constructed his Odyssey round a single action in our sense of the
phrase. And the Iliad the same. As then in the other arts of representation a single
representation means a representation of a single object, so too the plot being a
representation of a piece of action must represent a single piece of action and the
whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be
transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if
the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an
integral part of the whole. What we have said already makes it further clear that a
poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen
either probably or inevitably. The
difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the
other in verse—
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