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for example, of the Cypria and the Little
Iliad.1
The result is that out of an
Iliad or an Odyssey only one tragedy can be made,
or two at most, whereas several have been made out of the Cypria, and
out of the Little Iliad more than eight, e.g. The Award of
Arms, Philoctetes, Neoptolemus,
Eurypylus, The Begging, The Laconian
Women, The Sack of Troy, and Sailing of the Fleet, and
Sinon, too, and The Trojan Women. The next point is
that there must be the same varieties of epic as of tragedy2: an epic must be "simple or complex,"3 or else turn on "character" or on "calamity."
The constituent parts, too, are
the same with the exception of song and spectacle. Epic needs reversals and
discoveries and calamities, and the thought and diction too must be good. All these were used by Homer for the first
time, and used well. Of his poems he made the one, the
Iliad
, a "simple" story turning on "calamity," and the Odyssey a
"complex" story—it is full of "discoveries"—turning on
character. Besides this they surpass all other poems in diction and
thought. Epic differs from tragedy in the length of the composition
and in metre. The limit of length
already given4 will suffice—it must be
possible to embrace the beginning and the end in one view,
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which would be the case if the compositions were
shorter than the ancient epics but reached to the length of the tragedies presented
at a single entertainment.5
Epic has a special advantage which
enables the length to be increased, because in tragedy it is not possible to
represent several parts of the story as going on simultaneously, but only to show
what is on the stage, that part of the story which the actors are performing;
whereas, in the epic, because it is narrative, several parts can be portrayed as
being enacted at the same time. If
these incidents are relevant, they increase the bulk of the poem, and this increase
gives the epic a great advantage in richness as well as the variety due to the
diverse incidents; for it is monotony which, soon satiating the audience, makes
tragedies fail. Experience has shown that the heroic hexameter is the right
metre. Were anyone to write a narrative poem in any other metre or in several
metres, the effect would be wrong. The
hexameter is the most sedate and stately of all metres and therefore admits of rare
words and metaphors more than others, and narrative poetry is itself elaborate above
all others. The iambic and the
trochaic tetrameter are lively, the latter suits dancing and the former suits real
life.
1 As we have seen already in chapter 8, a poem or a play must be one story and not several stories about one hero. Thus, since the Iliad and Odyssey have this essential unity (i.e., one thread runs through the narrative of each), few plays can be made out of them but many out of the Cypria or the Little Iliad, which are merely collections of lays on similar themes.
2 See Aristot. Poet. 18.4.
3 See chapter 10.
4 See Aristot. Poet. 7.12.
5 A Satyr play by Aeschylus. The Phorcides were sisters of the Dragon who kept the garden of the Hesperides, and they lived “under Scythia.” The Prometheus is not the Prometheus Bound but another Satyr play, probably by Aeschylus.
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, translated by W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1932.
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