Now if this innocent had been of
any relation to his Thebais, if he had either farthered or hindered
the taking of the town, the poet might have found some sorry excuse
at least for detaining the reader from the promised siege. On these
terms this Capaneus of a poet engaged his two immortal predecessors,
and his success was answerable to his enterprise.
If this economy must be observed in the minutest parts of an epic
poem, which to a common reader seem to be detached from the body,
and almost independent of it, what soul, though sent into the world
with great advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts
and sciences, conversant with histories of the dead, and enriched
with observations on the living, can be sufficient to inform the
whole body of so great a work? I touch here but transiently,
without any strict method, on some few of those many rules of
imitating nature which Aristotle drew from Homer's "Iliads" and
"Odysses," and which he fitted to the drama--furnishing himself also
with observations from the practice of the theatre when it
flourished under AEschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles (for the
original of the stage was from the epic poem).
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