ed unnoticed,
if it had not been actually seen by the audience; but on the stage his
play failed, the incongruity of the incident offending the spectators.
(2) As far as may be, too, the poet should even act his story with the
very gestures of his personages. Given the same natural qualifications,
he who feels the emotions to be described will be the most convincing;
distress and anger, for instance, are portrayed most truthfully by one
who is feeling them at the moment. Hence it is that poetry demands a man
with special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him;
the former can easily assume the required mood, and the latter may
be actually beside himself with emotion. (3) His story, again, whether
already made or of his own making, he should first simplify and reduce
to a universal form, before proceeding to lengthen it out by the
insertion of episodes. The following will show how the universal element
in _Iphigenia_, for instance, may be viewed: A certain maiden having
been offered in sacrifice, and spirited away from her sacrificers into
another land, where the custom was to sacrifice all strangers to the
Goddess, she was made there the priestess of this rite. Long after that
the brother of the priestess happened to come; the fact, however, of the
oracle having for a certain reason bidden him go thither, and his
object in going, are outside the Plot of the play. On his coming he
was arrested, and about to be sacrificed, when he revealed who he
was--either as Euripides puts it, or (as suggested by Polyidus) by the
not improbable exclamation, 'So I too am doomed to be sacrificed, as
my sister was'; and the disclosure led to his salvation. This done, the
next thing, after the proper names have been fixed as a basis for the
story, is to work in episodes or accessory incidents. One must mind,
however, that the episodes are appropriate, like the fit of madness in
Orestes, which led to his arrest, and the purifying, which brought about
his salvation. In plays, then, the episodes are short; in epic poetry
they serve to lengthen out the poem. The argument of the _Odyssey_ is
not a long one.

A certain man has been abroad many years; Poseidon is ever on the watch
for him, and he is all alone. Matters at home too have come to this,
that his substance is being wasted and his son's death plotted by
suitors to his wife. Then he arrives there himself after his grievous
sufferings; reveals himself, and falls on his ene