9
Now in drama the episodes are short, but it is by them that the epic gains its length.
10
The story of the Odyssey is quite short. A man is for many years away from home and his footsteps are dogged by Poseidon and he is all alone. Moreover,affairs at home are in such a state that his estate is being wasted by suitors and a plot laid against his son, but after being storm-tossed he arrives himself, reveals who he is, and attacks them, with the result that he is saved and destroys his enemies.
11
That is the essence, the rest is episodes.
1
In every tragedy there is a complication and a denouement.The Greek says simply tying and loosing. Complication and denouement seem clumsy equivalents, yet they are the words we use in dramatic criticism. The incidents outside the plot and some of those in it usually form the complication, the rest is the denouement.
2
I mean this, that the complication is the part from the beginning up to the point which immediately precedes the occurrence of a change from bad to good fortune or from good fortune to bad; the denouement is from the beginning of the change down to the end.
3
For instance, in the Lynceus of Theodectes the complication is the preceding events, and the seizure of the boy, and then their own seizure; and the denouement is from the capital charge to the end.The boy must be Abas, and they are presumably Danaus and perhaps his other daughters. Aristotle seems to regard the arrest of Danaus not as part of the λύσις, but as the end of the δέσις.
