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). Narration,
doubtless, preceded acting, and gave laws to it. What at first was
told artfully was in process of time represented gracefully to the
sight and hearing. Those episodes of Homer which were proper for
the stage, the poets amplified each into an action. Out of his
limbs they formed their bodies; what he had contracted, they
enlarged; out of one Hercules were made infinity of pigmies, yet all
endued with human souls; for from him, their great creator, they
have each of them the divinae particulam aurae. They flowed from
him at first, and are at last resolved into him. Nor were they only
animated by him, but their measure and symmetry was owing to him.
His one, entire, and great action was copied by them, according to
the proportions of the drama. If he finished his orb within the
year, it sufficed to teach them that their action being less, and
being also less diversified with incidents, their orb, of
consequence, must be circumscribed in a less compass, which they